Hey You. Yeah You. Choose What I Read Next.

Post Updated 7/28 @8:05 PM MST

Yup, you read that title right. I want YOU to choose the next book or rather books I read in August. All of the books included in the poll are on my Reading Goals 2017 list.

I’ll be participating in Bout of Books again. It takes place from August 21st-27th. Last time I was really ambitious; which didn’t turn out as I had hoped. This go round I’m reducing the number of books from 7 to 2 or 3 books. I think that’s a much more attainable goal.

I will post the top 4 or 5 books you guys and dolls chose on Saturday, August 5th and begin reading your selections on Sunday, August 6th.

• Week of August 6th
• Week of August 13th
• Bout of Books week August 21st-27th

**UPDATE: Okay, so I didn’t even know this readathon was going on until after I made this post. Ha! Sometimes great minds think alike. The readathon is called Make Me Read It and it’s hosted by  Ely @ Tea & Titles and Val @ The Innocent Smiley and it runs from August 6th – 13th.

The poll expires on Friday, August 4th, so be sure to get your vote in to choose what I read for the month of August. I’m already on pins and needles, eagerly awaiting your decisions.

**NOTE: You may select up to three. See below for book summaries

 

Book Summaries

Kindred by Octavia Butler – The first science fiction written by an African-American woman. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity. Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning white boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she’s been given: to protect this young slaveholder until he can father her own great-grandmother.

Song of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe by Thomas Ligotti – Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. The stories take on decaying cities and lurid dreamscapes in a style ranging from rich, ornamental prose to cold, clinical detachment. His raw and experimental work lays bare the unimportance of our world and the sickening madness of the human condition.

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy – Hailed as one of the world’s supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his death so much as a passing thought. But one day death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise he is brought face to face with his own mortality. How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?

Swing Time by Zadie Smith – Two brown girls dream of being dancers–but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, about what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free.

Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them. Moving from northwest London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen – The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

Don’t Look Now by Daphne du Maurier – This is a tale of the supernatural involving a British couple vacationing in Venice to escape the pain of their young daughter’s recent death. An encounter with two sisters at a cafe, and the blind one’s claim that she can “see” the deceased child sitting with her parents, launches a series of events that ends violently. The story was made into a suspense movie a few years after it was published and has remained one of du Maurier’s best-known tales.