Help choose the December 2015 selection to read for the MR Literary Club!
Select from the following works:
The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings
Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
The Untouchable by John Banville
Spoiler:
Goodreads:
One of the most dazzling and adventurous writers now working in English takes on the enigma of the Cambridge spies in a novel of exquisite menace, biting social comedy, and vertiginous moral complexity. The narrator is the elderly Victor Maskell, formerly of British intelligence, for many years art expert to the Queen. Now he has been unmasked as a Russian agent and subjected to a disgrace that is almost a kind of death. But at whose instigation?
As Maskell retraces his tortuous path from his recruitment at Cambridge to the airless upper regions of the establishment, we discover a figure of manifold doubleness: Irishman and Englishman; husband, father, and lover of men; betrayer and dupe. Beautifully written, filled with convincing fictional portraits of Maskell's co-conspirators, and vibrant with the mysteries of loyalty and identity, The Untouchable places John Banville in the select company of both Conrad and le Carre.
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Babette's Feast by Karen Blixen
*
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.
Bonus votes:
Spoiler:
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-
BelleZora, bfisher, Bookpossum, Bookworm_Girl, caleb72, ccowie, fantasyfan, Hamlet53, HomeInMyShoes, issybird, Lynx-lynx, poohbear_nc, sun surfer
This includes posts thus far in the May to November 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.
The rotating nominator (this month - bfisher) may not vote in the poll. In the event of a tie, there will be a one-day non-multiple-choice run-off poll where the nominator again may not vote. If the run-off also ends in a tie then the tie will be resolved by the nominator.