August 2010 Mobile Read Book Club Vote
 

Help up choose a book as the August 2010 eBook for the Mobile Read Book Club. The poll will be open for 5 days. We will start the discussion thread for this book on August 20th. Select from the following books.


Sh*t My Dad Says by Halpern, Justin
More than a million people now follow Mr. Halpern's philosophical musings on Twitter, and in this book, his son weaves a brilliantly funny, touching coming-of-age memoir around the best of his quotes. An all-American story that unfolds on the Little League field, in Denny's, during excruciating family road trips, and, most frequently, in the Halperns' kitchen over bowls of Grape-Nuts, Sh*t My Dad Says is a chaotic, hilarious, true portrait of a father-son relationship from a major new comic voice.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler.
Here are a few quotes from the Amazon page:
"Every time I finish reading one of Chandler's Marlowe novels, I end up feeling depressed, because it's one less Chandler novel that I can read for the first time. In my mind, he's that good -- he is one of the only writers that I am consistenly incapable of setting down to go to sleep... I finished the last half of "The Long Goodbye" at about 5:00 am -- I was so wrapped up in it, that I failed to notice the time."

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett
It is 1944 and weeks before D-Day. The Allies are disguising their invasion plans with a phoney armada of ships and planes. Their plan would be scuppered if an enemy agent found out... and then, Hitler's prize agent, “The Needle”, does just that. Hunted by MI5, he leads a murderous trail across Britain to a waiting U-Boat. But he hasn't planned for a storm-battered island, and the remarkable young woman who lives there.

Don't Sleep There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett
The Pirahã Indians of the Amazon are a very peculiar people. They number fewer than 400 and have no myths, rituals or history. Their language is unrelated to any other living tongue. It can be whistled, sung, hummed or spoken. It has no words for numbers, colours, left or right, brother or sister.

The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
"More dramtatic than fiction...THE GUNS OF AUGUST is a magnificent narrative—beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained....The product of painstaking and sophisticated research."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to World War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and why it could have been stopped but wasn't. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, THE GUNS OF AUGUST will not be forgotten.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel written by Yann Martel. In the story, the protagonist Piscine "Pi" Molitor Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck, while stranded on a boat in the Pacific Ocean. Martel brought the idea of rituals many times throughout the novel as well as storytelling. Rituals give structure to abstract ideas and emotions—in other words, ritual is an alternate form of storytelling. It was rituals and storytelling that kept Pi Patel sane.

Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster
A delightful, witty, easily accessible set of talks on the topic of the novel. Relatively short, too.
Forster's book is not really a book at all; rather, it's a collection of lectures delivered at Cambridge University on subjects as parboiled as "People," "The Plot," and "The Story." It has an unpretentious verbal immediacy thanks to its spoken origin and is written in the key of Aplogetic Mumble: "Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad." Such gentle provocations litter these pages. How can you not read on? Forster's critical writing is so ridiculously plainspoken, so happily commonsensical, that we often forget to be intimidated by the rhetorical landscapes he so ably leads us through. As he himself points out in the introductory note, "Since the novel is itself often colloquial it may possibly withhold some of its secrets from the graver and grander streams of criticism, and may reveal them to backwaters and shallows."

The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family outside Munich. Liesel's father was taken away on the breath of a single, unfamiliar word - Kommunist - and Liesel sees the fear of a similar fate in her mother's eyes. On the journey, Death visits the young boy, and notices Liesel. It will be the first of many near encounters. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery.So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.The Book Thief is a story about the power of words to make worlds. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
From Booklist:
Gladwell, a New Yorker staff writer, offers an incisive and piquant theory of social dynamics that is bound to provoke a paradigm shift in our understanding of mass behavioral change. Defining such dramatic turnarounds as the abrupt drop in crime on New York's subways, or the unexpected popularity of a novel, as epidemics, Gladwell searches for catalysts that precipitate the "tipping point," or critical mass, that generates those events. What he finds, after analyzing a number of fascinating psychological studies, is that tipping points are attributable to minor alterations in the environment, such as the eradication of graffiti, and the actions of a surprisingly small number of people, who fit the profiles of personality types that he terms connectors, mavens, and salesmen. As he applies his strikingly counterintuitive hypotheses to everything from the "stickiness," or popularity, of certain children's television shows to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, Gladwell reveals that our cherished belief in the autonomy of the self is based in great part on wishful thinking. Donna Seaman

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland
.....Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (popularly known as Fanny Hill) is an erotic novel by John Cleland first published in England in 1748. Written while the author was in debtor's prison in London, it is considered "the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form of the novel." One of the most prosecuted and banned books in history, it has become a synonym for obscenity.

WooHoo! Eye of the Needle now has 100% of the votes. It pays to be first.

50-50! :p

...and now 50%

BOb

Bob,
You forgot to add the rest of the description under "Aspects of the novel". If you think it's too long, you can skip the first paragraph.


From Amazon.com:
There are all kinds of books out there purporting to explain that odd phenomenon the novel. Sometimes it's hard to know whom they're are for, exactly. Enthusiastic readers? Fellow academics? Would-be writers? Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster's 1927 treatise on the "fictitious prose work over 50,000 words" is, it turns out, for anyone with the faintest interest in how fiction is made. Open at random, and find your attention utterly sandbagged.

Forster's book is not really a book at all; rather, it's a collection of lectures delivered at Cambridge University on subjects as parboiled as "People," "The Plot," and "The Story." It has an unpretentious verbal immediacy thanks to its spoken origin and is written in the key of Aplogetic Mumble: "Those who dislike Dickens have an excellent case. He ought to be bad." Such gentle provocations litter these pages. How can you not read on? Forster's critical writing is so ridiculously plainspoken, so happily commonsensical, that we often forget to be intimidated by the rhetorical landscapes he so ably leads us through. As he himself points out in the introductory note, "Since the novel is itself often colloquial it may possibly withhold some of its secrets from the graver and grander streams of criticism, and may reveal them to backwaters and shallows."

This would have been my second choice. I should just add it to my TBR list anyway.

Oh oh choices, choices...

The Book Thief, a brilliant novel.

Ok, so I voted for my own nomination, just to make sure it had at least one vote.

But this month is full of good choices and I doubt if I will be disappointed...

Voted Eye of the Needle. Already read the Long Goodbye, but many of the titles are compelling. What is the theme this month? I don't see the relationship between the titles.

Free For All (any genre)

A lot of good stuff, I'd be happy with just about any of them, and might even break my unofficial "don't pay for DRM" rule depending on what wins.

I just voted for Sh*t My Dad Says. I hope this time we get a good book to read. But, please vote because you really do want to read what you voted for and not because it's cheap or free or some other asinine reasons like we had with The awful Egg book and 39 Steps.

That's right. I agree with you. But we have to choose one and only one.
I try to formulate a criterion of choice. If just about any of them are good, we might look one step ahead and ask us:

Which winner would lead us toward the most lively discussion?

Accordingly, Aspects of the Novel and The Tipping Point seem with more potential than others. Forester deals with a subject we are all interested by default and Gladwell similarly in a wider sense. This is then a solution by interest. There are other attributes by which to gage the future discussion: entertainment.

Other choices might be more entertaining, both while reading, interpreting, commenting and discussing. Among these I would put Life of Pi in evidence.

Cultural value. I look at Don't Sleep There Are Snakes as a good candidate under this aspect.

I will wait to cast my vote to read your observation and suggestions.

Well I'm withholding my vote for now to see which way the wind blows. Is that a good reason?