EoFF Book Club

[Freya]

60770

The last book club was a year ago. I want to read more. I love recommendations. So Let's have another book club for 2015! We'll come up with some ideas for January and then we'll use this thread to discuss it.

Some thoughts about it personally:



Let's try for non classics.

Unless that classic really needs to be read and we agree collectively, experiencing something new for everyone or almost everyone would probably create more discussion.


Let's try to avoid super niche genres.

You may think that a book about woodworking and it's exciting tales are awesome but when recommending something, try to think of something the majority would at least be okay with to spend the time to read.


Everyone can nominate

We're not going to have one person throw out ideas and then decide on that. I want everyone's input.


Let's try a book a month.

Let's try to have one a month, it'll keep this thread going and active while not pushing ourselves too hard.



Any other ideas or suggestions on how we can run this? Who's in for 2015?

[Shauna]

Good luck! ;)


I won't be participating as I am trying to get through Game of Thrones before I die of old age.

[Jinx]

lol









But yes, I am in to take part! I hope it works this time. xD

[Freya]

I figured giving ourselves almost a month to figure out how we're gonna do it may work better. Plus i made a pretty banner. :D

I plan on reading a book for every month at least so might as well have others join in. Heck Jinx, if it's only you and I, OH WELL.

[Pumpkin]

I cannae afford a bunch of books tho D:

[Jinx]

Library! :D

[Pumpkin]

My car is broken :(







(that would cost more than the books)

Might be able to find some online depending what they are. Like Star Girl and the Giver I found online for freesies

I want to read Star Girl again now

[chionos]

I'd like to do this. It will be especially nice to avoid the classics since I tend to fall back on those a lot and end up not reading newer things as I should. I'll read literally anything the rest of you pick, so have at it.

[Night Fury]

I'd be happy to join in with this!

shion do you have a kindle or e-reader?

[krissy]

I suggest 'reading Lolita in Tehran'
it is sort of about classics so good start for a group that doesn't wanna read them

[Pumpkin]

I'd be happy to join in with this!

shion do you have a kindle or e-reader?

I do not, but I think I can read kindle books on my amazon account on the computer

[Night Fury]

You may be able to torrent some pdf files of books but shhhh I never said that >.>

[noxious.sunshine]

tuebl.ca



I'm interested.

[Pumpkin]

Okay then I suggest Star Girl after krissy's book :hyper:

[fire_of_avalon]

Yes I have a Kindle which makes my ability to participate 100000000% easier. Because I make time to read, but not to go book shopping in a physical store, what with all the coffee smells and bright colors and too many people.

I suggest we read............ something! I'll have to think on it.

[Jinx]

A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

WE MUST

READ

[chionos]

PICK SOMETHING.

Any of the books mentioned so far would work for me. I'll read anything. Everything.

[Night Fury]

I would like to recommend The Help by Kathryn Stockett!
(I have a PDF copy of this too, to email to all kindle users if need be!)


The Help, Kathryn Stockett's debut novel, tells the story of black maids working in white Southern homes in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, and of Miss Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a 22-year-old graduate from Ole Miss, who returns to her family's cotton plantation, Longleaf, to find that her beloved maid and nanny, Constantine, has left and no one will tell her why. Skeeter tries to behave as a proper Southern lady: She plays bridge with the young married women; edits the newsletter for the Junior League; and endures her mother's constant advice on how to find a man and start a family. However, Skeeter's real dream is to be a writer, but the only job she can find is with the Jackson Journal writing a housekeeping advice column called "Miss Myrna." Skeeter knows little about housekeeping, so she turns to her friend's maid, Aibileen, for answers and finds a lot more.

[chionos]

I would like to recommend The Help by Kathryn Stockett!
(I have a PDF copy of this too, to email to all kindle users if need be!)


The Help, Kathryn Stockett's debut novel, tells the story of black maids working in white Southern homes in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, and of Miss Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a 22-year-old graduate from Ole Miss, who returns to her family's cotton plantation, Longleaf, to find that her beloved maid and nanny, Constantine, has left and no one will tell her why. Skeeter tries to behave as a proper Southern lady: She plays bridge with the young married women; edits the newsletter for the Junior League; and endures her mother's constant advice on how to find a man and start a family. However, Skeeter's real dream is to be a writer, but the only job she can find is with the Jackson Journal writing a housekeeping advice column called "Miss Myrna." Skeeter knows little about housekeeping, so she turns to her friend's maid, Aibileen, for answers and finds a lot more.

Not that I wouldn't read it again, but I've read this already, and I'm guessing others here have too. And those that haven't have probably at least seen the movie. It's a good book, though, so I'm not nixing the suggestion. Just something to think about.

[theundeadhero]

The Secret Lives of Lobsters is totally not niche and full of super interesting things about lobsters and their lives. It's non-fiction. Those secretive bastards.

[rarity]

I'd love to join in ! Sounds like a lot of fun x3

I know it's a classic but The Picture of Dorian Gray is a fantastic book, my favourite. Non-classic recommendation would be The Sight by David Clement-Davis.

[Freya]

Everyone is welcome to join! Locky linked her synopsis for the help but I'ma link a picture and it again just so everyone has them all together. I'm taking this info form goodreads.

Here's krissys suggestion:


https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1397751318l/7603.jpg


Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

Here's Shions suggestion:


https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1335947642l/22232.jpg


From the day she arrives at quiet Mica High in a burst of color and sound, hallways hum “Stargirl.” She captures Leo Borlock’s heart with one smile. She sparks a school-spirit revolution with one cheer. The students of Mica High are enchanted. Until they are not. Leo urges her to become the very thing that can destroy her - normal.

This is the one Jinx suggested:


https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1350364499l/15811545.jpg


This is Ruth Ozeki's third novel, shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize 2013. In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine.

Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.

Full of Ozeki’s signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

Here's Locky's suggestion:


https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1346100365l/4667024.jpg


Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women--mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends--view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.


And here are the two rarity suggested:



https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320467562l/5297.jpg


Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author’s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray’s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, “a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.” Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde’s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray’s relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.”

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388297746l/58085.jpg


In the shadow of an abandoned castle, a wolf pack seeks shelter. The she-wolf's pups will not be able to survive the harsh Transylvanian winter. And they are being stalked by a lone wolf, Morgra, possessed of a mysterious and terrifying power known as the Sight. Morgra knows that one of the pups born beneath the castle holds a key to power even stronger than her own power that could give her control of this world and the next. But the pack she hunts will do anything to protect their own, even if it means setting in motion a battle that will involve all of nature, including the creature the wolves fear the most: Man.

[Pumpkin]

Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

[Freya]

Thanks! Edited it in!

[Jinx]

Guys, A Tale for the Time Being is SO GOOD. Not just good. It's life-changing. Truly. A year later and thinking about that book still gives me shivers (and I plan on re-reading it again soon regardless!)

I've read The Help, and it's also a really good book. I'm not really raring to re-read it, but if that's what we chose, I'd be happy to.

Stargirl is another excellent choice. One of my favorite books.

[Pumpkin]

So now do we take it to a vote? Except we shouldn't vote for our own because obvious

We should read them all though!

I'm also reading My Sweet Audrina right now but.... its a pretty messed up book so I don't think its for everyone :erm:

[Jinx]

Yeah, it might be nice to make a rule that you can't vote for your own.

[Aerith's Knight]

I can suggest Epic Fantasy books if people want. I've read about 120 of them. I'm actually kind of running out of series and am reading them a second or third time.

Free suggestion: Kingkiller Chronicles: starting with "The name of the Wind." Likely one of the best book series I've ever read.

[Fox]

Free suggestion: Kingkiller Chronicles: starting with "The name of the Wind." Likely one of the best book series I've ever read.

Yes, if Pat Rothfuss ever gets around to finishing book 3, that would be great! He and Brandon Sanderson are my favourite fantasy authors at the moment

[Chibi Youkai]

Free suggestion: Kingkiller Chronicles: starting with "The name of the Wind." Likely one of the best book series I've ever read.

Yes, if Pat Rothfuss ever gets around to finishing book 3, that would be great! He and Brandon Sanderson are my favourite fantasy authors at the moment

I know. He put books one and two out super fast, and then book three is just taking it's time. He recently put out a short story in the same universe though. Supposedly it's pretty good.

[The Man]

Book two actually took like four years to come out after the first one, even though he was apparently done with it when the first book was published. He revised it after some of the criticism the first book received from some quarters, though.

I'd suggest The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, which is probably one of the best books I've ever read


Le Guin's introduction to the 1976 publication of the book identifies Left Hand of Darkness as a "thought experiment" to explore society without men or women, where individuals share the biological and emotional makeup of both sexes.

The Left Hand of Darkness is set in the "Hainish" universe, which Le Guin introduced three years earlier in Rocannon's World, her first novel. The series describes the interplanetary expansion started by the first race of humanity on the planet Hain, leading to the formation of the League of All Worlds, and eventually expanding to the eighty-three world collective called the Ekumen.

This novel takes place many centuries in the future - no date is given, though the year 4870 has been suggested. An envoy, Genly Ai, is on a planet called Winter ("Gethen" in the language of its own people) to convince the citizens to join the Ekumen. Winter is, as its name indicates, a planet that is always cold, and its citizens are "ambisexual," spending the majority of time as asexual "potentials." They only adopt sexual attributes once-monthly, during a period of sexual receptiveness and high fertility, called kemmer, in which individuals can assume male or female attributes, depending on context and relationships. These conditions have affected the development of civilizations on Winter. Among other things, the planet has never known war.

[noxious.sunshine]

My sister has been raving about "The Goldfinch" lately

Just throwing that out there.

Shion- I love the Star Girl books. My sister got them for me in high school and like I always wanted to be like her.. She's such an awesome character.

[chionos]

Okay, so I wasn't going to recommend anything, but I guess I will since this has become the Let's Recommend Books thread.

First up, a book nobody's going to want to read. Why suggest it, then? Well, because I feel I should just in case there's someone out there who might decide to read it on their own.

60856

Second up, one of my favorite authors, Morgan Llewelyn. My son's middle name came from this book:

60857

Thirdly, another of my favorite authors, and one of my favorite books of all time. This is a must read:

60858

[Freya]

I have the name of the wind but haven't read it yet. So that'd be an easy one for me to grab.

[rarity]

Name of the wind is fantastic, I've read it. It's a bit lengthy in parts but overall a good book.

[Freya]

Our suggestions are all over the place. Maybe we should think of genres or themes for the months? Like a Fantasy month, a popular fiction month, a horror month, a supernatural month etc etc That may get people out of their normal reading comfort zone

[Aerith's Knight]

Free suggestion: Kingkiller Chronicles: starting with "The name of the Wind." Likely one of the best book series I've ever read.

Yes, if Pat Rothfuss ever gets around to finishing book 3, that would be great! He and Brandon Sanderson are my favourite fantasy authors at the moment

I know. He put books one and two out super fast, and then book three is just taking it's time. He recently put out a short story in the same universe though. Supposedly it's pretty good.

Yeah, I have that book. It's nice, but I wouldn't buy it as hardcover. It's not very long. Good though.

Have you guys also read the new one from the Stormlight saga? Man, the book is like 1200 pages but so worth it.

[rarity]

Our suggestions are all over the place. Maybe we should think of genres or themes for the months? Like a Fantasy month, a popular fiction month, a horror month, a supernatural month etc etc That may get people out of their normal reading comfort zone


I think this is the best course of action, it makes more sense.

[Fox]

Yeah, I have that book. It's nice, but I wouldn't buy it as hardcover. It's not very long. Good though.

Have you guys also read the new one from the Stormlight saga? Man, the book is like 1200 pages but so worth it.

Part way through it as we speak. I tell ya, it is not the best size for reading on the train (I wish there was a part 1 and 2 like with the first one) but it's a fantastic story.


Book two actually took like four years to come out after the first one, even though he was apparently done with it when the first book was published. He revised it after some of the criticism the first book received from some quarters, though.

"Hmm, people didn't think there was enough emotional drama in book 1. Better spend 4 years adding Felurian..." :roll2

[Chibi Youkai]

Have you guys also read the new one from the Stormlight saga? Man, the book is like 1200 pages but so worth it.

Yes! Words of Radiance was awesome. It ended in a pretty amazing spot too, not to cliffhanger-y, but leaving you anxiously ready for the next book, which is probably still two or three years away, since he's still in the pre-writing stages.

[Aerith's Knight]

Have you guys also read the new one from the Stormlight saga? Man, the book is like 1200 pages but so worth it.

Yes! Words of Radiance was awesome. It ended in a pretty amazing spot too, not to cliffhanger-y, but leaving you anxiously ready for the next book, which is probably still two or three years away, since he's still in the pre-writing stages.

Man, it sucks to hear that. I'll have probably reread that book 5 or 6 times by then.

Also, some other good series: Painted man/Warded man series, Lies of Locke Lamora series, Black company (this one you have to get into)

[Leigh]

Love Monster by Rachel Bright
60876 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Love-Monster-Rachel-Bright/dp/0007445466)
Seriously. There is more heart in these 32 pages of pure cuteness than any book of the last ten years.

[Jinx]

I think maybe we should start/split the thread to have a book recommendations thread that isn't for the book club. This thread is getting kind of messy because people are talking about books they're not suggesting for the club.

Not that I hate book suggestions, just that it might be nice to keep this tidy. :)

[chionos]

I think maybe we should start/split the thread to have a book recommendations thread that isn't for the book club. This thread is getting kind of messy because people are talking about books their not suggesting for the club.

Not that I hate book suggestions, just that it might be nice to keep this tidy. :)

Agreed, thinking the same thing.

[Shauna]

I think maybe we should start/split the thread to have a book recommendations thread that isn't for the book club. This thread is getting kind of messy because people are talking about books they're not suggesting for the club.

Not that I hate book suggestions, just that it might be nice to keep this tidy. :)

I legit have no idea where the suggestions for the club start/end. ._.

[Freya]

LET'S START OVER:

What genre do you want january to be?

Then we'll go for suggestion there.

[rarity]

I think to start the new year, a nice light novel would be nice. perhaps a light fantasy.

[Aerith's Knight]

Mystery Fantasy Science Fiction Thriller Romance.

[Freya]

I half wrote one of those once

[Aerith's Knight]

Adult Psychological Metafiction Fairy Tale Horror Mythology Documentary... Realistic, of course. Would be silly otherwise.

[Freya]

Yeahhhhhh My nano novel kinda fell under that one. Do I win this battle?

I should finish these crazy genre idea novels...

[Freya]

Guuuuys what's our book?

[Jinx]

See Spot Run.

[Pant Leg Eater from the Bad World]

I dunno how I just noticed this thread.
I wanna do this.
But I don't know if I will be able to fill it into my January book reading schedule, as I am going to try and read as many Tolkein books as possible.

[Jinx]

There's a suggestion! The Hobbit!

[Freya]

OKay. The hobbit it is!

[Pant Leg Eater from the Bad World]

Yay!

[Jinx]

*fistbump*

[chionos]

Good grief. Seriously. What's the book?

[Jinx]

The Hobbit.

[Pant Leg Eater from the Bad World]

So has anybody else started reading The Hobbit yet? I'm about halfway through right now. Slow and steady. I haven't been in much of a reading mood lately. So. Meh.

[Jinx]

No, I'm at AGDQ and my current book is The Subtle Knife. I've actually got a few books I need to read to get back to the library...I probably won't be reading it for another couple of weeks.