BABBLING BOOKS

Tigerlily · Last edited by Tigerlily on Sat Aug 25, 2007 7:20 pm; edited 1 time in total

SEPTEMBER BOOK CHOICES - YOU DECIDE!

Which books would you like to read in September? All you have to do is vote for one of the books listed here. Read the blurbs below to see if there is anything of interest to you and place your vote. The book with the most votes by 30th August will be chosen for discussion from 1st September.

There is another poll running so please take at look at that one too. Two books will be chosen, but don't feel you have to read both if you don't want to!

The polls end midnight Thursday 30th August.

1. 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".

2. Me & Emma by Elizabeth Flock 304

The title characters in Me & Emma are very nearly photographic opposites--8-year-old Carrie, the raven-haired narrator, is timid and introverted, while her little sister Emma is a tow-headed powerhouse with no sense of fear. The girls live in a terrible situation: they depend on an unstable mother that has never recovered from her husband’s murder, their stepfather beats them regularly, and they must forage on their own for food.
Stop here and you have a story told many times before, as fiction and nonfiction in tales like Ellen Foster, or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings --stories in which a young girl reveals the horrors of her childhood. Me & Emma differentiates itself with a spectacular finish, shocking the reader and turning the entire story on its head. Through several twists and turns the reader learns that things are not quite the way our narrator led us to believe and everything crescendos in a way that (like all good thrillers) immediately makes you want to go back and read the whole book again from the start. --Victoria Griffith

3. A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon 512 pages

George Hall doesn't understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. 'The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.' Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored. At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light jazz. Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried, to Ray. Her family is not pleased - as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has 'strangler's hands'. Katie can't decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband's former colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.The way these damaged people fall apart - and come together - as a family is the true subject of Mark Haddon's disturbing yet very funny portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.

4. The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor 240 pages

Captain Gault has decided that his family must leave Lahardane. They are after all Protestants living in the big house in rural Cork, and the country is in turmoil. It is 1921. But 8-year-old Lucy can't bear to leave the seashore, the old house, the woods - so she hatches a plan. It is then that the calamity happens - an accident almost, but so vicious in its consequences that it blights the lives of the Gaults for years to come.

5. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier 248 pages

A brilliant historical novel on the corruption of innocence, using the famous painting by Vermeer as an inspiration. Griet, the young daughter of a tilemaker in seventeeth century Holland, obtains her first job, as a servant in Vermeer's household. Tracy Chevalier shows us, through Griet's eyes, the complicated family, the society of the small town of Delft, and life with an obsessive genius. Griet loves being drawn into his artistic life, and leaving her former drudgery, but the cost to her own survival may be high.

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

blueflower · Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2007 8:13 pm Post subject:

Have already read The Story of Lucy Gault and Lovely Bones. Had to go for Girl with a Pearl Earring as it has been sat on my shelves for ages.

heathera · Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2007 8:55 pm Post subject:

I've gone with The Lovely Bones as it's been on my tbr pile for months. However I do really fancy reading Spot of Bother, as I really liked The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon.
_________________
Currently Reading:

The Moonlit Cage - Linda Holeman

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

mummymelly · Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 7:11 pm Post subject:

Have already tried Lucy Gault and I didn't really like it but have voted for The Lovely Bones as I've been wanting to read it for a while. There are so many good choices this month...I want to read Me & Emma too!
_________________
Swap List: http://tinyurl.com/33pg6r
Currently Reading "Switchcraft" by Lowri Turner

Tigerlily · Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 7:16 pm Post subject:

Voted for Girl with a Pearl Earring as have been recommended it a lot and now have it on my TBR pile.
_________________
Reading: Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg
Reading Challenge 2009: 8
2008: 4
2007: 10

nicnic · Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 10:38 am Post subject:

Just managed to get Spot of Bother out the library. I had hoped to get the Kate Morton one but as usual they only have one copy and its out.

_________________
Currently reading: Man in the Dark by Paul Auster

Welcome to Babbling Books, Guest. We Hope You Enjoy Your Stay and Wish You a Merry Christmas!