Literary Time Period Nominations February 2012 • The MR Literary Club

[sun surfer]

Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read for February 2012!

The nominations will run through January 11 or until five works have made the list.

Final voting in a new poll will begin by January 11, where the month's selection will be decided.


The category for this month is:

Time Period
1981-2000, as chosen in the poll


This month is a two-part process:

The first part begins with a ONE-DAY POLL to determine the time period we will use. It is MULTIPLE CHOICE and you may choose as many options as you like when voting. This voting is separate from your nominations. There are no nominations during the poll, only voting. I will not vote in the poll, and if there is a tie, I will break it.

As soon as the poll is over and the time period is determined, then the second part (nominations) starts and you can begin nominating like normal. Nominations can be set in any time period and published in any time period, but they should be written during the time period selected.


Once the poll is over and nominations begin:

In order for a work to be included in the final poll it needs five nominations - the original nomination plus four supporting.

Each participant has FOUR nominations this month. You can nominate a new work for consideration or you can support (second, third, fourth or fifth) 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!

*

Nominations are closed:

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989 - Fully nominated

Spoiler:

In favour - Hamlet53, caleb72, fantasyfan, John F, hpulley

The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving “a great gentleman.” But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness” and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served. (from Amazon).

This book was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989.

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, 1995 - Fully nominated

Spoiler:

In favour - issybird, sun surfer, hpulley, fantasyfan, paola

Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: "Stunning and strange . . . Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. . . . The book is like a dream you want to last forever. . . . It glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit."—Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review

"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Saturn "is also a brilliantly allusive study of England's imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. . . . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. . . . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work." The Rings of Saturn - with its curious archive of photographs - chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich. "Sebald," as The New Yorker stated, "weaves his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction." The Emigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read") was "one of the great books of the last few years," as Michael Ondaatje noted: "and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strange a triumph."

In The Pond by Ha Jin, 1998 - 4

Spoiler:

In favour - HomeInMyShoes, issybird, Hamlet53, paola

Neuromancer by William Gibson, 1984 - 4

Spoiler:

In favour - fantasyfan, Nyssa, hpulley, John F

"Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction: the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same.
Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price...."

This is an amazing, challenging, cyberpunk novel that explores all sorts of significant concepts in a framework that has influenced not only novels but anime masterpieces such as the Ghost in the Shell sequence of Oshii.

It's not an easy read, but it rewards the challenges Gibson sets the reader.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, 1997 - 1

Spoiler:

In favour - caleb72

The God of Small Things (1997) is the debut novel of Indian author Arundhati Roy. It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" that lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how much." The book is a description of how the small things in life affect people's behavior and their lives. The book won the Booker Prize in 1997.

Money by Martin Amis, 1984 - 2

Spoiler:

In favour - Synamon, hpulley

Absolutely one of the funniest, smartest, meanest books I know. John Self, the Rabelaisian narrator of the novel, is an advertising man and director of TV commercials who lurches through London and Manhattan, eating, drinking, drugging and smoking too much, buying too much sex, and caring for little else besides getting the big movie deal that will make him lots of money. Hey, it was the '80s. Most importantly, however, Amis in Money musters more sheer entertainment power in any single sentence than most writers are lucky to produce in a career.
Quote:

About the Author - Regarded by many critics as one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fiction, Amis is often grouped with the generation of British-based novelists that emerged during the 1980s and included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. His work has been heavily influenced by American fiction, especially the work of Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow. A loose trilogy of novels set in London begins with Money: A Suicide Note (1984), a satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed, continues with London Fields (1989), and concludes with The Information (1995), a tale of literary rivalry. Time's Arrow (1991), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

Beloved by Toni Morrison, 1987 - 2

Spoiler:

In favour - Hamlet53, HomeInMyShoes

At the center of Toni Morrison's fifth novel, which earned her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War. Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe's past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just "a matter of keeping the past at bay," her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters' lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyone's future.

Godric by Frederick Buechner, 1981 - 4

Spoiler:

In favour - sun surfer, issybird, Hamlet53, fantasyfan

If you think a novel about a saint is likely to be a dry and airy sort of thing, think again. Godric was a 12th-century saint--born to Anglo-Saxon parents in Norfolk almost in the year of the Norman invasion (1066 for those of you long unschooled!). He was a peddler and wanderer long before he settled into the life of a hermit in northern England, led there by the famous hermit St. Cuthbert, who told him, "your true nesting place lies farther on, [and] until you reach it, every other place you find will fret you like a cage."

In Godric Frederick Buechner captures the voice and the times of this saint with a style that recalls the richly alliterative language of Middle English poetry. So too does it recall the beautiful earthiness of that literature, reminding us that this time of deep spirituality was also a time of real flesh-and-blood folk. And in some ways this is the deepest point of this delightful (and at times comic) novel: these people, like those who live among us today, become saints not by leaving the body behind but by finding a way to live more deeply within it. They find a way to turn it to glory.


"In the extraordinary figure of Godric, both stubborn outsider and true child of God, both worldly and unworldly, Frederick Buechner has found an ideal means of exploring the nature of spirituality. Godric is a living battleground where God fights it out with the world, the Flesh, and the Devil." - London Times Literary Supplement

Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner, 1984 - 1

Spoiler:

In favour - sun surfer

In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?" It tells the story of Edith Hope, who writes romance novels under a pseudonym. When her life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, however, Edith flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses.

But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive.


"Brookner's most absorbing novel...wryly realistic...graceful and attractive." - The New York Times Book Review

In The Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, 1994 - 1

Spoiler:

In favour - sun surfer

It is November 25, 1960, and three sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—“The Butterflies.”

In this extraordinary novel inspired by the true story, the voices of all four sisters—Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé—speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from hair ribbons and secret crushes to gunrunning and prison torture, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human cost of political oppression.

The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, 1986 - 1

Spoiler:

In favour - HomeInMyShoes

The great Californian novel about Yuppies in the bay area written entirely in verse.

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, 1993 - 3

Spoiler:

In favour - paola, issybird, Synamon

Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find -- through love or through exacting maternal appraisal -- a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multi ethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, 1984 - 2

Spoiler:

In favour - orlok, paola

One of his non sci-fi books.

[John F]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

... [/b]Nominations can be set in any time period and published in any time period, but they should be written during the time period selected.[/B] ...

Your requirements for the category sound a little different then what I was expecting, could I get a little clarification?

I was thinking of nominating The English Patient. I've been meaning to read it, and it appears to be set in a specific time period which seems relavent to the plot? It was published in 1992, so I'll assume it was written around 1990. (the story actually takes place towards the end of WWII). So I should vote for 1981-2000?

I'm thinking I should skip the nomination phase, as I'm not qualified to judge what is a good example of "Time Period" literature.

Thanks.

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by John F

Your requirements for the category sound a little different then what I was expecting, could I get a little clarification?

I was thinking of nominating The English Patient. I've been meaning to read it, and it appears to be set in a specific time period which seems relavent to the plot? It was published in 1992, so I'll assume it was written around 1990. (the story actually takes place towards the end of WWII). So I should vote for 1981-2000?

Yes, The English Patient would be 1981-2000.

I clarified "written in" versus "published in" mainly for a few works that aren't published until many, many years later, sometimes posthumously, so in those cases they'd fall into the time they were actually written, but in most cases the published date would be fine.

[fantasyfan]

I nominate the period 1901--1920. it begins with elegance and optimism and ends with the catastrophe of The Great War and the disillusionment of the Lost Generation. The writers include those who celebrate the era, those who see the futility of life and those who experience the horrors of war.

[John F]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

Yes, The English Patient would be 1981-2000.

I clarified "written in" versus "published in" mainly for a few works that aren't published until many, many years later, sometimes posthumously, so in those cases they'd fall into the time they were actually written, but in most cases the published date would be fine.

Originally Posted by fantasyfan

I nominate the period 1901--1920. it begins with elegance and optimism and ends with the catastrophe of The Great War and the disillusionment of the Lost Generation. The writers include those who celebrate the era, those who see the futility of life and those who experience the horrors of war.

These responses answer my questions. I'm not going to be the first to nominate, but I may 2nd a nomination.

[issybird]

I think I can clarify. This is a two-part process. First is the poll, where you can pick as man time periods as you want. The poll will determine the winning time period and then we get our four nominations for books.

[sun surfer]

Yes, sorry for the confusion! Trying to make the directions simple, I may have made them a bit too simple and may not have included enough information.

As issybird said, first we have the one-day poll which is occurring now. There are no nominations during this one-day poll, only voting on the poll. The poll is multiple choice and you may vote for as many options as you'd like. The voting on the poll will determine the time period we use.

Once the poll is over we will have our time period, and then we begin nominating works, like normal, that fits into the time selected.

If anyone was confused about the poll and voting process that already voted and would like to vote for more options than you already have, then PM me with what else you'd like to vote for. I can't alter the poll, but when it is over I can post any additional votes to be added to and included with the poll results.

ETA - I updated the original post to hopefully make it a little clearer.

[HomeInMyShoes]

And the winner is 1981 - 2000. Interesting. I'm going to have to think about this one. So many interesting options for this.

[sun surfer]

No one sent me a PM with updated votes (for those that might've been confused at first), so the poll is final. I think it's interesting that 2001-Present didn't get a single vote.

Anyway, 1981-2000 it is! I agree it's an interesting one.

The floor is open for nominations.

[HomeInMyShoes]

I'll start off the nominations with:

Ha Jin - In the Pond, 1998
I really wanted to nominate The Crazed, but it just missed the period having been published in 2002. I have no idea how I stumbled upon Jin, but I've got two or three of his books on my potential read list now. From what I know, In the Pond is not available as an e-book.

[fantasyfan]

I am going to nominate Neuromancer {1984} by William Gibson. Here's the amazon.com review:

"Here is the novel that started it all, launching the cyberpunk generation, and the first novel to win the holy trinity of science fiction: the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. With Neuromancer, William Gibson introduced the world to cyberspace--and science fiction has never been the same.
Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway--jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way--and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance--and a cure--for a price...."

This is an amazing, challenging, cyberpunk novel that explores all sorts of significant concepts in a framework that has influenced not only novels but anime masterpieces such as the Ghost in the Shell sequence of Oshii and films like Matrix and Dark City.

It's not an easy read, but it rewards the challenges Gibson sets the reader. It is available for Kindle and is priced under $7.

varios epub versions are available at around the same price from a number of sites including:
http://www.ebooks.com/256284/neuroma...ibson-william/
and
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/B...007462,00.html

[caleb72]

Try that again!

I would like to nominate The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Entry from Wikipedia:

The God of Small Things (1997) is the debut novel of Indian author Arundhati Roy. It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the "Love Laws" that lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how much." The book is a description of how the small things in life affect people's behavior and their lives. The book won the Booker Prize in 1997.

[Synamon]

I'll nominate Money by Martin Amis.

Originally Posted by Amazon Review

Absolutely one of the funniest, smartest, meanest books I know. John Self, the Rabelaisian narrator of the novel, is an advertising man and director of TV commercials who lurches through London and Manhattan, eating, drinking, drugging and smoking too much, buying too much sex, and caring for little else besides getting the big movie deal that will make him lots of money. Hey, it was the '80s. Most importantly, however, Amis in Money musters more sheer entertainment power in any single sentence than most writers are lucky to produce in a career.

Originally Posted by About the Author

Regarded by many critics as one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fiction, Amis is often grouped with the generation of British-based novelists that emerged during the 1980s and included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. His work has been heavily influenced by American fiction, especially the work of Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow. A loose trilogy of novels set in London begins with Money: A Suicide Note (1984), a satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed, continues with London Fields (1989), and concludes with The Information (1995), a tale of literary rivalry. Time's Arrow (1991), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

Inkmesh link (UK epub sources). Amazon has a Kindle edition, but I'm not sure about geographic availability. Also available in epub at kobobooks.

[issybird]

I'm nominating The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, first published in 1995 and published in English in 1998. I'm spoiler-tagging the description taken from Amazon for space reasons. Warning: it does not appear to be available in ebook.

Spoiler:

Shortlisted for the 1998 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Fiction: "Stunning and strange . . . Sebald has done what every writer dreams of doing. . . . The book is like a dream you want to last forever. . . . It glows with the radiance and resilience of the human spirit."—Roberta Silman, The New York Times Book Review

"Ostensibly a record of a journey on foot through coastal East Anglia," as Robert McCrum in the London Observer noted, The Rings of Saturn "is also a brilliantly allusive study of England's imperial past and the nature of decline and fall, of loss and decay. . . . The Rings of Saturn is exhilaratingly, you might say hypnotically, readable. . . . It is hard to imagine a stranger or more compelling work." The Rings of Saturn - with its curious archive of photographs - chronicles a tour across epochs as well as countryside. On his way, the narrator meets lonely eccentrics inhabiting tumble-down mansions and links them to Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, the travels of Sir Thomas Browne's skull, and the massive bombings of WWII. Cataloging change, oblivion, and memories, he connects sugar fortunes, Joseph Conrad, and the horrors of colonizing the Belgian Congo. The narrator finds threads which run from an abandoned bridge over the River Blyth to the terrible dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the silk industry in Norwich. "Sebald," as The New Yorker stated, "weaves his tale together with a complexity and historical sweep that easily encompasses both truth and fiction." The Emigrants (hailed by Susan Sontag as an "astonishing masterpiece-perfect while being unlike any book one has ever read") was "one of the great books of the last few years," as Michael Ondaatje noted: "and now The Rings of Saturn is a similar and as strange a triumph."

This is actually a great time period. There are so many books on my high priority list that were written in period 1980-2000. I could easily use up all my nominations. I will limit myself to two.


The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving “a great gentleman.” But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness” and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served. (from Amazon).

This book was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989.

This book is available for Kindles and as epub. Inkmesh Search.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

At the center of Toni Morrison's fifth novel, which earned her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War. Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe's past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just "a matter of keeping the past at bay," her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters' lives with compassion, humanity, and humor. Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyone's future. (from Amazon)

This book is available for Kindles and as epub. Inkmesh Search.