MobileRead Forums

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 April 2017 Book Club Nominations

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 ]

Sat February 25 2017

MobileRead Week in Review: 02/18 - 02/25
07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous \| Week in Review It was the week that was. Here's what MobileRead's been talking about since last Sunday: E-Book General - Reading Recommendations March 2017 Book Club Nominations

Mon February 20 2017

March 2017 Book Club Nominations
10:21 AM by issybird in Reading Recommendations \| Book Clubs Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for March, 2017. The nominations will run through midnight EST February 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 March is: Patricia Clarke Memorial Library. 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. [I'm helping out while Tom is unavailable. Let me know if anything's wrong. Please be gentle!] Official choices with three nominations each: (1)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. (2)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. (3)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. (4)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. (5)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. (6)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 (7)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 (8)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 Nominations: *A to Izzard (collected short fiction) by Damon Runyon [issybird, GA Russell, CRussel] 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. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow [JSWolf, Alohamora, WT Sharpe] 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. The Red Cockade by Stanley J. Weyman [issybird, bfisher, Dazrin] 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. Lardner on the Loose (collected short fiction) by Ring Lardner [GA Russell, issybird, CRussel] 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. The Art of Money Getting by PT Barnum [obs20] Spoiler: I believe it will give us great insight into the mind of our current president. *Humbugs of the World by PT Barnum [obs20, WT Sharpe, Dazrin] 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. King of the Khyber Rifles by Talbot Mundy [GA Russell, BenG] Spoiler: The men who govern India—more power to them and her!—are few. Those who stand in their way and pretend to help them with a flood of words are a host. And from the host goes up an endless cry that India is the home of thugs, and of three hundred million hungry ones. Kindle epub *Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell [BenG, bfisher, sun surfer] 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 Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson [BenG, bfisher, JSWolf] 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 The Man of Property by John Galsworthy [CRussel, Dazrin, sun surfer] 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 The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells [JSWolf, WT Sharpe] Spoiler: H.G. Wells's science fiction classic, the first novel to explore the possibilities of intelligent life from other planets, it still startling and vivid nearly after a century after its appearance, and a half-century after Orson Wells's infamous 1938 radio adaptation. The daring portrayal of aliens landing on English soil, with its themes of interplanetary imperialism, technological holocaust and chaos, is central to the career of H.G. Wells, who died at the dawn of the atomic age. The survival of mankind in the face of "vast and cool and unsympathetic" scientific powers spinning out of control was a crucial theme throughout his work. Visionary, shocking and chilling, The War Of The Worlds has lost none of its impact since its first publication in 1898. The nominations are now closed.
[ 64 replies ]

Sat February 04 2017

MobileRead Week in Review: 01/28 - 02/04
07:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous \| Week in Review Is it really Sunday again? Hoorah! Time to dig in to another digest of MobileRead delectables E-Book General - News Shelfie is shutting down tomorrow, Jan 31 2017 E-Book General - Reading Recommendations fantasyfan Vote • February 2017

Thu February 02 2017

fantasyfan Vote • February 2017
07:31 AM by sun surfer in Reading Recommendations \| Book Clubs Help us select what the MR Literary Club will read in February 2017! The options this month are courtesy of our rotating nominator, fantasyfan. 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 NINE 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! * From fantasyfan: I have had an itch to suggest a list of famous works of literary criticism. I think that as we are a literary club that would be a reasonable approach. The choices wouldn't necessarily be long; sometimes an essay has had a very significant impact. They could range from books examining philosophical approaches to literature, genre areas, and even specific authors or works. One would have to think about factors such as availability and price as works of literary criticism are not always best sellers nor inexpensive. ... Here's my list in chronological order, generally with the descriptions from Goodreads: Voting is closed. Final Results- 1904 Shakespearean Tragedy by A.C. Bradley Goodreads / 479 Pages / Votes- 4 Spoiler: "A.C. Bradley put Shakespeare on the map for generations of readers and students for whom the plays might not otherwise have become 'real' at all" writes John Bayley in his foreword to this edition of Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Approaching the tragedies as drama, wondering about their characters as he might have wondered about people in novels or in life, Bradley is one of the most liberating in the line of distinguished Shakespeare critics. His acute yet undogmatic and almost conversational critical method has—despite fluctuations in fashion—remained enduringly popular and influential. For, as John Bayley observes, these lectures give us a true and exhilarating sense of "the tragedies joining up with life, with all our lives; leading us into a perspective of possibilities that stretch forward and back in time, and in our total awareness of things." 1905 Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster Goodreads / 189 Pages / Votes- 9 Spoiler: Another classic. "Forster’s lively, informed originality and wit have made this book a classic. Avoiding the chronological approach of what he calls “pseudoscholarship,” he freely examines aspects all English-language novels have in common: story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. Index." 1913 The Victorian Age in Literature by G.K. Chesterton Goodreads / 132 Pages / Votes- 6 Spoiler: ‘I was born a Victorian; and sympathise not a little with the serious Victorian Spirit.’ In this engaging and extremely personal account G K Chesterton expounds his views on Victorian literature. Many of his opinions reflect the conventions of the age; however of the Victorian novel he refreshingly comments ‘it is an art in which women are quite beyond controversy’. Equally uncompromising about poets and poetry he does not hesitate to call Tennyson ‘a provincial Virgil’. This book is an important landmark in our understanding of an age which produced some of Britain’s most widely enjoyed literature. 1942 A Preface to Paradise Lost by C.S. Lewis Goodreads / 149 Pages / Votes- 1 Spoiler: Astonishingly, this remarkably perceptive book does not seem to be available for Kindle. Goodreads says little about it, but I have read it and this is a profound and brilliant exposition of the philosophy that underlies the great poem. It is also an attempt to rebut the very attractive views of Shelley who asserts that Satan is the true hero of the poem. Available in paperback 1948 Yeats: The Man and the Masks by Richard Ellmann Goodreads / 344 Pages / Votes- 1 Spoiler: One of the most influential poets of his age, W.B. Yeats eluded the grasp of many who sought to explain him. His life was complex in both its outer and inner events. Yeats's mystical concerns, such as his involvement with spiritualism and construction of a transcendental world system in A Vision, coexisted and occasionally clashed with his active involvement in public affairs. In this classic critical examination of the poet, Richard Ellmann strips away the masks of his subject: occultist, senator of the Irish Free State, libidinous old man, and Nobel Prize winner. 1948 The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis Goodreads / 302 Pages / Votes- 3 Spoiler: Again, there is very little about this book on Goodreads. It has been both influential and controversial. Leavis does brilliant work with James, Eliot, and Conrad. He is dismissive of Fielding and Dickens and doesn't quite know what to make of Emily Bronte. Some have said that he mistitled his book and should have used "A" instead of "The". So far the books have all been modestly priced. This one you might want to get from a library. 1949 Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson Goodreads / 281 Pages / Votes- 4 Spoiler: Revised twice since it first appeared, it has remained one of the most widely read and quoted works of literary analysis. Ambiguity, according to Empson, includes "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." From this definition, broad enough by his own admission sometimes to see "stretched absurdly far," he launches into a brilliant discussion, under seven classifications of differing complexity and depth, of such works, among others, as Shakespeare's plays and the poetry of Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot. This is a trailblazer! It is also quite modestly priced. 1982 The Rhetoric of Fiction Second edition by Wayne C. Booth Goodreads / 508 Pages / Votes- 2 Spoiler: The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon. For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject." A major work but quite expensive--I suggest you get it from the library. I have the PB edition which was cheaper than the ebook. 1984 Celtic Dawn: A Portrait of the Irish Literary Renaissance (AKA Black Swan) by Ulick O'Connor Goodreads / 374 Pages / Votes- 4 Spoiler: "It is the small details that make this book such a fascinating read. Often times, O’Connor includes anecdotes that make the characters seem more than characters from a not too distant history, but highlight them in the mind through their personal interactions with each other and with those around them. If you are a fan of any of the authors of the Irish Renaissance, this is a must read." Mr Hardie on Goodreads I found this book difficult to put down! Ulick O'Connor is a gifted writer and sensitive critic. It is a bit pricey at £7 but worth it. 2003 The Road to Middle-Earth Third edition by Tom Shippey Goodreads / 463 Pages / Votes- 2 Spoiler: Shippey's classic work, now revised in paperback, explores J.R.R. Tolkien's creativity and the sources of his inspiration. Shippey shows in detail how Tolkien's professional background led him to write "The Hobbit" and how he created a timeless charm for millions of readers.
[ 24 replies ]

Tue January 31 2017

Shelfie is shutting down tomorrow, Jan 31 2017
07:45 AM by birdbrainbb in E-Book General \| News Just a head's up that Shelfie is shutting down tomorrow on the 31st. If you have any ebooks from them, now's the time to back them up. From their website: http://www.shelfie.com/ We regret to inform you that Shelfie will be ceasing operations on January 31, 2017. What this means for Shelfie users: Our servers will be shutting down on January 31. You can re-download any DRM-free books between now and then. You no longer have access to DRM (.acsm) books. Your app will cease to function in a meaningful way on January 31. We started Shelfie with the idea of connecting books and readers and we have worked hard over the past four years to make that a reality. We are grateful for the support we have received from amazing readers like you, who have been a part of Shelfie. Keep reading, The Shelfie Team Shelfie was an app where you took pictures of your deadtree book collection and could purchase free or discounted ebook versions. I think there was some social aspect, as well, but I didn't use it very much so I'm not entirely sure!
[ 36 replies ]

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