Please read this entire post!December & January FICTION Book SuggestionsRECENTLY EDITED: We'll be starting our first FICTION book in December, and reading and discussing it for a full two months. This should make some of the staggered book discussion fans happy. How many of you would actively participate in the reading and discussion of a quality fiction book in the months of December & January? All we need is a small handful of us to have a fun discussion. Are you in?Here is the scoop. We need to quickly pick an Amazon.com "Bestseller" so that we can be comfortable that we're reading a book with mass appeal. So check out the below link to the Amazon.com bestsellers list. We need to stick with books that appear on this list.We should be able to knock this first step out within a few days, so that I can post our December & January book on our Home page, at the top of our Forums page, and then create a brand new forum.Amazon.com bestsellersOh, and this is how you can find the Amazon.com "bestsellers," for future reference. Go to Amazon.com. Near the top of the screen, in the middle, you will see a link for "Top Sellers." Click on this. Then, in the list of links off to the left, click on "Books." The bestsellers list pops up. This is where we will be picking our fiction selections, so please familiarize yourself with this list.This list contains nonfiction too, so you might want to narrow it down by selecting "Literature and Fiction."I'm seeing all sorts of quality books. And when you post your suggestion please don't then vanish off this thread. We're looking for more than a hit-n-run suggestion.Are you also willing to purchase, read and discuss ANY Amazon.com bestseller that is selected for December & January? This is what we're really looking for right now. We need a core group of BookTalk members to help us break into the world of fiction. Please help the community by being flexible. We can't obviously read everyone's #1 pick. But we need your help to make this first fiction discussion fun and dynamic. Even if your book isn't selected you ought to still participate.We should approach this December & January fiction discussion with the right frame of mind. Everyone knows it has been rather slow around here lately. By adding fiction we have a great opportunity to draw in brand new members, which is our primary objective. So your participation is very valuable.What should you do right now?Here is the bottom line. Many past suggestions have been hit-n-run suggestions with zero follow-up. Please be more active in this thread. If you suggest a book include a review, not just a link. And only suggest one or maybe two books per person. When one person suggests 7 books it makes selecting the final book very difficult.But here is the KEYWhen another person suggests a book READ about it. Think about that book suggestion. Let us know if you would enjoy reading it or not. The fiction selection will be chosen using our online ezboard poll. In other words we can have a total of 5 fiction books on the poll, and the one receiving the most votes will be the winner. We don't need 25 total suggestions. We need a small batch. So think hard. And please please please participate no matter what book wins. Do it for BookTalk. Any suggestions?Again, ONLY Amazon.com bestsellers. In time when we are larger and attracting new members isn't so important we can read more obscure fiction books, but right now we want books with mass appeal. This doesn't mean trash books. There are a ton of incredible books on the Amazon list. Edited by: Chris OConnor  at: 11/8/05 4:42 pm

I'll now give you all 5 examples of Amazon.com bestsellers that I think would make for excellent discussions. I started at the top of the bestseller list and worked down. If you do the same it will be interesting to compare our lists of "good" books.The Kiter RunnerAmazon.comIn his debut novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini accomplishes what very few contemporary novelists are able to do. He manages to provide an educational and eye-opening account of a country's political turmoil--in this case, Afghanistan--while also developing characters whose heartbreaking struggles and emotional triumphs resonate with readers long after the last page has been turned over. And he does this on his first try.The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and eventually cements their bond in ways neither boy could have ever predicted. Even after Amir and his father flee to America, Amir remains haunted by his cowardly actions and disloyalty. In part, it is these demons and the sometimes impossible quest for forgiveness that bring him back to his war-torn native land after it comes under Taliban rule. ("...I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.")Some of the plot's turns and twists may be somewhat implausible, but Hosseini has created characters that seem so real that one almost forgets that The Kite Runner is a novel and not a memoir. At a time when Afghanistan has been thrust into the forefront of America's collective consciousness ("people sipping lattes at Starbucks were talking about the battle for Kunduz"), Hosseini offers an honest, sometimes tragic, sometimes funny, but always heartfelt view of a fascinating land. Perhaps the only true flaw in this extraordinary novel is that it ends all too soon. The Lincoln Lawyer: A NovelAmazon.comBest-selling author Michael Connelly, whose character-driven literary mysteries have earned him a wide following, breaks from the gate in the over-crowded field of legal thrillers and leaves every other contender from Grisham to Turow in the dust with this tightly plotted, brilliantly paced, impossible-to-put-down novel. Criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller's father was a legendary lawyer whose clients included gangster Mickey Cohen (in a nice twist, Cohen's gun, given to Dad then bequeathed to his son, plays a key role in the plot). But Dad also passed on an important piece of advice that's especially relevant when Mickey takes the case of a wealthy Los Angeles realtor accused of attempted murder: "The scariest client a lawyer will ever have is an innocent client. Because if you [screw] up and he goes to prison, it'll scar you for life." Louis Roulet, Mickey's "franchise client" (so-called becaue he's able and willing to pay whatever his defense costs) seems to be the one his father warned him against, as well as being a few rungs higher on the socio-economic ladder than the drug dealers, homeboys, and motorcycle thugs who comprise Mickey's regular case load. But as the holes in Roulet's story tear Mickey's theory of the case to shreds, his thoughts turn more to Jesus Menendez, a former client convicted of a similar crime who's now languishing in San Quentin. Connelly tellingly delineates the code of legal ethics Mickey lives by: "It didn't matter...whether the defendant 'did it' or not. What mattered was the evidence against him--the proof--and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt." But by the time his client goes to trial, Mickey's feeling a few very reasonable doubts of his own. While Mickey's courtroom pyrotechnics dazzle, his behind-the-scenes machinations and manipulations are even more incendiary in this taut, gripping novel, which showcases all of Connelly's literary gifts. There's not an excess sentence or padded paragraph in it--what there is, happily, is a character who, like Harry Bosch, deserves a franchise series of his own.The Camel ClubFrom Publishers WeeklyArab terrorists, nuclear threat and political perfidy drive bestselling Baldacci's latest. The Camel Club, a four-man group of Washington, D.C., misfits (their leader has taken the ironic pseudonym "Oliver Stone") gathers every week to discuss political conspiracies they believe exist and what actions they might take. One night, while meeting on Roosevelt Island in the middle of the Potomac River, club members witness the murder of Secret Service employee Patrick Johnson, thus thrusting the wacky crew into the middle of a bigger conspiracy than they could ever have imagined. There are scores of characters and subplots to keep track of while the story veers back and forth between venues and villains, forcing readers to remain alert yet patient while awaiting the high-concept payoff. When it finally appears, it's a doozy: kidnappers who harm no one and are reasonable people with a legitimate gripe bring the U.S. to the verge of nuking Damascus. Baldacci maintains interest during the long buildup by supplying fascinating historical facts, amusing characters, high-tech spy lore and the backstories of his super agents, both good and evil. As fans of this writer know, years of experience have made him an author who promises a good story and then delivers it. The March: A NovelAmazon.comAs the Civil War was moving toward its inevitable conclusion, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, leaving a 60-mile-wide trail of death, destruction, looting, thievery and chaos. In The March, E.L. Doctorow has put his unique stamp on these events by staying close to historical fact, naming real people and places and then imagining the rest, as he did in Ragtime. Recently, the Civil War has been the subject of novels by Howard Bahr, Michael Shaara, Charles Frazier, and Robert Hicks, to name a few. Its perennial appeal is due not only to the fact that it was fought on our own soil, but also that it captures perfectly our long-time and ongoing ambivalence about race. Doctorow examines this question extensively, chronicling the dislocation of both southern whites and Negroes as Sherman burned and destroyed all that they had ever known. Sherman is a well-drawn character, pictured as a crazy tactical genius pitted against his West Point counterparts. Doctorow creates a context for the march: "The brutal romance of war was still possible in the taking of spoils. Each town the army overran was a prize... There was something undeniably classical about it, for how else did the armies of Greece and Rome supply themselves?" The characters depicted on the march are those people high and low, white and black, whose lives are forever changed by war: Pearl, the newly free daughter of a white plantation owner and one of his slaves, Colonel Sartorius, a competent, remote, almost robotic surgeon; several officers, both Union and Confederate; two soldiers, Arly and Will, who provide comic relief in the manner of Shakespeare's fools until, suddenly, their roles are not funny anymore. Doctorow has captured the madness of war in his description of the condition of a dispossessed Southern white woman: "What was clear at this moment was that Mattie Jameson's mental state befitted the situation in which she found herself. The world at war had risen to her affliction and made it indistinguishable." And later, " This was not war as adventure, nor war for a solemn cause, it was war at its purest, a mindless mass rage severed from any cause, ideal, or moral principle." As we have come to expect, Doctorow puts the reader in the picture; never more so than in recalling "The March" and letting us see it as a cautionary tale for our times.Ordinary Heroes: A NovelFrom Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. When retired newspaperman Stewart Dubinsky (last seen in 1987's Presumed Innocent) discovers letters his deceased father wrote during his tour of duty in WWII, a host of family secrets come to light. In Turow's ambitious, fascinating page-turner, a "ferocious curiosity" compels the divorced Dubinsky to study his "remote, circumspect" father's papers, which include love letters written to a fiancee the family had never heard of, and a lengthy manuscript, which his father wrote in prison and which includes the shocking disclosure of his father's court-martial for assisting in the escape of OSS officer Robert Martin, a suspected spy. The manuscript, hidden from everyone but the attorney defending him, tells of Capt. David Dubin's investigation into Martin's activities and of both men's entanglements with fierce, secretive comrade Gita Lodz. From optimistic soldier to disenchanted veteran, Dubin

Chris OConnor: How many of you would actively participate in the reading and discussion of a quality fiction book in the month of December?Provided that the book looks interesting, of course. I may be at a bit of a disadvantage when we're dealing with the bestseller list, though. We may all suffer a disadvantage there, in fact, as my experience has been that the people who are most involved in reading and most capable in discussing fiction tend not to agree with the status quo. But I'll certainly take a look through the list and see what appeals to me. Amazon's list is probably a great deal broader than something like the New York Times Bestseller List (which is often determined by expected sales). I understand your reason for limiting the pick to something from the bestseller list; I just hope we can move on from that soon.Are you also willing to purchase, read and discuss ANY Amazon.com bestseller that is selected for December?Not any, no. I don't think that's a reasonable expectation. I'll be a great deal more flexible than I would if I were simply looking for a book to read on my own, but I'm not going to invest time and money in a book that doesn't appeal to me in the least. Money's too tight and there are literally more than a hundred books demanding my attention.

Quote:I just hope we can move on from that soon.Definitely. Me too. But let's get this fiction thing started with a popular book that has some potential for pulling in new members. We can change course as needed once we get underway.

Hi Chris!!! Being the first time for me, I think your suggested book list would be OK (I'll try to add my 2 cents though!). I would even buy and read some of the books suggested in order to get this thing started, but I'd have to buy them from one of the many American/English bookshops in Rome (where I'm working and living at the moment ) simply because I'm not that keen on opening accounts just to buy books online Rob

RobI'm happy to hear you'll be joining us in the discussion. We'll be in good shape if we have at least 4 or 5 of us reading and discussing the book.Any of the books I posted look good?

I probably won't participate in the fiction discussion. I am keeping an open mind though. I will look at the books people suggest. If BookTalk ends up reading a book of fiction that I am interested in, I will consider reading and participating. However, I will not be considering fiction selections as I have considered past nonfiction selections. In the past, I have almost always read whatever won because I looked at my participation as an opportunity to learn about subjects I am interested in. I cannot commit to reading whatever fiction book wins, as I do not feel the need to educate myself through fiction.

It would have to be darn interesting to me to pull me away from my current fiction fare....I usually do NOT like what makes it to best sellers lists.Mr. P. The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - 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

I hope that the people who are saying they will only participate if the chosen book is extremely compelling will take the time to help pick the book. They can at least look at the suggestions, and speak their mind about what's been put on the table so far.

Adding fiction to our community is a big step and one that is sure to increase our appeal to a broader audience. I too hope that we you guys consider participating even if the winning fiction book isn't your choice. Having our first fiction book in December is a strategy, but not one that will succeed without the help of a significant group of BookTalk members.