Hi everyone, I’ve discovered the free version of Survey Monkey, a popular site used to create simple surveys, only lets you ask ten questions!

And since we have sixteen titles on our voting list I can’t use Survey Monkey!

So we’re going a modern but more traditional route to vote!

Take a look at the list and then you can give me your choices in person at the library, by phone (607-936-3713 x212) or, by sending an email to me at: REIMERL@STLS.ORG

If you prefer a PDF list, that you can print, just click the following link:

Book Club Voting List February 2020

Also, as promised, I’ve got the President Obama’s suggested reading list for 2020 incorporated into a brochure and I will put up another posting in a few minutes with that information.

 

And onto the voting selection list! (and by the way, in order to give everyone enough time to vote, you can send me an email with your selections, post them in a comment or let me know which books you like at our March 13 meeting!)

 

The Voting Selection List: 

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James | FICTION | Inspired by African mythology, James, a former Booker Prize winner, turns a motley group’s quest to find a missing boy into a fast-paced, fantastical adventure. These contentious companions explore a hyper-violent world of lush jungles, cities in the sky and dark forests, and they confront a catalogue of creatures: ferocious trolls, giant bats and a bloodsucking fiend made entirely of flies. Clearly, Hollywood special effects are still playing catch-up with the magic our very best writers can spin.

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Cracking India by Bipsi Sidwha | FICTION | The 1947 Partition of India is the backdrop for this powerful novel, narrated by a precocious child who describes the brutal transition with chilling veracity. Young Lenny Sethi is kept out of school because she suffers from polio. She spends her days with Ayah, her beautiful nanny, visiting with the large group of admirers that Ayah draws. It is in the company of these working class characters that Lenny learns about religious differences, religious intolerance, and the blossoming genocidal strife on the eve of Partition. As she matures, Lenny begins to identify the differences between the Hindus, Moslems, and Sikhs engaging in political arguments all around her. Lenny enjoys a happy, privileged life in Lahore, but the kidnapping of her beloved Ayah signals a dramatic change. Soon Lenny’s world erupts in religious, ethnic, and racial violence. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, the domestic drama serves as a microcosm for a profound political upheaval.

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Falter Has The Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben | NONFICTION | With 1989’s “The End of Nature,” McKibben was among the first to alert the public to climate change. His latest book is a sprint through what we’ve done to the planet and what we can do about it now. Determined to keep the words “climate change” from fading into our “mental furniture,” he has gathered the most vivid statistics, distilled history to its juiciest turns, and made the case as urgently as can be: Our existence is in jeopardy.

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Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo | FICTION | The co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize (alongside Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments”) is composed of novella-length chapters that draw us deep into the lives of a dozen women in Britain of various backgrounds and experiences. As the novel progresses, their connections accrue gradually, allowing us moments of understanding spiked with surprise. Evaristo skillfully weaves these tales together, creating a breathtaking symphony of black women’s voices, a clear-eyed survey of contemporary challenges that is nevertheless wonderfully life-affirming.

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A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves One Family and Migration in the 21st Century by Jason DeParle | NONFICTION | A riveting multigenerational tale of one Filipino family dispersing across the globe — from Manila to Abu Dhabi to Galveston, Tex., and so many places in between — as parents leave their kids for years at a time to send home wages many multiples of what they previously earned. As immigration emerges as a central political battleground in the Trump era, this book provides crucial insight into the global scope, shifting profiles and, above all, individual sacrifices of the migrant experience.

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How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell | NONFICTION | When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as…doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism, and to become more meaningfully connected in the process.

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Integrity by Stephen L. Carter | NONFICTION | Why do we care more about winning than about playing by the rules?

Integrity – all of us are in favor of it, but nobody seems to know how to make sure that we get it. From presidential candidates to crusading journalists to the lords of collegiate sports, everybody promises to deliver integrity, yet all too often, the promises go unfulfilled.

Stephen Carter examines why the virtue of integrity holds such sway over the American political imagination. By weaving together insights from philosophy, theology, history and law, along with examples drawn from current events and a dose of personal experience, Carter offers a vision of integrity that has implications for everything from marriage and politics to professional football. He discusses the difficulties involved in trying to legislate integrity as well as the possibilities for teaching it.

As the Cleveland Plain Dealer said, “In a measured and sensible voice, Carter attempts to document some of the paradoxes and pathologies that result from pervasive ethical realism… If the modern drift into relativism has left us in a cultural and political morass, Carter suggests that the assumption of personal integrity is the way out.

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Know My Name by Chanel Miller | NONFICTION | Miller, formerly known as Emily Doe, the sexual assault victim of Brock Turner, deliberately and triumphantly reclaims her story by drawing a clear-eyed portrait of how difficult it is for rape victims to get justice, and how the process serves as its own kind of re-victimization. In haunting prose, Miller documents a broken system, or several, which her book indicts one by one. “Know My Name” is a gut-punch, yes, but also blessedly hopeful.

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Lost Children Archive: A Novel by Valeria Luiselli |Fiction |“An epic road trip [that also] captures the unruly intimacies of marriage and parenthood. . . . This is a novel that daylights our common humanity, and challenges us to reconcile our differences.” —The Washington Post
In Valeria Luiselli’s fiercely imaginative follow-up to the American Book Award-winning Tell Me How It Ends, an artist couple set out with their two children on a road trip from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. As the family travels west, the bonds between them begin to fray: a fracture is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet.

Through ephemera such as songs, maps and a Polaroid camera, the children try to make sense of both their family’s crisis and the larger one engulfing the news: the stories of thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States but getting detained—or lost in the desert along the way.

A breath-taking feat of literary virtuosity, Lost Children Archive is timely, compassionate, subtly hilarious, and formally inventive—a powerful, urgent story about what it is to be human in an inhuman world.

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The Nickel Boys: A Novel by Colson Whitehead | FICTION | As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is “as good as anyone.” Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides “physical, intellectual and moral training” so the delinquent boys in their charge can become “honorable and honest men.”

In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear “out back.” Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold onto Dr. King’s ringing assertion “Throw us in jail and we will still love you.” His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble.

The tension between Elwood’s ideals and Turner’s skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys’ fates will be determined by what they endured at the Nickel Academy.

Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.

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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong | FICTION | This debut novel by a Saigon-born poet is labeled fiction but draws heavily on the events of the author’s life. The daring mix of historical recollection and sexual exploration is framed as a candid letter to the narrator’s mother, a volcanic woman whose life was made possible by the Vietnam War. (Her father was a U.S. soldier.) Vuong’s willingness to solve the equation of his own existence, no matter its components, is a hallmark of this poignant and lyrical work of self-discovery.

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The Orphan Master’s Son: A Novel by Adam Johnson | FICTION | The Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling novel of North Korea: an epic journey into the heart of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship.

Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and an influential father who runs a work camp for orphans. Superiors in the North Korean state soon recognize the boy’s loyalty and keen instincts. Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Jun Do rises in the ranks. He becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his overlords in order to stay alive. Driven to the absolute limit of what any human being could endure, he boldly takes on the treacherous role of rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”

Part breathless thriller, part story of innocence lost, part story of romantic love, The Orphan Master’s Son is also a riveting portrait of a world heretofore hidden from view: a North Korea rife with hunger, corruption, and casual cruelty but also camaraderie, stolen moments of beauty, and love.

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Strangers and Cousins by Leah Hager Cohen | FICTION | The tale of a quirky family planning a wedding in a tumble-down house contains all the promise of an arthritic rom-com, but, as masterfully told by Cohen, it’s an absolute delight infused with the most pressing concerns of our era. The story expands to look at a historical tragedy and a current battle over an influx of ultra-Orthodox Jewish residents in the surrounding town. Cohen takes comedy seriously, and it shows in this disarmingly substantive story that’s funny, tender, provocative and wise.

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The Topeka School by Ben Lerner | FICTION | Here is that all-too-rare masterpiece: a svelte big novel. Lerner does what only great novelists can, which is explore the condition of the whole country in the particular story of a few characters in a small town. Lerner takes us back to Kansas in the 1990s where a high school debate team star and his mother, a psychotherapist, contend with the increasingly toxic language that passes for civil discourse in America.

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We Live in Water: Stories by Jess Walter | NONFICTION |ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019. From the New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins, the first collection of short fiction from Jess Walter—a suite of diverse and searching stories about personal struggle and diminished dreams, all of them marked by the wry wit, keen eye, and generosity of spirit that has made him a bookseller and reader favorite

These twelve stories—published over the last five years in Harper’s, The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Playboy, and other publications—veer from comic tales of love to social satire to suspenseful crime fiction, from hip Portland to once-hip Seattle to never-hip Spokane, from a condemned casino in Las Vegas to a bottomless lake in the dark woods of Idaho. This is a world of lost fathers and redemptive conmen, of meth tweakers on desperate odysseys and men committing suicide by fishing.

We Live in Water is a darkly comic, heartfelt collection of stories from a “ridiculously talented writer” (New York Times), “one of the freshest voices in American literature” (Dallas Morning News).

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The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom | NONFICTION | Broom’s stirring memoir, the winner of the 2019 National Book Award for nonfiction, is set in New Orleans East, a part of the city that tourists don’t visit. The yellow house of the title, Broom’s family home, is the pride, hope and prison of a black, working-class family. After it is destroyed during Hurricane Katrina, it also becomes a symbol of the issues confronting us today: pernicious racism, corporate greed, displacement and the improbable arithmetic of survival as a member of the working poor.

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Have a great day and feel free to contact me at any time with questions about the book club or feedback about books of any kind!

Linda Reimer

Southeast Steuben County Library

Tel: 607-936-3713 x 212

Email: REIMERL@STLS.ORG

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References:

Selections taken from the

Washington Post Best of 2019 List

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/entertainment/books/best-books-of-2019/

 

And from President Obama’s Favorite Books of 2019 posted on his Twitter account on New Year’s Day 2020

https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/a30362154/barack-obamas-favorite-books-2019/