Suggestions: May 2006 Book of the Month

[mehastings]

Thread will close March 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.

**Note: At some point this month, one of the other mods may need to fill in running this section for a few weeks. I know that the majority of you do this already, but just a little request. In the interest of making things easier, if you can, please post a description of your book when you suggest it. This will also allow everyone to see a bit about the books that have already been suggested. Amazon, Barnes & Noble and many other book sites have book descriptions ready to go on them.

 

[-Carlos-]

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell



It's 1808 and that Corsican upstart Napoleon is battering the English army and navy. Enter Mr. Norrell, a fusty but ambitious scholar from the Yorkshire countryside and the first practical magician in hundreds of years. What better way to demonstrate his revival of British magic than to change the course of the Napoleonic wars? Susanna Clarke's ingenious first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, has the cleverness and lightness of touch of the Harry Potter series, but is less a fairy tale of good versus evil than a fantastic comedy of manners, complete with elaborate false footnotes, occasional period spellings, and a dense, lively mythology teeming beneath the narrative. Mr. Norrell moves to London to establish his influence in government circles, devising such powerful illusions as an 11-day blockade of French ports by English ships fabricated from rainwater. But however skillful his magic, his vanity provides an Achilles heel, and the differing ambitions of his more glamorous apprentice, Jonathan Strange, threaten to topple all that Mr. Norrell has achieved. A sparkling debut from Susanna Clarke--and it's not all fairy dust.

 

[MonkeyCatcher]

I second Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

 

[jaynebosco]

A Complicated Kindness



Taken from the Chapter.ca website:

Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull in New York City’s East Village. Instead she’s trapped in East Village, Manitoba, a small town whose population is Mennonite: “the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager.” East Village is a town with no train and no bar whose job prospects consist of slaughtering chickens at the Happy Family Farms abattoir or churning butter for tourists at the pioneer village. Ministered with an iron fist by Nomi’s uncle Hans, a.k.a. The Mouth of Darkness, East Village is a town that’s tall on rules and short on fun: no dancing, drinking, rock ’n’ roll, recreational sex, swimming, make-up, jewellery, playing pool, going to cities or staying up past nine o’clock.

As the novel begins, Nomi struggles to cope with the back-to-back departures three years earlier of Tash, her beautiful and mouthy sister, and Trudie, her warm and spirited mother. She lives with her father, Ray, a sweet yet hapless schoolteacher whose love is unconditional but whose parenting skills amount to benign neglect. Father and daughter deal with their losses in very different ways. Ray, a committed elder of the church, seeks to create an artificial sense of order by reorganizing the city dump late at night. Nomi, on the other hand, favours chaos as she tries to blunt her pain through “drugs and imagination.” Together they live in a limbo of unanswered questions.

Nomi’s first person narrative shifts effortlessly between the present and the past. Within the present, Nomi goes through the motions of finishing high school while flagrantly rebelling against Mennonite tradition. She hangs out on Suicide Hill, hooks up with a boy named Travis, goes on the Pill, wanders around town, skips class and cranks Led Zeppelin. But the past is never far from her mind as she remembers happy times with her mother and sister — as well as the painful events that led them to flee town. Throughout, in a voice both defiant and vulnerable, she offers hilarious and heartbreaking reflections on life, death, family, faith and love.

Eventually Nomi’s grief — and a growing sense of hypocrisy — cause her to spiral ever downward to a climax that seems at once startling and inevitable. But even when one more loss is heaped on her piles of losses, Nomi maintains hope and finds the imagination and willingness to envision what lies beyond.

 

[Stewart]

Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates (again )



Originally published in 1961 to great critical acclaim, Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road subsequently fell into obscurity in the UK, only to be rediscovered in a new edition published in 2001. Its rejuvenation is due in large part to its continuing emotional and moral resonance for an early 21st-century readership. April and Frank Wheeler are a young, ostensibly thriving couple living with their two children in a prosperous Connecticut suburb in the mid-1950s. However, like the characters in John Updike's similarly themed Couples, the self-assured exterior masks a creeping frustration at their inability to feel fulfilled or happy in their relationships or careers. Frank is mired in a well-paid but boring office job and April is a housewife still mourning the demise of her hoped-for acting career. Determined to identify themselves as superior to the mediocre sprawl of suburbanites who surround them, they decide to move to France where they will be better able to develop their true artistic sensibilities, free of the consumerist demands of capitalist America. However, as their relationship deteriorates into an endless cycle of squabbling, jealousy and recriminations, their trip and their dreams of self-fulfilment are thrown into jeopardy. Yates's incisive, moving and often very funny prose weaves a tale that is at once a fascinating period piece and a prescient anticipation of the way we live now. Many of the cultural motifs now seem quaintly dated--the early evening cocktails, Frank's illicit lunch breaks with his secretary, the way Frank isn't averse to knocking April around when she speaks out of turn all seem to belong to a different world--and yet the quiet desperation at thwarted dreams reverberates as much now as it did 40 years ago. Like F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, this novel conveys, with brilliant erudition, the poverty at the soul of many wealthy Americans and the exacting cost of chasing the American Dream

 

[steffee]

Can I second Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates?

 

[Kailana]

I have read A Complicated Kindness before. It is a half decent read, but not stellar. I will third Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, just because I should have read it by now.

 

[DiscoDan]

James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room​

Baldwin's 1956 novel, his second, was daring for its time, depicting a young man deep into Paris's second expatriate movement following World War II as he grapples with his sexual identity. He is drawn both to his fiance and to a male Italian bartender with whom he begins an affair.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

 

[Anamnesis]

Decision, decisions... Jonathan Strange sounds intriguing, but then again so does A Complicated Kindness. Eh, I read a lot of fantasy novels; think I'll do something different and second the latter .

 

[steffee]

I would like to suggest The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, just for a change...

Unashamedly stolen from Amazon...

Gillian Anderson
'She is leading women and the world to a different consciousness of the essence of women' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Glenn Close
'I feel my life has changed. You don't just hook up with Eve, you become part of her crusade' --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

I would post a picture but don't want to get into trouble

 

[ruby]

I would like to suggest The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, just for a change...

Unashamedly stolen from Amazon...



I would post a picture but don't want to get into trouble

Excellent choice steffee i agree with you it would make a change

 

[DiscoDan]

I saw a performance of the Vagina Monolgues and it was the funniest thing I've ever seen and the most serious thing I've ever seen in my entire life. I haven't read the book, but I'm sure it would be just as touching.

 

[steffee]

Is that two 2nds then?

 

[Stewart]

James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room​

Baldwin's 1956 novel, his second, was daring for its time, depicting a young man deep into Paris's second expatriate movement following World War II as he grapples with his sexual identity. He is drawn both to his fiance and to a male Italian bartender with whom he begins an affair.

I'm not far off finishing this book, and it's certainly a good book. I wonder, perhaps, if the narrative is a little overwrought for a twenty-seven year old. But then, literacy was much greater in a generation or two ago.

 

[Shade]

I read Giovanni's Room some time ago and liked it enough to read others of his (Another Country and Just Above My Head). But I'll stick to my guns and third Revolutionary Road instead... again...

 

[steffee]

Since today is the last day for nominations and there are very very few suggestions, I would like to suggest Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller, for no other reason than I want to read it, and there aren't many suggestions on this thread.

Stolen from Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.co.uk Review
Zoe Heller juggles journalism and novel-writing successfully in Notes on a Scandal and manages to say something interesting and complex about moral panics and the people who get caught up in them.

Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this--it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it. It's an abuse of her very limited power--he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons.

Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her. Above all, she devotes most of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her. This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession--and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover. --Roz Kaveney --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Synopsis
When Sheba arrives Barbara senses that she will be different from the rest of her staff-room colleagues. Sure enough, Sheba starts an affair with a pupil and is caught. When all the dust settles and Sheba's life falls apart, Barbara is there for her.

Hey, I'll even get a picture...



If, by some chance, lots of suggestions are put forward, please discard this suggestion and I'll stick with my Revolutionary Road seconding.

 

[abecedarian]

I nominate Broken Verses by Kamila Shamsie. I read it last week and enjoyed it very much. There's plenty to discuss here I think.

From Publishers Weekly
Turbulent Karachi is the backdrop for this intriguing, shimmeringly intelligent fourth novel by Shamsie (Kartography), which tells the story of progressive, overeducated Aasmaani Inqalab, the utterly likable 31-year-old daughter of fiery feminist icon Samina Akram. Since the age of 17, Aasmaani has been haunted by the brutal murder of her mother's lover—known simply as "the Poet"—and by her mother's disappearance two years later. As she eloquently puts it, "every prayer of mine for the last fourteen years had been one single word: Mama." Aasmaani takes a job as a quiz show researcher where she falls for the "dazzling" television producer Mir Adnan Akbar, who goes by "Ed." Ed is himself the child of a larger-than-life mother, the retired Pakistani actress Shehnaz Saeed, who happens to be Samina Akram's former confidante. Shehnaz's eagerly anticipated return to acting brings her into contact with Aasmaani. When she receives a cryptic letter, Shehnaz delivers it to Aasmaani knowing that Aasmaani's mother and the Poet developed a secret code to communicate with each other. As more letters arrive courtesy of Ed, Aasmaani convinces herself that the Poet is alive, held captive by a group he calls "the Minions." Although Aasmaani's interiority occasionally overwhelms the otherwise well-paced narrative, her characterization is Shamsie's crowning triumph. Wry, fetching and too clever for her own good, she is a captivating, unexpected heroine. Agent, Victoria Hobbs at A.M. Heath & Co. Ltd. (U.K.). (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

 

[tartan_skirt]

As it looks like you're short on suggestions I'll throw in an idea.

I nominate Out by Natsuo Kirino because it's a great book and even though it has been suggested before, it has never made it through.

Heres what's on Amazon about it (it gives a lot of the plot):

From Publishers Weekly
Four women who work the night shift in a Tokyo factory that produces boxed lunches find their lives twisted beyond repair in this grimly compelling crime novel, which won Japan's top mystery award, the Grand Prix, for its already heralded author, now making her first appearance in English. Despite the female bonding, this dark, violent novel is more evocative of Gogol or Dostoyevsky than Thelma and Louise. When Yayoi, the youngest and prettiest of the women, strangles her philandering gambler husband with his own belt in an explosion of rage, she turns instinctively for help to her co-worker Masako, an older and wiser woman whose own family life has fallen apart in less dramatic fashion. To help her cut up and get rid of the dead body, Masako recruits Yoshie and Kuniko, two fellow factory workers caught up in other kinds of domestic traps. In Snyder's smoothly unobtrusive translation, all of Kirino's characters are touching and believable. And even when the action stretches to include a slick loan shark from Masako's previous life and a pathetically lost and lonely man of mixed Japanese and Brazilian parentage, the gritty realism of everyday existence in the underbelly of Japan's consumer society comes across with pungent force.

 

[angerball]

I'll second Out, because it's a fantastic book.

 

[niloc]

A Plague On Both Your Houses: Susanna Gregory

A Plague On Both Your Houses
(The first book in the Matthew Bartholomew series)
(1996)
A novel by

by
Susanna Gregory

In the tradition of Ellis Peters, A Plague on Both Your Houses introduces the physician Matthew Bartholomew, whose unorthodox but effective treatment of his patients frequently draws accusations of heresy from his more traditional colleagues. Besides his practice, Bartholomew is teacher of Medicine at Michaelhouse, part of the fledgling University of Cambridge. In 1348, the inhabitants of Cambridge live under the shadow of a terrible pestilence that has ravaged Europe and is travelling relentlessly eastward towards England. Bartholomew, however, is distracted by the sudden and inexplicable death of the Master of Michaelhouse - a death the University authorities do not want investigated. When three more scholars die in mysterious circumstances, Bartholomew defies the University and begins his own enquiry. His pursuit for the truth leads him into a complex tangle of lies and intrigue that causes him to question the innocence of his closest friends, and even his family. And then the Black Death finally arrives and Bartholomew is dragged deeper and deeper into a quagmire which threatens not only his life, but the continued existence of the University and the future of the town.