Tag Archives: poll

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OK, so here’s the info for the books posted in the new poll, located in the top right corner. I’m doing two things differently this month:

1 – I’m going to be posting the book blurbs you see below in a “Polls Info” tab, and I’ll change that whenever there’s a new poll. I think people tend to come to my blog, miss this initial post, and then vote for whatever book sounds most familiar to them. Hopefully the little tab will help.

2 – I’m listing 5 books instead of 6, because the votes tend to be really spread out.

OK, so here are the books that you’ll pick among for me to read and review in April. The blurbs come from www.goodreads.com:

Thanks for the Memories by Cecelia Ahern – the modern lit pick

How can you know someone you’ve never met? Joyce Conway remembers things she shouldn’t. She knows about tiny cobbled streets in Paris, which she has never visited. And every night she dreams about an unknown little girl with blonde hair. Justin Hitchcock is divorced, lonely and restless. He arrives in Dublin to give a lecture on art and meets an attractive doctor, who persuades him to donate blood. It’s the first thing to come straight from his heart in a long time. When Joyce leaves hospital after a terrible accident, with her life and her marriage in pieces, she moves back in with her elderly father. All the while, a strong sense of déjà vu is overwhelming her and she can’t figure out why …

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe – the I-can’t-believe-I-haven’t-read-this-classic pick

Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, “a man of humanity,” as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking, controversial, and powerful work — exposing the attitudes of white nineteenth-century society toward “the peculiar institution” and documenting, in heartrending detail, the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families “sold down the river.” An immediate international sensation, Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the first year, was translated into thirty-seven languages, and has never gone out of print: its political impact was immense, its emotional influence immeasurable

Practical Demonkeeping by Christopher Moore – the funny pick
In Christopher Moore’s ingenious debut novel, we meet one of the most memorably mismatched pairs in the annals of literature. The good-looking one is one-hundred-year-old ex-seminarian and “roads” scholar Travis O’Hearn. The green one is Catch, a demon with a nasty habit of eating most of the people he meets. Behind the fake Tudor façade of Pine Cove, California, Catch sees a four-star buffet. Travis, on the other hand, thinks he sees a way of ridding himself of his toothy traveling companion. The winos, neo-pagans, and deadbeat Lotharios of Pine Cove, meanwhile, have other ideas. And none of them is quite prepared when all hell breaks loose.

The Unlikely Lavender Queen by Jeannie Ralston – the memoir pick

The Unlikely Lavender Queen is the intimate story of a woman who gives up a lot for the man she loves – her beloved blue state, bagels and all-night bodegas—only to have to wonder: Was it too much? Ralston offers a lively chronicle of her life as a wife, new mother and an urban settler in rural Texas. As she labors to convert a dilapidated barn into a livable home, deal with scorpions and unbearably hot summers, raise two young children while Robb is frequently away on assignment, she realizes her ultimate struggle is to reconcile her life plans and goals with her husband’s without coming out the proverbial loser. And just when it seems like she might be losing that fight–and herself– a little purple bloom changes her life.

The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen – the magical pick

The New York Times bestselling author of The Girl Who Chased the Moon welcomes you to her newest locale: Walls of Water, North Carolina, where the secrets are thicker than the fog from the town’s famous waterfalls, and the stuff of superstition is just as real as you want it to be. It’s the dubious distinction of thirty-year-old Willa Jackson to hail from a fine old Southern family of means that met with financial ruin generations ago. The Blue Ridge Madam—built by Willa’s great-great-grandfather during Walls of Water’s heyday, and once the town’s grandest home—has stood for years as a lonely monument to misfortune and scandal. And Willa herself has long strived to build a life beyond the brooding Jackson family shadow. No easy task in a town shaped by years of tradition and the well-marked boundaries of the haves and have-nots. But Willa has lately learned that an old classmate—socialite do-gooder Paxton Osgood—of the very prominent Osgood family, has restored the Blue Ridge Madam to her former glory, with plans to open a top-flight inn. Maybe, at last, the troubled past can be laid to rest while something new and wonderful rises from its ashes. But what rises instead is a skeleton, found buried beneath the property’s lone peach tree, and certain to drag up dire consequences along with it.

So there we have it. Get votin, folks!

>OK ladies & gents, it’s time for the March poll. Vote for the one you want to see me read / review here on my blog in March. There are 6 choices listed below, with a little synopsis for each one (I got the summaries from http://www.goodreads.com.) The poll is on the right near the top.

Voting ends the night of February 28th. Here we go!

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. le Guin - the sci-fi pick
Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life. Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Urras, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers - the non-fiction pick
Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun run a house-painting business in New Orleans. In August of 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approaches, Kathy evacuates with their four young children, leaving Zeitoun to watch over the business. In the days following the storm he travels the city by canoe, feeding abandoned animals and helping elderly neighbors. Then, on September 6th, police officers armed with M-16s arrest Zeitoun in his home. Told with eloquence and compassion, Zeitoun is a riveting account of one family’s unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water.

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler - the chick lit pick
In California s central valley, five women and one man join to discuss Jane Austen s novels. Over the six months they get together, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her eye for the frailties of human behaviour and her ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Karen Joy Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships.

My Antonia by Willa Cather - the classics pick
The story of Antonia Shimerda is told by on of the friends of her childhood, Jim Burden, an orphaned boy from Virginia. Though he leaves the prairie, Jim never forgets the Bohemian girl who so profoundly influenced his life. An immigrant child of immigrant parents, Antonia’s girlhood is spent working to help her parents wrest a living from the untamed land. Though in later years she suffers betrayal and desertion, through all the hardships of her life she preserves a valor of spirit that no hardship can daunt or break.When Jim Burden sees her again after many years he finds her “”a rich mine of life”,” a figure who has turned adversity into a particular kind of triumph in the true spirit of the pioneer.

The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown - the modern lit pick
The three Andreas sisters grew up in the cloistered household dominated by their Shakespearean professor father, a prominent, eccentric academic whose reverence for the Bard left its imprint on his daughters’ names: Rosalind (As You Like It), Bianca (The Taming of the Shrew), and Cordelia (King Lear). The siblings eventually left home and escaped their ponderous monikers with nicknames, but their mother’s medical maladies brings them back. Before long, their unwelcome reunion reveals that they all have problems: Rose is force-feeding a troubled relationship; Bean is entangled in a big city case of embezzlement; and unmarried Cordy is pregnant. Eleanor Brown’s first fiction has justly won praise as “thought-provoking… poignant… sparkling and devourable.”

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak - the YA pick
It’s just a small story really, about among other things: a girl, some words, an accordionist, some fanatical Germans, a Jewish fist-fighter, and quite a lot of thievery. . . .
Narrated by Death, Markus Zusak’s groundbreaking new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a young foster girl living outside of Munich in Nazi Germany. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she discovers something she can’t resist- books. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor’s wife’s library, wherever they are to be found.
With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, Liesel learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids, as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

Can’t wait to see which ya’ll choose! Also, I know the font color on the poll is dark – I can’t find an option to change it like all of my other side-bar stuff. Sorry it’s so hard to see – if you highlight it with your cursor you can read it easier.