MobileRead March 2017 Book Club Vote

[WT Sharpe]

March 2017 MobileRead Book Club Vote

Help us choose a book as the March 2017 eBook for the MobileRead Book Club. The poll will be open for 5 days. There will be no runoff vote unless the voting results a tie, in which case there will be a 3 day run-off poll. This is a visible poll: others can see how you voted. It is You may cast a vote for each book that appeals to you.

We will start the discussion thread for this book on March 20th. Select from the following Official Choices with three nominations each:

• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

Spoiler:

Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies…and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World. Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the longago twentieth century. Now in the care of a network of volunteer "adhocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest hightech touches. Now, though, it seems the "ad hocs" are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war: war for the soul of the Magic Kingdom, a war of evershifting reputations, technical wizardry, and entirely unpredictable outcomes. Bursting with cutting-edge speculation and human insight, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom reads like Neal Stephenson meets Nick Hornby: a comingofage romantic comedy and a kickbutt cybernetic tour de force.

• Lardner on the Loose (collected short fiction) by Ring Lardner
Kindle epub

Spoiler:

Ring Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical writings about sports, marriage, and the theatre. He was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom professed strong admiration for his writing.

In 1916, Lardner published his first successful book, You Know Me Al, an epistolary novel written in the form of letters from “Jack Keefe”, a bush-league baseball player, to a friend back home. The letters made much use of the fictional author’s idiosyncratic vernacular, with semi-literate grammar and phonetic spelling. Like most of Lardner’s stories, You Know Me Al employs satire, in this case to show the stupidity and avarice of a certain type of athlete. Until 1920, Lardner continued to write follow-up stories about Jack Keefe, some of which were collected in the books Treat ‘Em Rough and The Real Dope, narrating Jack’s Army experiences in World War I.

Lardner later published such stories as “Haircut”, “Some Like Them Cold”, “The Golden Honeymoon”, “Alibi Ike”, “A Day with Conrad Green”, and dozens more. Sometimes narrated by a “wise boob”, with slyly satirical commentary on manners and morals (The Big Town), sometimes taking a poignant view (“Now and Then”, “Old Folk’s Christmas”), sometimes sliding into sheer noir (“Champion”), always entertaining. His frequent use of vernacular influenced sports fiction writing for generations to come.

• A to Izzard (collected short fiction) by Damon Runyon
Kindle epub

Spoiler:

He was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from the Brooklyn or Midtown demi-monde. The adjective "Runyonesque" refers to this type of character as well as to the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicted.[4] He spun humorous and sentimental tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom go by "square" names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as "Nathan Detroit", "Benny Southstreet", "Big Jule", "Harry the Horse", "Good Time Charley", "Dave the Dude", or "The Seldom Seen Kid". His distinctive vernacular style is known as "Runyonese": a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in present tense, and always devoid of contractions. He is credited with coining the phrase "Hooray Henry", a term now used in British English to describe an upper-class, loud-mouthed, arrogant twit.

• The Red Cockade by Stanley J. Weyman
epub Kindle

Spoiler:

The Red Cockade is a Dumas-like swashbuckling historical romance, set around 1789 in Cahors and Nimes at the time of the French Revolution, and tells of the adventures of an aristocrat sympathetic to the cause of the people. The San Francisco Chronicle said this one 'deserves a place among the best historical fiction of the latter part of this [the nineteenth] century.' One of Weyman's finest.

• Humbugs of the World by PT Barnum

Spoiler:

This work exposes several of the chief humbugs of the world, written in the entertaining and humorous style Barnum is known for. Found within are discussions relative to hoaxes, money manias, adventurers, medicine and quacks, religious humbugs, trade and business impositions, spiritualists, ghosts and witchcrafts, and personal reminiscences.

• Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson

Spoiler:

Mrs. Lucas, Lucia (pronounced Lu-CHEE-A) to her intimates, resides in the village of Riseholme, a pretty Elizabethan village in Worcestershire, where she vigorously guards her status as "Queen" despite occasional attempts from her subjects to overthrow her. Lucia’s dear friend Georgie Pillson both worships Lucia and occasionally works to subvert her power.

A very witty book, you feel affection for Lucia and her affectations but at the same time you want to see her taken down a notch.

Kindle

• Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

Spoiler:

The most well-known and well-liked of Gaskell's works, this softly humorous picture of an English country village was first serialized in a magazine edited by Charles Dickens in 1851. Based on the village of Gaskell's childhood, "Cranford" is narrated by a young woman visiting the town who describes the genteel poverty of two middle-aged spinster sisters, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah. Gaskell tells of their little adventures in a confidential and almost chatty tone, perfectly conveying their habits and standards of propriety, decency, and kindness in reduced circumstances. The colorful characters and subtle class distinctions of the village of Cranford are captured in this compassionate and hopeful portrayal of small-town English life.

and from a Goodreads review:
the humor is so sly. at times it's difficult to believe that this was written over 150 years ago. I guess that gentle social humor has always been with us.

Kindle

• The Man of Property by John Galsworthy

Spoiler:

John Galsworthy (1867-1933) devoted virtually his entire professional career to creating a fictional but entirely representative family of propertied Victorians: the Forsytes. He made their lives and times, loves and losses, fortunes and deaths so real that readers accused him of including as characters in his drama real individuals whom they knew. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.

The entire saga comprises three trilogies of books, of which this is the first. The other two ("A Modern Comedy" and "End of the Chapter") are available as separate downloads.

This first trilogy, "The Forsyte Saga", chronicles the life of three generations of the Forsyte family, a wealthy upper middle class English family, in the turbulent years between the 1880s and the 1920s - a time period during which English society was completely transformed. The books are set against the great events of the day - the Boer War and WWI, the rise of Labour, the death of Queen Victoria, and much more.

This book was originally published as three novels, with a short story "interlude" between each one, the structure being:

The Man of Property
(Interlude) Indian Summer of a Forsyte
In Chancery
(Interlude) Awakening
To Let

Kindle Audible

[WT Sharpe]

If I don't vote this time, it won't be for lack of interest. They all look good. Actually, I started to vote for seven of them, but that seemed excessive. I'll wait and think on it some more.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

If I don't vote this time, it won't be for lack of interest. They all look good. Actually, I started to vote for seven of them, but that seemed excessive. I'll wait and think on it some more.

I think it's an exceptional slate, too. I've eliminated two, but six also seems too many; I generally don't like to vote for more than half. I think my next criterion is going to be for which books might lend themselves to the best discussion, IMO of course.

[CRussel]

Looks like several of us are still thinking about this month's choices. I know I am. I need to go look at which have good Audible versions as well, besides the two I know already.

[JSWolf]

You can get a FREE audiobook of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It's not read by a computer.

http://voicesinthedark.com/content.php?iContent=186

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Looks like several of us are still thinking about this month's choices. I know I am. I need to go look at which have good Audible versions as well, besides the two I know already.

Audible Versions are available for:
The Humbugs of the World (Narrated by Rick Adamson, not a narrator I know, and his reviews aren't great.)
Queen Lucia (Includes the excellent Nadia May narration)
The Man of Property (Link is to the David Case narration, but there are others.)
Cranford (Four excellent narrations, at least)

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

If I don't vote this time, it won't be for lack of interest. They all look good. Actually, I started to vote for seven of them, but that seemed excessive. I'll wait and think on it some more.

I voted for six - BURP

[BenG]

Martin Clifton's narration of Queen Lucia at Librivox is good and it's free.

[CRussel]

Well, I ended up voting for five though I could easily have gone for 6 or 7, but it looks like a lot of people are waiting until the last possible moment to vote. We've only had 5 voters so far, a woefully small number for this far into the process. Come on, folks, we have a superb slate here and it shouldn't be hard to pick some you'd like to read.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Well, I ended up voting for five though I could easily have gone for 6 or 7, but it looks like a lot of people are waiting until the last possible moment to vote. We've only had 5 voters so far, a woefully small number for this far into the process. Come on, folks, we have a superb slate here and it shouldn't be hard to pick some you'd like to read.

My inclination is to vote for six and since I'm indifferent among them, there's no reason not to vote for all of them now as opposed to trying to nudge a preferred choice at the end. But I'm trying to decide if some are more conducive to a lively discussion than others.

[CRussel]

My read is that we'll have the best discussion from the book that the most people actually READ. Which doesn't, so far as I've been able to determine, have much if anything to do with the number of people who vote for a given book. So jump on in. I, at least, will commit to trying to read any of the 5 I voted for. Though I also reserve the right to abandon if it's not what I expected.

[CRussel]

I'd like to see some more support for The Man of Property, the first of the Forsyte Saga. This is an excellent book that should give us much to talk about, and it's a very enjoyable read, IMHO. (I read this most recently about 8 years ago, but then life intruded and I never got to the rest of the books, so I'm actually quite looking forward to an excuse to try again.)

[issybird]

I also tend to think that The Man of Property would provide the most fodder for discussion - and it's a good read, too.

[GA Russell]

I hope a lot of people cast surprise ballots at 11:59 tonight!

[CRussel]

Well, with two more votes for three different books, we could have a four way runoff.