Literary Viral • April 2020

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Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

AnotherCat already has 3 nominations.

Doomsday Book wasn’t eligible (it was the selection before for the general book club). So that leaves two nominations and one free one.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Oh, I forgot about that.

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April Fools!

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Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

Blindness, The Dreamers, and Pale Horse, Pale Rider were also books that I had on my list.

I stand corrected! I feel like it's a good thing either way; if we found different books to choose from then there's more to discover from seeing each other's nominations and lists, but if we found some matching books it means we were on the same wavelength and that bodes well too.

The list I was deciding on included To Calais, in Ordinary Time by James Meek (I loved the synopsis and it fit the topic so perfectly leading me to almost nominate it, but I liked the other three previews better), They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell, Camille, La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, A Fortunate Man by John Berger, and A Country Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov (which I thought was interesting not only because we haven't read something by Bulgakov since our very first month so long ago, but also because it was based on real experiences as a doctor in more rural Russia just before revolution which would've been an interesting book to read and contrast with Doctor Zhivago... but I thought perhaps it might be a bit much barely-pre-revolutionary Russian doctor literature in such a short time ).

I also was thinking of more infamous literature too and at the top of my mind was Lady Chatterly's Lover, but I found so many disease-related books.

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moved to below...

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by drofgnal

You recently had Station Eleven, that was a prophetic choice. I've always wanted to read the Andromeda Strain, having liked the movie. The Plague by Albert Camus would also be a good read.

I had assumed dofgnal's The Plague and Andromoda Strain had made the cut. Apparantly not and I would have nominated Andromeda Strain as my third unused nomination if drofgnal hadn't mentioned it.

Maybe they were not seen or intended as nominations.

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Originally Posted by AnotherCat

I had assumed dofgnal's The Plague and Andromoda Strain had made the cut. Apparantly not and I would have nominated Andromeda Strain as my third unused nomination if drofgnal hadn't mentioned it.

Maybe they were not seen or intended as nominations.

Ah, I see where the confusion was now. I had blithely taken that post as just discussion rather than nominations, so my bad for not double checking on that. I was wondering why you weren't nominating The Andromeda Strain!

Okay, there's a simple remedy for this even if it's a little unorthodox. I'll add in The Andromeda Strain as your last nomination. The Plague isn't eligible as it was a selection for our club before too, so that covers all the books in drofgnal's post whether it was meant for nominations or no.

With only some of my votes being the only cast so far I would leave the clock running on the initial vote starting post, but it lists the wrong amount of votes per person and I don't feel like editing that post would work well, so I'm going to delete that one and restart the vote fresh in a minute.

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Once more, with feeling.

Nominations are complete and voting is now open!

Voting will close exactly four days from this post.

Each person has EIGHT votes to use.

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Okay, I think we're all on the same page now!


My votes thus far-

1 to Blindness
1 to A Journal of the Plague Year
1 to The Dreamers
1 to Pale Horse, Pale Rider
1 to The Samurai's Garden

I'll save my other votes until I sample the other previews.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Good solution to modify the nominations!

I am having a hard time keeping track of time. Everything is blending together without the outside delineation of the day to activities like work, shopping, eating out and other social things.

[AnotherCat]

Thanks for slipping The Andromeda Strain in.

My votes:

2 The Andromeda Strain
2 The Ghost Map
2 Blindness
2 The Samurai's Garden

I have read A Journal of the Plague Year before, and would be happy to reread that. I have a couple of Steven's other books on my to read list but for some reason not The Ghost Map, that even though I am familiar with and am interested in the cholera story, and knew of Steven's book; so whatever the out come the nominations have turned up a "to be read" for me.

[Bookworm_Girl]

The list is even better than I anticipated. I am going to have to download some samples in the morning to help decide.

[Bookworm_Girl]

It's interesting that we were very US-centric in our nominations this month.

Here are my votes. Reading samples was no help!

Blindness by José Saramago - 1
The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama - 1
Fever by Mary Beth Keane - 1
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson - 1
Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter - 1
A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel DeFoe - 1
The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker - 1

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Whew, I'm making it in the nick of time. I know what you mean, Bookworm_Girl. I rarely dislike any of the previews that we nominate, and often don't especially have any obvious favourites. But I do still have three votes to dole out, so I'll give them to three of the ones I wanted to sample first and haven't voted for yet:

1 to Fever
1 to The Andromeda Strain
1 to The Plague Dogs

This was another great month for nominations and I really liked the cohesiveness of the subject matter throughout whilst still having such varied choices.

I've never read The Andromeda Strain or seen the film. It's funny because when you were first mentioning it, I was confusing it with the film The Medusa Touch which I saw when very young, and which scarred me forever, because

Spoiler:

the scene near the end with the powerfully telekinetic evil man in hospital all bandaged up but still barely alive somehow so the disaster event wasn't successfully stopped, and his next target was a nuclear power station to basically destroy the world. That was the film that made me worried of a nuclear holocaust of the world growing up, so thanks a lot for that I say to the film!

Anyway I realised my confusion when I got the title ready for the nominations list, lol.

The Plague Dogs I know of and looks interesting, being a book by the author of Watership Down, which I've never read all the way through though again I saw the film when very young.

A Journal sounds quite interesting, and the only other DeFoe I read I loved (the obvious Robinson Crusoe), but that could be in large part to its subject matter so it'd be interesting to see how another book of his stacks up.

Fever looks interesting and especially pertinent to our current situation since there's the idea of so many asymptomatic carriers of C19 walking around out there.

I'd be happy to read Ghost Map as well, an historical fiction about London and its cholera outbreak of 1854. One noticeable thing about the author, Steven Johnson, is that he has a possibly unfortunate name by coincidence and I'm sure he's aware of that. When googling his name, almost all results were for a dangerous disease called Stevens-Johnson syndrome. It's severely flu-like, usually requiring hospitalisation, so oddly and coincidentally relevant to our current pandemic as well.

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Initial voting is complete and we have a tie between:

-Blindness
-The Samurai's Garden


Run-off voting is now open!

Voting will close exactly TWO DAYS from this post.

Each person has ONE vote to use.

If the run-off ends in a tie, the selection that received all its votes first will win.