12-01-2020, 10:26 AM | #1 |
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Winter Wonderland • December 2020
Help select what we'll read and discuss next!
The topic is Winter Wonderland. This topic is pretty open for a lot of things! Detailed nominating and voting guidelines can be found here. Basically, nominations are open for about four days and each person may nominate up to three literary selections which will go automatically to the vote. Voting by post then opens for four days, and a voter may give each nomination either one or two votes but only has a limited number of votes to use which is equal to the number of nominations minus one. Any questions, feel free to ask. We hope that you will read the selection with us and join in the discussion. * Nominations are now complete. Voting is now open! Results through post #26-
Last edited by sun surfer; 12-09-2020 at 02:35 PM. |
12-02-2020, 09:23 PM | #2 |
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My nominations are:
The Snow Goose - Paul Gallico (Novella) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snow_Goose_(novella) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...The_Snow_Goose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Li...d_the_Wardrobe https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/...d_the_Wardrobe The Long Walk - Slavomir Rawicz (challenged autobiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%82awomir_Rawicz https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9013.The_Long_Walk The Snow Goose must have been read by most British readers, and certainly many here in NZ and Australia; North America maybe not? The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has been sitting on my to read list for a long time, so a selfish nomination. The Long Walk I have read before (and also seen the movie adaption The Way Back) and is for me to be read again sometime. It is claimed to be an autobiography but there are some challenges as to its veracity; however if not entirely true or was someone else's trek it still makes a good story whose popularity has survived the test of time. Last edited by AnotherCat; 12-02-2020 at 09:27 PM. |
12-04-2020, 06:27 PM | #3 |
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Those are three diverse nominations, AnotherCat! I read the Narnia books when I was really young, maybe almost too young because I remember the last book scaring me, lol. It could be fun to read the first one again all these years later.
I've got my nominations down to four and just need to figure out which three to put up. |
12-04-2020, 08:22 PM | #4 |
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I am working on my nominations. I have a few ideas so far.
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12-05-2020, 12:01 AM | #5 | |
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My first nomination is The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I read it last winter and really enjoyed it.
From Goodreads: Quote:
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12-05-2020, 12:24 AM | #6 | |
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My second nomination is The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories. It sounds fun and includes authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Walter Scott and Elizabeth Gaskell.
From Amazon: Quote:
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12-05-2020, 01:42 AM | #7 | |
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My last nomination is Beartown by Fredrik Backman.
From Amazon: Quote:
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12-05-2020, 12:17 PM | #8 | |
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My first nomination is The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse (not the supermodel, heh). It's about an Englishman travelling in France in the 1920s still trying to recover from WWI, whose car swerves off the road during a snowstorm in the Pyrenees. Through the woods he finds a tiny village inn where he meets a woman and they share stories through the night.
Goodreads . Preview . 260 Pages . 2009 . England Quote:
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12-05-2020, 12:25 PM | #9 | |
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My second nomination is The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys. I thought the idea of reading vignettes of all the times in recorded history that the Thames has frozen over sounds fun and unique.
Goodreads . Preview . 186 Pages . 2007 . Canada & England Quote:
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12-05-2020, 12:41 PM | #10 | |
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And lastly I'll nominate Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay. This one is about a famous ballerina with dark secrets, originally from Russia but now living in retirement in Boston, who decides to auction off some jewellery. She contemplates her life and it traces her past in Stalinist Russia up until the present. I really enjoyed the preview and what I found intriguing about this was that while it doesn't sound like it shies away from the bleak politicial and economic climate of Russia in the 20th century, the protagonist is someone who has somewhat of a privileged and definitely artistic life.
Goodreads . Preview . 466 Pages . 2010 . U.S. Quote:
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12-05-2020, 01:08 PM | #11 |
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This was possibly the hardest month for me in terms of narrowing it down to three nominations. I had it down to four and I could not decide which one to leave out. The unfortunate fourth was Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata. It's by a Nobel winner and is about a geisha near a hot spring in the very snowy mountainous west of Japan where people come to holiday. While geishas in other parts of Japan may have a higher status, in this area they are seen as quite lowly, barely above prostitutes. She falls for a man with a family back home who is travelling there and this is the story of their doomed love. The preview was fantastic and the descriptions of the landscape and snow really evoke a 'winter wonderland' feeling, including a description at the start of the mountain tunnel the train must pass through to get to this area which is always under threat of an avalanche with thousands of men always on the ready to dig it out if the need arises.
If I had chosen to eliminate one of the four I was considering based on length, or having less of a straightforward narrative, or having less of a wintery feel in the preview, or Goodreads ratings, each of the others would've been left out instead depending on the criteria, and I did consider all that. I also thought about nominating diverse titles (which would've left out one of the ones with 'winter' in the title), having a foreign language nomination, having a nomination from a wider variety of years (Snow Country was published in 1948), etc. I even noticed only one author was male, but as if the tables were turned I wouldn't include a female author just because she was the only I was considering, I didn't consider that. I also know AnotherCat likes Japanese lit and Bookworm_Girl is interested in the Kawabata, but I felt they would be interested in the other three for various reasons too so I didn't let that sway me either way. In the end, I chose to not nominate the one that had been nominated here before. Snow Country had been nominated a few years ago (and almost won with only one vote separating it from the winner) while the other three are all fresh to the club. There really was no best reason to settle on for leaving one of the four out; that just happened to be the one I settled on. In a different hour it could've been a different decision with any of the other reasons I'd mentioned. |
12-05-2020, 01:16 PM | #12 |
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While I'm on the subject of considered books, I'll list all the ones from my longlist too before narrowing down to the above four, if anyone might be interested to check any of these out:
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen Ice by Anna Kavan Winter's Tales by Isak Denisen In the Winter Dark by Tim Winton Snowdrops by A.D. Miller A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy Ice by Sarah Beth Durst Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris The Face in the Frost by John Bellairs The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell Wintersong by S. Jae-Jones Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg |
12-05-2020, 01:17 PM | #13 |
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The vote will begin in a little while once I get the nominations list together.
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12-05-2020, 02:02 PM | #14 |
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12-05-2020, 02:06 PM | #15 |
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I don’t think I’ve heard of this book before. I don’t know how typical my experience is for North America. It sounds very good. Thanks for nominating it!
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