What novel would you like to discuss during the months of February and March?

It is time to start a conversation about what novel we should select for our next fiction discussion starting in February. Please post your suggestions here and remember to add a link to the novel. Also, please feel free to add comments on why your suggestion would make for a good discussion.

All members with at least 20 posts on the forums of BookTalk can suggest novels.

Feedback on the suggested novels is an important component to the selection process. Please review the novels and comment on the those that interest you. The novels with the most positive feedback will be placed in a poll which will determine our next novel to discuss as a group.

So, what novel should we discuss in February and March?

Grace by T. Greenwood
amazon.com/Grace-ebook/dp/B0063KB1PO/re ... inw_strp_1

Every family photograph hides a story. Some are suffused with warmth and joy, others reflect the dull ache of disappointed dreams. For thirteen-year-old Trevor Kennedy, taking photos helps make sense of his fractured world. His father, Kurt, struggles to keep a business going while also caring for Trevor's aging grandfather, whose hoarding has reached dangerous levels. Trevor's mother, Elsbeth, all but ignores her son while doting on his five-year-old sister, Gracy, and pilfering useless drugstore items.

Trevor knows he can count on little Gracy's unconditional love and his art teacher's encouragement. None of that compensates for the bullying he has endured at school for as long as he can remember. But where Trevor once silently tolerated the jabs and name-calling, now anger surges through him in ways he's powerless to control.

Only Crystal, a store clerk dealing with her own loss, sees the deep fissures in the Kennedy family--in the haunting photographs Trevor brings to be developed, and in the palpable distance between Elsbeth and her son. And as their lives become more intertwined, each will be pushed to the breaking point, with shattering, unforeseeable consequences.

I have already read this book, but I would read it again. I think it would make for a good discussion because the family dynamics and social issues are very intense, but not black and white. There is a lot of gray area to explore. It's really a lot better than the synopsis.

I don't know about you all, but I'm reading WATERSHIP DOWN.

http://www.amazon.com/Watership-Scribne ... rship+down

Book Description: A phenomenal worldwide bestseller for almost forty years, Richard Adams’s Watership Down is a timeless classic and one of the most beloved novels of all time. Set in England’s Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage, and survival follows a band of very special rabbits on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of brothers, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society.

The English Patient

by Michael Ondaatje

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.

I think this book would be a good choice for discussion because it’s an intriguing, romantic story but also has enough depth to create meaningful discussion. Also, due to the movie release, The English Patient is a well-recognized title and this might encourage participation.

Available from Amazon for $14 (Kindle) and $15 (Paperback)

I think it is great to allow discussions regarding picks. Some forums get carried away with "vote only" threads and then they are puzzled as to why picks fizzle instead of sizzle.

I recommend The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

I have read this once and listened to the audio book once and while thoroughly consumed in both experiences it was obvious that I missed 90% of what was going on so I bought a copy annotated by none other than Martin Gardner, writer for Scientific American puzzles and many books on mathematics.

Martin Gardner

I also know several people who are experts on the book including one whose username is DrThursday so our questions and discussions could be enhanced by consultation with them.

amazon.com/Man-Who-Was-Thursday-Nightma ... 1586170422

This recommendation has the advantage that the Kindle version is free as is various formats available at http://www.archive.org


Archive dot org

Begin Amazon.com review.
"Amazon.com Review

In an article published the day before his death, G.K. Chesterton called The Man Who Was Thursday "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine." Set in a phantasmagoric London where policemen are poets and anarchists camouflage themselves as, well, anarchists, his 1907 novel offers up one highly colored enigma after another. If that weren't enough, the author also throws in an elephant chase and a hot-air-balloon pursuit in which the pursuers suffer from "the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon."

But Chesterton is also concerned with more serious questions of honor and truth (and less serious ones, perhaps, of duels and dualism). Our hero is Gabriel Syme, a policeman who cannot reveal that his fellow poet Lucian Gregory is an anarchist. In Chesterton's agile, antic hands, Syme is the virtual embodiment of paradox:

He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realization; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike.... Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left--sanity.

Elected undercover into the Central European Council of anarchists, Syme must avoid discovery and save the world from any bombings in the offing. As Thursday (each anarchist takes the name of a weekday--the only quotidian thing about this fantasia) does his best to undo his new colleagues, the masks multiply. The question then becomes: Do they reveal or conceal? And who, not to mention what, can be believed? As The Man Who Was Thursday proceeds, it becomes a hilarious numbers game with a more serious undertone--what happens if most members of the council actually turn out to be on the side of right? Chesterton's tour de force is a thriller that is best read slowly, so as to savor his highly anarchic take on anarchy. --Kerry Fried --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title."

end Amazon.com review

Mentioned this before, it's quite long though and a bit daunting to be honest. I picked up the Kindle version for $2 when it was on sale, and it has been sitting on my iPad so I need an excuse to start reading it.

Anathem, Neal Stephenson
http://www.amazon.com/Anathem-ebook/dp/ ... 664&sr=8-1

Anathem, the latest invention by the New York Times bestselling author of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle, is a magnificent creation: a work of great scope, intelligence, and imagination that ushers readers into a recognizable -- yet strangely inverted -- world.

Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside "saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside -- the Extramuros -- for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.

Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of Apert, the fraas and suurs prepare to venture beyond the concent's gates -- at the same time opening them wide to welcome the curious "extras" in. During his first Apert as a fraa, Erasmas eagerly anticipates reconnecting with the landmarks and family he hasn't seen since he was "collected." But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change.

Powerful unforeseen forces jeopardize the peaceful stability of mathic life and the established ennui of the Extramuros -- a threat that only an unsteady alliance of saecular and avout can oppose -- as, one by one, Erasmas and his colleagues, teachers, and friends are summoned forth from the safety of the concent in hopes of warding off global disaster. Suddenly burdened with a staggering responsibility, Erasmas finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world -- as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of the planet . . . and beyond.

My friend lent me this book that seems pretty good. She really liked it and I trust her opinion on anything literary related.

The Road To Cardinal Valley by Earlene Fowler

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Cardinal-Val ... nal+valley

I've read that book. Recently I was thinking I should read it again. It was a long time ago and I do remember really liking it.

geo wrote:I don't know about you all, but I'm reading WATERSHIP DOWN.

http://www.amazon.com/Watership-Scribne ... rship+down

Book Description: A phenomenal worldwide bestseller for almost forty years, Richard Adams’s Watership Down is a timeless classic and one of the most beloved novels of all time. Set in England’s Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage, and survival follows a band of very special rabbits on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of brothers, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society.

A book about rabbits; really? Isn't it just the Hobbit with long ears.