3rd Quarter 2006 ~ FICTION Book Suggestions!

Chris OConnor

3rd Quarter 2006 ~ FICTION Book Suggestions!

Please use this thread for suggesting FICTION books for 3rd quarter of 2006 (July, August, & September)

All fiction suggestions need to be RECENT BESTSELLERS of some sort.

We're trying to make our fiction selections appealing to a broad audience to help pull in new members, so please stick with the game plan and put some effort into your suggestions.

Try using the Pulitzer Prize list for good book ideas. You'll see a timeline across the top. Scroll to the right and click on recent years. Scroll through the list of winners and look for fiction books you think would be great to read and discuss.

Or try the Amazon.com Bestsellers page. On the left you'll see a list of links. Since we're picking a FICTION book, you'll want to stick with either "Literature & Fiction" or "Science Fiction and Fantasy." If you can locate some bestselling fiction on some of those other links please do.

And then there is the New York Times Bestsellers list. Just make sure you're looking in the fiction and not nonfiction section.

Important

1. Provide the title, author, and a copied and pasted review. Also provide a link to Amazon where we can read more.

2. Do not just suggest books that are already on your shelf. We are looking for books that will help BookTalk pull in more members and result in incredible discussions. So think about what will help our community.

3. And PLEASE comment on other people’s suggestions. This is probably the most important thing you can do. Don't make a suggestion and then vanish. Be ACTIVE in this thread.

Let's hear some good suggestions!

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 3/16/06 10:44 pm

Discretion29

It's something I've been meaning to read for a while.

The Time Traveler's Wife
by: Audrey Niffenegger

Amazon.com
This clever and inventive tale works on three levels: as an intriguing science fiction concept, a realistic character study and a touching love story. Henry De Tamble is a Chicago librarian with "Chrono Displacement" disorder; at random times, he suddenly disappears without warning and finds himself in the past or future, usually at a time or place of importance in his life. This leads to some wonderful paradoxes. From his point of view, he first met his wife, Clare, when he was 28 and she was 20. She ran up to him exclaiming that she'd known him all her life. He, however, had never seen her before. But when he reaches his 40s, already married to Clare, he suddenly finds himself time travelling to Clare's childhood and meeting her as a 6-year-old. The book alternates between Henry and Clare's points of view, and so does the narration. Reed ably expresses the longing of the one always left behind, the frustrations of their unusual lifestyle, and above all, her overriding love for Henry. Likewise, Burns evokes the fear of a man who never knows where or when he'll turn up, and his gratitude at having Clare, whose love is his anchor.

Chris OConnor

Excellent suggestion! I'd consider reading and discussing it myself. And it is currently rated at #73 on Amazon.com. ::121

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 3/25/06 6:48 pm

MadArchitect

The same friend who suggested, once upon a time, that I read "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" recommended that I also read "The Time Traveller's Wife". He generally has pretty good taste, so that's probably one worth considering.

richard anthony carpenter

Hi, I'm new to this forum, which I just found by accident, it looks interesting.

I've just finished reading Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky and would like to know what other readers think of it - I thought it was terrific. It's on Amazon
with lots of favourable reviews, including this one:

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Celebrated in pre-WWII France for her bestselling fiction, the Jewish Russian-born Némirovsky was shipped to Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, months after this long-lost masterwork was composed. Némirovsky, a convert to Catholicism, began a planned five-novel cycle as Nazi forces overran northern France in 1940. This gripping "suite," collecting the first two unpolished but wondrously literary sections of a work cut short, have surfaced more than six decades after her death. The first, "Storm in June," chronicles the connecting lives of a disparate clutch of Parisians, among them a snobbish author, a venal banker, a noble priest shepherding churlish orphans, a foppish aesthete and a loving lower-class couple, all fleeing city comforts for the chaotic countryside, mere hours ahead of the advancing Germans. The second, "Dolce," set in 1941 in a farming village under German occupation, tells how peasant farmers, their pretty daughters and petit bourgeois collaborationists coexisted with their Nazi rulers. In a workbook entry penned just weeks before her arrest, Némirovsky noted that her goal was to describe "daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides." This heroic work does just that, by focusing—with compassion and clarity—on individual human dramas. (Apr. 1

richard anthony carpenter

Apologies, I couldn't make the Amazon link work first time - this should do it:
Amazon link

I think this book would interest readers of E.L.Doctorow's The March, as it describes the impact of war, although in a very different way.

LanDroid · Posted: Sun May 14, 2006 2:24 pm Post subject: NY Times

We might get some ideas here...

NY Times - Best fiction of past 25 years.

MadArchitect · Posted: Tue May 16, 2006 1:53 pm Post subject: Re: NY Times

This thread could use some padding, so I thought I'd reiterate some of my suggestions from last quarter's thread. Later on, I'll try to find some new suggestions as well.

Liquidation, by Irme Kertesz
Here is an excerpt from the Washington Post Review given on Amazon:
Kertesz's novel begins after the fall of communism with the introduction of Kingbitter, an editor at a failing Hungarian publishing house. He is wrestling with the last manuscript of his friend B., who killed himself 10 years earlier, in 1990. Oddly, B.'s manuscript, a play with the same title as the book in which it appears, recreates the dialogue among his friends that follows his suicide. Immediately a reader is thrown into a vortex where reality and imagination intermingle. The vortex gets denser as Kingbitter searches for a lost novel that he is certain B. must have been working on.
Reviewed by Melvin Jules Bukiet

Kertesz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2002, so he's something of a contemporary literatti. It's a short novel, but it promises to be dense and to offer a great deal to discuss.

Next up...
The Pyramid, by Ismail Kadare
Another short novel by an author that many North American readers probably don't know all that intimately. I've run across this book in several bookstores, and I'm intrigued by its concept. There's an analysis of modern themes implied, from what I understand, but at the same time we could use it as a jumping off point for discussing ancient Egypt.

From Publishers Weekly:
Albanian novelist Kadare (The Concert), living in political exile in France since 1991, spins cogent tales about the temptations and evils of totalitarian bureaucracy. His latest carries a universal message. Set in ancient Egypt-where Pharaoh Cheops oversees the construction of his tomb, the highest, most majestic pyramid ever, to be built by tens of thousands of his brainwashed subjects-the novel's hypnotically Kafkaesque narrative exposes the alienating, destructive effects of investing unquestioned power in a ruler, a state or a religion. The massive pyramid devours Egypt's resources and energies. Thousands die as it rises ever higher, and Cheops, depicted as a power-mad lunatic who craves adulation, periodically unleashes waves of arrests and torture of those falsely accused of sabotaging the project. Analogies to Stalin's paranoia, bloody purges and other terrors spring to mind, but the story takes on a broader meaning, demonstrating how a state or a ruling elite can mold public opinion so that its citizens willingly act against their own best interests.

Mr. Pessimistic · Posted: Tue May 16, 2006 3:05 pm Post subject: Re: NY Times

I checked out "PYRAMID" when it was up for vote on the last poll. I did not read it though as the chosen books took precedence and my time, as always, is short.

It looks interesting.

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

Once you perceive the irrevocable truth, you can no longer justify the irrational denial. - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Chris OConnor · Posted: Tue May 16, 2006 4:54 pm Post subject: Re: NY Times

Our next poll needs to go up tonight if we are to start a new fiction book within two weeks. So far "The Time Traveler's Wife" will definitely be on the poll. I sure wish we had some additional suggestions. I'll look over your suggestions in a minute, Mad. Tara and I will be speaking on the phone and trying to get the poll up tonight.

Chris OConnor · Posted: Tue May 16, 2006 5:06 pm Post subject: Re: NY Times

Time Travelers Wife and Suite Francaise are both on the best sellers list, while Liquidation and The Pyramid are no where near popular. Should we care?


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