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Suggestions: March 2006 Book of the Month

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mehastings

mehastings

Active Member
Thread will close January 15.

A maximum of ten books will be put to the vote.

If more than 10 books are suggested, then books which have more than one nomination will take priority (books with three nominations get priority over books with two etc.)

The remainder will be put forward in the order they are suggested (with only one book per member) until the 10 voting slots are filled.
 
Out by Natsuo Kirino

From Amazon.com:
A suburban Tokyo woman fed up with her loutish husband kills him in a fit of anger, then confesses her crime to a coworker on the night shift at the boxed-lunch factory. The coworker enlists the help of two other women at the factory to dismember and dispose of the body. Readers beware--Kirino's first mystery to be published in English (it was a best-seller in Japan) involves no madcap female bonding. The tenuous friendship between the four women, all with problems of their own even before becoming accessories to murder, begins to unravel almost immediately. Money changes hands. The body parts are discovered. The police begin asking questions, and a very bad man falsely accused of the crime is determined to find out who really deserves the punishment. The gritty neighborhoods, factories, and warehouses of Tokyo provide a perfect backdrop for this bleak tale of women who are victims of circumstance and intent on self-preservation at all costs.
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Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

From Amazon.com
An inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people's lives. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels. For two years they met to talk, share, and "shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color." Though most of the women were shy and intimidated at first, they soon became emboldened by the forum and used the meetings as a springboard for debating the social, cultural, and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. They discussed their harassment at the hands of "morality guards," the daily indignities of living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime, the effects of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, love, marriage, and life in general, giving readers a rare inside look at revolutionary Iran. The books were always the primary focus, however, and they became "essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity," she writes.

Threaded into the memoir are trenchant discussions of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and other authors who provided the women with examples of those who successfully asserted their autonomy despite great odds.
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Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

From Book Jacket:

English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory.
But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England's magical past and regained some of the powers of England's magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French.
All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington's army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange's heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear.
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Never let me go - Kazuo Ishiguro

amazon.de said:
Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham - an idyllic establishment situated deep in the English countryside. The children there were tenderly sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe they were special, and that their personal welfare was crucial. But for what reason were they really there? It is only years later that Kathy, now aged 31, finally allows herself to yield to the pull of memory. What unfolds is the haunting story of how Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, slowly come to face the truth about their seemingly happy childhoods - and about their futures. Never Let Me Go is uniquely moving novel, charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of our lives.
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amazon.com said:
All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.

Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure.
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Peder :D Didn't you say that this is the book that actually led you to Lolita herself? RLiT is so moving that it is well worth the read.

Doodle If you have read one of Ishiguro's books and enjoyed it, you will probably enjoy this one. But I found it, while well written, depressing. This is the second of his books I have started, and not finished. :eek:
 
Other than Reading Lolita in Tehran, which sadly didn't get as many votes as I'd hoped in last months poll, I'd vote for:

Stanley and the Women by Kingsley Amis

From Library Journal
Stanley is advertising manager of a London newspaper. The women are his ex-wife Nowell (```a not very good actress who isn't very beautiful'''), new wife Susan (```You certainly do marry some extraordinary people, Stanley'''), his dreadful mother-in-law, and psychiatrist Trish Collings, who's maltreating his son for schizophrenia. Rumor has it that Amis's new novel was rejected by several American publishers whose (female) editors took offense at its aggressively sexist tone. ```Would you assent to the proposition that all women are mad?''' a (male) psychiatrist asks Stanley. ```Yes. No, not all. There are exceptions, naturally.''' But in this tightly constructed, biting comedy no one comes off very well. Highly recommended for most fiction collections. Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
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I would second Never Let Me Go except I think it's fairer on everyone to wait until a book is available in paperback. So instead I'm nominating

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

A gripping but poetic tale of suburbia in the 1950s which Kurt Vonnegut called "The Great Gatsby of our time."

You can read more opinions on it here.
 
Shade said:
I would second Never Let Me Go except I think it's fairer on everyone to wait until a book is available in paperback. So instead I'm nominating

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.
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If I wasn't restricted from buying books I'd have this. It's one of the pieces my creative writing lecturer recommended and I rather liked the extract I looked at. When my embargo is lifted I will get this and Isherwood's Goodbye To Berlin; that interested me too.

As for Never Let Me Go, you can probably get the hardback for half-price in Waterstones and Borders in the UK.

I'll second Revolutionary Road, though, because I want to read it and have already read Never Let Me Go.
 
Shade said:
I would second Never Let Me Go except I think it's fairer on everyone to wait until a book is available in paperback.
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concering the paperback edition of Never let me go:
UK: paperback will be out on 2nd March 2006 but you get the hardcover for 6,78 pounds at amazon
USA: paperback is out
Germany: paperback will be out on 6th January 2006
Canada: paperback will be out on 31th January 2006
 
Durr. OK you got me. I was parochially referring to the UK 'mass-market' paperback which isn't out till March (and I'd also forgotten that this is for the March book discussion :eek: ). There is of course a 'trade paperback' edition in the UK already and, as Rogue has pointed out, you can get the hardcover for less than the paperback price...

Still, I'm sticking with my nomination of Revolutionary Road. Never Let Me Go is great but has had enough attention lately. :p
 
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