Overdrive’s library partners will soon be have the option of buying from Smashwords’s catalog of about 200,000 titles from 88,000 publishers and authors, and lending the ebooks to their patrons. The ebooks will be loaned on a one copy/one user model, with no limit on the number of loans or an expiration date,
Help us select the book that the MobileRead Book Club will read for June, 2014.
The nominations will run through midnight EST May 30 or until 10 books have made the list. The poll will then be posted and will remain open for five days.
Book selection category for June 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.
In 2010, Simon & Schuster published his book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,[7] detailing the evolution of diagnosis and treatment of human cancers from ancient Egypt to the latest developments in chemotherapy and targeted therapy.[8] The Oprah magazine listed it in its "Top 10 Books of 2010".[9] It was also listed in "The 10 Best Books of 2010" by The New York Times[10] and the "Top 10 Nonfiction Books" by Time.[11]
In 2011 The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer was nominated as a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. On April 18 it won the annual Pulitzer
The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.
(2) Hyperion by Dan Simmons No links provided.
Spoiler:
Winner of the Hugo award in 1990 for best novel.
On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion ...
(3) The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt No links provided.
Spoiler:
Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review
(4) Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden No links provided.
Spoiler:
The Giller winner in 2008.
(5) Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein Amazon US
Spoiler:
In one of Robert Heinlein's most controversial bestsellers, a recruit of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the Universe--and into battle with the Terran Mobile Infantry against mankind's most frightening enemy.
(6) The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss Amazon UK / Amazon US / Kobo
Spoiler:
The Black Count won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
It is the biography of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the mixed-race son of a French marquis and a Haitian slave, who became a swashbuckling swordsman in Paris and then a military hero of the French Revolutionary Wars, remaining the highest-ranking black military figure in a Western army until Gen. Colin Powell 200 years later. --Wikipedia
In the 1790s, the son of an aristocratic white father and a black slave woman became a charismatic French general who for a time rivaled Napoleon himself, and afterward languished in an Italian dungeon. His story inspired the novel “The Count of Monte Cristo,” written by his son, Alexandre Dumas, who also drew upon his father’s adventures in “The Three Musketeers.” Posterity remembers this son as Dumas père, to distinguish him from Alexandre Dumas fils, also a writer, whose novel “La Dame aux Camélias” was the source for Verdi’s “La Traviata.” But the general was the first of the three Alexandres (he preferred to be known as Alex), and in “The Black Count,” Tom *Reiss, the author of “The Orientalist,” has recovered this fascinating story with a richly imaginative biography. --NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/bo...pagewanted=all
Balram Halwai is the White Tiger - the smartest boy in his village. His family is too poor for him to afford for him to finish school and he has to work in a teashop, breaking coals and wiping tables. But Balram gets his break when a rich man hires him as a chauffeur, and takes him to live in Delhi. The city is a revelation. As he drives his master to shopping malls and call centres, Balram becomes increasingly aware of immense wealth and opportunity all around him, while knowing that he will never be able to gain access to that world. As Balram broods over his situation, he realizes that there is only one way he can become part of this glamorous new India - by murdering his master.
The White Tiger presents a raw and unromanticised India, both thrilling and shocking - from the desperate, almost lawless villages along the Ganges, to the booming Wild South of Bangalore and its technology and outsourcing centres. The first-person confession of a murderer, The White Tiger is as compelling for its subject matter as for the voice of its narrator - amoral, cynical, unrepentant, yet deeply endearing.
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.
Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.
It won the 2009 Hammett Prize and the 2010 Crawford Award.
The Hammett Prize is awarded annually by the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch (IACW/NA).
The Crawford award is a literary award given to a writer whose first fantasy book was published during the preceding 18 months. It's one of several awards presented by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA).
In a giant and rigidly bureaucratic agency, Charles Unwin is the personal clerk for legendary detective Travis Sivart. The detail-minded Unwin loves his job, but when Sivart suddenly goes missing, Unwin is unwillingly promoted to fill the vacancy. He only wants to solve one case: he wants to find Sivart so he can go back to being a clerk. In his first novel, Berry has created a wonderful and fantastic world, a vintage mystery seen through a hall of fun-house mirrors. Sivart’s cases have names like The Man Who Stole November Twelfth; a villain is the nefarious biloquist Enoch Hoffmann; chapters begin with koan-like excerpts from the Manual of Detection. Unwin’s adventures take him through rain-slicked city streets, to a dilapidated carnival run by criminals, and into the dreams of Sivart’s murdered supervisor. There are false starts and false identities, double crosses and doppelgängers—and there’s far more at stake than Unwin can imagine. Occasionally the story gets a little bit lost inside its own puzzle boxes, but this is a remarkably auspicious debut. --Keir Graff
Spoiler:
Review
Imaginative, fantastical, sometimes inexplicable, labyrinthine and ingenious...Great fun and very clever. My comparison? Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman - which is about as good as it gets --Observer
A wryly cerebral take on noir fiction...Separated conjoined twin gangsters, a duplicitous femme fatale and a nightmarish carnival owner inhabit the nocturnal, rain-soaked city where this clever, postmodern detective story is set --Financial Times
It is an elegant and stunningly imaginative fusion of detective and speculative fiction --Guardian
The plot's bursting with as many twists and surprises as you could hope for...It steams along the smooth rails of Berry's neatly constructed sentences, barrelling round each well-cambered turn with barely a judder --London Review of Books
Like Sin City, this is a noir fairytale, with the grey-scale, drizzly streets and shabby cafes contrasted by fluorescent, primary colour characters...Berry's work is reminiscent of the coolest young American novelists - Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Glen David Gold - in its sheer delight at how genre writing can be re-invigorated and re-imagined. The Manual of Detection makes the weird, fantastical world of the unconsciousness seem comically logical - like its subject, it is a dream. -- Scotland on Sunday
Colin Saville grows up in a mining village in South Yorkshire, against the background of war, of an industrialised countryside, of town and coalmine and village.
"If you haven't read David Storey's 1976 winner Saville read it at once, it is the best of all the Bookers." - The Observer
And since any abstracts about the book I could find were all as short as the one I used above, I'll also include the first review from Goodreads:
"This novel epitomizes one of my favorite quotes:
'Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.' - Boris Pasternak
Reading this book really is an extraordinary experience! I found much of it to be very comforting, very homey. I found other parts to be quite disturbing. This novel affected me in ways that I'm still trying to sort out. I suspect this is a story that I'll continue to think about, to try to come to terms with it, for a long time." - John
By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Rolfe Winkler
Apple Inc. and Google Inc. agreed to dismiss all lawsuits between them, bringing to a close a patent dispute between the iPhone maker and the Web giant’s Motorola unit.
Ah the Authors Guild, notable mainly for its fear and hatred of anything new (Amazon text-to-speech, Google book scanning, etc.), or that isn't entirely aligned with a small number of top authors and big publishing houses. If only there was an organization for authors in the U.S. that actually embraced the future for the benefit of its members, rather than one that has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the present.
Well, now one is launching. The Authors Alliance is launching May 21st, with a plan to "further the public interest in facilitating widespread access to works of authorship by helping authors navigate the opportunities and challenges of the digital age. We provide information and tools designed to help authors better understand and manage key legal, technological, and institutional aspects essential to a knowledge economy of abundance."
Well known British author Mary Stewart has died at age 97.
The bestselling pioneer of romantic-suspense novels Mary Stewart has died at the age of 97, her publisher has said.
Known for much-loved novels including Touch Not the Cat, This Rough Magic and Nine Coaches Waiting, Stewart among the first novelists to integrate mystery and romance. She made the archetype of the determined, intelligent heroine her own, thrusting her into daring adventures from which she would emerge intact and happily romantically involved. Stewart was spotted after sending the manuscript of her first novel, Madam, Will You Talk?, to Hodder & Stoughton in 1953. It hit the bestseller lists the following year, and she went on to pen a series of novels in a similar vein.
Stewart wrote a trilogy of hugely popular novels about the life of Merlin – The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment – a departure from her previous books, along with acclaimed children's books, including Ludo and the Star Horse and A Walk in Wolf Wood.
Simon & Scuster signs Deal with Scribd and Oyster
Simon & Schuster deal boosts 'Netflix of digital books' wannabes Scribd and Oyster
Market Watch and the WSJ
Ah the Authors Guild, notable mainly for its fear and hatred of anything new (Amazon text-to-speech, Google book scanning, etc.), or that isn't entirely aligned with a small number of top authors and big publishing houses. If only there was an organization for authors in the U.S. that actually embraced the future for the benefit of its members, rather than one that has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the present.
Well known British author Mary Stewart has died at age 97.
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