November 2013 MobileRead Book Club Vote
Help us choose a book as the November 2013 eBook for the MobileRead Book Club. The poll will be open for 5 days.
There will be no runoff vote unless the voting results a tie, in which case there will be a 3 day run-off poll. This is a
visible poll: others can see how you voted. It is
multiple-choice; you may cast a vote for each book that appeals to you.
We will start the discussion thread for this book on November 20th. Select from the following
Official Choices with three nominations each:
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Patricia Clark Memorial Library
• All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Amazon UK /
Amazon US
• Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Erich Kästner
Amazon (US)/
Kobo
Spoiler:
Quote:
Going to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising copywriter . . . weak heart, brown hair,” a young man with an excellent education but permanently condemned to a low-paid job without security in the short or the long run.
What’s to be done? Fabian and friends make the best of it—they go to work though they may be laid off at any time, and in the evenings they go to the cabarets and try to make it with girls on the make, all the while making a lot of sharp-sighted and sharp-witted observations about politics, life, and love, or what may be. Not that it makes a difference. Workers keep losing work to new technologies while businessmen keep busy making money, and everyone who can goes out to dance clubs and sex clubs or engages in marathon bicycle events, since so long as there’s hope of running into the right person or (even) doing the right thing, well—why stop?
• The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago
Amazon (US)/
Amazon (UK)/
Amazon (CA)/
B&N (US)/
Kobo or
Kobo/
Google Play (AUS) or
Google Play (AUS)
• Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
Amazon (US)
• The Dinner by Herman Koch
Amazon CA /
Amazon UK /
Amazon US
Spoiler:
“The Dinner,” the newly translated novel by the Dutch writer Herman Koch, has been a European sensation and an international best seller. (...)The success of “The Dinner” depends, in part, on the carefully calibrated revelations of its unreliable and increasingly unsettling narrator, Paul Lohman. Whatever else he may be, likable he is not. There is a bracing nastiness to this book that grows ever more intense with the turning of its pages. It will not please those who seek the cozy, the redemptive or the uplifting. If you are such a reader, you may stop right here. (NY Times)
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An internationally bestselling phenomenon: the darkly suspenseful, highly controversial tale of two families struggling to make the hardest decision of their lives -- all over the course of one meal.
It's a summer's evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse -- the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.
Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children. As civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple show just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.
Tautly written, incredibly gripping, and told by an unforgettable narrator, The Dinner promises to be the topic of countless dinner party debates. Skewering everything from parenting values to pretentious menus to political convictions, this novel reveals the dark side of genteel society and asks what each of us would do in the face of unimaginable tragedy. (Amazon.com)
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
No links provided.
• White Fever: A Journey to the Frozen Heart of Siberia by Jacek Hugo-Bader
Amazon (UK)
Spoiler:
From Amazon:
Quote:
This is the story of a journey like no other, as Jacek Hugo-Bader makes his way across Siberia, from Moscow to Vladivostok, in the middle of winter. Travelling alone in a modified Russian jeep, he traverses a continent that is two-and-a-half times bigger than America, awash with bandits and not always fully equipped with roads. Along the way, Hugo-Bader discovers a great deal of tragedy, but also plenty of dark humour among the reindeer shepherds, nomadic tribes, the former hippies, the shamans, and the followers of some of the many arcane religions that flourish in this isolated, impossible region.
• The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hidayat
Amazon Canada /
Amazon U.K. /
Amazon U.S. /
Bookworld Australia
• Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
OverDrive (US)/
OverDrive (Non-US)/
Amazon (UK)/
Amazon (CA)/
Google Play (AUS)