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=Welcome to Nancy's Book Club!=

Please list your book recommendations below. Thanks for your contributions!

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 * **TITLE** || **AUTHOR** || **PAGES** || **COMMENTS** ||
 * Ahab's Wife || Sena Jeter Naslund || 704 || epic work of historical fiction, honors that aphorism, using Herman Melville's //[|Moby-Dick]// as looking glass into early-19th-century America. ||
 * Shawdows of the Wind || Carlos Ruiz Zafon || 486 || In post-World War II Barcelona, young Daniel is taken by his bookseller father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a massive sanctuary where books are guarded from oblivion. Told to choose one book to protect, he selects //The Shadow of the Wind//, by Julian Carax. He reads it, loves it, and soon learns it is both very valuable and very much in danger because someone is determinedly burning every copy of every book written by the obscure Carax. ||
 * Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Going Home || Rhoda Janzen || 272 || This is an intelligent, funny, wonderfully written memoir. Janzen has a gift for following her elegant prose with the perfect snarky aside. If it weren't for the weird Mennonite food, I would like very much to be her friend.” ||
 * Ella Mino Pea || Mark Dunn || 224 || Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” ||
 * Scent of Rain and Lightning || Nancy Pickard || 336 || A decades-old mystery is solved and a woman’s haunting questions put to rest in Pickard’s latest thriller. ||
 * Honolulu || Alan Brennert || 464 || As the tale begins, readers meet young Regret, whose name speaks volumes of her value in turn-of-the-20th-century Korea. Emboldened by her desire to be educated, Regret commits herself as a mail-order bride to a prosperous man in Hawaii, where girls are allowed to attend school. But when she arrives, she finds her new husband is a callous plantation worker with drinking and gambling problems. ||
 * Moloka'i || Alan Brennert || 400 || Compellingly original in its conceit, Brennert's sweeping debut novel tracks the grim struggle of a Hawaiian woman who contracts leprosy as a child in Honolulu during the 1890s and is deported to the island of Moloka'i, where she grows to adulthood at the quarantined settlement of Kalaupapa. ||
 * Privileged Son || Dennis Mcdougal || 528 || More than a biography of Otis Chandler, the last of the Chandler family to hold the position of publisher for the Times Mirror media conglomerate before it was sold to the Tribune Company, this work is an exhaustive history of the Los Angeles Times, four generations of the Chandler family, and both institutions' influence on the development of Los Angeles and all of Southern California. ||
 * Double Indemnity || James Cain || 115 || When smalltime insurance salesman Walter Huff meets seductive Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of one of his wealthy clients, it takes him only minutes to determine that she wants to get rid of her husband--and not much longer to decide to help her do it. ||
 * To Kill a Mockingbird || Harper Lee || 336 || Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, //To Kill a Mockingbird// follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. ||
 * City of Thieves || David Benioff || 258 || Having elected to stay in Leningrad during the siege, 17-year-old Lev Beniov is caught looting a German paratrooper's corpse. The penalty for this infraction (and many others) is execution. But when Colonel Grechko confronts Lev and Kolya, a Russian army deserter also facing execution, he spares them on the condition that they acquire a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter's wedding cake. ||
 * The Madonnas of Leningrad || Debra Dean || 231 || Russian emigré Marina Buriakov, 82, is preparing for her granddaughter's wedding near Seattle while fighting a losing battle against Alzheimer's. Stuggling to remember whom Katie is marrying (and indeed that there is to be a marriage at all), Marina does remember her youth as a Hermitage Museum docent as the siege of Leningrad began; it is into these memories that she disappears. ||
 * Childhood's End
 * Childhood's End

Sci-Fi || Arthur Clarke || 256 || The Overlords appeared suddenly over every city--intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind. Benevolent, they made few demands: unify earth, eliminate poverty, and end war. With little rebellion, humankind agreed, and a golden age began. **Bu**t at what cost? With the advent of peace, man ceases to strive for creative greatness, and a malaise settles over the human race. To those who resist, it becomes evident that the Overlords have an agenda of their own. ||
 * Fountains of Paradise

Sci-Fi || Clarke || 332 || This is the story of an engineer using diamond cable to build a space elevator. Along the way we have visions of the Gibraltar bridge and the argument of putting rails on the side or not, since the vehicles on the bridge will be controlled not by occupants but by the road. The book is set in Clarke's favourite place on earth Sri-Lanka, although admittedly he conveniently shifts it to a more favourable latitude for scientific reasons. ||
 * Light of the Days

Sci-Fi || Clarke || 320 || //The Light of Other Days// follows a soulless tech billionaire (sort of an older, more crotchety Bill Gates), a soulful muckraking journalist, and the billionaire's two (separated since birth) sons. It's 2035, and all four hold ringside seats at the birth of a new paradigm-destroying technology, a system of "WormCams," harnessing the power of wormholes to see absolutely anyone or anything, anywhere, at any distance (even light years away). As if that weren't enough, the sons eventually figure out how to exploit a time-dilation effect, allowing them to use the holes to peer back in time. ||
 * Lathe of Heaven

Sci-Fi || Ursula LeGuin || 173 || George Orr has dreams that come true--dreams that change reality. He dreams that the aunt who is sexually harassing him is killed in a car crash, and wakes to find that she died in a wreck six weeks ago, in another part of the country. But a far darker dream drives George into the care of a psychotherapist--a dream researcher who doesn't share George's ambivalence about altering reality. T//he Lathe of Heaven// is an insightful and chilling examination of total power, of war and injustice and other age-old problems, of changing the world, of playing God. //-// ||
 * Rendezvous with Rama

Sci-Fi || Clarke || 274 || A huge, mysterious, cylindrical object appears in space, swooping in toward the sun. The citizens of the solar system send a ship to investigate before the enigmatic craft, called Rama, disappears. The astronauts given the task of exploring the hollow cylindrical ship are able to decipher some, but definitely not all, of the extraterrestrial vehicle's puzzles. From the ubiquitous trilateral symmetry of its structures to its cylindrical sea and machine-island, Rama's secrets are strange evidence of an advanced civilization. ||
 * Earth Abides

Sci-Fi || Geroge Stewart || 368 || Written in 1950. A disease of unparalleled destructive force has sprung up almost simultaneously in every corner of the globe, all but destroying the human race. One survivor, strangely immune to the effects of the epidemic, ventures forward to experience a world without man. What he ultimately discovers will prove far more astonishing than anything he'd either dreaded or hoped for. ||
 * Stranger in a Strange Land

Sci-Fi || Heinlein || 528 || The story of Valentine Michael Smith, born during, and the only survivor of, the first manned mission to Mars. Michael is raised by Martians, and he arrives on Earth as a true innocent: he has never seen a woman and has no knowledge of Earth's cultures or religions. But he brings turmoil with him, as he is the legal heir to an enormous financial empire, not to mention //de facto// owner of the planet Mars. ||
 * Canticle for Leibowitz

Sci-Fi || Walter Miller || 352 || Opens with the accidental excavation of a holy artifact: a creased, brittle memo scrawled by the hand of the blessed Saint Leibowitz, that reads: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma." To the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz, this sacred shopping list penned by an obscure, 20th-century engineer is a symbol of hope from the distant past, from before the Simplification, the fiery atomic holocaust that plunged the earth into darkness and ignorance. Written 1959 ||
 * Ringworld

Sci-Fi || Larry Niven || 352 || First in a trilogy. A new place is being built, a world of huge dimensions, encompassing millions of miles, stronger than any planet before it. There is gravity, and with high walls and its proximity to the sun, a livable new planet that is three million times the area of the Earth can be formed. We can start again! ||
 * Dune

Sci-Fi || Frank Herbert || 544 || Tells the sweeping tale of a desert planet called Arrakis, the focus of an intricate power struggle in a byzantine interstellar empire. Arrakis is the sole source of Melange, the "spice of spices." Melange is necessary for interstellar travel and grants psychic powers and longevity, so whoever controls it wields great influence. The troubles begin when stewardship of Arrakis is transferred by the Emperor from the Harkonnen Noble House to House Atreides. || Sci-Fi || Vonnegut || 336 || The richest and most depraved man on Earth takes a wild space journey to distant worlds, learning about the purpose of human life along the way. || Sci-Fi || Jules Verne || 336 || Originally published in 1870, Verne’s amazing undersea adventure is one of the earliest science fiction novels ever written. Since that time, generations of readers have plunged below the ocean’s waves with Captain Nemo and his first-ever submarine, //The Nautilus//. It’s a voyage of exploration and the imagination. ||
 * Sirens of 'Titatn
 * 20000 Leagues Under the Sea
 * Helliconia

Sci-Fi || Brian Aldiss || 400 || A planet orbiting binary suns, Helliconia has a Great Year spanning three millennia of Earth time: cultures are born in spring, flourish in summer, then die with the onset of the generations-long winter. Helliconia is emerging from its centuries-long winter. The tribes of the equatorial continent emerge from their hiding places and are again able to dispute possession of the planet with the ferocious phagors. In Oldorando, love, trade and coinage are being redisovered, This is the first volume of the Helliconia Trilogy -- a monumental saga that goes beyond anything yet created by this master among today's imaginative writers. ||
 * Andromeda Strain

Sci-Fi || Michael Crichton || 384 || A Nobel-Prize-winning bacteriologist, Jeremy Stone, urges the president to approve an extraterrestrial decontamination facility to sterilize returning astronauts, satellites, and spacecraft that might carry an "unknown biologic agent." The government agrees, almost too quickly, to build the top-secret Wildfire Lab in the desert of Nevada. Shortly thereafter, unbeknownst to Stone, the U.S. Army initiates the "Scoop" satellite program, an attempt to actively collect space pathogens for use in biological warfare. When Scoop VII crashes a couple years later in the isolated Arizona town of Piedmont, the Army ends up getting more than it asked for. ||
 * Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy

Sci-Fi || Douglas Adams || 208 || Join Douglas Adams's hapless hero Arthur Dent as he travels the galaxy with his intrepid pal Ford Prefect, getting into horrible messes and generally wreaking hilarious havoc. Dent is grabbed from Earth moments before a cosmic construction team obliterates the planet to build a freeway. You'll never read funnier science fiction; Adams is a master of intelligent satire, barbed wit, and comedic dialogue. ||