A few weeks ago I came up with an idea of starting a no-obligation book club here on the blog. I put out a request for my readers to suggest books and got various responses here, via Twitter and Facebook. I’ve narrowed the list down to 3 finalist for our first Blogger Book Club and I need your help again. I’ve got to pick one. Here they are:
Overview from Barnes and Noble:
When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces, Julia and Valentina. These two American girls never met their English aunt; they only knew that their mother, too, was a twin, and Elspeth her sister. Julia and Valentina are semi-normal American teenagers — with seemingly little interest in college, finding jobs, or anything outside their cozy home in the suburbs of Chicago, and with an abnormally intense attachment to one another.
The girls move to Elspeth’s flat, which borders Highgate Cemetery. They come to know the building’s other residents. There is Martin, a brilliant and charming crossword puzzle setter suffering from crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder; Marjike, Martin’s devoted but trapped wife; and Robert, Elspeth’s elusive former lover, a scholar of the cemetery. As the girls become embroiled in the fraying lives of their aunt’s neighbors, they also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including — perhaps — their aunt, who can’t seem to leave her old apartment and life behind.
Niffenegger weaves a captivating story in Her Fearful Symmetry: about love and identity, about secrets and sisterhood, and about the tenacity of life — even after death.
Overview from Barnes and Noble:
In this charming little book, Thoreau treats his subject as if it were a walk itself. As he wanders, so do his thoughts. Thoreau walked both for exercise of mind and body and as a way of exploring his inner and outer worlds.
Overview from Barnes and Noble:
If chaos theory transformed our view of the universe, biomimicry is transforming our life on Earth. Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature – taking advantage of evolution’s 3.8 billion years of R&D since the first bacteria. Biomimics study nature’s best ideas: photosynthesis, brain power, and shells – and adapt them for human use. They are revolutionising how we invent, compute, heal ourselves, harness energy, repair the environment, and feed the world.
Science writer and lecturer Janine Benyus names and explains this phenomenon. She takes us into the lab and out in the field with cutting-edge researchers as they stir vats of proteins to unleash their computing power; analyze how electrons zipping around a leaf cell convert sunlight into fuel in trillionths of a second; discover miracle drugs by watching what chimps eat when they’re sick; study the hardy prairie as a model for low-maintenance agriculture; and more.
They’re all quite different and all on my short list regardless of which gets selected for the blog. So I’m asking for your opinion – if you were going to read along (and I hope you will) which book would you choose?
