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May 2014: Suggestions

Polly Parrot

Polly Parrot

Moderator
Staff member
Decided to take over BOTM once again. :)


Please submit your suggestions for May as soon as possible, this way everyone will have plenty of time to read and, if necessary, purchase the book chosen. If possible, include a (short) description of the book and why you would like to nominate in.

There's no theme, so feel free to nominate anything you like. Thread is open to suggestions for the next two weeks or until ten suggestions have been made.

Don't restrict yourself to only suggesting one book but if this means more than ten suggestions in total have been made I will only take one of your suggestions forward to the voting thread (I'll ask you which one first).

EDIT: Please don't suggest your own book, anything that reeks of self promotion will be ignored.
 
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Polly Parrot said:
Decided to take over BOTM once again. :)

There's no theme, so feel free to nominate anything you like. Thread is open to suggestions for the next two weeks or until ten suggestions have been made.

Don't restrict yourself to only suggesting one book but if this means more than ten suggestions in total have been made I will only take one of your suggestions forward to the voting thread (I'll ask you which one first).
Click to expand...

Welcome back.

No theme, eh?

Thimking, thimking. From me, prolly modern, general interest, and controversial.
 
Nah, no theme for now. I will think of one for June though.

I thought I'd get suggestions for May under way nice and early to leave lots of time for reading and purchasing.

That and it buys me time to think of a theme which is broad enough for people to come up with lots of suggestions.
 
Polly Parrot said:
Decided to take over BOTM once again. :)


Please submit your suggestions for May as soon as possible, this way everyone will have plenty of time to read and, if necessary, purchase the book chosen. If possible, include a (short) description of the book and why you would like to nominate in.

There's no theme, so feel free to nominate anything you like. Thread is open to suggestions for the next two weeks or until ten suggestions have been made.

Don't restrict yourself to only suggesting one book but if this means more than ten suggestions in total have been made I will only take one of your suggestions forward to the voting thread (I'll ask you which one first).

EDIT: Please don't suggest your own book, anything that reeks of self promotion will be ignored.
Click to expand...



Well done Polly Parrot, congratulations on taking over this task.
I will suggest a book soon.
 
I would like to suggest;

Edmund Cooper's - All Fools Day

It is about a marvelous spell of sunny weather; idyllic in is warm and mildness.
Suddenly new sun spots appear, heralding consequence that no one could possibly have imagined.
Da da Derrrh.
 
Here are a few suggestions from me:

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith - I read this in Jr. High & am sure missed a lot, so would love to re-read it.
"...a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years. By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness -- in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience." (taken from goodreads)

Miss Spitfire by Sarah Miller
Helen Keller's story told from the viewpoint of her teacher, Annie Sullivan. I really liked this, having always wondered what it must have been like for her.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak - One of the strangest, yet most beautiful stories I have ever read. A story about a German girl in Nazi Germany told from the viewpoint of Death. Sweet, moving, hearbreaking. I'm nervous to watch the movie, yet looking forward to it.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford - Historical fiction centering on a Chinese boy who becomes friends with a Japanese girl. It was a very eye-opening book for me, as I hadn't realized everything that Japanese Americans had to go through around the time of the bombing on Pearl Harbor. This is definitely a bitter sweet story, but I enjoyed it.
 
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Polly Parrot said:
Curious what you'll come up with. :)
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1) Well, Polly, here's one: Light Years by James Salter.
And here is the description from Amazon:
"This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light Years is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness—and then felt compelled to destroy it."​

Notice the word "exquisite," not puffery for once.

2) And while I am at it: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson:

Again with the description from Amazon
"2005 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction
2004 National Book Critics Circle Winner
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father--an ardent pacifist--and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend's wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision--not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames's soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part".
​
This one is about Love, even though people see the word God and flee in the other direction. Too bad. It is a beautiful novel.

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I see Polly is reading The Boer War by Doyle. We could do a lot worse than honouring her new status, by all reading our new leader's book?
 
Voting sounds great, Peder. :) No reason we can't have The Boer War as one of the possibilities we're choosing from.

I've added Light Years to my "curious about" list. :)
 
I'm still thinking which books to suggest myself, not sure if I'll include the Doyle though, it might not be suitable as a BOTM book.
 
SuperReaderGirl said:
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak - One of the strangest, yet most beautiful stories I have ever read. A story about a German girl in Nazi Germany told from the viewpoint of Death. Sweet, moving, hearbreaking. I'm nervous to watch the movie, yet looking forward to it.
Click to expand...
I have this in my TBR pile so this would work for me.
 
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