Help us select the next book that the Mobile Read book club will read for May 2010.
The nominations will run through Apr 27.
Voting (new poll thread) will run for 5 days starting Apr 27.
Book selection category for May per the "official" club opening thread is:
May 2010
Classic (a book in the public domain that is still published and sold today. For example, it can be found as a pbook at Amazon.)
In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).
How Does This Work?
The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.
How Does a Book Get Selected?
Each book that is nominated will be listed in a pool at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.
How Many Nominations Can I Make?
Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.
How Do I Nominate a Book?
Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.
How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?
Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.
When is the Poll?
The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.
The floor is open to nominations.
Official choices each with three nominations:
The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne
During the American civil war, five men escape from captivity in the Confederacy by hot air balloon. A storm blows up, and they are swept out to sea, eventually finishing up on a seemingly uninhabited island, with no resources other than a few odds and ends they have in their pockets. The book tells the story of how they manage to survive on the island using only their skills and knowledge.
The island, however, has a deeper mystery. The men are helped by a mysterious unseen agent from time to time, and the sub-plot of the novel is their attempt to discover the truth behind this mystery. The book has a real "sting in the tale" ending; I'd strongly recommend that you DON'T read any detailed summary of it prior to reading it, or it'll spoil the ending for you.
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
When Arthur Clennam returns to England after many years abroad, he takes a kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother’s seamstress, and in the affairs of Amy’s father, William Dorrit, a man of shabby grandeur, long imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. As Arthur soon discovers, the dark shadow of the prison stretches far beyond its walls to affect the lives of many, from the kindly Mr. Pancks, the reluctant rent-collector of Bleeding Heart Yard, and the tipsily garrulous Flora Finching, to Merdle, an unscrupulous financier, and the bureaucratic Barnacles in the Circumlocution Office. A masterly evocation of the state and psychology of imprisonment, Little Dorrit is one of the supreme works of Dickens’s maturity.
The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe
The Baron was a real man in the british army who was posted in various places throughout the British empire in the 1700's. When he came home he apparently used to regale all his friends and neighbors with tall tales based on his travels. They seemed to become wilder and and wilder flights of fancy and lies until he becasme legend. ...
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Copyright ended on september 2008.
Brave New World is a novel by Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Set in the London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of futurism. Huxley answered this book with a reassessment in an essay, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final work, a novel titled Island (1962), both still in copyright.
In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Brave New World fifth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
(from the art of manliness):
Robinson Crusoe deals with mastery and morality. It addresses the ability of mankind to master his surroundings through hard work, and patience and faith, which eventually enable him to survive on an unknown island and able to cope with the difficult terrain, less-than-friendly natives and basically every wicked trial that comes his way. The morality addressed in this book is the eponymous protagonist’s rejection of his father’s advice to accept the happiness of the middle class life from which he was born. Against the wishes of his family, he runs off to sea to find adventure. It is not until Crusoe literally recreates a primitive approximation of that middle class life for himself on his island that he is freed.
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley:
Frankenstein, an instant bestseller and an important ancestor of both the horror and science fiction genres, not only tells a terrifying story, but also raises profound, disturbing questions about the very nature of life and the place of humankind within the cosmos: What does it mean to be human? What responsibilities do we have to each other? How far can we go in tampering with Nature? In our age, filled with news of organ donation genetic engineering, and bio-terrorism, these questions are more relevant than ever.
The Odyssey by Homer
In a way or another every western literary work comes from it.