MobileRead April 2010 Book Club Nominations

[Zipr]

Originally Posted by Sparrow

I'd like to nominate -
"Augustus Carp, Esq. - Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man" by Henry Bashford

I'll third this one.

[Katti's Cat]

I nominate 'Six of One' by Rita Mae Brown

"Perched right on the Mason-Dixon line, tiny Runnymede, Maryland, is ripe with a history almost as colorful as the women who live there—from Celeste Chalfonte, headstrong and aristocratic, who murders for principle and steals her brother’s wife, to Fannie Jump Creighton, who runs a speakeasy right in her own home when hard times come knocking. Then of course, there’re Louise and Julia, the boldly eccentric Hunsenmeir sisters. Wheezie and Juts spend their whole lives in Runnymede, cheerfully quibbling about everything from men to child-rearing to how to drive a car. But they never let small-town life keep them from chasing their biggest dreams—or from being true to who they really are. Sparkling with a perfect combination of sisterhood and sass, Six of One is a richly textured Southern canvas—Rita Mae Brown “at her winning, fondest best”(Kirkus Reviews). " [from Amazon]

This bookseries (this is the first one) has me in stitches whenever I read it.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Katti's Cat

I nominate 'Six of One' by Rita Mae Brown

"Perched right on the Mason-Dixon line, tiny Runnymede, Maryland, is ripe with a history almost as colorful as the women who live there...

I'll SECOND that one -- I've not read any Rita Mae Brown in years and she is a hoot!

[ctol]

I think Candide by Voltaire and The Decameron by Boccaccio would both be great choices since my earlier one Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agencey is not available to everyone in the club.

[Ea]

Originally Posted by ctol

I think Candide by Voltaire and The Decameron by Boccaccio would both be great choices since my earlier one Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agencey is not available to everyone in the club.

If you nominate Candide, I'll second it.

[Ea]

I'll nominate Love in a cold climate by Nancy Mitford

"Groomed for the perfect marriage by her mother, fearsome Lady Montdore, Polly instead scandalizes society by declaring her love for her uncle ‘Boy’ Dougdale, the Lecherous Lecturer, and promptly eloping to France. But the consequences of this union no one could quite expect..."

I've found it at Amazon, BooksOnBoard and Waterstones.

[aug_aug]

I'll vote for Confederacy of Dunces....

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by aug_aug

I'll vote for Confederacy of Dunces....

This is still the nominations at this point. Once all the nominations a new thread will be started for the voting.

[TC Beacham]

Originally Posted by Katti's Cat

I nominate 'Six of One' by Rita Mae Brown

Originally Posted by kennyc

I'll SECOND that one -- I've not read any Rita Mae Brown in years and she is a hoot!

I'll THIRD - it's been a long time for me too.

[ctol]

Originally Posted by Ea

If you nominate Candide, I'll second it.

So nominated

[A4-]

One nomination:

Desparate Husbands by Richard Glover

The new book from the author of In Bed with Jocasta and The Dag's Dictionary. Meet Richard, the original desperate husband, and his partner, the fabulous but formidable Jocasta. And say hello to their teenage offspring - the Teutonic Batboy and his irrepressible younger brother. Desperate Husbands lifts the lid on so-called normal family life, and reveals its soulful, hilarious absurdity. Welcome to a world where household appliances conspire against their owners, fathers practise ballet in the hallway and dead insects spell out an SOS on the kitchen floor. By turns sweet-natured yet perverse, familiar yet wildly original, Desperate Husbands may be the funniest book you read this year. 'Desperate Husbands is desperately, wickedly funny. I devoured it in one sitting, greedily checking ahead to see that I still had pages left. Richard Glover has done the miraculous - he's made ordinary family life extraordinarily entertaining. This is a must-read for anybody who's ever had a wife or a husband or a mother or a stove or a child or a pulse. Go ahead and open a page at random - you'll laugh out loud.' - Augusten Burroughs, bestselling author of Running with Scissors.

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

Discworld's equivalent of Santa Claus, the Hogfather (who flies in a sleigh drawn by four gigantic pigs), has been spirited away by a repulsive assassin, Mr. Teatime, acting on behalf of the Auditors who rule the universe and who would prefer that it exhibited no life. Since faith is essential to life, destroying belief in the Hogfather would be a major blow to humanity. It falls to a marvelously depicted Death and his granddaughter Susan to solve the mystery of the disappeared Hogfather, and meanwhile to fill in for him. On the way to the pair's victory, readers encounter children both naughty and nice; gourmet banquets made of old boots and mud; lesser and greater criminals; an overworked and undertrained tooth fairy named Violet; and Bilious, the god of hangovers, among other imaginative concepts.

Village of the Small Houses: A Memoir of Sorts by Ian Ferguson

Synopsis borrowed from GoodReads: Ian Ferguson won the 2004 Leacock Medal for Humor for this outrageously funny book about growing up destitute in the far north. Beginning with the dramatic events surrounding his birth, the richly recalled events of Ferguson's life and a vivid cast of loveable misfits make for a taut and appealingly idiosyncratic tale. In 1959, just one step ahead of the law, Hank Ferguson (the Ferguson brothers' con-artist dad) headed north in a beat-up two-toned 1953 Mercury Zephyr with his pregnant wife, Louise. He got as far as remote Fort Vermilion. Passing himself off as a teacher at the local "Indian school," he settled his ever-expanding family in what was then Canada's third poorest community. In this spirited reading, originally broadcast on CBC Radio in September 2004, Ian Ferguson's gifts as a comic actor rise exuberantly to the fore.

Love in a cold climate by Nancy Mitford

Groomed for the perfect marriage by her mother, fearsome Lady Montdore, Polly instead scandalizes society by declaring her love for her uncle ‘Boy’ Dougdale, the Lecherous Lecturer, and promptly eloping to France. But the consequences of this union no one could quite expect...

The Distance Travelled by Brett Alexander Savory

Why have certain denizens of Hell taken to throwing farm animals through innocent folks' kitchen windows? How long does it take a dead, desiccated gas attendant to walk out to his pumps? What sort of relationship do the Lord of the Underworld and Hell's Head Torturer have, besides the obvious professional one? What kind of air conditioning units do they use down there? Do they listen to Cyndi Lauper? What is Hell's official currency, and by what criteria did the Big Red Fella choose it? Can pigs eat cereal with a spoon? What nameless beast dwells in the flame pit near the hole to Upside? What is Upside, for that matter, and why should you care, anyway?

Brewster's millions by George Barr McCutcheon

The World According to Clarkson by Jeremy Clarkson

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain


Two nominations:

Three Men in a Boat (1989) by Jerome K. Jerome
ALREADY WON A BOOKCLUB AWARD
"...since its publication, Three Men in a Boat has never been out of print. It continues to be popular to the current day, with The Guardian ranking it #33 on The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time in 2003, and Esquire ranking it #2 in the 50 Funniest Books Ever in 2009".

And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer

Eoin Colfer, a lifelong fan of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series, says he was 'dumbfounded' when he got the call to write this book, but Adams' widow and his daughter had read all of Colfer's books and felt he was the perfect person to write the sixth book in the trilogy.
Product Description (from the Amazon website):
An Englishman's continuing search through space and time for a decent cup of tea ... Arthur Dent's accidental association with that wholly remarkable book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, has not been entirely without incident. Arthur has traveled the length, breadth, and depth of known, and unknown, space. He has stumbled forward and backward through time. He has been blown up, reassembled, cruelly imprisoned, horribly released, and colorfully insulted more than is strictly necessary. And of course Arthur Dent has comprehensively failed to grasp the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Arthur has finally made it home to Earth, but that does not mean he has escaped his fate. Arthur's chances of getting his hands on a decent cuppa have evaporated rapidly, along with all the world's oceans. For no sooner has he touched down on the planet Earth than he finds out that it is about to be blown up ... again. And Another Thing ... is the rather unexpected, but very welcome, sixth installment of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. It features a pantheon of unemployed gods, everyone's favorite renegade Galactic President, a lovestruck green alien, an irritating computer, and at least one very large slab of cheese.

My man Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse

My Man Jeeves is a collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the UK in May 1919 by George Newnes. Of the eight stories in the collection, half feature the popular characters Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, while the others concern Reggie Pepper, an early prototype for Wooster.

Candide by Voltaire

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

"The first in a series of outlandishly clever adventures featuring the resourceful, fearless literary detective Thursday Next-a New York Times bestseller!In Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection. But when someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature and plucks Jane Eyre from the pages of Bront?'s novel, Thursday is faced with the challenge of her career. Fforde's ingenious fantasy-enhanced by a Web site that re-creates the world of the novel-unites intrigue with English literature in a delightfully witty mix."


Three or more nominations:

The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald:

The Egg and I, first published in 1945, is a humorous memoir by American author Betty MacDonald about her adventures and travails as a young wife on a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. The book is based on the author's experiences as a newlywed in trying to acclimate and operate a small chicken farm with her first husband Robert Heskett[1] from 1927 to 1931 near Chimacum, Washington. On visits with her family in Seattle, she told stories of their tribulations, which greatly amused them. In the 1940s, MacDonald's sisters strongly encouraged her to write a book about these experiences. The Egg and I was MacDonald's first attempt at writing a book.

Topper by Thorne Smith

Thorne Smith is a master of urbane wit and sophisticated repartee. Topper, his best-known work, is the hilarious, ribald comedy on which the hit television show and movie (starring Cary Grant) were based.
It all begins when Cosmo Topper, a law-abiding, mild-mannered bank manager, decides to buy a secondhand car, only to find it haunted by the ghosts of its previous owners—the reckless, feckless, frivolous couple who met their untimely demise when the car careened into an oak tree. The ghosts, George and Marion Kerby, make it their mission to rescue Topper from the drab "summer of suburban Sundays" that is his life—and they commence a series of madcap adventures that leave Topper, and anyone else who crosses their path, in a whirlwind of discomfiture and delight.
As enchanting today as it was when first published in 1926, Topper has set the standard in American pop culture for such mischievous apparitions as those seen in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Heaven Can Wait, Beetlejuice, and Bewitched.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

A monument to sloth, rant and contempt, and suspicious of anything modern - this is Ignatius J. Reilly of New Orleans, crusader against dunces. In revolt against the 20th century, Ignatius propels his bulk among the flesh-pots of a fallen city, documenting life on his Big Chief tablets as he goes, until his mother decrees that Ignatius must work.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

The novel explains the tale of Hank Morgan, a 19th-century resident of Hartford, Connecticut who awakens to find himself inexplicably transported back in time to early medieval Britain at the time of the legendary King Arthur.

Augustus Carp, Esq. - Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man" by Henry Bashford

Bashford's comic 1924 volume offers the mock autobiography of Augustus Carp, a self-aggrandizing, stuffy, puritanical oaf, who indulges in numerous vices in the name of Christianity, rationalizing his own weaknesses while condemning others for the same acts. Great fun.

Six of One by Rita Mae Brown

Perched right on the Mason-Dixon line, tiny Runnymede, Maryland, is ripe with a history almost as colorful as the women who live there—from Celeste Chalfonte, headstrong and aristocratic, who murders for principle and steals her brother’s wife, to Fannie Jump Creighton, who runs a speakeasy right in her own home when hard times come knocking. Then of course, there’re Louise and Julia, the boldly eccentric Hunsenmeir sisters. Wheezie and Juts spend their whole lives in Runnymede, cheerfully quibbling about everything from men to child-rearing to how to drive a car. But they never let small-town life keep them from chasing their biggest dreams—or from being true to who they really are. Sparkling with a perfect combination of sisterhood and sass, Six of One is a richly textured Southern canvas—Rita Mae Brown “at her winning, fondest best”(Kirkus Reviews).

Fool by Christopher Moore

This is from Publisher's Weekly (as cited on Amazon):
Starred Review. Here's the Cliff Notes you wished you'd had for King Lear—the mad royal, his devious daughters, rhyming ghosts and a castle full of hot intrigue—in a cheeky and ribald romp that both channels and chides the Bard and all Fate's bastards. It's 1288, and the king's fool, Pocket, and his dimwit apprentice, Drool, set out to clean up the mess Lear has made of his kingdom, his family and his fortune—only to discover the truth about their own heritage. There's more murder, mayhem, mistaken identities and scene changes than you can remember, but bestselling Moore (You Suck) turns things on their head with an edgy 21st-century perspective that makes the story line as sharp, surly and slick as a game of Grand Theft Auto. Moore confesses he borrows from at least a dozen of the Bard's plays for this buffet of tragedy, comedy and medieval porn action. It's a manic, masterly mix—winning, wild and something today's groundlings will applaud.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

A Damon Runyon Omnibus

[Runyon] was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from the Brooklyn or Midtown demi-monde. The adjective "Runyonesque" refers to this type of character as well as to the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicted. He spun humorous tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom go by "square" names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as "Nathan Detroit," "Big Jule," "Harry the Horse," "Good Time Charley," "Dave the Dude," or "The Seldom Seen Kid." Runyon wrote these stories in a distinctive vernacular style: a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in present tense, and always devoid of contractions.

[Ben Thornton]

"My Man Jeeves" is by P. G. Wodehouse

My Man Jeeves is a collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the UK in May 1919 by George Newnes. Of the eight stories in the collection, half feature the popular characters Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, while the others concern Reggie Pepper, an early prototype for Wooster.

[A4-]

Thanks.

By the way, I didnt check for the amount of votes everyone has cast. Just put all nominations together.

[Ea]

Originally Posted by ctol

So nominated

Seconded.

[Nakor]

Originally Posted by A4-

Thanks.

By the way, I didnt check for the amount of votes everyone has cast. Just put all nominations together.

Thanks, that's handy. There is no voting yet; a proper poll will be created after the nominations are complete.

Also, I'll use my last vote now to third Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams