All About Books discussion

This thread will be an ongoing nomination thread for our monthly fiction read. Please suggest any books you think would be good to read with the group. Each month we will pick 5/6 books to go into the poll and the winning group will be our monthly fiction read.

Please be assured that even if your choice does not go into the poll immediately we will consider all member suggestions each month and try to include as many of them as possible

From what I've heard of it I think Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer might make for a good group read.

This is a bit older but I would like to read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

Much as I'd like to contribute here, I don't have enough free time to read at the moment.

I like the above suggestions.

Bette, this is an ongoing thread over the year so feel free to post if anything comes to mind

Thanks, Heather.

These may be of interest to the group:

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
The Orenda by Joseph Boyden
11/22/63 by Stephen King

I hope that's not too many.

I will be back to make suggestions at some point, but I don't have time to check the shelves right now to make sure I don't nominate something we've already read plus I find those hard sometimes. Is there any list of books discussed here or are all the titles in the same folders?

I’m happy for you to make suggestions and I will check the shelves when it comes to creating the polls

How about A Gentleman in Moscow?

Shirley wrote: "How about A Gentleman in Moscow?"

This looks very good and one I know I will be reading anyway in January as it's my real life book club pick

Heather wrote: "Shirley wrote: "How about A Gentleman in Moscow?"

This looks very good and one I know I will be reading anyway in January as it's my real life book club pick"

I also have it for another book club and am very much looking forward to reading it.

Petra wrote: "These may be of interest to the group:

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay
The Orenda by Joseph Boyden
11/22/63 by [author:Stephen..."

That's great Petra. I think a couple of those have been suggestion in previous nomination threads but not won the poll so are excellent suggestions.

Shirley wrote: "How about A Gentleman in Moscow?"

I absolutely loved this book! It was the best book I read last year and I gave it as a birthday gift to someone.
I would love to reread and discuss it!

Our January Poll is now up

1. A Gentleman in Moscow
A New York Times Bestseller.

On 21 June, 1922, Count Alexander Rostov - recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt - is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol.

Instead of being taken to his usual suite, he is led to an attic room with a window the size of a chessboard. Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely.

While Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval, the Count, stripped of the trappings that defined his life, is forced to question what makes us who we are. And with the assistance of a glamorous actress, a cantankerous chef and a very serious child, Rostov unexpectedly discovers a new understanding of both pleasure and purpose.

From the author of the Waterstones’ bestseller Rules of Civility comes a book about the salvation inherent in mutual understanding and respect and an awakened sense of the possibility of wonder.

2. Tin Man
This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that.

Ellis and Michael are twelve-year-old boys when they first become friends, and for a long time it is just the two of them, cycling the streets of Oxford, teaching themselves how to swim, discovering poetry, and dodging the fists of overbearing fathers. And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more.

But then we fast forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question, what happened in the years between?

With beautiful prose and characters that are so real that they jump off the page, Tin Man is a love letter to human kindness and friendship, and to loss and living

3. 11/22/63

WHAT IF you could go back in time and change the course of history? WHAT IF the watershed moment you could change was the JFK assassination? 11.22.63, the date that Kennedy was shot - unless . . .

King takes his protagonist Jake Epping, a high school English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, 2011, on a fascinating journey back to 1958 - from a world of mobile phones and iPods to a new world of Elvis and JFK, of Plymouth Fury cars and Lindy Hopping, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake's life - a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

With extraordinary imaginative power, King weaves the social, political and popular culture of his baby-boom American generation into a devastating exercise in escalating suspense

4. The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison’s debut novel immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family – Pauline, Cholly, Sam and Pecola – in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present.

Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

5. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine


Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive – but not how to live

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.

Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything.

One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted – while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life.

Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than… fine?

6. Here I Am

In the book of Genesis, when God calls out, "Abraham!" before ordering him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, Abraham responds, "Here I am." Later, when Isaac calls out, "My father!" before asking him why there is no animal to slaughter, Abraham responds, "Here I am."

How do we fulfill our conflicting duties as father, husband, and son; wife and mother; child and adult? Jew and American? How can we claim our own identities when our lives are linked so closely to others'? These are the questions at the heart of Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel in eleven years--a work of extraordinary scope and heartbreaking intimacy.

Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, D.C., Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East. At stake is the meaning of home--and the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.

Showcasing the same high-energy inventiveness, hilarious irreverence, and emotional urgency that readers loved in his earlier work, Here I Am is Foer's most searching, hard-hitting, and grandly entertaining novel yet. It not only confirms Foer's stature as a dazzling literary talent but reveals a novelist who has fully come into his own as one of our most important writer

I would love some suggestions for some non UK/USA based reads if anybody has any ideas?

Not sure if these are of interest:

The Tale of the Heike
Independent People
They Were Counted
The Door
The Slynx

Heather wrote: "I would love some suggestions for some non UK/USA based reads if anybody has any ideas?"

Some ideas from my TBR:

Old Masters: A Comedy (Austria)
The Prophets of Eternal Fjord (Norwegian author, set in Greenland)
The Melancholy of Resistance (Hungary)

[This is so annoying. I had quite a few ideas, but found out that most of them were more than 50 years old, i.e. classics...]

Some non UK/USA books on my tbr are-

A Brief History of Seven Killings (Jamaica)
A General Theory of Oblivion (Angola)
Down the Rabbit Hole (Mexico)
HHhH (France)
The Bone People (New Zealand)
Chronicle in Stone (Albania)

Chronicle in Stone is excellent.

I love that you are adding more books by authors outside the US and England.

Thanks everybody. I will definitely look into some of those and include them in future polls. I realised it was very Anglo-centric as I posted

A Brief History of Seven Killings
has been on my To Read list for a while -

I would like to suggest The Book of Night Women also by Marlon James

Terry ~ Huntress of Erudition wrote: "A Brief History of Seven Killings
has been on my To Read list for a while -"

Mine too. I have heard such a wide range of reviews and am conflicted about whether to read it or not.

I don't see what book won the poll. I could be missing it, however, since I have to get my books from the library I was hoping to order it a bit early as to have it for the 1st.

Rebecca wrote: "I don't see what book won the poll. I could be missing it, however, since I have to get my books from the library I was hoping to order it a bit early as to have it for the 1st."

Rebecca, the book that won the poll is An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser with 28 votes.

Rebecca wrote: "I don't see what book won the poll. I could be missing it, however, since I have to get my books from the library I was hoping to order it a bit early as to have it for the 1st."

Thanks Marina! :)

And yes Rebecca, as Marina says, An American Tragedy won the poll. The best way to see what the current poll results are is to click the "Polls" link at the top right.

Sorry about the lateness of the poll - we'll try to have polls done earlier so people checking out books from the library have enough time to obtain them!

Thank you for the help. I have ordered the book and hopefully it will arrive quickly! I can't wait to get reading !

Rebecca wrote: "Thank you for the help. I have ordered the book and hopefully it will arrive quickly! I can't wait to get reading !"

Great! :)

Some non UK/US selections I would like to read:

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Malaysia)
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (South Africa)
The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux (Honduras)
The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna (Croatia)

Pam wrote: "Some non UK/US selections I would like to read:

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Malaysia)
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (South Africa)
[boo..."

Some great choices Pam!

I'm going to be putting up the poll this week so if anybody has any other ideas for books they would like to see go into the poll please let me know!

The poll for our next group read will open tonight.

For February, I have chosen a few slight shorter books (why A History of seven Killings isn't included) given that our classic read is very long and A Gentleman in Moscow is also a bit of a chunky read. They are all written by non-UK/US authors.

1. The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen translated by Don Bartlett (available both uk and USA kindle and paperback plus audible narration)
2. Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare (available in the US and UK on both kindle and paperback. UK/US Audible available)
3. A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa, Daniel Hahn (Translator). (available in the US and UK on both kindle and paperback. NO AUDIOBOOK
4. The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna (available in the US and UK on both kindle and paperback. UK/US Audible available)
5. Human Acts by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith (available in the US and UK on both kindle and paperback. US Audible but not UK)
6. Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin translated by Megan Mcdowell. (available in the US and UK on both kindle and paperback. US audiobook available but not UK)

Thanks Heather :)

I love the options! Thank you.

I like the options, too! I would be happy with any of them.

I did think of this one. It's obviously older. Not sure how the group will feel about it. Deliverance by James Dickey.

Leslie wrote: "I did think of this one. It's obviously older. Not sure how the group would feel. Deliverance by James Dickey."

That is on my TBR so I, for one, would like that!

I would love some more suggestions for our March read.

As Chrissie has pointed out, the February read has had a poor uptake with very few people reading and discussing the book so I would like to make sure that as many people as possible participate in the group read.

I haven't got time to do it this month but next month I can go back to nominations and seconds like we did previously if people think that would be better. Happy to take all suggestions to improve group read participation

I am all for reading books outside the US. I do read them a lot too, but there are so many interesting others. What about Atonement by Ian McEwan ? Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino? Billard um halb zehn by Heinrich Böll a work of Hans Fallada, a work by Kazuo Ishiguro or Haruki Murakami? I have read some of them, though not all. Just giving ideas...

Claire wrote: "I am all for reading books outside the US. I do read them a lot too, but there are so many interesting others. What about Atonement by Ian McEwan ? Invisible Cities..."

Incredibly enough I've never read Invisible Cities by Calvino, even if I know it is one of his masterpiece. I'd like to read it then!

Laura, it's one of my favorite books. I even read it in English once because I was leading our group read of the month in my real-life English bookclub, back when I was living in Luxembourg. I might probably decide to re-read it, should it win the poll for one of our group reads.

Let's read it then!!!!

The poll for the next group fiction read can be found here:

https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/1...

I'm considering making April to be a female only poll. We have had mainly male authors suggested, which is fine, but I'd like to give some female authors a chance!

Any suggestions?

Uhm, I don't know what to vote in the poll, there is one book I want to read and another one I want to re-read. Will have to think about it a little more. I haven't participated in any of our group reads in a long time, but I hope this will be a good chance to do so.

I will think about female authors and get back to this thread, Heather. You had a good idea.

Marina wrote: "Uhm, I don't know what to vote in the poll, there is one book I want to read and another one I want to re-read. Will have to think about it a little more. I haven't participated in any of our group..."

I haven't voted either for the same reason! There is one I would love to discuss, a couple I want to read. It's always difficult, I just hope lots of people participate in the discussions next month

Heather wrote: "I just hope lots of people participate in the discussions next month "

I hope so!

Some books written by female authors we could consider for April:

Everything You Need by A.L. Kennedy
We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg

I would like to read something by Zadie Smith so I will suggest White Teeth and/or On Beauty.

Nice idea about reading some women authors.

A few suggestions to perhaps consider:
The Clay Girl by Heather Tucker
Mischling by Affinity Konar
Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani

A couple of books already suggested are on my TBR list as well.