MobileRead April 2017 Book Club Nominations

[WT Sharpe]

Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for April, 2017.

The nominations will run through midnight EST March 26 or until 10 books have made the list. The poll will then be posted and will remain open for five days.

The book selection category for April is: Award Winners.

In order for a book to be included in the poll it needs THREE NOMINATIONS (original nomination, a second and a third).

How Does This Work?

The Mobile Read Book Club (MRBC) is an informal club that requires nothing of you. Each month a book is selected by polling. On the last week of that month a discussion thread is started for the book. If you want to participate feel free. There is no need to "join" or sign up. All are welcome.

How Does a Book Get Selected?

Each book that is nominated will be listed in a poll at the end of the nomination period. The book that polls the most votes will be the official selection.

How Many Nominations Can I Make?

Each participant has 3 nominations. You can nominate a new book for consideration or nominate (second, third) one that has already been nominated by another person.

How Do I Nominate a Book?

Please just post a message with your nomination. If you are the FIRST to nominate a book, please try to provide an abstract to the book so others may consider their level of interest.

How Do I Know What Has Been Nominated?

Just follow the thread. This message will be updated with the status of the nominations as often as I can. If one is missed, please just post a message with a multi-quote of the 3 nominations and it will be added to the list ASAP.

When is the Poll?

The poll thread will open at the end of the nomination period, or once there have been 10 books with 3 nominations each. At that time a link to the initial poll thread will be posted here and this thread will be closed.

The floor is open to nominations. Please comment if you discover a nomination is not available as an ebook in your area.

Official choices with three nominations each:

(1) A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow
Goodreads | Amazon US / Author's Website / Audible / Kobo US
Print Length: 173 pages

Spoiler:

A 1993 Edgar Award winner.

From Goodreads:

Somewhere in the hinterlands of Alaska, among the millions of sprawling acres that comprise “The Park,” a young National Park Ranger has gone missing. When the detective sent after him also vanishes, the Anchorage DA’s department must turn to their reluctant former investigator, Kate Shugak. Shugak knows The Park because she’s of The Park, an Aleut who left her home village of Niniltna to pursue education, a career, and the righting of wrongs. Kate’s search for the missing men will take her from self-imposed exile back to a life she’d left behind, and face-to-face with people and problems she'd hoped never to confront again.

(2) Three Cheers for Me by Donald Jack
Goodreads | Amazon US / Kobo US
Print Length: 256 pages

Spoiler:

Stephen Leacock Award winner.

From Goodreads:

With his disturbingly horse-like face and a pious distaste for strong drink and bad language, young Bartholomew Bandy doesn’t seem cut out for life in the armed services, as we meet him at the start of the First World War.

Yet he not only survives the dangers and squalor of the infantry trenches, he positively thrives in the Royal Flying Corps, revealing a surprising aptitude for splitarsing Sopwith Camels and shooting down the Hun. He even manages to get the girl.

Through it all he never loses his greatest ability – to open his mouth and put his foot in it.

Donald Jack’s blackly humorous Bandy memoirs are classics of their kind. Against an unshrinkingly depicted backdrop of war and its horrors, his anti-hero’s adventures are both gripping and shockingly funny.

(3) My Real Children by Jo Walton
Goodreads
Print Length: 320 pages

Spoiler:

My Real Children is a 2014 Tiptree Winner.

It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know--what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev.

Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War--those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post bristling with nuclear missiles?

Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history; each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. Jo Walton's My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan's lives... and of how every life means the entire world.

(4) The Light of Day by Eric Ambler
Goodreads | Amazon US / Audible
Print Length: 224 pages

Spoiler:

1964 Edgar Award winner for Best Novel

From Goodreads:

The Light of Day was the basis for Jules Dassin’s classic film, Topkapi.

When Arthur Abdel Simpson first spots Harper in the Athens airport, he recognizes him as a tourist unfamiliar with city and in need of a private driver. In other words, the perfect mark for Simpson’s brand of entrepreneurship. But Harper proves to be more the spider than the fly when he catches Simpson riffling his wallet for traveler’s checks. Soon Simpson finds himself blackmailed into driving a suspicious car across the Turkish border. Then, when he is caught again, this time by the police, he faces a choice: cooperate with the Turks and spy on his erstwhile colleagues or end up in one of Turkey’s notorious prisons. The authorities suspect an attempted coup, but Harper and his gang of international jewel thieves have planned something both less sinister and much, much more audacious.

(5) Still Life by Louise Penny
Goodreads
Print Length: 377 pages

Spoiler:

Awards:
1. Anthony Awards Best First Novel
2. Barry Awards Best First Novel
3. Dilys Awards Best Book
4. New Blood" Dagger award
5. Arthur Ellis award

As the early morning mist clears on Thanksgiving Sunday, the homes of Three Pines come to life - all except one…

From Goodreads:

To locals, the village is a safe haven. So they are bewildered when a well-loved member of the community is found lying dead in the maple woods. Surely it was an accident - a hunter's arrow gone astray. Who could want Jane Neal dead?

In a long and distinguished career with the Sûreté du Quebec, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache has learned to look for snakes in Eden. Gamache knows something dark is lurking behind the white picket fences, and if he watches closely enough, Three Pines will begin to give up its secrets…

Winner of the New Blood Dagger in Britain and the Arthur Ellis Award in Canada for best first crime novel. As well as the Dilys award, for the book the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association most enjoyed selling in 2006. STILL LIFE was also named one of the Kirkus Reviews Top Ten mysteries of 2006.

Runner-up for the CWA Debut Dagger Award, 2004
'The Canadian Louise Penny was Very Highly Commended for her entry STILL LIFE, which missed taking the Debut Dagger by only a whisker.'

(6) Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Goodreads | Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo US / Library Thing
Print Length: 322 pages

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” —William Faulkner
*
Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.”

(7) The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Goodreads
Print Length: 366 pages

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

In this Newbery Medal-winning novel, Bod is an unusual boy who inhabits an unusual place—he's the only living resident of a graveyard. Raised from infancy by the ghosts, werewolves, and other cemetery denizens, Bod has learned the antiquated customs of his guardians' time as well as their ghostly teachings—such as the ability to Fade so mere mortals cannot see him.

Can a boy raised by ghosts face the wonders and terrors of the worlds of both the living and the dead? And then there are beings such as ghouls that aren't really one thing or the other.

The Graveyard Book won the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal and is a Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel.

Nominations are now closed.

[WT Sharpe]

*** A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow [CRussel, issybird, Dazrin]
Goodreads | Amazon US / Author's Website / Audible / Kobo US
Print Length: 173 pages

Spoiler:

A 1993 Edgar Award winner.

From Goodreads:

Somewhere in the hinterlands of Alaska, among the millions of sprawling acres that comprise “The Park,” a young National Park Ranger has gone missing. When the detective sent after him also vanishes, the Anchorage DA’s department must turn to their reluctant former investigator, Kate Shugak. Shugak knows The Park because she’s of The Park, an Aleut who left her home village of Niniltna to pursue education, a career, and the righting of wrongs. Kate’s search for the missing men will take her from self-imposed exile back to a life she’d left behind, and face-to-face with people and problems she'd hoped never to confront again.

*** My Real Children by Jo Walton [JSWolf, WT Sharpe, BenG]
Goodreads
Print Length: 320 pages

Spoiler:

My Real Children is a 2014 Tiptree Winner.

It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know--what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev.

Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War--those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post bristling with nuclear missiles?

Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history; each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. Jo Walton's My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan's lives... and of how every life means the entire world.

*** Three Cheers for Me by Donald Jack [issybird, CRussel, bfisher]
Goodreads | Amazon US / Kobo US
Print Length: 256 pages

Spoiler:

Stephen Leacock Award winner.

From Goodreads:

With his disturbingly horse-like face and a pious distaste for strong drink and bad language, young Bartholomew Bandy doesn’t seem cut out for life in the armed services, as we meet him at the start of the First World War.

Yet he not only survives the dangers and squalor of the infantry trenches, he positively thrives in the Royal Flying Corps, revealing a surprising aptitude for splitarsing Sopwith Camels and shooting down the Hun. He even manages to get the girl.

Through it all he never loses his greatest ability – to open his mouth and put his foot in it.

Donald Jack’s blackly humorous Bandy memoirs are classics of their kind. Against an unshrinkingly depicted backdrop of war and its horrors, his anti-hero’s adventures are both gripping and shockingly funny.

*** The Light of Day by Eric Ambler [BenG, CRussel, JSWolf]
Goodreads | Amazon US / Audible
Print Length: 224 pages

Spoiler:

1964 Edgar Award winner for Best Novel

From Goodreads:

The Light of Day was the basis for Jules Dassin’s classic film, Topkapi.

When Arthur Abdel Simpson first spots Harper in the Athens airport, he recognizes him as a tourist unfamiliar with city and in need of a private driver. In other words, the perfect mark for Simpson’s brand of entrepreneurship. But Harper proves to be more the spider than the fly when he catches Simpson riffling his wallet for traveler’s checks. Soon Simpson finds himself blackmailed into driving a suspicious car across the Turkish border. Then, when he is caught again, this time by the police, he faces a choice: cooperate with the Turks and spy on his erstwhile colleagues or end up in one of Turkey’s notorious prisons. The authorities suspect an attempted coup, but Harper and his gang of international jewel thieves have planned something both less sinister and much, much more audacious.

*** The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman [WT Sharpe, Dazrin, BenG]
Goodreads
Print Length: 366 pages

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

In this Newbery Medal-winning novel, Bod is an unusual boy who inhabits an unusual place—he's the only living resident of a graveyard. Raised from infancy by the ghosts, werewolves, and other cemetery denizens, Bod has learned the antiquated customs of his guardians' time as well as their ghostly teachings—such as the ability to Fade so mere mortals cannot see him.

Can a boy raised by ghosts face the wonders and terrors of the worlds of both the living and the dead? And then there are beings such as ghouls that aren't really one thing or the other.

The Graveyard Book won the Newbery Medal and the Carnegie Medal and is a Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel.

*** Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner [GA Russell, bfisher, issybird]
Goodreads | Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo US / Library Thing
Print Length: 322 pages

Spoiler:

From Goodreads:

“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.” —William Faulkner
*
Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.”

*** Still Life by Louise Penny [JSWolf, treadlightly, Dazrin]
Goodreads
Print Length: 377 pages

Spoiler:

Awards:
1. Anthony Awards Best First Novel
2. Barry Awards Best First Novel
3. Dilys Awards Best Book
4. New Blood" Dagger award
5. Arthur Ellis award

As the early morning mist clears on Thanksgiving Sunday, the homes of Three Pines come to life - all except one…

From Goodreads:

To locals, the village is a safe haven. So they are bewildered when a well-loved member of the community is found lying dead in the maple woods. Surely it was an accident - a hunter's arrow gone astray. Who could want Jane Neal dead?

In a long and distinguished career with the Sûreté du Quebec, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache has learned to look for snakes in Eden. Gamache knows something dark is lurking behind the white picket fences, and if he watches closely enough, Three Pines will begin to give up its secrets…

Winner of the New Blood Dagger in Britain and the Arthur Ellis Award in Canada for best first crime novel. As well as the Dilys award, for the book the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association most enjoyed selling in 2006. STILL LIFE was also named one of the Kirkus Reviews Top Ten mysteries of 2006.

Runner-up for the CWA Debut Dagger Award, 2004
'The Canadian Louise Penny was Very Highly Commended for her entry STILL LIFE, which missed taking the Debut Dagger by only a whisker.'

Nominations are now closed.

[WT Sharpe]

I think later in the year when we decide on which categories to keep and which ones to discard, Award Winners should be the first to go. A month devoted to Award Winners sounds like a great idea, but here it is nineteen hours since I started the thread, and not one nomination.

[CRussel]

I'll nominate A Cold Day for Murder, the first book in the outstanding Kate Shugak series of Alaskan mysteries, and winner of a 1993 Edgar Award.

Amazon:

Spoiler:

Somewhere in the hinterlands of Alaska, among the millions of sprawling acres that comprise “The Park,” a young National Park Ranger has gone missing. When the detective sent after him also vanishes, the Anchorage DA’s department must turn to their reluctant former investigator, Kate Shugak. Shugak knows The Park because she’s of The Park, an Aleut who left her home village of Niniltna to pursue education, a career, and justice in an unjust world. Kate’s search for the missing men will take her from self-imposed exile back to a life she’d left behind, and face-to-face with people and problems she'd hoped never to confront again.

The first novel in the popular Kate Shugak Series, A Cold Day for Murder established Dana Stabenow as a new voice in Alaskan mystery writing, and earned her an Edgar Award.

Audible:

Spoiler:

Publisher's Summary

Eighteen months ago, Aleut Kate Shugak quit her job investigating sex crimes for the Anchorage DA’s office and retreated to her father’s homestead in a national park in the interior of Alaska. But the world has a way of beating a path to her door, however remote. In the middle of one of the bitterest Decembers in recent memory ex-boss — and ex-lover — Jack Morgan shows up with an FBI agent in tow. A Park ranger with powerful relatives is missing, and now the investigator Jack sent in to look for him is missing, too.
Reluctantly, Kate, along with Mutt, her half-wolf, half-husky sidekick, leaves her wilderness refuge to follow a frozen trail through the Park, twenty thousand square miles of mountain and tundra sparsely populated with hunters, fishermen, trappers, mushers, pilots and homesteaders. Her formidable grandmother and Native chief, Ekaterina Shugak, is — for reasons of her own — against Kate’s investigation; her cousin, Martin, may be Kate’s prime suspect; and the local trooper, Jim Chopin, is more interested in Kate than in her investigation. In the end, the sanctuary she sought after five and a half years in the urban jungles may prove more lethal than anything she left behind in the city streets of Anchorage.

This is short (173 pages), inexpensive, and has a wonderful Audible version that is WhisperSync'd as well. Really, let's just go with this and have some fun this month.

Amazon.com - $2.99
Audible -- $1.99 WhisperSync
Kobo - $2.99
FREE on Author's Website: $0.00 (mobi/epub)

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I think later in the year when we decide on which categories to keep and which ones to discard, Award Winners should be the first to go. A month devoted to Award Winners sounds like a great idea, but here it is nineteen hours since I started the thread, and not one nomination.

Sorry, Tom. I had it written, but got interrupted and hadn't actually posted it!

This becomes another "free for all" month. Nothing wrong with that, of course. And now that I've nominated the winner, we can just move directly to reading it.

[issybird]

I'll second A Cold Day for Murder.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I think later in the year when we decide on which categories to keep and which ones to discard, Award Winners should be the first to go. A month devoted to Award Winners sounds like a great idea, but here it is nineteen hours since I started the thread, and not one nomination.

There are tons of award winners I'd love to nominate, but I don't think they'd be of general interest. So I figured I'd wait and watch.

However, I think you're right. It becomes a non-category, which doesn't help focus.

[Dazrin]

Is Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup eligible? The book didn't win an award but the movie won three Academy Awards.

I haven't looked into availability but it is in the public domain so should be widely available for free. It is also fairly short, I have it listed as 227 pages.

[Dazrin]

I will third Cold Day for Murder. I really enjoyed it when I read it a few years ago.

Originally Posted by CRussel

I'll nominate A Cold Day for Murder, the first book in the outstanding Kate Shugak series of Alaskan mysteries, and winner of a 1993 Edgar Award.
...
Amazon.com - $2.99
Audible -- $1.99 WhisperSync
Kobo - $2.99

It is also available free and DRM-free on the author's website in epub or mobi formats:
https://stabenow.com/novels/kate-shu...ay-for-murder/

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by CRussel

...now that I've nominated the winner, we can just move directly to reading it.

Works for me.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Dazrin

Is Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup eligible? The book didn't win an award but the movie won three Academy Awards.

I haven't looked into availability but it is in the public domain so should be widely available for free. It is also fairly short, I have it listed as 227 pages.

My rule for what's eligible has always been if three people vote for it, it's eligible. Let the members decide.

[JSWolf]

I'll nominate My Real Children by Jo Walton. It's a 2014 Tiptree Winner.

It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know--what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev.

Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War--those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post bristling with nuclear missiles?

Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history; each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. Jo Walton's My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan's lives... and of how every life means the entire world.?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by CRussel

And now that I've nominated the winner, we can just move directly to reading it.

Sorry, I've already read it. So it cannot win. My nomination however is better than yours. I've nominated the winner.

Seriously though, Jo Walton is very good. She's won multiple awards for multiple books.

[JSWolf]

I think we should pick a book that's won the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Sorry, I've already read it. So it cannot win. My nomination however is better than yours. I've nominated the winner.

Seriously though, Jo Walton is very good. She's won multiple awards for multiple books.

Ah, but really good books are always good for a re-read. And since I just finished a re-read, I can testify that this A Cold Day for Murder is definitely re-read worthy. Go for the Audible version this time around, to vary the experience.