MobileRead June 2014 Book Club Nominations

[pilotbob]

MobileRead Book Club
June 2014 Nominations

Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for June, 2014.

The nominations will run through midnight EST May 30 or until 10 books have made the list. The poll will then be posted and will remain open for five days.

Book selection category for June is:

Award Winners

In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).

How Does This Work?
The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.

How Does a Book Get Selected?
Each book that is nominated will be listed in a poll at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.

How Many Nominations Can I Make?
Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.

How Do I Nominate a Book?
Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.

How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?
Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.

When is the Poll?
The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the initial poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.

The floor is open to nominations. Please comment if you discover a nomination is not available as an ebook in your area.


Official choices with three nominations each:

(1) The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha-Mukherjee
Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / Scribd

Spoiler:

In 2010, Simon & Schuster published his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,[7] detailing the evolution of diagnosis and treatment of human cancers from ancient Egypt to the latest developments in chemotherapy and targeted therapy.[8] The Oprah magazine listed it in its "Top 10 Books of 2010".[9] It was also listed in "The 10 Best Books of 2010" by The New York Times[10] and the "Top 10 Nonfiction Books" by Time.[11]

In 2011 The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer was nominated as a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. On April 18 it won the annual Pulitzer

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.

(2) Hyperion by Dan Simmons
No links provided.

Spoiler:

Winner of the Hugo award in 1990 for best novel.

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion ...

(3) The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
No links provided.

Spoiler:

Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review

(4) Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden
No links provided.

Spoiler:

The Giller winner in 2008.

(5) Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
Amazon US

Spoiler:

In one of Robert Heinlein's most controversial bestsellers, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the Universe--and into battle with the Terran Mobile Infantry against mankind's most frightening enemy.

(6) The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss
Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

The Black Count won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

It is the biography of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the mixed-race son of a French marquis and a Haitian slave, who became a swashbuckling swordsman in Paris and then a military hero of the French Revolutionary Wars, remaining the highest-ranking black military figure in a Western army until Gen. Colin Powell 200 years later. --Wikipedia

In the 1790s, the son of an aristocratic white father and a black slave woman became a charismatic French general who for a time rivaled Napoleon himself, and afterward languished in an Italian dungeon. His story inspired the novel “The Count of Monte Cristo,” written by his son, Alexandre Dumas, who also drew upon his father’s adventures in “The Three Musketeers.” Posterity remembers this son as Dumas père, to distinguish him from Alexandre Dumas fils, also a writer, whose novel “La Dame aux Camélias” was the source for Verdi’s “La Traviata.” But the general was the first of the three Alexandres (he preferred to be known as Alex), and in “The Black Count,” Tom *Reiss, the author of “The Orientalist,” has recovered this fascinating story with a richly imaginative biography. --NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/bo...pagewanted=all

(7) The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Google Play (Aus)

Spoiler:

Won the Man Booker prize in 2008.

Balram Halwai is the White Tiger - the smartest boy in his village. His family is too poor for him to afford for him to finish school and he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables. But Balram gets his break when a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi. The city is a revelation. As he drives his master to shopping malls and call centres, Balram becomes increasingly aware of immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he will never be able to gain access to that world. As Balram broods over his situation, he realizes that there is only one way he can become part of this glamorous new India - by murdering his master.
The White Tiger presents a raw and unromanticised India, both thrilling and shocking - from the desperate, almost lawless villages along the Ganges, to the booming Wild South of Bangalore and its technology and outsourcing centres. The first-person confession of a murderer, The White Tiger is as compelling for its subject matter as for the voice of its narrator - amoral, cynical, unrepentant, yet deeply endearing.

(8) The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Amazon Australia / Amazon Canada / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.

(9) The Manual of Detection by Jedidiah Berry
Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo / Penguin

Spoiler:

It won the 2009 Hammett Prize and the 2010 Crawford Award.

The Hammett Prize is awarded annually by the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch (IACW/NA).

The Crawford award is a literary award given to a writer whose first fantasy book was published during the preceding 18 months. It's one of several awards presented by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA).

You can read the first chapter here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=104310258

Spoiler:

In a giant and rigidly bureaucratic agency, Charles Unwin is the personal clerk for legendary detective Travis Sivart. The detail-minded Unwin loves his job, but when Sivart suddenly goes missing, Unwin is unwillingly promoted to fill the vacancy. He only wants to solve one case: he wants to find Sivart so he can go back to being a clerk. In his first novel, Berry has created a wonderful and fantastic world, a vintage mystery seen through a hall of fun-house mirrors. Sivart’s cases have names like The Man Who Stole November Twelfth; a villain is the nefarious biloquist Enoch Hoffmann; chapters begin with koan-like excerpts from the Manual of Detection. Unwin’s adventures take him through rain-slicked city streets, to a dilapidated carnival run by criminals, and into the dreams of Sivart’s murdered supervisor. There are false starts and false identities, double crosses and doppelgängers—and there’s far more at stake than Unwin can imagine. Occasionally the story gets a little bit lost inside its own puzzle boxes, but this is a remarkably auspicious debut. --Keir Graff

Spoiler:

Review
Imaginative, fantastical, sometimes inexplicable, labyrinthine and ingenious...Great fun and very clever. My comparison? Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman - which is about as good as it gets --Observer

A wryly cerebral take on noir fiction...Separated conjoined twin gangsters, a duplicitous femme fatale and a nightmarish carnival owner inhabit the nocturnal, rain-soaked city where this clever, postmodern detective story is set --Financial Times

It is an elegant and stunningly imaginative fusion of detective and speculative fiction --Guardian
The plot's bursting with as many twists and surprises as you could hope for...It steams along the smooth rails of Berry's neatly constructed sentences, barrelling round each well-cambered turn with barely a judder --London Review of Books

Like Sin City, this is a noir fairytale, with the grey-scale, drizzly streets and shabby cafes contrasted by fluorescent, primary colour characters...Berry's work is reminiscent of the coolest young American novelists - Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Glen David Gold - in its sheer delight at how genre writing can be re-invigorated and re-imagined. The Manual of Detection makes the weird, fantastical world of the unconsciousness seem comically logical - like its subject, it is a dream. -- Scotland on Sunday

(10) Saville by David Storey
Amazon Au / Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / Amazon US / B&N

Spoiler:

Winner of the Booker Prize.

From Goodreads:

Colin Saville grows up in a mining village in South Yorkshire, against the background of war, of an industrialised countryside, of town and coalmine and village.

"If you haven't read David Storey's 1976 winner Saville read it at once, it is the best of all the Bookers." - The Observer

And since any abstracts about the book I could find were all as short as the one I used above, I'll also include the first review from Goodreads:

"This novel epitomizes one of my favorite quotes:

'Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.' - Boris Pasternak

Reading this book really is an extraordinary experience! I found much of it to be very comforting, very homey. I found other parts to be quite disturbing. This novel affected me in ways that I'm still trying to sort out. I suspect this is a story that I'll continue to think about, to try to come to terms with it, for a long time." - John

[pilotbob]

Wondering if a particular book is available in your country? The following spoiler contains a list of bookstores outside the United States you can search. If you don't see a bookstore on this list for your country, find one that is, send me the link via PM, and I'll add it to the list.

Spoiler:

Australian
Angus Robertson
Booktopia
Borders
Dymocks
Fishpond
Google

Canada
Amazon. Make sure you are logged out. Then go to the Kindle Store. Search for a book. After the search results come up, in the upper right corner of the screen, change the country to Canada and search away.
Google
Sony eBookstore (Upper right corner switch to/from US/CA)

UK
BooksOnBoard (In the upper right corner is a way to switch to the UK store)
Amazon
Foyle's
Google
Penguin
Random House
Waterstones
WH Smith

*** The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha-Mukherjee [Mims, Synamon, msjo]
Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo / URL="http://www.scribd.com/book/224369806/The-Emperor-of-All-Maladies-A-Biography-of-Cancer"]Scribd[/URL]

Spoiler:

In 2010, Simon & Schuster published his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,[7] detailing the evolution of diagnosis and treatment of human cancers from ancient Egypt to the latest developments in chemotherapy and targeted therapy.[8] The Oprah magazine listed it in its "Top 10 Books of 2010".[9] It was also listed in "The 10 Best Books of 2010" by The New York Times[10] and the "Top 10 Nonfiction Books" by Time.[11]

In 2011 The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer was nominated as a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. On April 18 it won the annual Pulitzer

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.

*** Hyperion by Dan Simmons [John F, treadlightly, Dazrin]
No links provided.

Spoiler:

Winner of the Hugo award in 1990 for best novel.

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion ...

*** The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt [John F, ccowie, BelleZora]
No links provided.

Spoiler:

Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review

*** Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein [crich70, Dazrin, caleb72]
Amazon US

Spoiler:

In one of Robert Heinlein's most controversial bestsellers, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the Universe--and into battle with the Terran Mobile Infantry against mankind's most frightening enemy.

** Extenuating Circumstances by Jonathan Valin [GA Russell, fantasyfan]
Amazon US / Overdrive

Spoiler:

Extenuating Circumstances won the 1990 Shamus Award for Best Novel.
WikiPedia

*** Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden [ccowie, BelleZora, Billi]
No links provided.

Spoiler:

The Giller winner in 2008.

From Goodreads:
Will Bird is a legendary Cree bush pilot, now lying in a coma in a hospital in his hometown of Moose Factory, Ontario. His niece Annie Bird, beautiful and self-reliant, has returned from her own perilous journey to sit beside his bed. Broken in different ways, the two take silent communion in their unspoken kinship, and the story that unfolds is rife with heartbreak, fierce love, ancient blood feuds, mysterious disappearances, fires, plane crashes, murders, and the bonds that hold a family, and a people, together. As Will and Annie reveal their secrets-the tragic betrayal that cost Will his family, Annie's desperate search for her missing sister, the famous model Suzanne-a remarkable saga of resilience and destiny takes shape. From the dangerous bush country of upper Canada to the drug-fueled glamour of the Manhattan club scene, Joseph Boyden tracks his characters with a keen eye for the telling detail and a rare empathy for the empty places concealed within the heart. Sure to appeal to readers of Louise Erdrich and Jim Harrison, Through Black Spruce establishes Boyden as a writer of startling originality and uncommon power.

* Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese [John F]
No links provided.

Spoiler:

Winner of the following awards:

• Amazon's Best Books of the Year: 2009 (#16)
• Publishers Weekly's Best Books: 2009 (Fiction)
• Indies Choice Book Award (Adult Fiction, 2010)
• New York Times bestseller

From Amazon:

A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel—an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.

*** The Manual of Detection by Jedidiah Berry [BenG, sun surfer, WT Sharpe]
Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo / Penguin

Spoiler:

It won the 2009 Hammett Prize and the 2010 Crawford Award.

The Hammett Prize is awarded annually by the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch (IACW/NA).

The Crawford award is a literary award given to a writer whose first fantasy book was published during the preceding 18 months. It's one of several awards presented by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA).

You can read the first chapter here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=104310258

Spoiler:

In a giant and rigidly bureaucratic agency, Charles Unwin is the personal clerk for legendary detective Travis Sivart. The detail-minded Unwin loves his job, but when Sivart suddenly goes missing, Unwin is unwillingly promoted to fill the vacancy. He only wants to solve one case: he wants to find Sivart so he can go back to being a clerk. In his first novel, Berry has created a wonderful and fantastic world, a vintage mystery seen through a hall of fun-house mirrors. Sivart’s cases have names like The Man Who Stole November Twelfth; a villain is the nefarious biloquist Enoch Hoffmann; chapters begin with koan-like excerpts from the Manual of Detection. Unwin’s adventures take him through rain-slicked city streets, to a dilapidated carnival run by criminals, and into the dreams of Sivart’s murdered supervisor. There are false starts and false identities, double crosses and doppelgängers—and there’s far more at stake than Unwin can imagine. Occasionally the story gets a little bit lost inside its own puzzle boxes, but this is a remarkably auspicious debut. --Keir Graff

Spoiler:

Review
Imaginative, fantastical, sometimes inexplicable, labyrinthine and ingenious...Great fun and very clever. My comparison? Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman - which is about as good as it gets --Observer

A wryly cerebral take on noir fiction...Separated conjoined twin gangsters, a duplicitous femme fatale and a nightmarish carnival owner inhabit the nocturnal, rain-soaked city where this clever, postmodern detective story is set --Financial Times

It is an elegant and stunningly imaginative fusion of detective and speculative fiction --Guardian
The plot's bursting with as many twists and surprises as you could hope for...It steams along the smooth rails of Berry's neatly constructed sentences, barrelling round each well-cambered turn with barely a judder --London Review of Books

Like Sin City, this is a noir fairytale, with the grey-scale, drizzly streets and shabby cafes contrasted by fluorescent, primary colour characters...Berry's work is reminiscent of the coolest young American novelists - Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Glen David Gold - in its sheer delight at how genre writing can be re-invigorated and re-imagined. The Manual of Detection makes the weird, fantastical world of the unconsciousness seem comically logical - like its subject, it is a dream. -- Scotland on Sunday

*** The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss [BenG, Billi, Mims]
Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

The Black Count won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

It is the biography of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the mixed-race son of a French marquis and a Haitian slave, who became a swashbuckling swordsman in Paris and then a military hero of the French Revolutionary Wars, remaining the highest-ranking black military figure in a Western army until Gen. Colin Powell 200 years later. --Wikipedia

In the 1790s, the son of an aristocratic white father and a black slave woman became a charismatic French general who for a time rivaled Napoleon himself, and afterward languished in an Italian dungeon. His story inspired the novel “The Count of Monte Cristo,” written by his son, Alexandre Dumas, who also drew upon his father’s adventures in “The Three Musketeers.” Posterity remembers this son as Dumas père, to distinguish him from Alexandre Dumas fils, also a writer, whose novel “La Dame aux Camélias” was the source for Verdi’s “La Traviata.” But the general was the first of the three Alexandres (he preferred to be known as Alex), and in “The Black Count,” Tom *Reiss, the author of “The Orientalist,” has recovered this fascinating story with a richly imaginative biography. --NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/bo...pagewanted=all

*** The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga [caleb72, BelleZora, Synamon]
Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Google Play (Aus)

Spoiler:

Won the Man Booker prize in 2008.

Balram Halwai is the White Tiger - the smartest boy in his village. His family is too poor for him to afford for him to finish school and he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables. But Balram gets his break when a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi. The city is a revelation. As he drives his master to shopping malls and call centres, Balram becomes increasingly aware of immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he will never be able to gain access to that world. As Balram broods over his situation, he realizes that there is only one way he can become part of this glamorous new India - by murdering his master.
The White Tiger presents a raw and unromanticised India, both thrilling and shocking - from the desperate, almost lawless villages along the Ganges, to the booming Wild South of Bangalore and its technology and outsourcing centres. The first-person confession of a murderer, The White Tiger is as compelling for its subject matter as for the voice of its narrator - amoral, cynical, unrepentant, yet deeply endearing.

*** The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes [sun surfer, Billi, ccowie]
Amazon Australia / Amazon Canada / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.

*** Saville by David Storey [sun surfer, WT Sharpe, fantasyfan]
Amazon Au / Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / Amazon US / B&N

Spoiler:

Winner of the Booker Prize.

From Goodreads:

Colin Saville grows up in a mining village in South Yorkshire, against the background of war, of an industrialised countryside, of town and coalmine and village.

"If you haven't read David Storey's 1976 winner Saville read it at once, it is the best of all the Bookers." - The Observer

And since any abstracts about the book I could find were all as short as the one I used above, I'll also include the first review from Goodreads:

"This novel epitomizes one of my favorite quotes:

'Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.' - Boris Pasternak

Reading this book really is an extraordinary experience! I found much of it to be very comforting, very homey. I found other parts to be quite disturbing. This novel affected me in ways that I'm still trying to sort out. I suspect this is a story that I'll continue to think about, to try to come to terms with it, for a long time." - John

[Mims]

I'll start things by nominating The Emperor of All Maladies: a biography of cancer by Siddhartha-Mukherjee .

In 2010, Simon & Schuster published his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,[7] detailing the evolution of diagnosis and treatment of human cancers from ancient Egypt to the latest developments in chemotherapy and targeted therapy.[8] The Oprah magazine listed it in its "Top 10 Books of 2010".[9] It was also listed in "The 10 Best Books of 2010" by The New York Times[10] and the "Top 10 Nonfiction Books" by Time.[11]

In 2011 The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer was nominated as a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. On April 18 it won the annual Pulitzer

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.

Hope I correctly added these links. If not, thanks in advance for your patience.
http://smile.amazon.com/Emperor-All-.../dp/B003UYUP58
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/empe...=9781439181713
http://http://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebook/the-emperor-of-all-maladies-1
http://www.scribd.com/book/224369806...aphy-of-Cancer

[Synamon]

Originally Posted by Mims

I'll start things by nominating The Emperor of All Maladies: a biography of cancer by Siddhartha-Mukherjee .

Second. I just signed this out from the library a few days ago and it's next on my list to listen to.

[John F]

I'll nominate Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Winner of the Hugo award in 1990 for best novel.

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion ...

Available at libraries everywhere.*

[John F]

I'll nominate The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review

Available at libraries everywhere.*

[msjo]

Originally Posted by Mims

I'll start things by nominating The Emperor of All Maladies: a biography of cancer by Siddhartha-Mukherjee .

I am pleased to cast a third vote for this excellent book. It is a long book but well worth the time to read. I bought it as an e-book from Kobo about three years ago so I know it is readily available.

[crich70]

I'll nominate Starship Troopers Click

In one of Robert Heinlein's most controversial bestsellers, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the Universe--and into battle with the Terran Mobile Infantry against mankind's most frightening enemy.

I was going to nominate Have spacesuit will travel, but I noticed at the last minute that it didn't win an award but was just nominated unlike Starship Troopers. It's available at Amazon.

[treadlightly]

Originally Posted by John F

I'll nominate Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Winner of the Hugo award in 1990 for best novel.

I'll second this.

[Mims]

Dr. Mukherjee said in an interview with Medscape that Ken Burns next project is a six hour production called Cancerwhich will be out in 2015 and is based on The Emperor of all Maladies. He also said that the project follows the structure of the book, but it has a much larger format.

The Emperor of all Maladies is available at Amazon, BN, Kobo, and some Overdrive libraries.

Seems to be available now with Scribd for all those with subscriptions or trial subscriptions.

[Dazrin]

I will second Starship Troopers and third Hyperion.

Originally Posted by crich70

I'll nominate Starship Troopers Click

I was going to nominate Have spacesuit will travel, but I noticed at the last minute that it didn't win an award but was just nominated unlike Starship Troopers. It's available at Amazon.

Have Space Suit - Will Travel won the Sequoyah Award in 1961 according to Goodreads, so it qualifies. An award winner doesn't need to be a major award and sometimes there are very interesting choices in some of the obscure awards.

[GA Russell]

I would like to nominate a detective story to the list, so I will nominate a Harry Stoner novel called Extenuating Circumstances by Jonathan Valin.

Extenuating Circumstances won the 1990 Shamus Award for Best Novel.

I think I read all of Valin's novels back in the day, and enjoyed every one of them.

New York Times: "Mr. Valin is an expert writer who provides coherent plots and believable dialogue."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Valin

http://www.amazon.com/Extenuating-Ci...jonathan+valin
https://www.overdrive.com/media/1249...-circumstances

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

I will second Starship Troopers and third Hyperion.



Have Space Suit - Will Travel won the Sequoyah Award in 1961 according to Goodreads, so it qualifies. An award winner doesn't need to be a major award and sometimes there are very interesting choices in some of the obscure awards.

Interesting. I didn't know that. It is a good story. I haven't read Starship Troopers yet but I have seen the movies.

[Dazrin]

Here is the tally up through see editing remark. Nine fully nominated titles so far, order they were fully nominated is noted.

(1) *** The Emperor of All Maladies: a biography of cancer by Siddhartha-Mukherjee [Mims, Synamon, msjo]
2011 Pulitzer
Available at: Overdrive / "Amazon, BN, Kobo, Scribd, and some Overdrive libraries"

Spoiler:

In 2010, Simon & Schuster published his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,[7] detailing the evolution of diagnosis and treatment of human cancers from ancient Egypt to the latest developments in chemotherapy and targeted therapy.[8] The Oprah magazine listed it in its "Top 10 Books of 2010".[9] It was also listed in "The 10 Best Books of 2010" by The New York Times[10] and the "Top 10 Nonfiction Books" by Time.[11]

In 2011 The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer was nominated as a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. On April 18 it won the annual Pulitzer

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.

(2) *** Hyperion by Dan Simmons [John F, treadlightly, Dazrin]
1990 Hugo Award winner
Available at: Overdrive

Spoiler:

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion ...

(3) *** The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt [John F, ccowie, BellaZora]
2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Available at: Overdrive

Spoiler:

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review

(5) *** Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein [crich70, Dazrin, caleb72]
1960 Hugo Award for Best Novel
Available at: Amazon / Overdrive

Spoiler:

In one of Robert Heinlein's most controversial bestsellers, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the Universe--and into battle with the Terran Mobile Infantry against mankind's most frightening enemy.

** Extenuating Circumstances by Jonathan Valin [GA Russell, fantasyfan]
1990 Shamus Award for Best Novel
Available at: Overdrive, Amazon

Spoiler:

I think I read all of Valin's novels back in the day, and enjoyed every one of them.

New York Times: "Mr. Valin is an expert writer who provides coherent plots and believable dialogue."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Valin

(4) *** Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden [ccowie, BellaZora, Billi]
2008 Giller Prize
Available at: Overdrive

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:
Will Bird is a legendary Cree bush pilot, now lying in a coma in a hospital in his hometown of Moose Factory, Ontario. His niece Annie Bird, beautiful and self-reliant, has returned from her own perilous journey to sit beside his bed. Broken in different ways, the two take silent communion in their unspoken kinship, and the story that unfolds is rife with heartbreak, fierce love, ancient blood feuds, mysterious disappearances, fires, plane crashes, murders, and the bonds that hold a family, and a people, together. As Will and Annie reveal their secrets-the tragic betrayal that cost Will his family, Annie's desperate search for her missing sister, the famous model Suzanne-a remarkable saga of resilience and destiny takes shape. From the dangerous bush country of upper Canada to the drug-fueled glamour of the Manhattan club scene, Joseph Boyden tracks his characters with a keen eye for the telling detail and a rare empathy for the empty places concealed within the heart. Sure to appeal to readers of Louise Erdrich and Jim Harrison, Through Black Spruce establishes Boyden as a writer of startling originality and uncommon power.

* Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese [John F]
Amazon's Best Books of the Year: 2009 (#16), Publishers Weekly's Best Books: 2009 (Fiction), Indies Choice Book Award (Adult Fiction, 2010), New York Times bestseller
Available at: Overdrive

Spoiler:

From Amazon:

Quote:
A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel—an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.

(9) *** The Manual of Detection by Jedidiah Berry [BenG, sun surfer, WT Sharpe]
2009 Hammett Prize and the 2010 Crawford Award
Available at:
Amazon / Amazon UK / Penguin / Kobo / Overdrive

Spoiler:

The Hammett Prize is awarded annually by the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch (IACW/NA).

The Crawford award is a literary award given to a writer whose first fantasy book was published during the preceding 18 months. It's one of several awards presented by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA).

Synopsis:

In a giant and rigidly bureaucratic agency, Charles Unwin is the personal clerk for legendary detective Travis Sivart. The detail-minded Unwin loves his job, but when Sivart suddenly goes missing, Unwin is unwillingly promoted to fill the vacancy. He only wants to solve one case: he wants to find Sivart so he can go back to being a clerk. In his first novel, Berry has created a wonderful and fantastic world, a vintage mystery seen through a hall of fun-house mirrors. Sivart’s cases have names like The Man Who Stole November Twelfth; a villain is the nefarious biloquist Enoch Hoffmann; chapters begin with koan-like excerpts from the Manual of Detection. Unwin’s adventures take him through rain-slicked city streets, to a dilapidated carnival run by criminals, and into the dreams of Sivart’s murdered supervisor. There are false starts and false identities, double crosses and doppelgängers—and there’s far more at stake than Unwin can imagine. Occasionally the story gets a little bit lost inside its own puzzle boxes, but this is a remarkably auspicious debut. --Keir Graff

Reviews:

Imaginative, fantastical, sometimes inexplicable, labyrinthine and ingenious...Great fun and very clever. My comparison? Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman - which is about as good as it gets --Observer

A wryly cerebral take on noir fiction...Separated conjoined twin gangsters, a duplicitous femme fatale and a nightmarish carnival owner inhabit the nocturnal, rain-soaked city where this clever, postmodern detective story is set --Financial Times

It is an elegant and stunningly imaginative fusion of detective and speculative fiction --Guardian
The plot's bursting with as many twists and surprises as you could hope for...It steams along the smooth rails of Berry's neatly constructed sentences, barrelling round each well-cambered turn with barely a judder --London Review of Books

Like Sin City, this is a noir fairytale, with the grey-scale, drizzly streets and shabby cafes contrasted by fluorescent, primary colour characters...Berry's work is reminiscent of the coolest young American novelists - Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Glen David Gold - in its sheer delight at how genre writing can be re-invigorated and re-imagined. The Manual of Detection makes the weird, fantastical world of the unconsciousness seem comically logical - like its subject, it is a dream. -- Scotland on Sunday

You can read the first chapter here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=104310258

(6) *** The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss [BenG, Billi, Mims]
2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
Available at: Amazon / Amazon UK / Kobo / Overdrive

Spoiler:

It is the biography of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the mixed-race son of a French marquis and a Haitian slave, who became a swashbuckling swordsman in Paris and then a military hero of the French Revolutionary Wars, remaining the highest-ranking black military figure in a Western army until Gen. Colin Powell 200 years later. --Wikipedia

In the 1790s, the son of an aristocratic white father and a black slave woman became a charismatic French general who for a time rivaled Napoleon himself, and afterward languished in an Italian dungeon. His story inspired the novel “The Count of Monte Cristo,” written by his son, Alexandre Dumas, who also drew upon his father’s adventures in “The Three Musketeers.” Posterity remembers this son as Dumas père, to distinguish him from Alexandre Dumas fils, also a writer, whose novel “La Dame aux Camélias” was the source for Verdi’s “La Traviata.” But the general was the first of the three Alexandres (he preferred to be known as Alex), and in “The Black Count,” Tom *Reiss, the author of “The Orientalist,” has recovered this fascinating story with a richly imaginative biography. --NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/bo...pagewanted=all

(8) *** The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga [caleb72, BelleZora, Synamon]
2008 Man Booker Prize
Available at: Amazon US / Amazon UK / B&N (US) / Google Play (AUS)

Spoiler:

Balram Halwai is the White Tiger - the smartest boy in his village. His family is too poor for him to afford for him to finish school and he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables. But Balram gets his break when a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi. The city is a revelation. As he drives his master to shopping malls and call centres, Balram becomes increasingly aware of immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he will never be able to gain access to that world. As Balram broods over his situation, he realizes that there is only one way he can become part of this glamorous new India - by murdering his master.
The White Tiger presents a raw and unromanticised India, both thrilling and shocking - from the desperate, almost lawless villages along the Ganges, to the booming Wild South of Bangalore and its technology and outsourcing centres. The first-person confession of a murderer, The White Tiger is as compelling for its subject matter as for the voice of its narrator - amoral, cynical, unrepentant, yet deeply endearing.

(7) *** The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes [sun surfer, Billi, ccowie]
Man Booker Prize
Available at: Amazon Australia Canada UK US / Kobo US

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.

** Saville by David Storey [sun surfer, WT Sharpe]
Booker Prize winner
Amazon Au / Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / Amazon US / B&N

Spoiler:

Winner of the Booker Prize.

From Goodreads:

Colin Saville grows up in a mining village in South Yorkshire, against the background of war, of an industrialised countryside, of town and coalmine and village.

"If you haven't read David Storey's 1976 winner Saville read it at once, it is the best of all the Bookers." - The Observer

And since any abstracts about the book I could find were all as short as the one I used above, I'll also include the first review from Goodreads:

"This novel epitomizes one of my favorite quotes:

'Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.' - Boris Pasternak

Reading this book really is an extraordinary experience! I found much of it to be very comforting, very homey. I found other parts to be quite disturbing. This novel affected me in ways that I'm still trying to sort out. I suspect this is a story that I'll continue to think about, to try to come to terms with it, for a long time." - John

[Mims]

Thank you Dazrin for the nice summary.