Goodreads Choice Awards Book Club discussion

Nominate your February picks!

Nominees:
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Graceling

In keeping with the Fiction category for February I'd like to suggest this Choice Awards nominee:

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

A gleeful and exhilarating tale of global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, high-tech data visualization, young love, rollicking adventure, and the secret to eternal life—mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore

The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design drone—and serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey has landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But after just a few days on the job, Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than the name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything, instead “checking out” impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he’s embarked on a complex analysis of the customers’ behavior and roped his friends into helping to figure out just what’s going on. But once they bring their findings to Mr. Penumbra, it turns out the secrets extend far outside the walls of the bookstore.

With irresistible brio and dazzling intelligence, Robin Sloan has crafted a literary adventure story for the twenty-first century, evoking both the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or a young Umberto Eco, but with a unique and feisty sensibility that’s rare to the world of literary fiction. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is exactly what it sounds like: an establishment you have to enter and will never want to leave, a modern-day cabinet of wonders ready to give a jolt of energy to every curious reader, no matter the time of day.

I'd like to nominate Graceling. Apparently it's very good!

ohhh, Graceling looks very good Vanessa!

Cathie wrote: "In keeping with the Fiction category for February I'd like to suggest this Choice Awards nominee:

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

A gleeful ..."

Sounds like a great choice, Cathie!

Is there a poll for this? Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore gets my vote!

I would vote for Graceling as i have read the other one.

Yes when are we voting for february books?

I'm not sure...Nicolette set up this thread and I think she's really busy with school right now?

Since there are only two books, could they both be additional reads?

I just messaged Nicolette, so why don't we wait and see for awhile?

I was thinking the same thing Joanne. If we don't do a poll, then we can just add the 2 books as Member's Nominations :-). (It would give us our 4 books for the month.) And if we do a poll, we can always do a buddy read for the one that isn't picked.

No worries members :-)

I agree, very good idea!

I'm going to close this thread, so no more new nominations. One way or another, we will go with the 2 choices that have been offered :-). Let's keep it simple for the first couple of months :-) A new thread for March nominations will be up soon, so you can purchase, reserve books ahead of time if you want.

We still have 2 books that were tied for January nominations that we didn't get around to incorporating into our reads this month; I will have to put on the thinking cap about how to work them into the schedule, probably for March or April. Bear with us as we work out the kinks; we're listening to you :-)

I would like to nominate Eden I am currently reading it and it is an impressive debut by new author David Holley I highly recommend it.

Hi Edgar. We have already chosen our nominated books for February. A new nomination poll will be opening up soon for March. You can nominate Eden there when I get it set up :-)

Hi Isabella. This thread is closed now. (See my post before Edgar's). You can nominate Ruby Red in the March nominating thread when I get it set up.