You'll love this one...!! A book club & more discussion

In true celebration of the new year the theme for next month is new beginnings (major changes etc).

If you lead last month then it is up to you whether or not you choose to nominate this month.

Please can you give me all of the following:

The title, the author

Brief description of the book

**If you nominate a book I assume that you are willing to lead the discussion. It's not hard to do I promise!**

IF YOU DON'T GIVE ME A DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK I WON'T ACCEPT YOUR NOMINATION

One nomination per person please. Thank you!

You have 3 days to nominate!

I am surprised taht there are no nominations yet,s o I will nominate

The Echo Maker A Novelby Richard Powers.

This is a new beginnings book on two levels as it is a new beginning on an individual level and it is also an allegorical look at a changed USA (post 9-11). This is a comnplex book and it wouldn't surprise me if there aren't other layers of new beginnngs and major change.

Here is the description (nto from Good reads so you can look at that too to decide if its one you want to read):
Late one night, near the Platte River in Kearney, Nebraska, where the sandhill cranes pause every year in their spectacular migration, Mark Schluter flips his truck. Brain damaged, he develops Capgras syndrome, which makes him think that his sister, Karin, is an impostor. Despondent at Mark's constant requests to produce his "real" sister, Karin writes a letter to Gerald Weber, a cognitive neurologist whose case histories of bizarre brain disorders have best-selling appeal (think Oliver Sacks). Karin sees her brother’s recovery as a chance to “restart them both.” Weber, who is suffering a very different kind of identity crisis himself, agrees to examine Mark. Powers has taken the primal question--"Who am I?"--and traced it to its chemical elements, exploring the ways the mind constructs smooth narratives out of messy reality. But his investigation is larger than the individual, leading him to explore how humans as a species smooth out the rough spots, tuning out the natural world, straying from the instincts that might keep us alive on our own long journey. Powers has complete command of storytelling skills, building questions of both plot and philosophy so deftly that, in their denouemont, there is no surprise, only recognition. A remarkable novel, from one of our greatest novelists, and a book that will change all who read it.

Richard Powers’s “Echo Maker” is a wise and elegant post-9/11 novel. It is not an elegy for How We Used to Live or a salute to Coming to Grips, but a quiet exploration of how we survive, day to day.

Gone by Michael Grant


Mal Peet The Guardian, Saturday 18 April 2009 Article history

It's axiomatic that for the fun to start the adults must be disposed of. Michael Grant does this in the most perfunctory and audacious way. From a chunk of southern California, everyone over the age of 15 vanishes in an instant, just like that - poof! Teachers in mid-sentence, drivers from cars, parents at home, all gone. These opening pages are excellent; the "liberated" children's swift modulation from thrilled excitement to panic is deftly, economically and wittily written. (The first screams come when the kids realise their cellphones and the internet are down.)

It transpires that the small town of Perdido Beach and its environs have been isolated from the world by an egg-shaped force-field. Our hero, Sam Templeton, and his friends Astrid, Quinn and Edilio assume responsibility for holding anarchy at bay. A sweet girl called "Mother" Mary takes charge of the pre-school nursery. In a lovely touch, a boy named Albert sombrely reopens McDonald's, aware that the availability of number-one combos is the linchpin of civilisation as we know it. Then a convoy of cars from Coates Academy creeps into town. Coates is a residential school for "difficult" (for which read "deeply weird") children. The leader of the contingent is Caine, a charismatic boy who mellifluously assumes power. He is, of course, Bad, and soon enough a battle between Sam and Caine, Good and Evil, develops.


This is from the gurdian newspaper

Its the beginning of a new life without adults

Just to clarify: it looks as if "Gone" is a young adult book (published by HarperTeen), albeit a good hefty one.

Cecily wrote: "Just to clarify: it looks as if "Gone" is a young adult book (published by HarperTeen), albeit a good hefty one. "

it is

But is that a problem? I am 31 and I eenjoyed it

Not necessarily a problem, but as this group is aimed more at adults than young adults, I thought it worth pointing out so that people could make a more informed choice.

I've really struggled with a suggestion for this theme, as too many books came to mind.

Oryx and Crake (Atwood) - too apocalyptic?
Riddley Walker (Hoban) - ditto, and somewhat obscure?
Middlesex (Eugenides) - maybe not a subject everyone would be comfortable with?
Small Island (Levy) - for Brits, the TV adaptation might be too fresh in our minds (but maybe that would be a good thing?)
Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Gau) - plenty of Sinophiles in the group
Cold Spring Harbout (Yates) - brilliant

But in the end, I'm going to nominate
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. It's a short but powerful (and award-winning) novella about the honeymoon of a couple of newlyweds in the very early 1960s. Both shy and unable to talk about intimate things, and thus misunderstanding each other - lost opportunities and the consequence of inaction and, to a lesser extent, action. Painful in places and ironic that set in the "swinging" 60s, but they can't live like that. It is interesting to compare it with Margaret Drabble's The Millstone. Two very different stories, but both feature women struggling with sexual intimacy against the zeitgeist of the 60s.

But if anyone wants to nominate any of the others that I didn't, please feel free.

Cecily wrote: "Not necessarily a problem, but as this group is aimed more at adults than young adults, I thought it worth pointing out so that people could make a more informed choice."

you have a point regarding people being informed

Though there is nothing in the group that says the group is aimed for adults:-

its states

The group's main theme is recommendations! Name any book you have read and enjoyed and receive recommendations from other goodreads users as to what you may want to read next!!

& is followed by

Whatever you are into I'm sure someone out there can recommend a similar title to you, classics, horror, chick lit, memoirs, children's books, crime, fiction, humour, you name it!!
[close:] The group's main theme is recommendations! Name any book you have read and enjoyed and receive recommendations from other goodreads users as to what you may want to read next!!

Put the title of the book in the topic line and a brief description in the message box! Voila!

Whatever you are into I'm sure someone out there can recommend a similar title to you, classics, horror, chick lit, memoirs, children's books, crime, fiction, humour, you name it!!

Goodness me, I wasn't trying to generate an argument about the precise definition of the group.

It's just that it appears to comprise mostly adults who mostly discuss adult fiction. We have had YA books as monthly reads, but as it's not the norm, I just thought it worth pointing it out.

Sorry if you, Afsana, or anyone else has taken offence. That wasn't my intention at all.

Cecily wrote: "Goodness me, I wasn't trying to generate an argument about the precise definition of the group.

It's just that it appears to comprise mostly adults who mostly discuss adult fiction. We have had Y..."

I apologise aswell-I wasn't meaning to set off an argument either.

II was just pointing out that its varied group and a good book but maybe I could have phrased it better

SOmetimes its hard to get a point across over the internet or on email rather than facee to face and it comes off all wrong

I haven't taken offence and am sure noone else has either.

No problem whatsoever if people want to choose a young adults book as the monthly read, but good idea to let people know.

Seeing as I bought the book ages ago (and Cecily has reminded me) I will nominate

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license...records my first name simply as Cal."

So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.