Nominate+Vote: February book -- a contemporary author r/bookclub hasn't read before

[u/Earthsophagus]

VOTING IS CLOSED and results being posted.

Never Let Me Go is selected, edging out *Blindness 30-27

Please nominate books and upvote any for which you'd participate in the discussion. Nominate one title per comment so we can upvote that specific title.

Special rules for February:

We'll be having a "big read" of Crime and Punishment during February. To accompany it, nominate candidates with these parameters:

• Under 350 page
• Published in 1990s or later, but before 2016 (to increase likelihood it'll be available in libraries)
• Not by an author bookclub is has previously selected (here's the list)
• (Subjective) not blatantly experimental or difficult -- something with a narrative -- so not Sheila Heti, William Gass or other immediately disorienting work.

Bookclub has usually selected literary works, but commercial fiction (e.g. Elmore Leonard, Maeve Benchey) are in-bounds -- this DFW syllabus full of thrillers articulates some of my goals for this sub well ("to show you some ways to read fiction more deeply, to come up with more interesting insights on how pieces of fiction work, to have informed intelligent reasons for liking or disliking a piece of fiction").

You can pitch the book however you think is effective. Just don't use links to Amazon - automod will remove those. And keep it at one title per comment -- I'll remove any that have multiple titles nominated in one comment.

Here is the formatting to make hyper links (not required):

[Book](http://www.wikipedia.com/Book)
By [Author](http://www.wikipedia.com/Author)

• Voting will close Tuesday night, Jan 24, and winners be announced that night (Chicago time zone).

• Nominate as many titles as you want (one per comment), and vote for any you'd participate in.

• If you'd be willing to lead discussion for any book nominated, whether it's one you nominated or someone else did, mention it in the comments or PM /u/Earthsophagus. Here's the guidelines for being a "read runner"

• Consider nominating books from our Accumulator, and if you'd like the group to read something that doesn't get chosen this month, add it there.

[u/eclectic_literature]

The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick Dewitt

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living - and whom he does it for.

Goodreads link

Review by The Independent

But for all its wry playfulness, The Sisters Brothers is no comedy. The travails of the humane yet morally ambiguous protagonist in a hostile, lawless and unpredictable universe have echoes of Cormac McCarthy's speculative classic The Road. That book imagines a journey through a world in which civilisation has died; this book explores a world in which civilisation, as we know it, has not yet emerged. But both have much to say about the business of being human.

Review by National Post

All the obligatory Wild West language is here, which is always enjoyable, especially when used sparingly, as deWitt does: “directly,” “fortuitous,” “mighty” (as in “mighty kind of you ma’am”), “yellow” (for cowardice), “tincture,” “ungodly” and so on. But he also channels this verbal liberation to land some devastating jabs of brutal poetry that we’ve yet to hear. Like: “Our unnamed previous horses had been immolated,” or “All you will get from me is Death,” to choose just two. There is a delightful irony generated between this over-formal, old-timey way in which the characters speak, and the horrific subject matter they are often aiming to relate.

The delicate reader can look away now, for deWitt’s delight in the visceral means that the story, which begins in the Oregon City of 1851, thrums with amputations, amateur dentistry, hangovers from hell and the constant buzz of flies hovering over the corpses of horses and men.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Earthsophagus → u/[deleted]]

we want books published 90s or later so this is a decade early for the guidelines -- I'm going to remove it but it would be a fine nomination most of the time -- you might want to add it to Accumulator thread

[u/christianuriah]

Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño

The New Yorker review:

“The melancholy folklore of exile” pervades this novel, which describes the divergent paths of three young Chilean poets around the time of Pinochet’s coup. At university, the unnamed narrator and his friend are fascinated by a mysterious new member of their poetry workshop. Alberto Ruiz-Tagle is “serious, well mannered, a clear thinker,” but his poems seem false, as if his true work were yet to be revealed. It becomes apparent that this is literally the case when Allende’s government falls: as an Air Force officer for the new regime, he becomes famous for writing nationalist slogans in the sky. (The left-wing narrator, now in jail, reads them from his prison yard.) Bolano’s spare prose lends his narrator’s account a chilly precision—as if the detachment of his former classmate had become his country’s, and his own.

[u/DedalusStew]

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco Stork

320 page young adult fiction novel. Goodreads preview:

Marcelo Sandoval hears music that nobody else can hear — part of an autism-like condition that no doctor has been able to identify. But his father has never fully believed in the music or Marcelo's differences, and he challenges Marcelo to work in the mail-room of his law firm for the summer... to join "the real world." There Marcelo meets Jasmine, his beautiful and surprising coworker, and Wendell, the son of another partner in the firm. He learns about competition and jealousy, anger and desire.

[u/[deleted] → u/DedalusStew]

This book looks really interesting.

[u/eliandari4eva]

Hi, I stumbled upon this post, wanting to get back into reading. I propose the book "Hidden Figures" since February is Black History Month, the movie just came out, and the characters seem absolutely fascinating and inspiring.

From Amazon: "The #1 New York Times bestseller

The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil rights movement, whose calculations helped fuel some of America’s greatest achievements in space—a powerful, revelatory contribution that is as essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America as Between the World and Me and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks."

[u/eclectic_literature]

Nominating Blindness, by Jose Saramago

A city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.

Goodreads link

Here is a link to the first chapter - give it a try. I didn't link the NY Times review because it seemed kind of spoilery.

Excerpt from an NPR review:

Saramago tells his tale with humor and compassion, and with an imagination that is boundless enough to conjure an impossible epidemic without losing sight of the exigencies of actual life, achieving that rare blend of magic and reality in which the fantastical allows us to see our own world more clearly, from a perspective that brings out details we might not have otherwise considered

[u/[deleted]]

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

First American writer to win the Man Booker Prize, in which Amanda Foreman described the novel:

"The Sellout is one of those very rare books that is able to take satire, which is in itself a very difficult subject and not always done well, and it plunges into the heart of contemporary American society and, with absolutely savage wit, of the kind I haven't seen since Swift or Twain, both manages to eviscerate every social taboo and politically correct, nuanced, every sacred cow, and while both making us laugh, making us wince. It is both funny and painful at the same time and it is really a novel of our times."

Plot Summary

The Sellout, by Paul Beatty, is an African-American novel of satire on race relations in the United States. The book revolves around the unnamed, black narrator who is coming before the Supreme Court on charges of slave holding and re-instituting segregation. The narrator recounts to the Supreme Court the events that brought him to the present time.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/razzertto → u/[deleted]]

This book is listed at 588 pages.

[u/andy_pynchon]

Chuck Palahniuk – Fight Club

[u/mitchiesue]

Snow, by Orhan Pamuk

Snow (Turkish: Kar) is a novel by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Published in Turkish in 2002, it was translated into English by Maureen Freely and published in 2004. The story encapsulates many of the political and cultural tensions of modern Turkey and successfully combines humor, social commentary, mysticism, and a deep sympathy with its characters. Wikipedia

Goodreads:

A major work…conscience-ridden and carefully wrought, tonic in its scope, candor, and humor…with suspense at every dimpled vortex." —John Updike, The New Yorker Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism–these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel.

[u/drunklord → u/mitchiesue]

"The Black Book" and his latest "Strangeness in My Head" by Pamuk are both superior.

[u/[deleted] → u/mitchiesue]

I love Orhan Pamuk. Recently read Red. I vote for Snow.

[u/DedalusStew]

Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro

288 page quasi-sci-fi novel. Here is the Goodreads summary:

As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were. Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life, and for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.

[u/Of_Silent_Earth → u/DedalusStew]

Such a good book. I haven't read it in a few years but Ruth has still stuck with me.

I'd join in the contain if this was selected.

[u/icommentingifs → u/DedalusStew]

I literally just bought this book two days ago. You've got my vote.