Modern Good Reads discussion

It’s time to nominate our JANUARY Book of the Month. Let’s let the fun of a new book and discussion begin.


What do you want to read & discuss?

We will be picking from your choices, but one book will be decided by your votes and the second by the moderators. We try to maintain a balance between indie and more mainstream books, and will make sure the final choices reflect the two. If the popular vote is for an indie, then the moderators will choose a mainstream option. If the popular vote is mainstream, then we will chose an indie option.


Please nominate your favorite to our list and we will get the poll up soon. First the ground rules:
- No self-nominations
- Any nominated book must have a minimum of 100 ratings
- The nominations will be open for three days
- Nominations will be listed in a first-come, first-serve manner, with the books with the most nominations heading the list
- Total number of nominations taken for the poll is twenty.
- If you prefer to email me your choices, those will be added at the end of that day’s nominations.

Lost & Found

The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg

This is on my 12 + 4 for 2015

The Gospel According to the Son
Norman Mailer fused fact and fiction to create indelible portraits of such figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, and Lee Harvey Oswald. In The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer reimagines, as no other modern author has, the key character of Western history. Here is Jesus Christ’s story in his own words: the discovery of his divinity and the painful, powerful journey to accepting and expressing it, “as if I were a man enclosing another man within.” In its brevity and piercing simplicity, it may be Mailer’s most accessible, direct, and heartfelt work.

Praise for The Gospel According to the Son

“Quietly penetrating . . . [Norman Mailer’s] gospel is written in a direct, rather relaxed English that yet has an eerie, neo-Biblical dignity.”—John Updike, The New Yorker

“A book of considerable intellectual force . . . The writer’s powerful mind works in a specialized way, not by theological argumentation but by telling or retelling a story.”—The New York Review of Books

“Challenges readers on the religious right and the atheist left with equally rich interpretive tasks.”—The Dallas Morning News

“An informed and believable work of fiction . . . of what may have been going through the mind of Jesus during his epic ministry.”—San Francisco Chronicle

How new does the book have to be? I just ran into a Must-read published in 2007 Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Tavris and Aronson

Cary wrote: "How new does the book have to be? I just ran into a Must-read published in 2007 Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Tavris and Aronson"

Seems very interesting. I think there is no need for the book to be new.

I nominate Darker Things byRob Cornell

I really enjoyed the book, and its a great start to a series.

:)

American Sniper: Memoirs

From 1999 to 2009, U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle recorded the most career sniper kills in United States military history. The Pentagon has officially confirmed more than 150 of Kyle's kills (the previous American record was 109), but it has declined to verify the astonishing total number for this book. Iraqi insurgents feared Kyle so much they named him al-Shaitan (“the devil”) and placed a bounty on his head. Kyle earned legendary status among his fellow SEALs, Marines, and U.S. Army soldiers, whom he protected with deadly accuracy from rooftops and stealth positions. Gripping and unforgettable, Kyle’s masterful account of his extraordinary battlefield experiences ranks as one of the great war memoirs of all time.

A native Texan who learned to shoot on childhood hunting trips with his father, Kyle was a champion saddle-bronc rider prior to joining the Navy. After 9/11, he was thrust onto the front lines of the War on Terror, and soon found his calling as a world-class sniper who performed best under fire. He recorded a personal-record 2,100-yard kill shot outside Baghdad; in Fallujah, Kyle braved heavy fire to rescue a group of Marines trapped on a street; in Ramadi, he stared down insurgents with his pistol in close combat. Kyle talks honestly about the pain of war—of twice being shot and experiencing the tragic deaths of two close friends.

American Sniper also honors Kyles fellow warriors, who raised hell on and off the battlefield. And in moving first-person accounts throughout, Kyles wife, Taya, speaks openly about the strains of war on their marriage and children, as well as on Chris.

Adrenaline-charged and deeply personal, American Sniper is a thrilling eyewitness account of war that only one man could tell.

What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund

A gorgeously unique, fully illustrated exploration into the phenomenology of reading-how we visualize images from reading works of literature, from one of our very best book jacket designers, himself a passionate reader. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.

What do we see when we read? Did Tolstoy really describe Anna Karenina? Did Melville ever really tell us what, exactly, Ishmael looked like?

The collection of fragmented images on a page - a graceful ear there, a stray curl, a hat positioned just so - and other clues and signifiers helps us to create an image of a character. But in fact our sense that we know a character intimately has little to do with our ability to concretely picture our beloved - or reviled - literary figures.

In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Knopf's Associate Art Director Peter Mendelsund combines his profession, as an award-winning designer; his first career, as a classically trained pianist; and his first love, literature - he thinks of himself first, and foremost, as a reader - into what is sure to be one of the most provocative and unusual investigations into how we understand the act of reading.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana

Or, My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potock

The Clay Lion

I nominate The Clay Lion by Amalie Jahn.

The Tailor's Girl by Fiona McIntosh

The Tailor's Girl by Fiona McIntosh

I second the American Sniper

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
and I second the Clay Lion by Amalie JahnThe Slap The Clay Lion

Or

Confederacy of Dunces

The Bone Clocks

I've just discovered Liane Moriarty. I'll nominate What Alice Forgot.

Thanks for these great nominations. I will tally the choices and get a poll put together this afternoon.