Literary Contemporary Vote • March 2015

[sun surfer]

Help choose the March 2015 selection to read for the MR Literary Club! The poll will be open for three days and a discussion thread will begin shortly after a winner is chosen.

The vote is multiple choice. You may vote for as many or as few as you like. If you vote for the winner it is hoped that you will read the selection with the club and/or join in the discussion.

In the event of a tie, there will be a one-day non-multiple-choice run-off poll. If the run-off also ends in a tie, then the tie will be resolved in favour of the selection that received all of its initial nominations first.


Select from the following works:


Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2006

Spoiler:

4.22 rating on Goodreads


From Goodreads:

In 1960s Nigeria, a country blighted by civil war, three lives intersect. Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna, a young woman, has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic new lover, the professor. And Richard, a shy English writer, is in thrall to Olanna's enigmatic twin sister. As the horrific Biafran War engulfs them, they are thrown together and pulled apart in ways they had never imagined.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's masterpiece, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, is a novel about Africa in a wider sense: about the end of colonialism, ethnic allegiances, class and race - and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.

The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, 2012

Spoiler:

Amazon Best Book of the Month, January 2012. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2013). It's available at Overdrive and 3M Cloud Library in the US. Also at Amazon and Kobo globally.


From Goodreads:

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.

Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”

Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love. A towering literary achievement, The Orphan Master’s Son ushers Adam Johnson into the small group of today’s greatest writers.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison, 2008

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.

In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.

Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, “with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.” Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.

There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who’s spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens’ mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.

The Master by Colm Tóibín, 2003

Spoiler:

It's historical fiction about a period of Henry James' life.


From Goodreads:

Like Michael Cunningham in The Hours, Colm Tóibín captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Beautiful and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of a man born into one of America's first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.

In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín captures the loneliness and the hope of a master of psychological subtlety whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed those he tried to love. The emotional intensity of this portrait is riveting.

[sun surfer]

It's Sun vs Son vs Morrison vs the Tóibín one!

[Bookpossum]

Well, I think they all look very good. I just voted for The Master though, as I would like to read that one particularly.

[Bookworm_Girl]

3 of the 4 were already on my TBR list and the other sounds good too!

[fantasyfan]

As usual the selection is top quality. The one I really would llike to read is The Master by Colm Tóibín. The problem is that it doesn't seem to be available as an eBook--even here in Ireland (gasp). The easiest one for me to obtain is The Orphan Master's Son though it is a bit pricey. The other two don't appeal to me though I'm sure they are very fine books.

Perhaps I'm just too old-fashioned! Hence, I'll abstain from the vote and see how things turn out.

[sun surfer]

fantasyfan, The Master is available as an ebook on the .com site of Amazon. I'm surprised that it's not available on the .co.uk site (how did that happen?), but if you're willing to do a bit of internet travelling it's obtainable.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

fantasyfan, The Master is available as an ebook on the .com site of Amazon. I'm surprised that it's not available on the .co.uk site (how did that happen?), but if you're willing to do a bit of internet travelling it's obtainable.

Not available from amazon.ca either, but I'm used to that. My budget means I usually read paper from the library for both bookclubs. I don't believe we've had a rule that books must be available as eBooks for the literary club.

This year my eReading total is way up. It's more than one-third of the titles I've read this year (including two bookclub selections). I feel so modern.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I'm surprised that The Master isn't widely available as an ebook. Only the audiobook is in my library, but I have access to the ebook through my Oyster subscription. The other nominations are in my library.

HIMS, paperbooks are acceptable for the literary club. I specifically remember the Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Yukio Mishima books were only in paper. Both are now available in ebooks since we read them.

[caleb72]

Yes, Master is available as an audio book in my eLibrary and that is the option I would take if it wins the vote. I rarely consume books this way but I'm sure I'll survive.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I'm surprised that The Master isn't widely available as an ebook. Only the audiobook is in my library, but I have access to the ebook through my Oyster subscription. The other nominations are in my library.

HIMS, paperbooks are acceptable for the literary club. I specifically remember the Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Yukio Mishima books were only in paper. Both are now available in ebooks since we read them.

I was quite surprised to find that The Master was not available in my library either as eBook or in audio format. Even Overdrive doesn't have it--while it did have Fugitive Pieces. Tóibín, after all, is a well known author and quite a few of his other books are easily obtainable.

It is true that we have had other books which required use of a pb. And The Master is available through Book Depository.

[Bookpossum]

Luckily for me, all four books are available from my library, so I'm fine whichever one wins.

[sun surfer]

And we have a three-way tie! It was so close all around that with only one more vote we might've had a tie between them all.

It's looking like March, crafty month, wants to keep both book clubs in suspense as long as it can. I'll have the run-off up soon.


ETA The one-day run-off poll is up - cast your vote now!