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Sat April 22 2017

MobileRead Week in Review: 04/15 - 04/22

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Here it is again, our weekly roundup! Enjoy!

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations


Thu April 20 2017

May 2017 Book Club Nominations

01:01 AM by WT Sharpe in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

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

The nominations will run through midnight EST April 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 May is: Science Fiction.

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) In Times Like These: A Time Travel Adventure by Nathan van Coops
Goodreads | Amazon US / Barnes & Noble / Kobo US
Print Length: 384 pages

Spoiler:
From Goodreads:

"We broke something. How do you break time? Can something so bad happen that you fracture the world?" Benjamin Travers has been electrocuted. What's worse, he and his friends have woken up in the past. As the friends search for a way home, they realize they're not alone. There are other time travelers, and some of them are turning up dead. When Ben meets an enigmatic scientist and his charming, time-traveling daughter, salvation seems at hand, but escaping the dangers of the past may lead to a deadly future. If he hopes to save his friends, Ben must learn to master space and time, and survive a journey where past and future violently collide.

(2) Balance of Trade (Liaden Universe #3) by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Goodreads | Amazon US / Audible / Baen
Print Length:464 pages

Spoiler:
From Goodreads:

Assistant Trader Jethri Gobelyn was an honest, hardworking young man who knew a lot about living onboard his family's space-going trade ship; something about trade, finance, and risk-taking; and a little bit about Liadens. It was, oddly enough, the little bit he knew about Liadens that seemed like it might be enough to make his family's fortune, and his own, too. In short order, however, Jethri Gobelyn was about to find out a lot more about Liadens...like how far they might go to protect their name and reputation. Like the myriad of things one might say-intentionally or not-with a single bow. Like what it would take to make a Liaden trade-ship crew trash a bar. Like how hard it is to say "I'm sorry!" in Liaden. Pretty soon it was clear that as little as he knew about Liadens, he knew far less about himself. With his very existence a threat to the balance of trade, Jethri Gobelyn needed to learn fast, or else help destroy all he held dear.

(3) Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Goodreads | Wikipedia
Print Length: 145 pages

Spoiler:
From Goodreads:

Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems.

(4) The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency #1) by John Scalzi
Goodreads | Overdrive
Print Length: 334 pages

Spoiler:
Our universe is ruled by physics. Faster than light travel is impossible—until the discovery of The Flow, an extradimensional field available at certain points in space-time, which can take us to other planets around other stars.

Riding The Flow, humanity spreads to innumerable other worlds. Earth is forgotten. A new empire arises, the Interdependency, based on the doctrine that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It’s a hedge against interstellar war—and, for the empire’s rulers, a system of control.

The Flow is eternal—but it’s not static. Just as a river changes course, The Flow changes as well. In rare cases, entire worlds have been cut off from the rest of humanity. When it’s discovered that the entire Flow is moving, possibly separating all human worlds from one another forever, three individuals—a scientist, a starship captain, and the emperox of the Interdependency—must race against time to discover what, if anything, can be salvaged from an interstellar empire on the brink of collapse.

(5) Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Goodreads
Print Length: 194 pages

Spoiler:
From Goodreads:

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television 'family'. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people did not live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

(6) Kirinyaga by Mike Resnick
Goodreads
Print Length: 306 pages

Spoiler:
From Goodreads:

Hailed for his grandeur of imagination and superb worldbuilding, winner of and nominee for more than fifty awards for his outstanding work, Mike Resnick has rightfully won a place as one of science fiction's master storytellers. Now, in Kirinyaga, Resnick presents the haunting and utterly compelling tale of one man's utopia.

By the twentieth second century in the African nation of Kenya, polluted cities sprawl up the flanks of sacred Mount Kirinyaga. Great animal herds are but distant memories. European crops now grow on the sweeping savannas. But Koriba, a distinguished, educated man of Kikuyu ancestry, knows that life was different for his people centuries ago--and he is determined to build a utopian colony, not on earth, but on the terraformed planetoid he proudly names Kirinyaga.

As the mundumugu--witch doctor--Koriba leads the colonists. Reinstating the ancient customs and stringent laws of the Kikuyu people, he alone decides their fate. He must face many challenges to the struggling colony's survival: from a brilliant young girl whose radiant intellect could threaten their traditional ways to the interference of "Maintenance" which holds the power to revoke the colony's charter. All the while, only Koriba--unbeknownst to his people--maintains the computer link to the rest of humanity.

Ironically, the Kirinyaga experiment threatens to collapse--not from violence or greed--but from humankind's insatiable desire for knowledge. The Kikuyu people can no more stand still in time than their planet can stop revolving around its sun.

Deeply moving, swiftly paced, and profound in its implications, Kirinyaga is Mike Resnick's most triumphant work to date. His Fable of Utopia is the book every science fiction reader will want to own and savor for years to come.

Nominations are now closed.

[ 42 replies ]


Sat April 08 2017

MobileRead Week in Review: 04/01 - 04/08

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Missed some of our big stories this week? Time to catch up:

E-Book General - News

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations


Fri April 07 2017

Rakuten Kobo acquires Shelfie

05:04 AM by MGlitch in E-Book General | News

http://m.news.kobo.com/press/release...fie-technology

Nice to see Shelfie get a new home at Kobo. Also looking forward to the integration of their services with Kobo

[ 4 replies ]


Mon April 03 2017

bfisher Vote • April 2017

10:36 PM by sun surfer in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read in April 2017!

The options this month are courtesy of our rotating nominator, bfisher.


Voting will run for four days. The vote will close exactly four days from this post; even if the final tally doesn't occur immediately after voting closes, no votes made after that time will count.

Votes will be made by post. Each person has SIX votes to use.

You may give each nominee one or two (or no) votes. You may vote all at once in one post or vote in separate posts at different times, so long as you have more votes remaining to cast. You may use any number of your possible votes up to the maximum. Any extraneous votes per person (past their maximum or more than two for one nominee) won't count. Votes cannot be changed once they are cast.

The rotating nominator may not vote. Once voting is complete, the count will be tallied and a winner declared. In the event of a tie, there will be a one-day run-off vote, also in this thread. If the run-off also ends in a tie, then the tie will be resolved by the nominator.

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


The floor is now open!

*

Voting is closed. Final results-

  • Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
    Post / Goodreads / 213 Pages / Votes- 4

  • The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje
    Post / Goodreads / 300 Pages / Votes- 7

  • Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
    Post / Goodreads / 236 Pages / Votes- 5

  • In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar
    Post / Goodreads / 254 Pages / Votes- 1

  • Burmese Days by George Orwell
    Post / Goodreads / 291 Pages / Votes- 9

  • And the Birds Rained Down by Jocelyne Saucier
    Post / Goodreads / 166 Pages / Votes- 5

  • The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
    Post / Goodreads / 344 Pages / Votes- 7

[ 11 replies ]


Sat March 25 2017

MobileRead Week in Review: 03/18 - 03/25

07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Feast your eyes on some of the discussions from this week at MobileRead...

E-Book General - Reading Recommendations


Mon March 20 2017

April 2017 Book Club Nominations

01:09 AM by WT Sharpe in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

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.

[ 50 replies ]


Sat March 04 2017

Non-Fiction Nominations & Vote • March 2017

12:13 PM by sun surfer in Reading Recommendations | Book Clubs

Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read in March 2017!


The category for this month is:

Non-Fiction


-Nominations will run for three days.-

You may offer up to two nominations. All nominees (so long as they are within the category) will move forward to the vote with no need for support from others.

Once nominations are complete, voting will begin and also occur in this thread.


-Voting will then run for four days.-

I will make a post in this thread to open voting. The vote will close exactly four days from that post; even if the final tally doesn't occur immediately after voting closes, no votes made after that time will count.

Votes will be made by post. You will have a number of votes to cast equal to the number of nominees minus one, which will be specified when the vote begins. You may give each nominee one or two (or no) votes. You may vote all at once in one post or vote in separate posts at different times, so long as you have more votes remaining to cast. You may use any number of your possible votes up to the maximum. Any extraneous votes per person (past their maximum or more than two for one nominee) won't count. Votes cannot be changed once they are cast.

Once voting is complete, the count will be tallied and a winner declared. In the event of a tie, there will be a one-day run-off vote, also in this thread. If the run-off also ends in a tie, then the tie will be resolved in favour of the selection that was nominated first.


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


What is literature for the purposes of this club? A superior work of lasting merit that enriches the mind. Often it is important, challenging, critically acclaimed. It may be from ancient times to today; it may be from anywhere in the world; it may be obscure or famous, short or long; it may be a story, a novel, a play, a poem, an essay or another written form. If you are unsure if a work would be considered literature, just ask!


The floor is now open!

*

Nominations are closed. Voting is closed. Final results:

  • The Renaissance by Walter Pater
    Post / Goodreads / 192 Pages / Votes- 10

  • Totem and Taboo by Siegmund Freud
    Post / Goodreads / 178 Pages / Votes- 3

  • Craft for a Dry Lake by Kim Mahood
    Post / Goodreads / 247 Pages / Votes- 2

  • The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad
    Post / Goodreads / 270 Pages / Votes- 5

  • A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
    Post / Goodreads / 125 Pages / Votes- 8

  • Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
    Post / Goodreads / 231 Pages / Votes- 11

  • The House of Medici by Christopher Hibbert
    Post / Goodreads / 370 Pages / Votes- 6

  • Diaries, 1942-1954 by James Lees-Milne
    Post / Goodreads / 496 Pages / Votes- 3

  • The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
    Post / Goodreads / 231 Pages / Votes- 7

[ 29 replies ]




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