Can we restart the book club to function in the manner it did before the crash? I liked the idea of the group voting for the months entry out of 4-5 books.
Earth Abides was the inspiration for "The Stand" by King. First paragraph of a review (from audible) Earth Abides is one of the most important books I have ever read. This is not an adventure novel or a thriller. There are no zombies and no roaming bands of cannibals. Instead, its focus is on the Earth in the wake of humanity's destruction and on the remaining humans who inhabit this bleak new world. It is a carefully honed experiment in anthropology and sociology. Its depth and complexity is astounding and it deserves to be ranked as one of the best novels of the twentieth century. It can be boring at times but it is truly brilliant, beautiful, sad, terrifying, and entirely worth the trouble. And the narrator is excellent and adds enormous value to the story.
King is actually one of my favorite writers, but Christ we've read a lot of his stuff. The Stand is pretty much our only nomination, though. We've actually already read The Devil in the White City before, at least we had it for a selection. And since tomorrow is the 1st, looks like it's The Stand. I liked it, too, but to be frank, it was just too much, especially for this group. God knows if this version of the group will last through the fall.
An unstated rule of the TMB Book Club is "no books about dogs". Except my book that includes a dog and is marvelous.
No seriously.... Now that Shogun by James Clavell has been updated and is on Audible, that's my vote.
Or final option... Secret History by Donna Tartt Person that recommended it to me hated Goldfinch fwiw, but said this one would be GREAT for a book club.
I had just flown in from Switzerland and was barely on the internet yesterday as I spent most of the day sleeping after a week and a half of partying too hard and sailing around the Aegean with no internet. However, it's not too late, but we've had way, way too many King books. (I love King, we just need to switch it up)
Let's just go with The Stand since I already started a thread and stuff. Drop some of those nominees the last month of September.
I got back from my bachelor party yesterday hoping there'd be a poll or something. Gonna pass on The Stand. After Seveneves, I was hoping for a bit of a shorter read. Which come to think of it, should be part of the rules too.
Uprooted by Naomi Novik (author of Temeraire series) “Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.” Agnieszka loves her valley home, her quiet village, the forests and the bright shining river. But the corrupted Wood stands on the border, full of malevolent power, and its shadow lies over her life. Her people rely on the cold, driven wizard known only as the Dragon to keep its powers at bay. But he demands a terrible price for his help: one young woman handed over to serve him for ten years, a fate almost as terrible as falling to the Wood. The next choosing is fast approaching, and Agnieszka is afraid. She knows—everyone knows—that the Dragon will take Kasia: beautiful, graceful, brave Kasia, all the things Agnieszka isn’t, and her dearest friend in the world. And there is no way to save her. But Agnieszka fears the wrong things. For when the Dragon comes, it is not Kasia he will choose. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22544764-uprooted?ac=1
Are voting or just going w The Blackfish's suggestion? If we're voting - New York by Edward Rutherford Edward Rutherfurd celebrates America’s greatest city in a rich, engrossing saga, weaving together tales of families rich and poor, native-born and immigrant—a cast of fictional and true characters whose fates rise and fall and rise again with the city’s fortunes. From this intimate perspective we see New York’s humble beginnings as a tiny Indian fishing village, the arrival of Dutch and British merchants, the Revolutionary War, the emergence of the city as a great trading and financial center, the convulsions of the Civil War, the excesses of the Gilded Age, the explosion of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the trials of World War II, the near demise of New York in the 1970s and its roaring rebirth in the 1990s, and the attack on the World Trade Center. A stirring mix of battle, romance, family struggles, and personal triumphs,New York: The Novel gloriously captures the search for freedom and opportunity at the heart of our nation’s history. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8258519-new-york?ac=1 Been wanting to read this for a while, so I might as well suggest it for the club
No voting. The Blackfish said his first, so we go with that. Voting just seemed to irritate people when the book they wanted to read didn't win. Seemed we lost people every month after the vote.
Hokay cool. Should be a quick read this month so people reading The Stand can have a little extra time
The Blackfish It's a stand alone, yes? If so, I'm in. Traveling Europe on my honeymoon starting the 5th so I'll have time to read on the trains.
Also, can I recommend that those participating get to choose a book every so often? Like this is Blackfish's month, next can be Truman, etc. I'm not in a rush to pick any book myself, just making a suggestion so there's no confusion on the next choice.
BTW guys, if we're picking a book that's as long as The Stand we should have just gone with Power of the Dog and The Cartel Both of those together are shorter than that damn book. Cripes almighty. Don't get me wrong, I loved it, but I want y'all to experience those 2 fantastic books as well.
My vote for November: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22557272-the-girl-on-the-train?ac=1 A debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people’s lives. Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. “Jess and Jason,” she calls them. Their life—as she sees it—is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost. And then she sees something shocking. It’s only a minute until the train moves on, but it’s enough. Now everything’s changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good? Compulsively readable, The Girl on the Train is an emotionally immersive, Hitchcockian thriller and an electrifying debut.
This looks good too, but I figured we already had a sci-fi book recently. Im cool with either. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24611668-saturn-run?from_search=true&search_version=service The year is 2066. A Caltech intern inadvertently notices an anomaly from a space telescope—something is approaching Saturn, and decelerating. Space objects don’t decelerate. Spaceships do. A flurry of top-level government meetings produces the inescapable conclusion: Whatever built that ship is at least one hundred years ahead in hard and soft technology, and whoever can get their hands on it exclusively and bring it back will have an advantage so large, no other nation can compete. A conclusion the Chinese definitely agree with when they find out. The race is on, and an remarkable adventure begins—an epic tale of courage, treachery, resourcefulness, secrets, surprises, and astonishing human and technological discovery, as the members of a hastily thrown-together crew find their strength and wits tested against adversaries both of this earth and beyond. What happens is nothing like you expect—and everything you could want from one of the world’s greatest masters of suspense
Girl on the Train is good, I think people here will like it. I read it a couple months ago, so it's pretty fresh for me.
Bad news - my L train got stuck. Good news - Got to knock out the first 4 chapters of Saturn Run. Very early but Im hooked. Interesting characters w some mystery and humor. Going to read a few more chapters and start a thread on it. If you're between books, start reading it
I'll probably jump in this month. I'd already read The Stand and wasn't really interested in last month's since I just read one like it. But this one sounds good.