Voting: January 2006 Book of the Month

[mehastings]

Voting will close December 1, 2005.

Small Island by Andrea Levy

Amazon.com
Andrea Levy's award-winning novel, Small Island, deftly brings two bleak families into crisp focus.... As the chapters reverse chronology and the two groups collide and finally mesh, the book unfolds through time like a photo album, and Levy captures the struggle between class, race, and sex with a humor and tenderness that is both authentic and bracing. The book is cinematic in the best way--lighting up London's bombed-out houses and wartime existence with clarity and verve while never losing her character's voice or story.

Black Sunday by Thomas Harris

From Library Journal
This is the 1975 debut novel from Harris, who went on to write Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal. Black Sunday pits an American Vietnam veteran of dubious sanity and PLO terrorist accomplices against a ruthless Israeli security agent and the FBI in a race to kill the 80,000 spectators at the Super Bowl, with the president of the United States in attendance. The plot (large-scale terrorist act perpetrated in the United States by an American) was considered somewhat improbable when first reviewed but is considerably less so today.

If On a Winter's Night, A Traveler by Italo Calvino

Amazon.com
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading.

The Periodic Table by Primo Levy

Amazon.com
Writer Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian Jew, did not come to the wide attention of the English-reading audience until the last years of his life. A survivor of the Holocaust and imprisonment in Auschwitz, Levi is considered to be one of the century's most compelling voices, and The Periodic Table is his most famous book. Springboarding from his training as a chemist, Levi uses the elements as metaphors to create a cycle of linked, somewhat autobiographical tales, including stories of the Piedmontese Jewish community he came from, and of his response to the Holocaust.

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Amazon.com
Neverwhere's protagonist, Richard Mayhew, learns the hard way that no good deed goes unpunished. He ceases to exist in the ordinary world of London Above, and joins a quest through the dark and dangerous London Below, a shadow city of lost and forgotten people, places, and times. His companions are Door, who is trying to find out who hired the assassins who murdered her family and why; the Marquis of Carabas, a trickster who trades services for very big favors; and Hunter, a mysterious lady who guards bodies and hunts only the biggest game.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Amazon.com
The Blind Assassin is a tale of two sisters, one of whom dies under ambiguous circumstances in the opening pages. The survivor, Iris Chase Griffen, initially seems a little cold-blooded about this death in the family. But as Margaret Atwood's most ambitious work unfolds--a tricky process, in fact, with several nested narratives and even an entire novel-within-a-novel--we're reminded of just how complicated the familial game of hide-and-seek can be.

Palindrome Hannah by Michael Bailey

Book Description
Five dark tales set around the rain-soaked city of Seattle. A series of clever and horrifying narratives intertwine in this blend of art and pop, horror and dramatic intrigue. Mysterious palindromes haunt the text and question the nature of coincidence.

 

[Ice]

It has been decided that from now on, the BOTM poll thread is to be for voting only - not for discussion.

Thank you for your co-operation

 

[sirmyk]

Is there a way to put those posts, previously deleted from such threads, into places where they are deemed appropriate (I heard there was some slightly heated discussion about one of the books in particular that I never had the chance to read through before they were removed from here after some questions were raised about this book)? Just curious...

 

[mehastings]

The posts that were deleted from this thread really weren't appropriate for anywhere else. They were essentially telling other members which of two books to vote for, or replying to a post that did. Otherwise, we would gladly have moved/left them.

 

[mehastings]

Poll is closed. Discussion of both Small Island and Palindrome Hannah will begin Jan 1.