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Tigerlily

FEBRUARY BOOK CHOICES - YOU DECIDE!

Which books would you like to be read in February? All you have to do is vote for one of the books below. Read the blurbs and see if there is anything that looks interesting and the book with the most votes by 23rd January will be chosen to be read from 1st Feb onwards.

There is also another poll running so please take a look at that one too as there may be something on that list of interest to you. There will be two books chosen but you don't have to read both if you don't want to.

1. Death by Chocolate by Toby Moore - 240 pages

In the Twenty-First Century of Our Lord, Christ the Fit, it has been illegal to be fat for three years, except in Louisiana and Alabama, where they cling to their chicken-fried-fullest-fat-cream-sodden-gumbo-dunkin'-mall-waddling-lives as if their souls depended on it. Matt Devlin is a Health Enforcement Agent. His is humdrum work, busting the eateasys selling illegal burgers and chocolate, checking weight permits, issuing tickets and looking for humonsters, the really big ones. When a beautiful woman is found dead, dressed only in sweet-scented brown (made from the rarest cocoa bean) Homicide call for help. It looks like murder, but is it also a food crime?

2. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer - 368 pages

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, Oskar sets out to solve the mystery of a key he discovers in his father's closet. It is a search which leads him into the lives of strangers, through the five boroughs of New York, into history, to the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, and on an inward journey which brings him ever closer to some kind of peace.

3. Bitter Sweets by Roopa Farooki - 300 pages

In 1950s Bengal, Henna Rub, a precocious, wayward teenager, brings off a brilliant marriage to a wealthy romantic, Ricky Karim, trapping him with a web of lies that she has spun with her wheeler-dealer father. And so on his wedding night, believing himself married to an educated, sonnet-reading, tennis-playing soul mate, Ricky is horrified to discover that his new bride is in fact a lazy, illiterate, shopkeeper's daughter. As Ricky and Henna uneasily tolerate their loveless marriage of convenience, the way is paved for a future of double lives and complicit deception an unspoken family tradition that is inherited by their daughter Shona, who elopes with her secret love to live above a subcontinental sweet shop in 1980s South London. But two decades later, with her own children grown, it is Shona who is forced to discover unpalatable truths about her loved ones, and come to terms with the lies which superficially hold the three generations of her family together ...and which are really keeping them apart. 'A major fiction debut both commercial and literary. Charmingly entertaining on the one hand, with serious points to make about human behaviour on the other.' - "Publishing News".'Combining the cultural heritage of Monica Ali's Brick Lane with the intimate humour of family life in Roddy Doyle's novels, Farooki explores complex and sensitive issues of ethnic difference, the values of family and attitudes to relationships in an enlightening and tender way' - "Easy Living". 'A funny and moving debut' - Bella.

4. Brick Lane by Monica Ali - 496 pages

At the tender age of nineteen, Nazneen's life is turned upside down. After an arranged marriage to a man twenty years her elder she exchanges her Bangladeshi village home for a block of flats in London's East End. In this new world, where poor people can be fat and even dogs go on diets, she struggles to make sense of her existence - and to do her duty to her husband. A man of inflated ideas (and stomach), he sorely tests her compliance. But Nazneen submits, as she must do, to Fate and devotes her life to raising her family and slapping down her demons of discontent. Until Karim, a young radical, steps into the picture. Against a background of escalating racial and gang conflict, they embark on an affair that finally forces Nazneen to take control of her life...

5. The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall - 224 pages

The world has changed. War rages in South America and China, and Britain - now entirely dependent on the US for food and energy - is run by an omnipresent dictatorship known simply as The Authority. Assets and weapons have been seized, every movement is monitored and women are compulsorily fitted with contraceptive devices.This is Sister's story of her attempt to escape the repressive regime. From the confines of her Lancaster prison cell she tells of her such for The Carhullan Army, a quasi-mythical commune of 'unofficial' women rumoured to be living in a remote part of Cumbria...

6. The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant - 416 pages

Alessandra is not quite fifteen when her prosperous merchant father brings a young painter back with him from Holland to adorn the walls of the new family chapel. She is fascinated by his talents and envious of his abilities and opportunities to paint to the glory of God. Soon her love of art and her lively independence are luring her into closer involvement with all sorts of taboo areas of life. On excursions into the streets of night-time Florence she observes a terrible evil stalking the city and witnesses the rise of the fiery young priest, Savanarola, who has set out to rid the city of vice, richness, even art itself. Alessandra must make crucial decisions about the shape of her adult life, as Florence itself must choose between the old ways of the luxury-loving Medicis and the asceticism of Savanorola. And through it all, there is the painter, whose love will change everything.

7. Wicked by Gregory Maguire - 512 pages

An astonishingly rich re-creation of the land of Oz, this book retells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, who wasn't so wicked after all. Taking readers past the yellow brick road and into a phantasmagoric world rich with imagination and allegory, Gregory Maguire just might change the reputation of one of the most sinister characters in literature.

8. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold - 256 pages

My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon. Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet ..."The Lovely Bones" is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting - but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places. 'Spare, beautiful and brutal prose ..."The Lovely Bones" is compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing.' - "The Times". 'Moving and compelling ...It will put an imperceptible but stealthily insistent hold on you.I sat down in the morning to read the first couple of pages; five hours later, I was still there, book in hand, transfixed.' - Maggie O'Farrell, "Sunday Telegraph".

9. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier - 448 pages

A soldier wounded in the Civil War, Inman turns his back on the carnage of the battlefield and begins the treacherous journey home to Cold Mountain, and to Ada, the woman he loved before the war began. As Inman attempts to make his way across the mountains, through the devastated landscape of a soon-to-be-defeated South, Ada struggles to make a living from the land her once-wealthy father left when he died. Neither knows if the other is still alive.

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Reading: Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg
Reading Challenge 2009: 8
2008: 4
2007: 10

Ruth · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 3:13 pm Post subject:

Gone for Bitter Sweets, although I also have Wicked and Brick Lane on my tbr. Have already read The Lovely Bones - great book!
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"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."

Tigerlily · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 3:27 pm Post subject:

Have gone for The Birth of Venus as it's being discussed on Radio 4's book club next month. Hard choice this month as so many good titles to choose from.
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Reading: Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg
Reading Challenge 2009: 8
2008: 4
2007: 10

blueflower · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 4:42 pm Post subject:

, I'll have to go for the Birth Venus as I already have it. But I am going to have to get The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall. Living in Cumbria as I do it could be interesting. I read out the bit about the army of unofficial women living in remote part of Cumbria and he burst out laughing and remarked that at least no one would find them! So I will have to read it.

Amie · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 7:55 pm Post subject:

The Birth of Venus is fantastic, so is Extremely Loud..., and I loved Wicked.
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Kill the tbr - currently 124
Currently reading:
War and Peace - Leo Tolsty
Wild Swans by Jung Chan
The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing

amarie · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:34 pm Post subject:

Went for The Birth of Venus as it's the only one I have in my huge TBR! I've read Brick Lane & The Lovely Bones before.
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http://www.readitswapit.co.uk/MyBooks.aspx

heathera · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 8:55 pm Post subject:

I've gone for The Lovely Bones as it's been on my tbr for ages, also I heard the Radio 4 review on it a couple of weeks ago and I definitely want to read it SOON! I've read Brick Lane before and loved it. Like the look of Bitter Sweets as well.
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Currently Reading:

The Moonlit Cage - Linda Holeman

1001 Book Challenge:
2009 - 4
2008 - 14
Books Available for Swapping on RISI

nicnic · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 9:51 pm Post subject:

I've gone for Cold Mountain as I nominated it and I have on TBR from a bookcrossing ring so I have to read it asap. None of the other ones really appeal to me at the mo
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Currently reading: Man in the Dark by Paul Auster

mummymelly · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 10:58 pm Post subject:

Have voted for Lovely Bones but would love to read Wicked too!
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Swap List: http://tinyurl.com/33pg6r
Currently Reading "Switchcraft" by Lowri Turner

annecater · Posted: Wed Jan 16, 2008 11:45 pm Post subject:

I've voted for the Carhullen Army as I've got it on TBR, but it doesnt look as though it will win.

Gwen - when I've read it I will send it on to you, dont bother buying it. I'll put a sticky on it to remind me.
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Currently reading: The Tent The Bucket and Me by Emma Kennedy and Granny The Pag by Nina Bawden

1001 Challenge Books read in 2009 - 3
1001 Challenge Books read in 2008 - 8
1001 Challenge Books read in 2007 - 13

blueflower · Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 8:45 pm Post subject:

Just seen this, thanks Anne. Have you read any other Sarah Hall books? I have both her previous ones but haven't read them yet, except I did start the The Electric Michelangelo when on holiday once and was enjoying it but for some reason I didn't finish it but keep meaning to get back to it.

annecater · Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 4:19 pm Post subject:

No, I've not read any of her books yet Gwen. The Carhullen Army does look fascinating though. I'll read it next after 'Elsewhere' then send it on to you. I have your address already.

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Currently reading: The Tent The Bucket and Me by Emma Kennedy and Granny The Pag by Nina Bawden

1001 Challenge Books read in 2009 - 3
1001 Challenge Books read in 2008 - 8
1001 Challenge Books read in 2007 - 13

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