Pick your top 2 books, the book with the most votes will be our choice for February!

List your top 2 below please!

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers
A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
Blessed Are the Cheesemakers - Sarah-Kate Lynch
Elsewhere - Gabrielle Zevin
Good Grief - Lolly Winston
Gould's Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan
Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie
Ishmael - Daniel Quinn
I Was Amelia Earhart - Jane Mendelsohn
Little Children - Tom Perotti
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
She's Not There - Jennifer Finney Boylan
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers - Mary Roach
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - Jose Saramago
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation - Lauren Willig
The Way of the Peaceful Warrior

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The nominations came from:
cheesygiraffe
Ishepoh
Ixion
Kyrissaean
Marlene-TC
MissyZ
morescode
Sunlightbub
zzz
Zmrzlina

I'll send a small surprise out to whoever gets the most correct guesses as to who nominated each book? (HINT: Some people posted their nominations on the old forum thread and not everyone has nominated 2 books! ;) )
Post your answers in this thread!

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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers
The literary sensation of the year, a book that redefines both family and narrative for the twenty-first century. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together.

A Walk in The Woods - Bill Bryson
Back in America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson decided to reacquaint himself with his native country by walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Georgia to Maine with Stephen Katz, a buddy from Iowa. Despite Katz's overwhelming desire to find cozy restaurants, he and Bryson eventually settle into their stride, and while on the trail they meet a bizarre assortment of hilarious characters. But A Walk in the Woods is more than just a laugh-out-loud hike. Bryson's acute eye is a wise witness to this beautiful but fragile trail, and as he tells its fascinating history, he makes a moving plea for the conservation of America's last great wilderness. An adventure, a comedy, and a celebration, A Walk in the Woods is destined to become a modern classic of travel literature.

Blessed Are the Cheesemakers - Sarah-Kate Lynch
In County Cork, Ireland, Joseph Corrigan and Joseph Feehan, better known as Corrie and Fee, are the aging manufacturers of world-renowned Coolarney Blue. Their chief worry is a conspicuous lack of successors, and the narrative chronicles the solution to their quest in the unlikely but fated convergence of two characters. Abbey Corrigan, granddaughter of worrywart Corrie, who hasn't seen her in 24 years, sits abandoned on the Pacific Island Ate'ate while her irrigation-obsessed and hypercritical husband gets biblical with the natives. Meanwhile, in Manhattan, Kit Stephens is a burned-out stockbroker and despondent alcoholic, heartbroken by the recent departure of his wife and now fired from his job. In a series of fantastic coincidences, the two end up at the Coolarney factory, a meeting that will forever change their lives and the future of cheese. The pace of this heartwarming novel is brisk, and the background detail so colorful that the reader will henceforth eat cheese with a new appreciation for its magical properties.

Elsewhere - Gabrielle Zevin
Welcome to Elsewhere. It is warm, with a breeze, and the beaches are marvelous. It’s quiet and peaceful. You can’t get sick or any older. Elsewhere is where fifteen-year-old Liz Hall ends up, after she has died. It is a place so like Earth, yet completely different. Here Liz will age backward from the day of her death until she becomes a baby again and returns to Earth. But Liz wants to turn sixteen, not fourteen again. She wants to get her driver’s license. She wants to graduate from high school and go to college. And now that she’s dead, Liz is being forced to live a life she doesn’t want with a grandmother she has only just met. And it is not going well. How can Liz let go of the only life she has ever known and embrace a new one? Is it possible that a life lived in reverse is no different from a life lived forward? This moving, often funny book about grief, death, and loss will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.

Good grief - Lolly Winston
When 36-year-old Sophie Stanton's husband dies of cancer, she desperately wants to be a graceful, composed Jackie Kennedy kind of widow. Alas, Sophie is more of a Jack Daniels kind. Self-medicating with cartons of ice cream for breakfast, showing up to work in her bathrobe and bunny slippers, soon she's lost not only her husband, but her job and her waistline. In an attempt to reinvent her life, Sophie moves to Ashland, Oregon, where she finds an embittered 13-year-old girl with a fascination for fire, a job as Salad Girl at the local French restaurant, and an alarmingly cute actor whom Sophie wishes she didn't like quite so much. Readers will laugh and cry along with Sophie as she proves to the world and herself that she can recover from something this devastating with darkly comic humor and her own type of class.

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish - Richard Flanagan
Gould's Book of Fish is a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia -- a world of convicts and colonists, thieves and catamites, whose bloody history is recorded in a very unusual taxonomy of fish. Billy Gould was a forger and thief sentenced to life imprisonment in a penal colony in Van Diemen's Land -- now Tasmania. After six months he escaped and boarded a whaler for the Americas, but before long his adventures landed him back in prison. The prison doctor utilizes Gould's painting talents to create an illustrated taxonomy of the country's exotic sea creatures, which he madly believes will assure his place in history and the Royal Society. Lost and re-created, destroyed and hidden, Gould's book resurfaces in the present day littered with scrawls recording his unutterably strange life and that of his country. Gould's Book of Fish is a tour de force that questions the reliability of history and science, and the substance of artistic creation.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie.
Rashid Khalifa, a renowned storyteller, has lost his touch. Once an "Ocean of Notions," he is now "The Shah of Blahs." Haroun, Rashid's son, embarks on an epic quest to restore his father's creativity. One of the problems is environmental: the pollutants of modern civilization have clouded the once-clear streams of story. Another is conspiratorial: the Union of Tight Lips, minions of the evil Khattam-Shud, confound communication by switching on rows of "darkbulbs." This book is more a postmodern fairy than a traditional novel. The story is allegorical rather than realistic, the characters emblematic and two-dimensional. Poignant parallels between Rashid's predicament and Rushdie's own situation are what hold the reader's interest. An amusing but lightweight entertainment.

Ishmael – Daniel Quinn
The narrator of this extraordinary tale is a man in search for truth. He answers an ad in a local newspaper from a teacher looking for serious pupils, only to find himself alone in an abandoned office with a full-grown gorilla who is nibbling delicately on a slender branch. "You are the teacher?" he asks incredulously. "I am the teacher," the gorilla replies. Ishmael is a creature of immense wisdom and he has a story to tell, one that no other human being has ever heard. It is a story that extends backward and forward over the lifespan of the earth from the birth of time to a future there is still time to save. Like all great teachers, Ishmael refuses to make the lesson easy; he demands the final illumination to come from within ourselves. Is it man's destiny to rule the world? Or is it a higher destiny possible for him-- one more wonderful than he has ever imagined?

I Was Amelia Earhart - Jane Mendelsohn
Past and present, fact and fiction, first-person and third blend into a life of the celebrated aviatrix-both before and after her famed disappearance in 1937, at age 39-that unfolds with the surreal precision of a dream. The Earhart limned here is materialistic, glory-seeking, sexually hungry, outrageously self-absorbed and utterly charismatic. Telling her tale with ruthless honesty in both her own voice and that of the self she sees, she speaks of her days as America's sweetheart, as the wife of publisher G.P. Putnam. Diverting from the historical record, she also speaks of the years after she and her navigator, crash-land on a South Sea island that they name "Heaven”, but that becomes a decent approximation as the years slip by and the castaways discover happiness in nature and in each other's arms. When rescue seems eminent, Earhart and Noonan take to the air one last time, and crash one last time, perhaps into eternity but in any case into an existence defined by not by control but by "abandonment"-a message in keeping with the story's theme but in fact an ironic one for a novel as calculatedly lovely and moving as this one.

Little Children by Tom Perotti
Perrotta sent up the foibles of high-schoolers in Election (1998) and of Ivy Leaguers in Joe College (2000). Here, in warmly humorous prose, he takes on the thirtysomething parents of young children. Handsome stay-at-home dad Todd, dubbed the Prom King by the moms at the playground, secretly grooves to Raffi and loves staging horrific train wrecks with his young son; he has flunked the bar exam twice and can sense his wife's increasing exasperation, but he can't force himself to study. Although Sarah has a Ph.D. in feminist studies, she is completely flummoxed by her toddler's temper tantrums and her husband's seeming infatuation with a pornographic Web site. Sarah and Todd fall into an unlikely affair, and although they know they are acting out of desperation to escape problems on the home front, their relationship is full of electric sex and genuine emotion. Perrotta, with a light but sure hand, expertly sketches the angst of the playground set and then amps up his material with a subplot involving a child molester. A fast-reading, wholly engaging novel.

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.

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed–even comforted–by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham’s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now. A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance–and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest work.

She's Not There : A Life in Two Genders - Jennifer Finney Boylan
The provocative bestseller She’s Not There is the winning, utterly surprising story of a person changing genders. By turns hilarious and deeply moving, Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the territory that lies between men and women, examines changing friendships, and rejoices in the redeeming power of family. Told in Boylan’s fresh voice, She’s Not There is about a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret. Through her clear eyes, She’s Not There provides a new window on the confounding process of accepting our true selves.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers - Mary Roach
Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers—some willingly, some unwittingly—have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating, ennobling account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries—from the anatomy labs and human-sourced pharmacies of medieval and nineteenth-century Europe to a human decay research facility in Tennessee, to a plastic surgery practice lab, to a Scandinavian funeral directors' conference on human composting. In her droll, inimitable voice, Roach tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ - Jose Saramago
This thoughtful, provocative study of Jesus' self-understanding as both son of God and an all-too-human family member caused debate in the Portuguese parliament and is likely to generate discussion here. Saramago reveals a deep knowledge of scripture, theology, and Christian history, but his true gift may lie in evoking the physical world. Christian writers have often downplayed the earthier aspects of the Incarnation, but here Jesus is "identified as a shepherd by the smell of goat." God says that it is "dissatisfaction, one of the qualities which make man in My image and likeness," which led him to desire a son on Earth. "There will be a church," God tells Jesus, giving a lengthy martyrology as evidence. Jesus dies as do many of us, lamenting "a life planned for death from the very beginning."

The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig
Deciding that true romantic heroes are a thing of the past, Eloise Kelly, an intelligent American who always manages to wear her Jimmy Choo suede boots on the day it rains,leaves Harvard’s Widener Library bound for England to finish her dissertation on the dashing pair of spies the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian. What she discovers is something the finest historians have missed: a secret history that begins with a letter dated 1803. Eloise has found the secret history of the Pink Carnation—the most elusive spy of all time, the spy who single-handedly saved England from Napoleon’s invasion.

The Way of the Peaceful Warrior – Dan Millman
During his junior year at the University of California, while training to become a world-champion gymnast, Dan Millman stumbled on a 94-year-old mentor nicknamed Socrates, a powerful, unpredictable, and elusive character. He taught a way to maximize performance using a unique blend of Eastern philosophy and Western fitness to cultivate the true essence of a champion - the "way of the peaceful warrior." Millman's first-person account of his odyssey into realms of light, darkness, mind, body, and spirit has since become an international bestseller about the universal quest for happiness.

My two votes are for;

Gould's Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan
Little Children - Tom Perotta


And my guesses for who nominated what are;

Ishepoh - Ishmael and The Way of the Peaceful Warrior

Ixion - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Middlesex

Kyrissaean - Little Children

Marlene-TC - She's Not There : A Life in Two Genders

MissyZ - Never Let Me Go and The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

morescode - Good grief and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Sunlightbub - A Walk in The Woods

zzz The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

cheesy - Blessed Are the Cheesemakers and I Was Amelia Earhart

I'm voting:

Gould's Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

My top 2 votes:

A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
Good Grief - Lolly Winston

Actually I have these 2 and no I didn't nominate either of them. So that means I have at least 2 more of these on TBR that I did nominate and no I'm not going to say if Z is right or not. :P All the books sound great to me and I would be happy with any of them. Well except I gave away my copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius :rolleyes:

Ok.......... change of plans, huh?


Then I vote for:

A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish - Richard Flanagan


And I'm not guessing who nominated what or I'd reveal what I nominated.

I'll go for A Walk in Woods and Good Grief.

Did you give it away because it was no good, Cheesy??..It's been sitting on my TBR's for a couple of years now :huh:

I vote for:

Little Children - Tom Perotti
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

I happen to have these 2 already so of course, that helped my decision a bit. :whistle:

Hard decision...
I guess I'll vote for these two:
Elsewhere
Never Let Me Go

If you guys pick the fish one I might have to skip that month...
I have a bit of a fish phobia (ichthyophobia)
don't laugh :whip:

Other than that... I'm game for any of the books that've been nominated

Heck! I may just have to skip the months where books I don't have are chosen. :P I have too many here to just go out and pay full price for a book for the club. :lol:

We'll see... the one by Kazuo Ishiguro would be tempting since it's Japanese. ;)

Don't they have libraries in the backwoods town you're from, hillbilly? :blink:

I just couldn't get into it at the time and I owed it to someone on the relays. It's a big book from my recollection. :unsure:

Good point... I can try that... I try to avoid the library as I'll go in and check out a bunch of books and then come home to all the books I have here and feel guilty. :ph43r:

:lol: :lol: :lol:

This hillbilly has a library. :whistle:

Well, that I can understand. I also feel that way when I pick up books. :(


But... I'd rather read something I really want to read then force myself to pick something up because "I should read it". I just have to get my interest peaked enough to enjoy it. ;)

How did I manage to post twice?

I remember some that were nominated on the other forum. Let's see...
Marlene-TC
Good Grief
Zmrzlina
Elsewhere
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Now the rest are guesses..
MissyZ
Never Let Me Go
Ishepoh
Ishmael
Sunlightbub
A Walk in Woods

Dang it! It loggedme out again. That was me above. :(

I'm voting for:


A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Oh... and I already listened to the audio book for "Good Grief" so if that one gets voted... I can at least discuss it some. ;) It's been a while though... that was back in March/April last year. :blink:

My vote would be A Walk in the Woods because I've looked at that before and thought about it, and also Secret History of the Pink Carnation because I loved it and would be really interested in hearing what others had to say! I was really proud that 5 of you added it to your wishlist after I had it in a swap! :wub:

What a great list of choices!!! Oh fun! :D

Only pick 2?!!

(I'm really bummed the poll isn't working, 'cos I had this great plan of how to vote for 2 or 4 extras... :whistle: :lol: )

And oh my gosh, who thought of Pink Carnation! Great idea! I'm voting for
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation and
Middlesex

(But if I had 5 votes, I'd also vote for A Walk in the Woods, Little Children, and She's Not There. :whistle: )



Now, as to who nominated which books.... Hmmm....

Well I think MissyZ might have nominated Pink Carnation -- either that, or Marlene nominated it secretly after she listed the others in the forum.

Might Cheesy have suggested the Cheesemakers? And Middlesex.

Ixion nominated I Was Amelia Earhart and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Morsie nominated Stiff.

MissyZ nominated Never Let Me Go and She's Not There.

Ishepoh nominated Gould's Book of Fish.

Sunlightbub nominated A Walk in the Woods and Ishmael.

zzz nominated The Way of the Peaceful Warrior and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.

Zmrzlina nominated Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Elsewhere.

Marlene nominated Little Children and Good Grief.



Now, you'll notice that I just guessed places for all the books, but never mentioned my name. That's 'cos I just "guessed" other people suggested any book or books that got my name on the list, just to mess with your minds! :lol:

I'm going to say that Marlene nominated Pink Carnation, and that Ishepoh nominated Ishmael...

The rest, I have no idea!

I'm not sure who likes reading what so I'm not even gonna try guessing who nominated what. I'd just like to say you all done well - so many good ones to pick from!

I vote for:

Little Children - Tom Perrotta
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

But there were so many others I liked to *runs off to wishlist to add a few more books* :whistle:

my votes go to:
elsewhere and stiffs

now for guessing who nominated what:

a heartbreaking work.... krissaean
a walk in the woods... ishepoh
blessed are the cheesemakers...morse
elsewhere...sunlightbub
good grief...ixion
goulds book of fish... zmrzlina
haroun and the sea of stories...zzz
ishmael....zmrzlina
i was amelia earhart...sunlight
little children...ixion
middlesex...cheesy
never let me go...missyz
she's not there...marlene
stiffs...morse
the gospel according to jesus christ...zzz
secret historyof the pink carnation...marlene
way of the peaceful warrior...ishepoh

these are all total guesses as i didnt read much of the nominations thread before the other forum closed down. it will be interesting to see who nominated what.

I'm voting for:
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers
A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is one of my fav all time books!

OK here are my votes:

Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish - Richard Flanagan
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides

I'll tell you what - There's quite a few books here that I'm going to add to my wishlist if they don't get picked! :D

How do you pick just two? :blink:

I'd just like to say that Blessed are the Cheesemakers is a fabulous book, I read it a year or so ago.

If I have to pick only two then I'm voting for:

Middlesex
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

(I was torned because Elsewhere, Stiff, Little Children, Ishmael and Gospel also sounded amazing. Good Grief and Heartbreaking Work are both on Mt. TBR)

he he he! Isn't this fun?
I am happy to see that there are some people voting for the book I suggested (which isn't Stiff, by the way :whistle: :P )

And, interestingly enough, the book that I am reading right now is The Reading Group by Elizabeth Noble (book ring)

I'm voting for
Middlesex
Elsewhere

I've got a few of them anyway, but the others deffo!

Great minds think alike! :thumbsup:

ETA: Looks like I need to start locating my copy of "Middlesex"... it could be ANYWHERE!!! :blink:

I've seen the movie and I forgot the name of it right now. It looks like it would be a interesting book. :)

I'm going to have to try to locate a copy! :erm:
Quickly!

I'm already in the middle of 5 books though so I have to finished at least a couple of those first. :whistle:

Sand :whip:

Are you making some suggestions for those whose votes are suppose to come during the day? :lol:

Instinct!!
With Cuba Gooding Jr and one of my favorite actors, Anthony Hopkins. :D

I have about 150 pages 'till the end :whistle: