Tag Archives: Reading Lists

Bookish Talk, Lists

If you love lists like I do…

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2011 Indie Lit Awards

…then you won’t mind another! The short list for the 2011 Indie Lit Awards is up! I am very excited about it and can’t wait to see which ones will come out on top. Our panel members have quite the challenge ahead of them but as much work as it is, I quite enjoyed myself last year.

2011 Indie Lit Awards (Short List)

Biography/ Memoir

  • Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua (Penguin)
  • Bossypants by Tina Fey (Reagan Arthur Books)
  • I Pray Hardest When Being Shot At by Kyle Garret (Hellgate Press)
  • Little Princes by Conor Grennan (William Morrow)
  • Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch (Harper)

GLBTQ

  • Well With My Soul by Gregory Allen (ASD Publishing)
  • Swimming to Chicago by David Matthew Barnes (Bold Strokes Books)
  • Songs of the New Depression by Kergan Edwards-Stout (Circumspect Press)
  • Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender by Nick Krieger (Beacon Press)
  • Huntress by Melinda Lo (little brown books for young readers)

Fiction

  • Dance Lessons by Aine Greaney (Syracuse University Press)
  • Cross Currents by John Shors (Penguin Group: NAL Trade)
  • The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Knopf/Doubleday Publishing Group)
  • Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)
  • The Last Time I Saw Paris by Lynn Sheene (Penguin Group)

Mystery

  • Missing Daughter, Shattered Family by Liz Strange (MLR Press)
  • The Cut by George Pelecanos (Reagan Arthur/LIttle, Brown)
  • A Trick of the Light by Louise Penny (St. Martin’s Press)
  • The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes by Marcus Sakey (Dutton)
  • Fun & Games by Duane Swierczynski (Mulholland Books/Little, Brown)

Non-Fiction

  • Berlin 1961 by Frederick Kempe (Putnam Adult)
  • In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson (Crown)
  • Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff (Harper)
  • Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku (Doubleday)
  • The Social Animal by David Brooks (Random House)

Poetry

  • Beyond Scent of Sorrow by Sweta Vikram (Modern History Press)
  • Catalina by Laurie Soriano  (Lummox Press)
  • What Looks Like an Elephant by Edward Nudelman  (Lummox Press)
  • Three Women: A Poetic Triptych and Selected Poems by Ramos, Emma Eden  (Heavy Hands Ink)
  • Sonics in Warholia by Megan Volpert (Sibling Rivalry Press)

Speculative Fiction

  • A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (Candlewick)
  • The Magician King by Lev Grossman (Viking)
  • 11/22/1963 by Stephen King (Scribner)
  • Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor Books)
  • Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Crown)

We expect to announce the winners in mid-March. If you’d like more info on the awards, check out the web page.

Book Club, Bookish Talk, Lists

Book Club: What We Pitched & What Was Chosen

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If you visited me earlier in the week, you may have read this post where I expressed my anxiety anticipation over my book club’s yearly selection meeting. Well, we met at Border’s last night to select twelve books and let me tell you, it was hard to limit myself to two books. I came in with a stack of oh… 18 or so.

I’ve separated them into two groups.

Once the chosen books have been assigned to a month, I will post them under the Book Club tab.

The Chosen

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
A Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japriscot
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Pearl of China by Anchee Min
Room by Emma Donoghue
The Lost City of Z by David Grann
*The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
*Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

*Pitched by me

The Recommended (not chosen)

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
*Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong
Candide by Voltaire
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
*Safe From the Sea by Peter Geye
Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli
The Photographer by Emannuel Guibert
The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
*The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
*We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

*Pitched by me

What do you think of the list? Sometimes it’s hard to choose for an entire year because you just don’t know what you’ll want to read several months down the line but we’ve been choosing this way for years. It seems to work for us.