New Leaf Nominations for January 2020 • I'd Rather be Reading: Books about Books

[issybird]

I'm having a hard time narrowing down my potential nominations. Perhaps clarity will come in the morning.

[Victoria]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

I have just checked and the Hanff is available from one of my libraries. gmw may have difficulties in getting it though.

Great, thanks for checking Bookpossum If gmw can get it, I’ll renominate it.

[Victoria]

Originally Posted by issybird

I'm having a hard time narrowing down my potential nominations. Perhaps clarity will come in the morning.

That always works for me!

[CRussel]

I had already checked out 84, Charing Cross Road, issybird. But thanks for the confirmation.

Charlie.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Victoria

Great, thanks for checking Bookpossum If gmw can get it, I’ll renominate it.

Sorry, Victoria. I am interested - love 84 Charing Cross Road - but my library options are limited and no sign of anything by Hanff except an audiobook of 84 Charing Cross Road.

I'm still working out what I want to nominate.

[gmw]

I nominate The Binding by Bridget Collins

Synopsis from Goodreads:

Books are dangerous things in Collins's alternate universe, a place vaguely reminiscent of 19th-century England. It's a world in which people visit book binders to rid themselves of painful or treacherous memories. Once their stories have been told and are bound between the pages of a book, the slate is wiped clean and their memories lose the power to hurt or haunt them.

After having suffered some sort of mental collapse and no longer able to keep up with his farm chores, Emmett Farmer is sent to the workshop of one such binder to live and work as her apprentice. Leaving behind home and family, Emmett slowly regains his health while learning the binding trade. He is forbidden to enter the locked room where books are stored, so he spends many months marbling end pages, tooling leather book covers, and gilding edges. But his curiosity is piqued by the people who come and go from the inner sanctum, and the arrival of the lordly Lucian Darnay, with whom he senses a connection, changes everything.

437 hardcover pages.

It's almost 12 months old and prices currently look good to very good in most places (the prices have varied a lot in the last 12 months). This is the first adult novel of an author known for her YA works (published as B.R. Collins).

Example prices from Kobo: USD $2.99, CAD $2.99, GBP £4.99, AUD $8.99

I read this about 6 months ago and enjoyed it very much. It's perhaps a little soon for me to want to read it again, but for the club I would put myself out.

[Victoria]

I nominate a book from my tbr, To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis. It includes nods to several books, and the title is a homage to and the subtitle of Jerome K Jerome’s comic travelogue, Three Men in a Boat (1889). It won both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1999, and was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1998.


From Amazon:

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a science-fiction fantasy in the guise of an old-fashioned Victorian novel, complete with epigraphs, brief outlines, and a rather ugly boxer in three-quarters profile at the start of each chapter. Or is it a Victorian novel in the guise of a time-traveling tale, or a highly comic romp, or a great, allusive literary game, complete with spry references to Dorothy L. Sayers, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle?

What Connie Willis soon makes clear is that genre can go to the dogs. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a fine, and fun, romance--an amused examination of conceptions and misconceptions about other eras, other people.

From Booklist:

What a stitch! Willis' delectable romp through time from 2057 back to Victorian England, with a few side excursions into World War II and medieval Britain, will have readers happily glued to the pages. Rich dowager Lady Schrapnell has invaded Oxford University's time travel research project in 2057, promising to endow it if they help her rebuild Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by a Nazi air raid in 1940..

Take an excursion through time, add chaos theory, romance, plenty of humor, a dollop of mystery, and a spoof of the Victorian novel, and you end up with what seems like a comedy of errors but is actually a grand scheme "involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog. And a hideous piece of Victorian artwork."

Available on Overdrive
Kobo: $8.99 CA; $6.99 USD; $11.99 AUD; £5.99 GB
Kindle: $7.80 CA

[issybird]

I'm going to third Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy as I continue to dither about a nomination of my own, planning to get one up today!

[issybird]

I suppose everyone would be up for The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte? It's been on my TBR for a while.

I kid, I kid. (The TBR bit is true.)

[issybird]

I'm really running into a problem with Australia this month. Every time I think I've settled on a title, I have one of the following issues:

• Not available in Australia.
• Available only as an audiobook.
• Available as an ebook, but the price is stratospheric.

I shall carry on.

[issybird]

Here we go.

I'm going to nominate Rereadings by Anne Fadiman, ed.

From Kobo:

Is a book the same book-or a reader the same reader-the second time around? The seventeen authors in this witty and poignant collection of essays all agree on the answer: Never.

<SNIP>

These essays are not conventional literary criticism; they are about relationships. The relationship between reader and book is a powerful one, and as these writers attest, it evolves over time. Rereadings reveals at least as much about the reader as about the book: each is a miniature memoir that focuses on that most interesting of topics, the protean nature of love. And as every bibliophile knows, no love is more life-changing than the love of a book.

I'll be honest; in general I don't reread much, but in recent years I've rediscovered the Victorian novelists and my experience of them is much deeper and richer than when I read them decades ago. So I'm on board with the essential premise!

Kobo: US$9.99; CA$10.99; AU$13.08; UK£6.95 / Amazon AU: $9.86

Heh! Cheapest in Australia. There had to be something. The US is the highball price, but the book's available on OverDrive.

272 pp.

[gmw]

I second: To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis. (I've seen this around and thought about picking it up.)

I second: Rereadings by Anne Fadiman. (I do re-read and I really like the sound of this.)

[Victoria]

Originally Posted by issybird

I suppose everyone would be up for The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte? It's been on my TBR for a while.

I kid, I kid. (The TBR bit is true.)

It does sound like a rather noir to start the new year

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by gmw

I second: To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis. (I've seen this around and thought about picking it up.)

I third this one.

[Bookpossum]

And I third Rereadings.