Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read in July 2015! This is our 50th month and what better way to celebrate than with a new category?
The nominations will run for four days until 5 July. Then, a separate voting poll will begin where the month's selection will be decided.
The category for this month is:
Journey around the World
Nominations can be set anywhere, but they should be written by an author from a country that has not had an official selection yet.
Current countries with at least one official selection, and therefore excluded- Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Nigeria, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Russia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States
Club Travel Map in Google Maps, created by HomeInMyShoes
Club Travel Map in TravBuddy
In order for a work to be included in the poll it needs four nominations - the original nomination plus three supporting.
Each participant has four nominations to use. You can nominate a new work for consideration or you can support (second, third or fourth) a work that has already been nominated by another person.
To nominate a work just post a message with your nomination. If you are the first to nominate a work, it's always nice to provide an abstract to the work so others may consider their level of interest.
What is literature for the purposes of this club? A superior work of lasting merit that enriches the mind. Often it is important, challenging, critically acclaimed. It may be from ancient times to today; it may be from anywhere in the world; it may be obscure or famous, short or long; it may be a story, a novel, a play, a poem, an essay or another written form. If you are unsure if a work would be considered literature, just ask!
The floor is now open!
*
Nominations closed. Final nominations:
The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer, South Africa - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour- sun surfer, fantasyfan, Hamlet53, Bookpossum
The book won the Man Booker and the author won the Nobel.
From Goodreads:
Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.
Amazon AU Amazon UK Amazon US
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam, Bangladesh - Fully nominated
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende, Chile - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour- Hamlet53, sun surfer, Bookpossum, Lynx-lynx
Author country Chile, setting Chile
From Wikipedia:
The House of the Spirits (Spanish:
La casa de los espíritus, 1982) is the debut novel of Isabel Allende. The novel was rejected by several Spanish-language publishers before being published in Barcelona in 1982. It became an instant best seller, was critically acclaimed, and catapulted Allende to literary stardom. The novel was named Best Novel of the Year in Chile in 1982, and Allende received the country's Panorama Literario award.
The House of the Spirits has been translated into over 37 languages.
The book was first conceived by Allende when she received news that her 100-year-old grandfather was dying. She began to write him a letter that ultimately became the manuscript of
The House of the Spirits.
The story details the life of the Trueba family, spanning four generations, and tracing the post-colonial social and political upheavals of Chile – though the country's name, and the names of figures closely paralleling historical ones, such as "the President" or "the Poet", are never explicitly given. The story is told mainly from the perspective of two protagonists (Esteban and Alba) and incorporates elements of magical realism.
Hamlet53 says: Unfortunately my searching indicates that this book is not available as an ebook in English. For any who are literate in
Spanish there is an ebook though as well as
one in Dutch.
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones, New Zealand - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour- sun surfer, Bookpossum, Lynx-lynx, Bookworm_Girl
The author is from New Zealand and the book is set on Bougainville, an autonomous island off Papua New Guinea. The book won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book) and the Kiriyama Prize, and it was a Man Booker finalist.
From Goodreads:
In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations.
So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.
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The Plague by Albert Camus, Algeria - Fully nominated