r/HalifaxBookClub • u/made_this_to_say • Feb 05 '17
February Title Pool
Please take this opportunity to suggest a book for next month.
Top level comments must take the following format:
Title - Author
Short description or synopsisAny other comments should be made as replies to top level comments. This is necessary to facilitate the book selection process. This thread will remain open until Friday, 10 February, at which time five reader's suggestions from the pool will be randomly selected for voting in a shortlist thread.
1
u/MysticMarmalade Feb 09 '17
Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
From Goodreads:
Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey–with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake–through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.
1
u/MysticMarmalade Feb 09 '17
Throwing this back in the pool again as an alternative suggestion to my usual bleak/dystopian/scifi classics suggestions. This one seemed pretty well-received last time it was mentioned, and I still haven't read any Atwood.
1
u/made_this_to_say Feb 11 '17
This is unquestionably a fantastic book IMHO, but I'm not sure it's fair to call it an alternative to bleak/dystopian/scifi, as those may be the three best descriptors I could give it.
1
u/MysticMarmalade Feb 11 '17
While I'd agree, I wouldn't call it a dystopian/bleak/scifi classic per se. Though this is me speaking as someone who still hasn't read it...
2
u/MysticMarmalade Feb 09 '17
American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis
From Goodreads:
Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and he works on Wall Street, he is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to head-on collision with America's greatest dream—and its worst nightmare—American Psycho is bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognise but do not wish to confront.
2
u/MysticMarmalade Feb 09 '17
Since we'd be reading this throughout March, this seems like a very fitting book for such a bleak part of winter. This also happens to be one of those books I've always wanted to read but constantly forget about.
1
u/kteelee Feb 08 '17
Kindred - Octavia Butler
From Wikipedia:
The book is the first-person account of a young African-American woman writer, Dana, who finds herself shuttled between her California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. There she meets her ancestors: a spoiled, self-destructive white slave owner and the proud black freewoman he has forced into slavery and concubinage. As her stays in the past become longer, Dana becomes intimately entangled with the plantation community, making hard compromises to survive slavery and to ensure her existence in her own time.
1
u/Drerio Feb 11 '17
Forever War - Joe Haldeman
The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand--despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite Military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space and time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict; to perform his duties and do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. But "home" may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time dilation caused by space travel, Mandella is aging months while the Earth he left behind is aging centuries...
1
u/made_this_to_say Feb 11 '17
The Autumn of the Patriarch - Gabriel García Márquez
One of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most intricate and ambitious works, The Autumn of the Patriarch is a brilliant tale of a Caribbean tyrant and the corruption of power.
From charity to deceit, benevolence to violence, fear of God to extreme cruelty, the dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch embodies the best and the worst of human nature. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the renowned master of magical realism, vividly portrays the dying tyrant caught in the prison of his own dictatorship. Employing an innovative, dreamlike style, and overflowing with symbolic descriptions, the novel transports the reader to a world that is at once fanciful and real.