MobileRead December 2013 Book Club Nominations

[Bookpossum]

I'll third Dubliners.

Oops - beaten to the draw by sun surfer! I'll take my vote back and think again.

[Bookpossum]

I'll second the Ursula Le Guin Vol. 2.

[sun surfer]

I'll also third The Mysterious Mr. Quin.

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

I'll third Dubliners.

Oops - beaten to the draw by sun surfer! I'll take my vote back and think again.

[BelleZora]

Third Ursula Le Guin.

[caleb72]

I'll second Limits by Niven.

[caleb72]

I'll nominate Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man.

The Illustrated Man is a 1951 book of eighteen science fiction short stories by Ray Bradbury that explores the nature of mankind. A recurring theme throughout the eighteen stories is the conflict of the cold mechanics of technology and the psychology of people.
The unrelated stories are tied together by the frame device of "the Illustrated Man", a vagrant with a tattooed body whom the unnamed narrator meets. The man's tattoos, allegedly created by a time-traveling woman, are animated and each tell a different tale. All but one of the stories had been published previously elsewhere, although Bradbury revised some of the texts for the book's publication.
The concept of the Illustrated Man would later be reused by Bradbury as an antagonistic character in Something Wicked This Way Comes, the tattoos coming to represent the souls of sinful victims of a mysterious carnival.

Amazon (US): LINK
Amazon (UK): LINK
Amazon (CA): LINK
Kobo (US): LINK
Google Play (AU): LINK

[crich70]

I'll third the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

[John F]

I'll second The Illustrated Man.

[HomeInMyShoes]

I'll third The Illustrated Man. I've read a few of the stories in R is for Rocket previously, but I have enjoyed the last two Bradbury books I've read.

One part of The Exiles still makes me laugh when I think of it.

[kennyc]

R is for Rocket contains one of my all time favorite stories - Frost and Fire!

[sun surfer]

I'll nominate The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. There's a few different threads for it floating around the library here, so here's two possibilities:

ePub
Kindle

Originally Posted by HomeInMyShoes

I'll nominate:

Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain by Lucia Perillo

Amazon.ca Amazon.com

Spoiler:

Populating a small town in the Pacific Northwest, the characters in Lucia Perillo’s story collection all resist giving the world what it expects of them and are surprised when the world comes roaring back.

An addict trapped in a country house becomes obsessed with vacuum cleaners and the people who sell them door-to-door. An abandoned woman seeks consolation in tales of armed robbery told by one of her fellow suburban housewives. An accidental mother struggles to answer her daughter’s badgering about her paternity. And in three stories readers meet Louisa, a woman with Down syndrome who serves as an accomplice to her younger sister’s sexual exploits and her aging mother’s fantasies of revenge.

Together, Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain is a sharp-edged, witty testament to the ambivalence of emotions, the way they pull in directions that often cancel one another out or twist their subjects into knots. In lyrical prose, Perillo draws on her training as a naturalist and a poet to map the terrain of the comic and the tragic, asking how we draw the boundaries between these two zones. What’s funny, what’s heartbreaking, and who gets to decide?

Shortlisted for the 2012 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize ($25,000): To an author whose debut work—a first novel or collection of short stories published in 2012—represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise.

This sounds interesting. I will second it.


I will nominated Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh by Mo Yan (Winner 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature)..

From Publishers Weekly:

Spoiler:

If China has a Kafka, it may be Mo Yan. Like Kafka, Yan (The Republic of Wine; Red Sorghum) has the ability to examine his society through a variety of lenses, creating fanciful, Metamorphosis-like transformations or evoking the numbing bureaucracy and casual cruelty of modern governments. The title novella of this collection of eight tales chronicles the story of old Ding, whose 43 years of dedicated service to the Municipal Farm Equipment Factory have earned him the honorific Shifu, or master worker. Despite this praise, Ding is abruptly laid off one month before his retirement. After contemplating his options including setting himself on fire in protest Ding decides to go with a more entrepreneurial approach, converting an abandoned bus into a cottage-for-hire for lovers. As an old man getting his first taste of capitalism, he serves as a symbol for many of those facing struggles in modern China. Another entry, "Man and Beast," a leftover piece from Mo's Red Sorghum saga, evokes some of the horror of Japan's wartime treatment of China, while "The Cure" demonstrates the hatred and desperation China inflicted upon itself during the Cultural Revolution. Mo abandons the realistic mode for "Soaring," in which a new bride takes flight like a butterfly, though the violence with which she's brought back to earth proves that not every fable features a happy ending. This collection brings together stories written over the past 20 years and feels more like a random buffet than a carefully planned meal. Still, it provides a useful introduction to one of China's most important contemporary writers.

Kindle

[Bookpossum]

I'll second The Jungle Book. "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" is one of my all-time favourite stories.

[Dazrin]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

I'll nominate The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. There's a few different threads for it floating around the library here, so here's two possibilities:

ePub
Kindle

I will third this.

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

I'll second The Jungle Book. "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" is one of my all-time favourite stories.

Mine too, and since I read it to my daughter (5) earlier this year, one of her's too.

[pynch]

An epub of Joyce’s Dubliners can also be found in his Complete Works in the Patricia Clark Memorial Library.

EDIT:
The link for the Sherlock Holmes Memoirs isn’t working, the URL address is missing.

Another version of the Memoirs is in the the Sherlock Holmes Omnibus, which has been proof-read more diligently.