February Book Recommendations Thread

1/25/2020

It's that time again!

Post your recommendations for February's Book of the Month in the comments. We will hold a survey vote on Saturday, February 1st, to decide what book we will read. Deadline for comments is Saturday, February 1st, 1 pm (MT. I know this goes without saying but... make it sexy.

There's been a lot of good recs that didn't get the nod in past months. Here is a chart of points received for non winners. If you're like me, and you don't remember what they are, see shocktober-book-menu.html november-book-menu.html december-book-menu.html january-book-menu.html

9 Comments

Evan

1/30/2020 06:58:25 am

Everything about this sounds hot to me...

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. (400 pages)

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; some had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they removed their veils and began to speak more freely–their stories intertwining with the novels they were reading by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, as fundamentalists seized hold of the universities and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the women in Nafisi’s living room spoke not only of the books they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments.

Azar Nafisi’s luminous masterwork gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny, and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

Andy

2/1/2020 09:52:53 am

What could be hotter than half the earth in eternal daylight? What's cooler than the other half in eternal night??

The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray (384 pages)

It is 2059, and the world has crashed. Forty years ago, a solar catastrophe began to slow the planet’s rotation to a stop. Now, one half of the globe is permanently sunlit, the other half trapped in an endless night. The United States has colonized the southern half of Great Britain—lucky enough to find itself in the narrow habitable region left between frozen darkness and scorching sunlight—where both nations have managed to survive the ensuing chaos by isolating themselves from the rest of the world.

Ellen Hopper is a scientist living on a frostbitten rig in the cold Atlantic. She wants nothing more to do with her country after its slide into casual violence and brutal authoritarianism. Yet when two government officials arrive, demanding she return to London to see her dying college mentor, she accepts—and begins to unravel a secret that threatens not only the nation’s fragile balance, but the future of the whole human race.

P. S. This guy does other things I pay attention to:
* QI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGUbswyONrA
* No such thing as a fish: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-such-thing-as-a-fish/id840986946
&c.

As he is a factual researcher type guy (??) by profession, I am interested to see him write fiction.

Bonus: https://twitter.com/alexbell/status/1217503992764358657

Evan

2/1/2020 11:21:44 am

Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald

One of the music world’s pre-eminent critics takes a fresh and much-needed look at the day Dylan “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival, timed to coincide with the event’s fiftieth anniversary.

On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan took the stage at Newport Folk Festival, backed by an electric band, and roared into his new rock hit, Like a Rolling Stone. The audience of committed folk purists and political activists who had hailed him as their acoustic prophet reacted with a mix of shock, booing, and scattered cheers. It was the shot heard round the world—Dylan’s declaration of musical independence, the end of the folk revival, and the birth of rock as the voice of a generation—and one of the defining moments in twentieth-century music.

In Dylan Goes Electric!, Elijah Wald explores the cultural, political and historical context of this seminal event that embodies the transformative decade that was the sixties. Wald delves deep into the folk revival, the rise of rock, and the tensions between traditional and groundbreaking music to provide new insights into Dylan’s artistic evolution, his special affinity to blues, his complex relationship to the folk establishment and his sometime mentor Pete Seeger, and the ways he reshaped popular music forever. Breaking new ground on a story we think we know, Dylan Goes Electric! is a thoughtful, sharp appraisal of the controversial event at Newport and a nuanced, provocative, analysis of why it matters.

Madison

2/1/2020 11:34:03 am

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu

Ken Liu is one of the most lauded short story writers of our time. This collection includes a selection of his science fiction and fantasy stories from the last five years—sixteen of his best—plus a new novelette.

Andy

2/1/2020 11:36:01 am

Gonna be *reeeeeally* hard to read a book that comes out Feb 25th in February.

Madison E Reece

2/1/2020 11:37:21 am

DAMN IT.

Andy

2/1/2020 11:39:19 am

That said, I did pre-order it.

Madison

2/1/2020 11:37:57 am

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

Madison

2/1/2020 11:40:18 am

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting “lost boys” to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart―who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient―into the social scene, to disastrous effect.

Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.

February Book Recommendations Thread

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