Help choose the May 2016 selection to read for the MR Literary Club!
Select from the following works:
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, 1925
Goodreads / Estimated Length: 230 pages
Spoiler:
From Amazon:
Heralded as Virginia Woolf's greatest novel, this is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life. When we meet her, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.
"Mrs. Dalloway was the first novel to split the atom. If the novel before Mrs. Dalloway aspired to immensities of scope and scale, to heroic journeys across vast landscapes, with Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf insisted that it could also locate the enormous within the everyday; that a life of errands and party-giving was every bit as viable a subject as any life lived anywhere; and that should any human act in any novel seem unimportant, it has merely been inadequately observed. The novel as an art form has not been the same since.
"Mrs. Dalloway also contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century."
--Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, 1938
Goodreads / Estimated Length: 366 pages
Limits and Renewals by Rudyard Kipling, 1932
Goodreads / Estimated Length: 271 pages
Spoiler:
The note from the cover of Bookpossum's copy reads as follows:
Limits and Renewals was Rudyard Kipling's last collection of stories. There are, as so often, fourteen of them, interspersed with apposite poems. The subjects are familiar, humorous, sometimes bizarre, incidents told in the ironic, allusive dialogue that only Kipling could write. There are stories of Early Christians, of "The Woman in his Life" (who is, of course, a dog) of various kinds of practical jokes, a charming anecdote of a village priest and village atheist. But these stories were written after the Great War and Kipling's loss of his only son, when he was old and often in pain. It is not surprising, though not immediately obvious, that he was obsessed with the problem of pain at this time and also with the "breaking strain" that a man can take. A more rewarding theme in this book is the value of love, the salvation of personality through loving - rather than being loved.
You can download a copy of it from the Adelaide University ebook site here:
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kipling/rudyard/
A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley, 1939
Goodreads / Estimated Length: 286 pages
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Guidelines-
Spoiler:
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: 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-
AnotherCat, bfisher, Bookpossum, Bookworm_Girl, caleb72, fantasyfan, HomeInMyShoes, issybird, sun surfer
This includes posts thus far in the September to February 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 single-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.