Evil Editor hosts a monthly book discussion on his blog. Books are chosen by EE with an eye toward providing exposure to a different genre each month. Perhaps after encountering an author you wouldn't normally read, you'll want to purchase his/her other books.
As the Evil Minions live all over the globe, it is unlikely everyone can participate in every discussion, but we'll vary the times so that no one misses every one of them because it's always 4 AM when the discussion is held. Each discussion will last about an hour toward the end of the month. The exact dates and times will be announced at least ten days in advance. The text of the discussions will remain on the blog for those who read the book but couldn't make the discussion. Here's the upcoming schedule:
April ?? Date to be announced.
Homicide My Own (Mystery), Anne Argula
Two slog-bottom cops from Spokane, Washington, are assigned to what appears to be a routine mission: They’re to go to an Indian reservation on the Northwest coast and pick up a man who’s being held for kidnapping a teenaged girl. Once there, however, one of the cops (given the unusual moniker of “Odd”) becomes obsessed with a decades-old murder, the only unsolved murder in the island’s history, and he really doesn’t want to head back to Spokane until he’s found some resolution. His partner, Quinn, the acid-tongued menopausal wife of a decent and boring pharmacist (and the novel’s narrator) finds Odd’s behavior rather amusing at first . . . but then finds it to be much more than amusing. In an intriguing character study, Anne Argula has developed a novel that not only forces a reader to keep turning the pages; it goes so far as to force the reader to look at life – and death – in a new and uncharacteristic way.
The book was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original Mystery of 2005, presented by the Mystery Writers of America.
May
Twilight (YA), Stephanie Meyer
The book begins with a familiar YA premise (the new kid in school), and lulls us into thinking this will be just another realistic young adult novel. Bella has come to the small town of Forks on the gloomy Olympic Peninsula to be with her father. At school, she wonders about a group of five remarkably beautiful teens, who sit together in the cafeteria but never eat. As she grows to know, and then love, Edward, she learns their secret. They are all rescued vampires, part of a family headed by saintly Carlisle, who has inspired them to renounce human prey. For Edward's sake they welcome Bella, but when a roving group of tracker vampires fixates on her, the family is drawn into a desperate pursuit to protect the fragile human in their midst. The precision and delicacy of Meyer's writing lifts this wonderful novel beyond the limitations of the horror genre to a place among the best of YA fiction.
In 2007, New Moon, the second book in the Twilight Series, made #1 in the American Library Association's 2007 Teens' Top Ten list. In 2006, Twilight made #2, second to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Twilight is to be a movie, with Kristen Stewart (Speak, Panic Room) as Bella and Robert Pattinson (Cedric Diggory from the Harry Potter movies) as Edward.
June
Bet Me (Contemporary Romance), Jennifer Crusie
Minerva Dobbs is an overweight, over-cautious woman in her 30s, but when she hears her ex-boyfriend bet handsome Calvin Morrisey that he can't get Min into bed within a month, she decides to give both men a taste of their own medicine. Inevitably, Min hits a stumbling block when she finds herself falling hard for Cal, who lures her with rich food and mind-boggling kisses. Cal, in turn, can't resist the lush, sexy Min. Their road is not an easy one, and they have to consume massive quantities of Chicken Marsala and Krispy Kremes—some might argue too many of each—before they reach their happy ending.
Winner of the Romance Writers of America's Rita Award for Best Contemporary Single Title of 2005.
More about the book here: http://www.jennycrusie.com/books/betme.php
July
To Say Nothing of the Dog (Science Fiction), Connie Willis
In the mid-twenty-first century, the formidable Lady Schrapnell has donated a small fortune to the Oxford University department of time travel in order to rebuild Coventry Cathedral, which was destroyed during a Nazi bombing raid. Among the Oxford researchers is Ned Henry, who has made so many drops into the cathedral's past that he's suffering from a dangerously advanced case of "time-lag".
The infirmary prescribes two weeks of bedrest with no time travel, but the only way Ned can avoid Lady Schrapnell for that long is to escape into the past -- into Victorian England, to be precise. He just has to run a vital errand in that era for the department first. Unfortunately, Ned's time-lag is so bad that he's not sure what the errand is; but if he fails, history could unravel around him.
Willis frequently takes affectionate satirical pokes at P.G. Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, and Dorothy Sayers, who are clearly among the story's inspirations. To Say Nothing of the Dog is a charming comedy of errors. and winner of the Hugo Award for best Novel of 1999.
August
The Devil in the White City (Nonfiction), Erik Larson
Not long after Jack the Ripper haunted the ill-lit streets of 1888 London, H.H. Holmes (born Herman Webster Mudgett) dispatched somewhere between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women, in the churning new metropolis of Chicago; many of the murders occurred during (and exploited) the city's finest moment, the World's Fair of 1893. Larson's breathtaking new history is a novelistic yet wholly factual account of the fair and the mass murderer who lurked within it. Bestselling author Larson (Isaac's Storm) strikes a fine balance between the planning and execution of the vast fair and Holmes's relentless, ghastly activities. The passages about Holmes are compelling and aptly claustrophobic; readers will be glad for the frequent escapes to the relative sanity of Holmes's co-star, architect and fair overseer Daniel Hudson Burnham, who managed the thousands of workers and engineers who pulled the sprawling fair together on an astonishingly tight two-year schedule.
Nominated for the National Book Award, nonfiction, 2003, and scheduled to be a motion picture, release date 2009.
Sorry. Because taking book suggestions from the Evil Minions would result in a veritable flood, you are stuck with EE's choices.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Book Chat Schedule
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10 comments:
What is the queasy factor of DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY? I've read both factual and fictional accounts of this before (including Robert Bloch's AMERICAN GOTHIC and Schechter's book) and prefer to avoid anything that dwells on the gory aspects. I am too prone to nightmares.
Query: What author, relatively unknown by his own name but famous under another pseudonym, also wrote as "H.H. Holmes"? (No fair looking it up!)
If we don't want to read TWILIGHT, can we substitute another book with the same cover?
http://tinyurl.com/2c54r9
(courtesy of the Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books blog)
and prefer to avoid anything that dwells on the gory aspects.
Having read none of the books, I can only say that the books you've read were not nominated for the National Book Award, and that this is a history book. It sounds like you'd be pleased to read the first customer review at Amazon, which states:
It would appear that Larson goes a bit too far out of his way to avoid the lurid and sensationalitic aspects of Holmes' killing spree. One has only to visit some of the numerous web sites devoted to Holmes to see that Larson is particularly reticent to discuss Holmes' sexual deviance. This is understandable, as Larson wants to be taken seriously as an historian, yet the facts are out there (most of them well documented) so it wouldn't have hurt to have included a bit more of the darker details.
Thanks. I think that QPB might still have it, and I probably have enough points to get it for free.
Hit the book store tonight and Homicide My Own is out of print. Hopefully I'll find it elsewhere.
I won't get Perfect Circle for a week, so I'm also hoping March means sometime well into the month and not near the first. Do you know about when these discussions will take place?
They'll all be near the end of the month.
I've ordered Homicide my Own from Amazon.com.
BAMM.com has it too. There is a sequel out; two reviewers at Mystery Guild think it's awful, but it's well-rated at amazon.com.
For what any of that is worth.
OK- I'm on Amazon right now - ordering the first two, and checking your list.
I see you've been moving on through the rest of the months - this is great- thanks so much for doing this. It's a whole different ball'a wax - having a book club with an editor at its center.
A hearty agreement with evil's selections!! And ++ good on the first go.
I just read Homicide My Own twice. In one sitting. Thanks for recommending it. (I got it from the library.) It's hard to believe this was a first novel.
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