January-March 2025 Nominations and voting

Believe or not, it is time to vote for the first authors for 2025 :)

Nomination gives a point to the author. Seconding, thirding and so on and all other kinds of support add a point as well. The 3 authors with the most points win in the order of the number of votes they got (unless one or more of the 3 has an anniversary or something - in which case I will try to match them to their month). Ties that produce more than 3 authors overall at the top will be broken with an admin half-vote and everyone who is in a tie but does not make it into this selection, gets half a point for next time.

Anyone is eligible to be nominated except for the authors we had read the last 24 months: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/Monthly_Author_Reads#Recent_Picks . It is preferred that the author has at least some work in English (original or translated) -- most of the participants read in English (even if some may be able to also use other languages) :)

Just to make everyone's life easier (so you do not need to click on the wiki if you do not want to), here is the list of ineligible authors:

Anthony Trollope
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Alan Brennert
Chaim Potok
Elizabeth von Arnim
Edna Ferber
Honoré de Balzac
Emily St. John Mandel
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Colson Whitehead
The Brontë Sisters
Willa Cather
Elizabeth Gaskell
George Bernard Shaw
Sir Walter Scott
Wilkie Collins
Maggie O'Farrell
Margaret Atwood
Émile Zola
James Baldwin
Jane Gardam
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Robert Louis Stevenson
George Eliot

Deadline: December 1, 2024, whatever time I get around to counting :)

I nominate Beryl Bainbridge

I nominate Pearl S. Buck

I nominate Henry James.

Dawn Powell

Dawn Powell was author from the 50s who wrote novels filled with biting and hilarious plots. "Dawn Powell (November 28, 1896 – November 14, 1965) was an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and short story writer. Known for her acid-tongued prose, "her relative obscurity was likely due to a general distaste for her harsh satiric tone.Nonetheless, Stella Adler and author Clifford Odets appeared in one of her plays. Her work was praised by Robert Benchley in The New Yorker and in 1939 she was signed as a Scribner author where Maxwell Perkins, famous for his work with many of her contemporaries, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, became her editor. A 1963 nominee for the National Book Award, she received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifetime achievement in literature the following year. A friend to many literary and arts figures of her day, including author John Dos Passos, critic Edmund Wilson, and poet E.E. Cummings,Powell's work received renewed interest after Gore Vidal praised it in a 1987 editorial for The New York Review of Books. Since then, the Library of America has published two collections of her novels."

Emma Donohgue

I nominate John Le Carré. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by my TBR right now, there are too many books calling out to me...

>7 MissWatson: I second LeCarré

I'll second Pearl S. Buck.

I nominate James McBride

I’ll second Henry James.

I second James McBride.

I nominate Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

>13 BuecherDrache: second Adichie

I second John Le Carre.

>13 BuecherDrache: Adichie is not eligible because we had him as the author of the month in the last 24 months.

I will do another count in the morning from a proper computer but it looks like John Le Carre, Pearl S. Buck and James McBride (in some order) will be our first 3 2025 authors, with Henry James getting the 1/2 point for next time.

Final votes counting:

January: John Le Carré - MissWatson, Cecilturtle, Tess_W
February: James McBride - DAGray08, kac522
March: Pearl S. Buck - Tess_W, kac522

1/2 points for next time: Henry James - kac522, dianelouise100

Beryl Bainbridge - kjuliff
Dawn Powell - cindydavid4
Emma Donohgue - cindydavid4
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - BuecherDrache, kjuliff (ineligible)

Next voting: February 1 - February 28.

Topics for the first 3 authors of 2025 will be up later in the week. Thanks everyone for voting!

January: John Le Carré: https://www.librarything.com/topic/366716
February: James McBride: https://www.librarything.com/topic/366717
March: Pearl S. Buck: https://www.librarything.com/topic/366718

Happy holidays!

I am not a big fan of espionage reads but Id like to try him. Is there one that would appeal to me nonethless?

>20 cindydavid4: The start of his Karla trilogy Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is probably the best starting point for any new reader. It is self-contained so no need to read the next 2 in the trilogy if you do not want to and if you like it enough, there is a lot to explore (including The Spy Who Came in From the Cold -- which is great but more dated than Tinker... and).

thanks Ill try it

for Baldwin, the NYer has a column about his time in Turkey which he says saves his life. havent read it yet but very interested in what he has to say. unfortunately there is a wall, but you can probably pick it up at newstands. Ill check it out and quote some of it here.

>22 cindydavid4: Or for for the non-series stuff - The Night Manager for example (which is still on my list of books to read but I watched the series based on it and loved it).

Oh that does sound good thanks