MobileRead October 2016 Book Club Nominations

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've never played Bridge. No do I even know how. So a book about Bridge would not get a vote from me at all.

Fair enough, Jon. I already knew it was an outlier. But figured if nothing else it would introduce it to any here that might find it of interest.

Oh, and even though I have no idea why anyone cares (I know you do, I just don't understand the why), here's the Overdrive link for Bridge in the Fourth Dimension

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Here they are, but I don't see the big deal about adding them as you still have to check your local libraries.

Me Talk Pretty One Day
Overdrive
Overdrive Audio

But you do the work to tell me if it might be available.

[covingtoncat73]

Mislaid by Nell Zink. It is hilarious. There is quite a bit of send-up of academia, particularly Southern academia and the mores of the Southern bourgeois.

I am looking at the current Amazon listing and realizing how lucky I was I got this as a "daily deal," when it was on sale. https://www.amazon.com/Mislaid-Novel...4488917&sr=8-1

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the first 40% of the book as an example.

“She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“She would see that in England, for reasons unknown, a woman can simultaneously be cute as a bug’s ear, a serious rose gardener, and a nymphomaniac.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“As a writer, she was struggling. As an accomplice to the wholesale drug trade, she was setting new benchmarks for excellence in felony crime.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“If and when family planning is the responsibility of females, males are best kept under lock and key.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

“It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

Originally Posted by CRussel

Fair enough, Jon. I already knew it was an outlier. But figured if nothing else it would introduce it to any here that might find it of interest.

Oh, and even though I have no idea why anyone cares (I know you do, I just don't understand the why), here's the Overdrive link for Bridge in the Fourth Dimension

All endorse this. It's been a long time since I used to play bridge with three other graduate students at lunch when I was in graduate school. I still recall enough to follow the bidding and play and the general strategy. Two of the four were killer players that used to team at duplicate tournaments. They would split up for our friendly lunch time games.

[issybird]

LOL, grad school was the last time I played, too; although for years after I'd work out problems in the bridge columns in the paper (the concept of bridge columns sounding distinctly Paleolithic to our younger members, no doubt).

All I can say is that if my groceries had come from my bridge, I'd have been svelte indeed!

[WT Sharpe]

Second Mislaid.

[issybird]

I'll third Mislaid. OverDrive has it and I like campus novels.

[bfisher]

I'll second Me Talk Pretty One Day.

[BenG]

I'd like to nominate The Deadly Dowager by Edwin Greenwood.

Spoiler:

According to a contemporary review, it was “quite the jolliest crime story that has come our way in many moons.” Yet it’s not at all comic in the manner of, say, a Donald Westlake caper about Dortmunder and his lovable gang of burglars. Black humor, gallows humor, sardonic humor — these better describe the overall tone of Greenwood’s tale of the 83-year-old Dowager Duchess Arabella, Lady Engleton, who decides to do away with a handful of her inconvenient relatives.

Arabella becomes a serial killer for what she believes is the best of reasons. Her own two sons having died, one in the Boer War and the other in the Great War, and the de Birkett family’s fortunes having precipitously declined, she has taken it upon herself to establish her 20-year-old grandson Henry in a manner befitting his noble station. Initially, she persuades various childless in-laws — a dotty clergyman, a blustery India hand, a Harley Street doctor, a stupid businessman, and a pair of sisters, one repulsively fat, the other mousy — to allow her to insure their lives, making Henry the beneficiary. Arabella will naturally pay all the fees against the day — no doubt quite distant, of course — when each finally shuffles off this mortal coil. While maintaining a demeanor of sweetness and innocence, she then starts killing them off, one after the other.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/enter...1a1_story.html

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...om_search=true

[JSWolf]

I'll nominate Rivers of London (aka Midnight Riot) by Ben Aaronovitch.

If you like fantasy set in modern day in real places that's witty, fun, clever, humorous, has a very good story, and interesting characters, this is the book for you.

My name is Peter Grant and until January I was just probationary constable in that mighty army for justice known to all right-thinking people as the Metropolitan Police Service (as the Filth to everybody else). My only concerns in life were how to avoid a transfer to the Case Progression Unit–we do paperwork so real coppers don't have to–and finding a way to climb into the panties of the outrageously perky WPC Leslie May. Then one night, in pursuance of a murder inquiry, I tried to take a witness statement from someone who was dead but disturbingly voluable, and that brought me to the attention of Inspector Nightingale, the last wizard in England. Now I'm a Detective Constable and a trainee wizard, the first apprentice in fifty years, and my world has become somewhat more complicated: nests of vampires in Purley, negotiating a truce between the warring god and goddess of the Thames, and digging up graves in Covent Garden . . . and there's something festering at the heart of the city I love, a malicious vengeful spirit that takes ordinary Londoners and twists them into grotesque mannequins to act out its drama of violence and despair. The spirit of riot and rebellion has awakened in the city, and it's falling to me to bring order out of chaos–or die trying.

This is available at Overdrive for some libraries.

https://www.overdrive.com/media/332278/rivers-of-london (might be for the UK)
https://www.overdrive.com/media/480602/midnight-riot (for the US)

[CRussel]

I'll absolutely second Rivers of London/Midnight Riot. This is witty more than funny, but definitely left me regularly chortling and reading passages to my DW. (Best nomination you've made, Jon!)

[CRussel]

And I'll take my third ticket to nominate Alice, Let's Eat by Calvin Trillin.

Now, I know some of you may not play bridge, but we ALL eat! And we all like to laugh out loud. With Alice, Let's Eat, we can do both. Originally published in 1996, my DW and I read passages of this back and forth to each other as we both read it and often fought over who got to the book first (the problem of pBooks!) This is a collection of essays from The New Yorker that cover his attempts to find the best examples of local foods.

In this delightful and delicious book, Calvin Trillin, guided by an insatiable appetite, embarks on a hilarious odyssey in search of “something decent to eat.” Across time zones and cultures, and often with his wife, Alice, at his side, Trillin shares his triumphs in the art of culinary discovery, including Dungeness crabs in California, barbecued mutton in Kentucky, potato latkes in London, blaff d’oursins in Martinique, and a $33 picnic on a no-frills flight to Miami. His eating companions include Fats Goldberg, the New York pizza baron and reformed blimp; William Edgett Smith, the man with the Naughahyde palate; and his six-year-old daughter, Sarah, who refuses to enter a Chinese restaurant unless she is carrying a bagel (“just in case”). And though Alice “has a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day,” on the road she proves to be a serious eater–despite “seemingly uncontrollable attacks of moderation.”

Overdrive
Amazon US
Amazon CA
Goodreads

A bit pricey, but it IS on Overdrive, and it's a nice length (192 pages). Oh, and did I mention? This is really funny!

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by issybird

LOL, grad school was the last time I played, too; although for years after I'd work out problems in the bridge columns in the paper (the concept of bridge columns sounding distinctly Paleolithic to our younger members, no doubt).

All I can say is that if my groceries had come from my bridge, I'd have been svelte indeed!

With my DW pregnant, and I was trying to actually finish my third year of college, there were definitely meals that I never got. The combination of bridge, hearts and gin rummy games in the college caf kept us mostly fed, but didn't do a whole lot for my grades.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I'll nominate Rivers of London (aka Midnight Riot) by Ben Aaronovitch.

If you like fantasy set in modern day in real places that's witty, fun, clever, humorous, has a very good story, and interesting characters, this is the book for you.



This is available at Overdrive for some libraries.

https://www.overdrive.com/media/332278/rivers-of-london (might be for the UK)
https://www.overdrive.com/media/480602/midnight-riot (for the US)

I can't give this a nod without a Kindle link, Jon!

[WT Sharpe]

So I'll provide one.

https://www.amazon.com/Midnight-Riot.../dp/B004C43F70

And I third it.