Greek Chat Book Club Vote 5/20

[James]

Since I have no idea how to post a poll just post a reply for which book you want to vote for. There are 15 listed, where the suggestor bothered to post a description I reposted it.

Try to pick something fun people. Also, not a Lifetime movie in book form please. *Gags*

1. Illium by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons' work is easily some of the most intelligent in science fiction. His 'Hyperion Cantos' became an instant classic, and stands as a landmark work of literature, a masterpiece in any genre. With 'Ilium', Simmons brings a new vision to life, full of fascinating insights and riveting storylines.

Mars has... changed. It no longer resembles the red planet that haunted the skies of Earth throughout human history. Gods rule Mars now, and they have remade it in the image of ancient earth. The father of all gods, Zeus, and hundreds of dieties from the greek Pantheon rule over Mars and the titanic struggle taking place on its changed surfaces. The entire Trojan war is being fought, a quarter of a million humans living and dying in a re-enactment of one of the greatest conflicts of all time.

Thomas Hockenberry was a twentieth century expert on the Trojan War, now resurrected by the awe-inspiring technology of the 'gods' two millenia after his death. His role is to act as a sholar, and document the fidelity of the re-enactment, as well as observing pivotal moments he could only dream about in his former life. Aside from Zeus, the gods themselves do not know the outcome of the great war, and Hockenberry is forbidden to reveal it. The gods cannot help jockeying amongst themselves, each intent on defending their respective worshippers. Hockenberry's role will change from one of observer to active participant, as Aphrodite herself enlists his unwilling aid as she conspires against her immortal sister.

2. "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac...description below from Barnes & Noble.com:
...One of the most influential and important novels of the 20th century, this is the book that launched the Beat Generation and remains the bible of that literary movement. On the Road's publication in 1957 was a wake-up call to the American public that not all its youth were modeled after characters on Ozzie and Harriet: it portrayed Ivy League-educated white kids who smoked dope, hitchhiked, and frequented black jazz joints and Mexican whorehouses. It was the harbinger of the radical changes that would soon sweep society in the 1960s.

3.Family Trust
High powered business woman and born-rich philantropist inherit guardianship of child.
This books is hysterical....

4. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, Douglas Adams

5. Author: Brad Meltzer.

Title: The First Consel or The Tenth Justice. Legal thrillers. Way better than Grishom.

6. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Description from Barnes & Noble: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/bo...erid=O9t1vATsXG

Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors the book received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America. In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail -- the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase -- that opens whole worlds of emotion. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name. Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along a first-generation path strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves. The New York Times has praised Lahiri as "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." The Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity.

7."The Five People You Meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom
(he also wrote "Tuesdays With Morrie" another GREAT book)

8. Tuesdays with Morrie

9. Confessions of a Shoaholic

10. Angels and Demons, which is also by Dan Brown

11. Garden of Good & Evil by John Berendt.

Here is a description from Amazon:
John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has been heralded as a "lyrical work of nonfiction," and the book's extremely graceful prose depictions of some of Savannah, Georgia's most colorful eccentrics--remarkable characters who could have once prospered in a William Faulkner novel or Eudora Welty short story--were certainly a critical factor in its tremendous success. (One resident into whose orbit Berendt fell, the Lady Chablis, went on to become a minor celebrity in her own right.) But equally important was Berendt's depiction of Savannah socialite Jim Williams as he stands trial for the murder of Danny Hansford, a moody, violence-prone hustler--and sometime companion to Williams--characterized by locals as a "walking streak of sex." So feel free to call it a "true crime classic" without a trace of shame.

12. Wild by Jon Krakauer

13. On the Road

14. Fast Food Nation

15. Fast Food Nation