Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read for December 2012!
The nominations will run for up to three days until December 4 or until five works have made the list.
Final voting in a new poll will begin by December 4, where the month's selection will be decided.
The category for this month is:
Open
In order for a work to be included in the poll it needs four nominations - the original nomination plus three supporting.
Each participant has four nominations to use. You can nominate a new work for consideration or you can support (second, third or fourth) a work that has already been nominated by another person.
To nominate a work just post a message with your nomination. If you are the first to nominate a work, it's always nice to provide an abstract to the work so others may consider their level of interest.
What is literature for the purposes of this club? A superior work of lasting merit that enriches the mind. Often it is important, challenging, critically acclaimed. It may be from ancient times to today; it may be from anywhere in the world; it may be obscure or famous, short or long; it may be a story, a novel, a play, a poem, an essay or another written form. If you are unsure if a work would be considered literature, just ask!
The floor is now open!
*
Nominations through post 21:
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami - Fully nominated
The Silent Steppe by Mukhamet Shayakhmetov - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour - sun surfer, paola, issybird, Hamlet53
The Silent Steppe is an enthralling story of a family living through one of the most traumatic periods of Soviet history, as seen through the eyes of a young boy growing up in a family of Kazakh nomads. It encompasses the horrors of political persecution and famine in the 1930s, and culminates in the author's first hand account of the Battle of Stalingrad and his long trek home through freezing winter conditions after being wounded and discharged from the Red Army.
(from
here)
Available as pbook
here
In the US, libraries that borrow from WorldCat shouldn't have a problem obtaining a copy.
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz -Fully nominated
Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks - Fully nominated
Spoiler:
In favour - caleb72, sun surfer, drofgnal, voodoo_pepperweb
When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love. As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."
Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. Written with stunning emotional intelligence and introducing "an inspiring heroine" (The Wall Street Journal), Brooks blends love and learning, loss and renewal into a spellbinding and unforgettable read.
Amazon (US)
Amazon (UK)
B&N (US)
Kobo
Found also in many e-libraries through overdrive and is fulfilled in epub and even in Kindle format (for applicable regions/libraries). Even Australia hasn't missed out.
The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos - 3
Talismano by Abdelwahab Meddeb - 2
Spoiler:
In favour - sun surfer, caleb72
From Amazon:
A lush journey into a Tunisia of memory and imagination.
Talismano is a novelistic exploration of writing seen as a hallucinatory journey through half-remembered, half-imagined cities—in particular, the city of Tunis, both as it is now, and as it once was. Walking and writing, journey and journal, mirror one another to produce a calligraphic, magical work: a palimpsest of various languages and cultures, highlighting Abdelwahab Meddeb’s beguiling mastery of both the Western and Islamic traditions. Meddeb’s journey is first and foremost a sensual one, almost decadent, where the narrator luxuriates in the Tunis of his memories and intercuts these impressions with recollections of other cities at other times, reviving the mythical figures of Arab-Islamic legend that have faded from memory in a rapidly westernizing North Africa. A fever dream situated on the knife-edge between competing cultures, Talismano is a testament to the power of language to evoke, and subdue, experience.
Editorial Reviews
“Meddeb promises nothing short of an orgy. First, an orgy of the senses: at the outset of the novel, a city, Tunis, deploys its smells and shadows, like the fulfillment of an erotic desire. But also an orgy of sense, of meaning: reviving heresy and heathens, the novel culminates in the sacrificial slaughter of a bull. Talismano lays out an enigmatic mosaic . . . It took a foreigner, someone who is not what he seems, to unleash the French language and send it whirling.” (Gérard Dupuy - Libération )
“Talismano has that rare quality, one found among others in Antonin Artaud’s Héliogabale, in Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, or in Burroughs’s The Wild Boys, that is, a darkness both lively and aggressive.” (Malek Alloula )
Available:
E-Book Amazon UK
E-book Amazon US
Also available everywhere as a p-book.
History: A Novel by Elsa Morante - 2
Spoiler:
In favour - paola, issybird
Elsa Morante
Here is the blurb (which gives something away of the plot, be warned):
HISTORY was written nearly 3 decades after Morante spent a year hiding from the Germans in remote farming villages in the mountains south of Rome. There she witnessed the full impact of the war and first formed the ambition to write an account of what history does when it reaches the realm of ordinary people struggling for life and bread. The central character in this powerful and unforgiving novel is Ida Mancuso, a schoolteacher whose husband has died and whose feckless teenage son treats the war as his playground. A German soldier on his way to North Africa rapes her and leaves her pregnant with a boy whose survival becomes Ida's passion, and her source of joy and meaning amid universal catastrophe.
Looks like pbook only
The Loser by Thomas Bernhard - 3