Voting for Sabbatical Books...

I've sent a voting e-mail to my bookclub friends plus other readers I know to help me pare down the 4 books I'll take on sabbatical (ouch!) Here are the options in alphabetical order (current leaders marked with an asterisk) with the brief descriptions that interested me.


All Other Nights by Dara Horn - her follow up to The World to Come (though not a sequel). About a Jewish family involved in spying, Passover and the Civil War across the Mason-Dixon line. And of course, there's a love story.

Bellwether by Connie Wills - I first read about this author in Book Lust (anthology of books for every mood by a Seattle librarian) in regards to To Say Nothing of the Dog (which I haven't read & perhaps should have included in the voting). It's my one real sci-fi book on the list about a chaos theorist and a sociologist who studies fads that are brought together by accident with mayhem ensuing. Lots of fun-poking at corporate environments and the similarities between humans and sheep.

**Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye - I liked her The Handmaid's Tale, I hated The Blind Assassin - so Margaret and I are tentative with each other. It's about how "girls" treat each other. Sort of a "Mean Girls" for grown-ups. Highly recommended by one of my friends as her favorite Atwood.

The Curious Incident of the Dog - by Mark Haddon. This has been a random interest for me due to browsing Borders display tables. It takes a young, autistic wanna-be Sherlock Holmes as the main character who is sleuthing to find the murderer of the neighbor's poodle to clear his name and who has to deal with the fact that other people are a total mystery to him and he has no understanding for sarcasm, nuances and subtlety.

Eva Luna by Isabelle Allende is a follow-up (though not a sequel) to her House of the Spirits which I have read and enjoyed. It fits into Latin America's "Magic Realism" genre like Paolo Coelho or Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Hundred Years of Solitude) & other Latin authors writing fictional dramas with fantasy bents.

**Good Omens by Terry Pratchette & Neil Gaiman - the world is supposed to end in Armegeddon in a few days but the main characters angel Aziraphale & demon Crowley haven't done the greatest jobs getting everything in place which might have to do with the fact that neither of them are that thrilled about the whole plan anyways. British humor.

**Zadie Smith's On Beauty - I really liked her previous book White Teeth about mixed families and coming-of-age in the U.K. This was the winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction (whatever that is!) and contains similar themes this time in the U.S.

Geraldine Brook's The People of the Book - The fictional story of the travels of the 'Sarajevo Haggadah' a Jewish religious volume that travelled Europe surviving centuries of war and religious purges. Essentially a fly-on-the-wall story from a book's perspective.

The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay - probably the biggest tome of the bunch, this is the story of love and faith overcoming huge obstacles in South African apartheid. The main character Peekay is an English boy coming-of-age amidst Afrikaner hatred towards the English and Nazi sympathy during WWII. I've seen the movie and it was incredible (great music too!)

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield - a famous dying author who has told 19 versions of her history finally agrees to tell the truth to an unworldly, bookish biographer. The two women then discover a lot about each other, ghosts, and history as they figure out the truth in the story.

**The infamous Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - everyone's heard of it. Some folks have read it. Not me. It's been on my bookshelf for probably 4+ years.