MobileRead October 2016 Book Club Vote

[WT Sharpe]

October 2016 MobileRead Book Club Vote

Help us choose a book as the October 2016 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 October 20th. Select from the following Official Choices with three nominations each:

• Bridge in the Fourth Dimension: Further Adventures of the Hideous Hog by Victor Mollo
Goodreads | Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo UK / Kobo US / Overdrive
Print Length: 160 pages

Spoiler:

I read it laughing out loud, rolling on the floor, totally devoured it and kept coming back for more for years until my original paperback was in tatters.

Victor Mollo was one of the all time most successful contract bridge players in the UK where they play it as a blood sport. I came across Bridge in the Menagerie when I was still in college, and playing bridge to feed my family. I read it laughing out loud, rolling on the floor, totally devoured it and kept coming back for more for years until my original paperback was in tatters. That original book was long out of print but has now come back in print, but has never been converted to eBook format. However, this sequel can be read without having read the original and by those whose knowledge of bridge is no more than passing. I haven't played a hand myself in probably 15 years, but I'd love to play out the hands in this.
— CRussel

• Mislaid by Nell Zink
Goodreads | Amazon US
Print Length: 288 pages

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

Stillwater College in Virginia, 1966. Freshman Peggy, an ingénue with literary pretensions, falls under the spell of Lee, a blue-blooded poet and professor, and they begin an ill-advised affair that results in an unplanned pregnancy and marriage. The couple are mismatched from the start—she’s a lesbian, he’s gay—but it takes a decade of emotional erosion before Peggy runs off with their three-year-old daughter, leaving their nine-year-old son behind.

Worried that Lee will have her committed for her erratic behavior, Peggy goes underground, adopting an African American persona for her and her daughter. They squat in a house in an African American settlement, eventually moving to a housing project where no one questions their true racial identities. As Peggy and Lee’s children grow up, they must contend with diverse emotional issues: Byrdie must deal with his father’s compulsive honesty; while Karen struggles with her mother’s lies—she knows neither her real age, nor that she is “white,” nor that she has any other family.

Years later, a minority scholarship lands Karen at the University of Virginia, where Byrdie is in his senior year. Eventually the long lost siblings will meet, setting off a series of misunderstandings and culminating in a comedic finale worthy of Shakespeare.

• Rivers of London (US title: Midnight Riot) by Ben Aaronovitch
Goodreads | Amazon US / Overdrive UK / Overdrive US
Print Length: 400 pages

Spoiler:

"I'll absolutely second Rivers of London/Midnight Riot. This is witty more than funny, but definitely left me regularly chortling and reading passages to my DW. (Best nomination you've made, Jon!)"
— CRussel

My name is Peter Grant and until January I was just probationary constable in that mighty army for justice known to all right-thinking people as the Metropolitan Police Service (as the Filth to everybody else). My only concerns in life were how to avoid a transfer to the Case Progression Unit–we do paperwork so real coppers don't have to–and finding a way to climb into the panties of the outrageously perky WPC Leslie May. Then one night, in pursuance of a murder inquiry, I tried to take a witness statement from someone who was dead but disturbingly voluable, and that brought me to the attention of Inspector Nightingale, the last wizard in England. Now I'm a Detective Constable and a trainee wizard, the first apprentice in fifty years, and my world has become somewhat more complicated: nests of vampires in Purley, negotiating a truce between the warring god and goddess of the Thames, and digging up graves in Covent Garden . . . and there's something festering at the heart of the city I love, a malicious vengeful spirit that takes ordinary Londoners and twists them into grotesque mannequins to act out its drama of violence and despair. The spirit of riot and rebellion has awakened in the city, and it's falling to me to bring order out of chaos–or die trying.

• The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
Goodreads | Amazon US
Print Length: 119 pages

Spoiler:

"[O]ne of the funniest books I've ever read."
— Issybird

From Goodreads:

Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday-and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer's art. Waugh's dark and savage satire on the Anglo-American cultural divide depicts a world where reputation, love, and death cost a very great deal.

• Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
Goodreads | Amazon Au / Amazon Ca / Amazon UK / Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo US / Overdrive / Overdrive Audio
Print Length: 272 pages

Spoiler:

From The Guardian:

"The temptation when reviewing a David Sedaris book is simply to quote liberally, and enviously, from his endless stock of pithy one-liners. A humorist par excellence, he can make Woody Allen appear ham-tongued, Oscar Wilde a drag. Me Talk Pretty One Day collects tales from both home and abroad, and picks up from where Naked - in which he first introduced his larger-than-life Technicolor family - left off."
— David Vincent

From Goodreads:
David Sedaris' move to Paris from New York inspired these hilarious pieces, including the title essay, about his attempts to learn French from a sadistic teacher who declares that every day spent with you is like having a caesarean section. His family is another inspiration. You Can't Kill the Rooster is a portrait of his brother, who talks incessant hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. And no one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers of food and cashiers with six-inch fingernails.

• Noises Off by Michael Frayn
Goodreads | Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo US
Print Length: 176 pages

Spoiler:

"I saw it on Broadway when Linda Thorson was in the cast, and I laughed so hard during the first two acts, that I didn't have any laughter left inside of me for the third act!"
— GA Russell

From Goodreads:

Noises Off, the classic farce by the Tony Award—winning author of Copenhagen, is not one play but two: simultaneously a traditional sex farce, Nothing On, and the backstage “drama” that develops during Nothing On’s final rehearsal and tour. The two begin to interlock as the characters make their exits from Nothing On only to find themselves making entrances into the even worse nightmare going on backstage. In the end, at the disastrous final performance, the two plots can be kept separate no longer, and coalesce into a single collective nervous breakdown.

• Bellwether by Connie Willis
Goodreads
Print Length: 256 pages

Spoiler:

Pop culture, chaos theory and matters of the heart collide in this unique novella from the Hugo and Nebula winning author of Doomsday Book. Sandra Foster studies fads and their meanings for the HiTek corporation. Bennet O'Reilly works with monkey group behavior and chaos theory for the same company. When the two are thrust together due to a misdelivered package and a run of seemingly bad luck, they find a joint project in a flock of sheep. But a series of setbacks and disappointments arise before they are able to find answers to their questions.

• The Deadly Dowager by Edwin Greenwood
Goodreads
Print Length: 244 pages

Spoiler:

From The Washington Post:

According to a contemporary review, it was “quite the jolliest crime story that has come our way in many moons.” Yet it’s not at all comic in the manner of, say, a Donald Westlake caper about Dortmunder and his lovable gang of burglars. Black humor, gallows humor, sardonic humor — these better describe the overall tone of Greenwood’s tale of the 83-year-old Dowager Duchess Arabella, Lady Engleton, who decides to do away with a handful of her inconvenient relatives.

Arabella becomes a serial killer for what she believes is the best of reasons. Her own two sons having died, one in the Boer War and the other in the Great War, and the de Birkett family’s fortunes having precipitously declined, she has taken it upon herself to establish her 20-year-old grandson Henry in a manner befitting his noble station. Initially, she persuades various childless in-laws — a dotty clergyman, a blustery India hand, a Harley Street doctor, a stupid businessman, and a pair of sisters, one repulsively fat, the other mousy — to allow her to insure their lives, making Henry the beneficiary. Arabella will naturally pay all the fees against the day — no doubt quite distant, of course — when each finally shuffles off this mortal coil. While maintaining a demeanor of sweetness and innocence, she then starts killing them off, one after the other.

• Alice, Let's Eat by Calvin Trillin
Goodreads | Amazon Ca / Amazon US / Overdrive
Print Length: 193 pages

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

In this delightful and delicious book, Calvin Trillin, guided by an insatiable appetite, embarks on a hilarious odyssey in search of “something decent to eat.” Across time zones and cultures, and often with his wife, Alice, at his side, Trillin shares his triumphs in the art of culinary discovery, including Dungeness crabs in California, barbecued mutton in Kentucky, potato latkes in London, blaff d’oursins in Martinique, and a $33 picnic on a no-frills flight to Miami. His eating companions include Fats Goldberg, the New York pizza baron and reformed blimp; William Edgett Smith, the man with the Naughahyde palate; and his six-year-old daughter, Sarah, who refuses to enter a Chinese restaurant unless she is carrying a bagel (“just in case”). And though Alice “has a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day,” on the road she proves to be a serious eater–despite “seemingly uncontrollable attacks of moderation.” Alice, Let Eat amply demonstrates why The New Republic called Calvin Trillin “a classic American humorist.”

• Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald
Goodreads | Kindle / Barnes & Noble / BAM!
Print Length: 272 pages

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

Wild, dangerous, and flat-out unbelievable, here is the incredible memoir of the Canadian actor, gambler, and raconteur, and one of the greatest stand-up comedians of all time

Norm Macdonald tells the story of his life—more or less—from his rural origins on a farm in the backwoods of Ontario to an epically disastrous appearance on Star Search, from an unbelievable audition for Lorne Michaels to his memorable run as the anchor of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” (until a couple of O.J. jokes got him fired). But Based on a True Story is much more than just a memoir: it’s the hilarious, inspired epic of Norm’s life.

Told as dispatches from a road trip to Las Vegas with his sidekick and enabler, Adam Eget—a plan hatched to regain the fortune he’d lost to sports betting and other vices—Norm recounts the milestone moments of his life: the regrets, the love affairs, the times that Fortune smiled on him, and the times it did not. As the clock ticks down, Norm’s debt reaches record heights, and he must find a way to evade the hefty price that’s been placed on his head by one of the most dangerous loan sharks in the country.

As a comedy legend should, Norm peppers these pages with classic jokes and long-mythologized Hollywood stories. This tense, wildly adventurous, totally original, and absurdly funny memoir turns the conventional “comic’s memoir” on its head and gives the reader an exclusive glimpse inside the mad, glorious mind of Norm Macdonald.

[WT Sharpe]

Crap. I meant to vote for Rivers of London and instead voted for The Loved One. That Rivers of London looks really good. I read a bit of the "Look Inside" sample at Amazon.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Crap. I meant to vote for Rivers of London and instead voted for The Loved One. That Rivers of London looks really good. I read a bit of the "Look Inside" sample at Amazon.

Everyone should read The Loved One. Flatly hilarious.

Originally Posted by issybird

Everyone should read The Loved One. Flatly hilarious.

I'm about two thirds through it. It started slow, introducing the characters and general theme, but than took off. Some comedy is what I needed at the moment so I just picked the one that was available from my local library and started on it. If it wins that's good.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Crap. I meant to vote for Rivers of London and instead voted for The Loved One. That Rivers of London looks really good. I read a bit of the "Look Inside" sample at Amazon.

Whether Rivers wins or not, I highly recommend it. And since I know you sometimes listen to audio books, I'll go so far as to suggest getting the WhisperSync as well for $3.99.

I don't know The Loved One, don't have an opinion. I will probably only vote for Rivers of London/Midnight Riot and Alice, Let's Eat. Well, and Bridge in the Fourth Dimension, the Further Adventures of the Hideous Hog, of course, but I know that has almost no chance of winning. I nominated it primarily to bring it to folks attention if they are, or have been, bridge players. For those of us to whom that applies, it really is quite hilarious.

[WT Sharpe]

Had I voted as I intended there would be a four way tie now between Rivers of London, The Loved One, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Bellwether.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Had I voted as I intended there would be a four way tie now between Rivers of London, The Loved One, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Bellwether.

You're a Moderator, can't you fix it? Or is that level of control only for Site Admins?

[WT Sharpe]

I could, but I don't think it would be playing fair. Besides, it would open up a can of worms should anyone else decide that they didn't intend to vote for something.

[CRussel]

I'd actually be OK with changing it for someone who realized and reported a mistaken vote within a few moments of their actual vote (as was the case here, I believe). Later change of mind, however? No, that's a can of worms you don't want to open. The difference is a mistake, vs a change of mind.

[WT Sharpe]

The Kindle version of The Loved One seems to require some hunting to find, but here's the link, if anyone's interested: https://www.amazon.com/Loved-One-Eve.../dp/B00873GVKU. I'll add it to the first post.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

The Kindle version of The Loved One seems to require some hunting to find, but here's the link, if anyone's interested: https://www.amazon.com/Loved-One-Eve.../dp/B00873GVKU. I'll add it to the first post.

Thanks, Tom. My OverDrive libraries also carry it, so people might look there.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by CRussel

I'd actually be OK with changing it for someone who realized and reported a mistaken vote within a few moments of their actual vote (as was the case here, I believe). Later change of mind, however? No, that's a can of worms you don't want to open. The difference is a mistake, vs a change of mind.

I agree it's OK to fix a mistaken vote as long as the request to fix was right after the mistaken vote was made.

[JSWolf]

Come on people. Do you want to read something very witty and clever funny and very good? If you do, then vote for Rivers of London aka Midnight Riot.

[CRussel]

I have nothing against the Waugh, other than the very high price for a very short book, but Midnight Riot/Rivers of London is such a good book I'd really like to see it win. And I say that knowing that some people will be inclined to dismiss it based on "type" (it can't decide if it's Urban Fantasy or Police Procedural), thinking it isn't for them. It is. It's a delightfully witty book, and even my DW, who does not read anything classified as Urban Fantasy, ever, loved it.

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by CRussel

I have nothing against the Waugh, other than the very high price for a very short book, but Midnight Riot/Rivers of London is such a good book I'd really like to see it win. And I say that knowing that some people will be inclined to dismiss it based on "type" (it can't decide if it's Urban Fantasy or Police Procedural), thinking it isn't for them. It is. It's a delightfully witty book, and even my DW, who does not read anything classified as Urban Fantasy, ever, loved it.

Oooo, if I'd noticed that "type" earlier, I would have voted for it. It looks like it was on some sale this past June, cuz I apparently bought it then. Guess I'll go read it anyway, and then see where the vote goes!