01-01-2017, 09:52 AM | #1 |
languorous autodidact ✦
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Contemporary Nominations & Vote • January 2017
Happy New Year everyone! Here's to 2017 being a great reading year!
Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read in January 2017! The category for this month is: Contemporary (2001-Present) -Nominations will run for three days.- You may offer up to two nominations. All nominees (so long as they are within the category) will move forward to the vote with no need for support from others. Once nominations are complete, voting will begin and also occur in this thread. -Voting will then run for four days.- I will make a post in this thread to open voting. The vote will close exactly four days from that post; even if the final tally doesn't occur immediately after voting closes, no votes made after that time will count. Votes will be made by post. You will have a number of votes to cast equal to the number of nominees minus one, which will be specified when the vote begins. You may give each nominee one or two (or no) votes. You may vote all at once in one post or vote in separate posts at different times, so long as you have more votes remaining to cast. You may use any number of your possible votes up to the maximum. Any extraneous votes per person (past their maximum or more than two for one nominee) won't count. Votes cannot be changed once they are cast. Once voting is complete, the count will be tallied and a winner declared. In the event of a tie, there will be a one-day run-off vote, also in this thread. If the run-off also ends in a tie, then the tie will be resolved in favour of the selection that was nominated first. We hope that you will read the selection with the club and join in the discussion. 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 is now open! * Nominations are closed. Voting is closed. Final results:
Last edited by sun surfer; 01-08-2017 at 11:19 AM. |
01-01-2017, 10:13 AM | #2 |
The Dank Side of the Moon
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About Grace by Anthony Doerr.
From Publishers Weekly: The majesty of nature, the meaning of courage, the redemptive power of love and the pathos of isolation—all are gracefully explored in Doerr's story of the price paid for a gift. So why does so little seem to happen in this beautiful, ponderous and sometimes monotonous first novel by the author of the exquisite collection The Shell Collector? David Winkler has seen glimpses of the future ever since he was a boy. As a 32-year-old hydrologist in Anchorage, Alaska, he dreams of his future wife; soon they meet, fall in love and run away to Ohio, where she gives birth to their daughter, Grace. But when he dreams that he fails to save Grace from a flood, Winkler abandons wife and child, hoping to flee the future. He becomes a hermetic handyman on a Caribbean island near St. Vincent, befriended by a local family. The years pass until, emboldened by his surrogate family's grown daughter, a gifted marine biologist, Winkler realizes that he must embark on a journey to discover if Grace is alive. This is a lyrical tale tuned a bit too fine: Doerr's dreamy prose accords more attention to nature than character, so that Winkler, transfixed by the wonders of water and snowflakes but singularly unreflective about his actual life, is a frustratingly opaque protagonist. There are gorgeous moments here, but a stifling lack of story. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
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01-03-2017, 12:35 AM | #3 | |
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I have been looking forward to this category! For my first nomination I select The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan published in 2013 by Vintage Australia and winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2014.
From Goodreads: Quote:
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01-03-2017, 10:09 PM | #4 | |
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Wow - great nomination! (And not just because Flanagan is an Australian.)
I would like to nominate Nora Webster by Colm Toibin. I thought The Master was terrific, and plan on reading more of Toibin's books. From Goodreads: Quote:
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01-04-2017, 12:13 AM | #5 | |
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My second nomination is The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht published in 2011 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a British imprint of Orion Books, and by Random House in America.
Here is the Amazon description: Quote:
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01-04-2017, 10:56 AM | #6 |
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Some very interesting nominations so far!
I looked around for two intriguing contemporary literary books that (a) haven't been nominated here before (in fact I don't even think either author has ever been nominated), (b) haven't already been marked as read by my lit club GR friends, (c) weren't already on my to-read lists and (d) were available in our various countries as ebooks. Here are the results. Oddly, both include cold, isolated islands, both are by female authors and feature women, and both are from 2013, though it was chance as I only realised these things while writing this post. All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld, 2013 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner, European Union Prize for Literature UK winner, Costa Book Award for Novel nominee, among others From Goodreads: Jake Whyte is living on her own in an old farmhouse on a craggy British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. Her disobedient collie, , and a flock of sheep are her sole companions, which is how she wanted it to be. But every few nights something—or someone—picks off one of the sheep and sets off a new deep pulse of terror. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumors of an obscure, formidable beast. But there is also Jake's past—hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, held in the silences about her family and the scars that stripe her back—a past that threatens to break into the present. With exceptional artistry and empathy, All the Birds, Singing reveals an isolated life in all its struggles and stubborn hopes, unexpected beauty, and hard-won redemption. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, 2013 Man Booker Prize nominee, National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction nominee, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction winner, among others From Goodreads: On a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes up on the beach. Tucked inside is the diary of a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl names Nao Yasutani. Ruth--a writer who finds the lunchbox--suspects that it is debris from Japan's 2011 tsunami. Once she beings to read the diary, Ruth quickly finds herself drawn into the mystery of Nao's fate. Meanwhile in Tokyo, Nao, uprooted from her home in the U.S., bullied at school, and watching her parents spiral deeper into disaster, has decided to end her life. But first, she wants to recount the story of her great-grandmother, a 104-year-old Zen Buddhist nun, in the pages of her secret diary... |
01-04-2017, 11:17 AM | #7 |
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Nominations are closed and voting is now open!
Voting will close exactly four days from this post. Each person has FIVE votes to use. Please refer to the first post for all other information. |
01-04-2017, 05:02 PM | #8 |
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Interesting selections!
I will start with 2 votes for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. |
01-04-2017, 05:22 PM | #9 |
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This is hard! I'll vote:
2 for Toibin 1 for Flanagan 1 for Obreht 1 for Wyld |
01-04-2017, 06:39 PM | #10 |
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Very tough! I am going to have to download samples to figure out how to use my remaining votes.
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01-04-2017, 09:46 PM | #11 |
Wizard
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I vote:
2 for Toibin 2 for Flanagan Still thinking about the fifth vote ... |
01-06-2017, 10:01 AM | #12 |
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I'll begin with one vote for each of: Nora Webster, All the Birds, Singing and A Tale for the Time Being.
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01-07-2017, 01:16 AM | #13 |
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I read through samples to help with my next choices.
1 for About Grace by Anthony Doerr. I've wanted to read something by him for awhile, and I really enjoyed the sample even more than I anticipated. 1 for All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld. I don't think I would have found this one on my own, and I wanted to keep reading more after the sample ended. |
01-07-2017, 10:51 AM | #14 |
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1 vote for About Grace
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01-07-2017, 01:19 PM | #15 |
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A little less than a day left for voting.
I had saved two votes until I'd investigated all of the options further. Now that I have, it's a tough choice! But I'll give one more vote to the Wyld, which is my top choice, and one more to the Tóibín. I think if Nora Webster wins it'll be the first time we've ever had an author repeat in the lit club (and, oddly enough, his other win was our last go at the Contemporary category), but I did really like The Master, this one looks interesting and being an Irish book is tempting (did Bookpossum know what she was doing in nominating this? ... well maybe similar as Bookworm_Girl nominating the Flanagan!) To speed up my club reading this month I might listen to our selection on audio whatever it is, if it's available. I checked out both the Tóibín and the Flanagan samples, those two being in the lead so far. The Tóibín is great - I really like the narrator, Fiona Shaw, and what I heard of the book. The Flanagan contained one of my pet peeves in samples whether audio or ebook, which is it wasn't the book but the introduction! Bah. How hard is it to synch up a sample to the actual book? |
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