Literary Region Nominations • February 2013

[fantasyfan]

I'll second The Old Man and the Sea for my last choice.

[sun surfer]

There's the old saying, "The best laid plans of mice and men go often awry".

The real kicker is that there'd have been no controversy at all and we'd have had a perfect category for our recent interests if Time Period had been rightly listed. Well, in any case the mix-up has led to an interesting nominating month.


ETA - I second Up From Slavery.

[paola]

Originally Posted by fantasyfan

I'll second The Old Man and the Sea for my last choice.

ah, indeed I had not realised I've used up all my nominations!

sunsurfer, no problem and indeed thanks for all you do for this club!

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by paola

sunsurfer, no problem and indeed thanks for all you do for this club!

Ditto

[Bookpossum]

And from me too.

I third Up from Slavery.

[issybird]

I reread very little these days, but I decided I'd be doing this category a disservice if I didn't nominate my favorite Canadian novel, Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies. From Goodreads:

Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.

It doesn't seem to be available as an ebook, at least in the USA. I hope it's available in Canada!

[Synamon]

Originally Posted by issybird

It doesn't seem to be available as an ebook, at least in the USA. I hope it's available in Canada!

Nope, not available as an ebook in Canada either. Good book though.

I've read a bunch of the recent nominations, so I guess I'll pick the one I liked the most to use up a nom and third The Good Earth.

PS: Catch-22 sucks.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by issybird

I reread very little these days, but I decided I'd be doing this category a disservice if I didn't nominate my favorite Canadian novel, Fifth Business, by Robertson Davies. From Goodreads:



It doesn't seem to be available as an ebook, at least in the USA. I hope it's available in Canada!

I can't find the ebook but it is easily available from The Book Depository in paperback--published by Penguin as part of Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics at a reasonable price and free delivery world wide. I bought my copy of Turn Magic Wheel from that source. I've always found them excellent, quick, and reliable.

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Fift.../9780141186153

[sun surfer]

Thanks for the thanks.

[Billi]

I give my votes to Hemingway, Washington and Davies.

[issybird]

Fourth The Old Man and the Sea

[Hamlet53]

Fourth The Good Earth.

Nominate The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

From Wikipedia (to those few who may not be familiar with this novel)

Spoiler:

The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. For it he won the annual National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for novels and it was cited prominently when he won the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in financial and agricultural industries. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they were trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California. Along with thousands of other "Okies", they sought jobs, land, dignity, and a future.

It's available as an ebook.

[Synamon]

Second Grapes of Wrath.

[caleb72]

I'll third Grapes of Wrath.

[sun surfer]

I third Fifth Business. The description didn't pull me in right away, but issybird saying it's her favourite Canadian novel has me intrigued.


With my last nomination I had a hard time deciding between three books including The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence (Canadian) and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Wayne Johnston (Canadian), but I finally chose (the one from the U. S.):

I nominate A Separate Peace by John Knowles.

From Amazon:

Set at a boys’ boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.

A bestseller for more than thirty years, A Separate Peace is John Knowles’s crowning achievement and an undisputed American classic.

"A masterpiece." - National Review

"A model of restraint, deeply felt and beautifully written." - The Observer