h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Donm akeee puyges wriggggggggggggggle im typping!

Since I can't vote for my own book I'd have to go for "3 Men In A Boat" I've been meaning to read it since I finished Connie Willis' "To Say Nothing Of The Dog."

Silverlocke is good, too. There has been a Live Action Game set in the Silverlocke world, (The first game was called "Drink Deep" the second run was "Drink Deeper") I played Jackie Paper, my wife was Puff.

Hold on to your votes until the nominations are complete. If anyone has voted directly for someone else's book without making a selection of their own I'll tally that, but you've already put a book up, Mac.

Since I'm the Vote God here, I'm neither nominating nor voting. I can't narrow myself down to one book anyway.

But if we were to open up a second vote/poll for best non-fiction work, I would nominate "The Reason Why" by Cecil-Woodham Smith, even though it's rather long. A wonderful examination of the personalities and events that led to the charge of the Light Brigade.

"War and Peace" isn't short, but it is historical. And they way I always read it, it turns out much shorter than it really is.


I nominate "A Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula Le Guin, unless you want to be purists about the term "science fiction" since this is fantasy. It's the first in the Earthsea series of books.

Hmm, I shall have to give some thought to this.

The Road to Nab End, by William Woodruff is good. There is an American connection as his family emigrated to Fall River, RI, then his Dad returned to fight in WWI with his family following. It is about the depression years in the Lancashire cotton industry and the first 16 years of William's life. Not as depressing as it sounds and an excellent account of family life.

He grows up to be an eminent historian, returning to the US where he built an academic career for himself after attending night school in London.

A really good read and I have got the second volume lined up, Beyond Nab End.

See, that's the problem with most of the books I like. All of them are parts of a series....

The Wizard of Earthsea is good and short, though.

I'm sticking with Silverlock.

I know several folks have talked up DNA's posthumously published 'Salmon of Doubt' and I place my bid for that or his 'Last Chance to See'. I know I shouldn't nominate two books, so if someone's already done that for one of 'em, I'll nominate t'other. This way, I figure we could combine the World Book Selection with a tribute to the man got all this HooToo stuff started.

'Nuff said. [for now; you know how I am--blah, blah, blah]
B4iramble

We read Last Chance to See for World Book Day last year, B4.

Good for you all. Guess I'll pick that up on my own, then. Nomination then goes for 'Salmon of Doubt'. Now let's see if too many of us have ALREADY read it...
B4ihave2findanothertitle

Most of us dove right into the Salmon of Doubt when it came out. A good book, but sad that it was his last.

Ya know, I'm just gonna go back over to Barnes & Noble and scour their new SF/Fantasy section until I find a book not yet listed. Something that looks like it'll be a good read.

Or I could just wait for all the other submissions and cast a vote. Hmm.

B4mygraymatterimplodes

And surely Salmon of Doubt qualifies as a collection of essays or short works, not as a novel in its own right. Last Chance To See is, of course, non-fiction.

The Category is historical or science fiction.

I think it's pretty obvious I don't have my full attention on the subjects at hand. Let me count the ways.

1. My posts here.
2. My annexation of more space to the Atelier.
3. My over-eagerness in the Panto.
4. My faux pas in the Siege of Galyana.

"Three strikes, you're out". Well, I fell like I should bury my head in shame. Shame we don't have an smiley. It'd come in handy right now...
B4 (I'm thinking of changing this, too. Gets me in all sorts of trouble.)

Sounds like you're nearly ready for the L plate to come off.

Okay, here's my choice. It's a book that has been recommended several times to me and I have been meaning to read it, but somehow never get around to it. Right now, I'm at the library and there it was sitting out in their display. It was cosmic, you know, like, meant to be or something.

Anyway, the book is called Ex-Libris by Ross King. Here is the blurb from the jacket:

"A cryptic summons to a remot coutry house launches a London bookseller on an odyssey through seventeenth century Europe. Given the task of restoring a magnificent library that has been pillaged during the English Civil War, Isaac Inchbold finds himself slipping from the surface of 1600s London into an underworld of spies and smugglers, ciphers and forgeries.

As the bookish Inchbold assembles the fragments of a complex historical mystery, he learns how Sir Ambrose Plessington, founder of the library escaped from Bohemia on the eve of the Thity Years War with plunder from the Imperial Library. Inchbold's hunt for one of these stolen volumes - a lost Hermetic text - soon casts him into an elaborate intrigue involving such seemingly unrelated events as the sack of Constantinople in 1453 and Sir Walter Raleigh's last voyage in search of the gold of El Dorado.

Set in an age of scientific advancement and religious persecution, Ex-Libris sweeps back and forth between Prague and London, between explorations in astronomy and recipes for invisible ink, between artistic achievement and political upheaval. Ultimately, Inchbold's fortunes hang on the discovery of the missing manuscript, but his search reveals that the lost volume is not what it seems and that he has been made an unwitting player in a treacherous game."

The book is not overly long at 391 pages and was published in 1998 and so should be readily available.

Sounds like it has something for everyone.

Oooh!

Seeing mention of Silverlook my mind is immediately taken to Sherlock which leads me to ponder why I've never read a Sherlock Holmes book.

Aaarrrrgh! Vacillating (more like gyrating) between 'Smilla's Sense of Snow', 'Ex-Libris', and 'Silverlock'.

I'm gonna just purchase the remainder of Barnes & Noble stock, camp out in there store in Columbia, take nourishment from their Starbucks cafe, and pore over the available volumes until I find something equally good to nominate. Nothing like making the choice more difficult!

Ex-Libris sounded really good, and I couldn't figure out why, and then I realized...oh, yeah, my class is reading that! Well, half of them. The other half are reading "An Instance of the FingerPost" which, while good, is far too long to read for this.

Lil - 5 days have gone by with no postings here. Perhaps it is time for the first vote.

I preferred Ex Libris to Fingerpost. I kept waiting for *something* to happen in the latter. Two hundred pages in, I gave up.