Help choose the September 2015 selection to read for the MR Literary Club! The poll will be open for three days and a discussion thread will begin shortly after a winner is chosen.
The vote is multiple choice. You may vote for as many or as few as you like. If you vote for the winner it is hoped that you will read the selection with the club and join in the discussion.
NEW - When the poll ends, bonus votes will be manually added before determining final results. Basically, anyone who has commented in two out of the last six discussion threads is eligible for bonus votes, and everyone eligible will have any votes cast doubled. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to vote if interested in participating in the literary club whether eligible for bonus votes or not, and anyone interested in bonus votes is encouraged to become eligible as it doesn’t take much. Currently eligible:
Spoiler:
BelleZora, bfisher, Bookpossum, Bookworm_Girl, caleb72, ccowie, desertblues, fantasyfan, Hamlet53, HomeInMyShoes, Lynx-lynx, paola, sun surfer
This includes posts in the March to August discussion threads.
*There are a few caveats to eligibility as outlined in
this post.
**If anyone feels there is any mistake in eligibility, please let me know before the poll is over. Once the poll ends and the tally with bonus votes added is announced, the results will be final.
In the event of a tie, there will be a one-day non-multiple-choice run-off poll. If the run-off also ends in a tie, then the tie will be resolved in favour of the selection that received all of its initial nominations first.
Select from the following works:
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Spoiler:
From Amazon:
Quote:
* Winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize
* Named the Costa Book of the Year
* Amazon Best Book of the Month for March 2015
When Helen Macdonald's father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer—Helen had been captivated by hawks since childhood—she'd never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk. But in her grief, she saw that the goshawk's fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White's chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor. Projecting herself "in the hawk's wild mind to tame her" tested the limits of Macdonald's humanity and changed her life.
Heart-wrenching and humorous, this book is an unflinching account of bereavement and a unique look at the magnetism of an extraordinary beast, with a parallel examination of a legendary writer's eccentric falconry. Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson
Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Spoiler:
It's available on Kindle Unlimited.
Saint Exupéry was a French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator. He won several of France's highest literary awards and also won the U.S. National Book Award. He is best remembered for his novella The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) and for his lyrical aviation writings, including Wind, Sand and Stars and Night Flight.
Best known for his classic children's book The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was also an accomplished novelist and memoirist. For a dozen-plus years preceding the outbreak of World War II, he was a commercial aviator, flying for the French courier company Aéropostale. He was stationed both in South America (flying the spine of the Andes through Chile and Argentina) and in French West Africa (navigating between Toulouse and such African cities as Dakar, Marrakech, Casablanca, and Cairo, and secluded military outposts in the Sahara). Sadly, in 1944 he disappeared without a trace while flying a war-related reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean.
Fans of The Little Prince will gain insight into that strange little book, by reading this strange little book. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that Wind, Sand and Stars is the Ur-consciousness of The Little Prince, and its essence can be found in Wind: the little desert foxes, the plane crashes, the calm acceptance of an impending Saharan death, and finally, the thirst-induced hallucinations, during which Saint-Exupéry likely conjured his children's story.
National Geograpic also listed it as one of the 100 best adventure stories:
3. Wind, Sand & Stars. By Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1940)
With beautiful prose, Antoine de Saint-Exupery describes his adventureous flights over the Pyrenees, Andes and Sahara. Probably the best book ever written about flying