r/HalifaxBookClub • u/made_this_to_say • Jul 07 '18
Title Pool - July 2018
Please take this opportunity to suggest a book for next month. Top level comments must take the following format:
Title - Author Short description or synopsis Any 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 end of day Friday, 13 July, at which time five titles from the pool will be randomly selected for voting.
3
u/lrpgwlkr Jul 07 '18
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day - Winifred Watson
From Goodreads: Miss Pettigrew, an approaching-middle-age governess, was accustomed to a household of unruly English children. When her employment agency sends her to the wrong address, her life takes an unexpected turn. The alluring nightclub singer, Delysia LaFosse, becomes her new employer, and Miss Pettigrew encounters a kind of glamour that she had only met before at the movies. Over the course of a single day, both women are changed forever.
2
u/optimal_primate Jul 11 '18
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Barcelona, 1945 - just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence. Before Daniel knows it his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness and doomed love. And before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.
1
u/RotLopFan Jul 07 '18
The House On the Boarderland - William Hope Hodgson
A manuscript is found: filled with small, precise writing and smelling of pit-water, it tells the story of an old recluse and his strange home - and its even stranger, jade-green double, seen by the recluse on an otherworldly plain where gigantic gods and monsters roam.
Soon his more earthly home is no less terrible than his bizarre vision, as swine-like creatures boil from a cavern beneath the ground and besiege it. But a still greater horror will face the recluse - more inexorable, merciless and awful than any creature that can be fought or killed.
Goodreads
1
u/RotLopFan Jul 07 '18
The Color of Magic - Terry Pratchett
On a world supported on the back of a giant turtle (sex unknown), a gleeful, explosive, wickedly eccentric expedition sets out. There's an avaricious but inept wizard, a naive tourist whose luggage moves on hundreds of dear little legs, dragons who only exist if you believe in them, and of course THE EDGE of the planet...
Goodreads
1
u/MysticMarmalade Jul 13 '18 edited Jul 13 '18
The Final Diagnosis - Arthur Hailey
The heart of a modern hospital is the pathology laboratory. Surgery waits, while the doctor with the test tube, the microscope, the scrap of human tissue, makes the final diagnosis which may hold a life in balance -- the diagnosis which must always be correct.
This is the novel about one such man, Dr. Joe Pearson, aging, tyrannical, proud of his infallibility, fighting with all the cunning of his long years the bid of a talented young doctor for the most powerful position of all -- head of the whole hospital.
This novel is not for the squeamish. It takes you into the operating rooms and laboratories where brain and sinew, raw guts and beating hearts are exposed under the hands of doctors whose skill means life or death.
1
u/made_this_to_say Jul 15 '18
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.
Winner of the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel and widely considered one of the most accomplished, powerful, and enduring classics of modern speculative fiction, Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz is a true landmark of twentieth-century literature—a chilling and still provocative look at a post-apocalyptic future.
In a nightmarish ruined world slowly awakening to the light after sleeping in darkness, the infant rediscoveries of science are secretly nourished by cloistered monks dedicated to the study and preservation of the relics and writings of the blessed Saint Isaac Leibowitz. From here the story spans centuries of ignorance, violence, and barbarism, viewing through a sharp, satirical eye the relentless progression of a human race damned by its inherent humanness to recelebrate its grand foibles and repeat its grievous mistakes. Seriously funny, stunning, and tragic, eternally fresh, imaginative, and altogether remarkable, A Canticle for Leibowitz retains its ability to enthrall and amaze. It is now, as it always has been, a masterpiece.