Literary Region Nominations & Vote • February 2018

[sun surfer]

Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read in February 2018!


The category for this month is:

Region
The Korean Peninsula, Mongolia & China, as chosen by vote


Detailed nominating and voting guidelines can be found here.

Simply put, we first begin with a one-day vote to determine this month's region. Voting will close exactly one day from this post and each person has SIX votes to use.

After, nominations will open for four days and each person may nominate up to two literary selections which will go automatically to the vote. Voting then opens for four days and each person votes by post, receives a number of votes equal to the number of nominations minus one and may give each nomination up to two votes. Any questions, feel free to ask.

We hope that you will read the selection with the club and join in the discussion.

Spoiler:

-Previously chosen regions currently ineligible:
Latin America
Central Asia, East Europe & Russia
Canada & the U.S.A.
North Africa & The Middle East
Southeast Asia
Portugal, Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain & France
North & Central Europe

The floor is now open!

*

Region voting is closed. Final results-

• Ireland & The U.K.
  Votes- 0
• Japan
  Votes- 0
• The Korean Peninsula, Mongolia & China
  Votes- 2
• South Asia
  Votes- 0
• The South Pacific
  Votes- 0
• Southeast Europe
  Votes- 0
• Sub Saharan Africa
  Votes- 2

Nominations are now closed. Voting is closed. Final results-

• Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang, China
  Post / Goodreads / 289 Pages / Votes- 0
  
  
• Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Chin, Korea
  Post / Goodreads / 263 Pages / Votes- 5

[Bookworm_Girl]

I will start with 2 votes for The Korean Peninsula, Mongolia & China.

[sun surfer]

I give two to Sub-Saharan Africa.

[sun surfer]

Region voting is over and there is a tie between The Korean Peninsula, Mongolia & China and Sub-Saharan Africa. Per the guidelines the winner is the first to receive all its votes which means the winner is:

The Korean Peninsula, Mongolia & China!

Nominations are now open for four days.

[Bookworm_Girl]

My first nomination is Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang originally published in 1943. It is a collection of 4 novellas and 2 short stories. Her stories were first published collectively as Romances.

From Goodreads:

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

From Wikipedia:

Eileen Chang (September 30, 1920 – September 8, 1995) was one of the most influential modern Chinese writers.

Chang is noted for her fiction writings that deal with the tensions between men and women in love, and are considered by some scholars to be among the best Chinese literature of the period. Chang's portrayal of life in 1940s Shanghai and Japanese-occupied Hong Kong is remarkable in its focus on everyday life and the absence of the political subtext which characterised many other writers of the period. The poet and University of Southern California professor Dominic Cheung commented "had it not been for the political division between the Nationalist and Communist Chinese, she would have almost certainly won a Nobel Prize".

[Bookworm_Girl]

My second nomination is Please Look After Mom (or Mother in some countries) by Kyung-Sook Chin. She is the first South Korean and first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012 (for this novel).

Amazon Best Books of the Month, April 2011:

There is a simple, yet remarkable, scene in Kyung-sook Shin’s novel, Please Look After Mom, where the book’s title character visits her adult son in Seoul. He lives in a duty office in the building where he works, because he can't afford an apartment. At night, they sleep on the floor and she offers to lie next to the wall to shield him from a draft. “I can fall asleep better if I’m next to the wall,” she says. And with this gesture, we catch a glimpse of the depth of love she has for her first-born and the duty-bound sacrifices she’s made on behalf her family. Please Look After Mom is the story of a mother, and her family’s search for her after she goes missing in a crowded train station, told through four richly imagined voices: her daughter’s, her oldest son’s, her husband’s, and finally her own. Each chapter adds a layer to the story’s depth and complexity, until we are left with an indelible portrait of a woman whose entire identity, despite her secret desires, is tied up in her children and the heartbreaking loss that is felt when family bonds loosen over time. Kyung-sook Shin’s elegantly spare prose is a joy to read, but it is the quiet interstitial space between her words, where our own remembrances and regrets are allowed to seep in, that convicts each one of us to our core.--Shane Hansanuwat

[June]

Please Look After Mom sounds really interesting, thank you for letting me know about this book

[Bookworm_Girl]

You're welcome, June! I nominated this region because the literary club hasn't read many books from it, and also it ties-in with the Olympics this month. I added many interesting books to my TBR list while searching for nominations. It was hard to pick just two!

[sun surfer]

Please Look After Mom/Mother reminds me of the Korean film Mother because of the title, the country, the vague premise of an older mother with an adult son she cares about, and a mystery to be solved. Reading the rest of the description it's obvious the film is in no way related to this book, but if anyone is interested the film is a masterpiece. It's one of my all-time favourites.

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

You're welcome, June! I nominated this region because the literary club hasn't read many books from it, and also it ties-in with the Olympics this month. I added many interesting books to my TBR list while searching for nominations. It was hard to pick just two!

A great nomination for the region and book.

[sun surfer]

Oops, I had it in my head that nominations were over now, not a day ago. I suppose somehow with the new extra day I got mixed up. Regardless,

Nominations are closed and voting is now open!

Voting will close exactly four days from this post.

Each person has ONE vote to use.


For what it's worth, I had a book to nominate and was going to look for another too, but I really like both of the current nominations better and nominations of mine did well the last couple of months so I held off.

[June]

I vote for Please look after Mother

[Bookworm_Girl]

I vote for Please Look After Mom.

[sun surfer]

I've read preview excerpts of both. Please Look After Mom begins with a narrative viewpoint similar to a Choose Your Own Adventure book, being written in the present tense and calling the reader 'you'. This intrigues me since I've never read a normal book like that (although the perspective may change through the book). I'd like to read both nominations but because of that, and because I'm not sure if I've ever read a book from Korea and because it'd be nice to choose a contemporary selection,

I give my vote to Please Look After Mom.

[bfisher]

I vote for Please Look After Mom.