I linked to a brief review of mine, but I'll copy and paste.

If Not Now, When? is rooted in historical events and draws on Levi's own experiences in Auschwitz and as a displaced person after the war, on the stories of partisans he met, and on secondary sources. It gives us a feel for the broad spaces and the marshes and forests, the scattered skirmishes of a spread-out war, and the uneasy relationships between civilians and different partisan groups, with trade and exchange persisting even in desperate conditions, but with Russians and Poles not always friendly to Jews.

Levi is a novelist, however, not a historian. It is individuals who are at the core of his work -- Mendel first and foremost, but others are also given substance -- and their relationships as they seek companionship, romance and fleeting happiness. Some struggle with doubt and despair, and in Mendel's more ruminative moments we see the philosophical quandry facing those who have lost everything and must find new goals, new purposes. But this doesn't dominate the story. If Not Now, When? exhibits Levi's familiar restraint, his disdain for the flamboyant or dramatised, but it is a fast-moving novel, a simple but powerful story of human endurance and struggle in a hostile world.

Yeah, if it's random, I don't care whether I know anything about the book, but if we're consensing, then I'm more interested.

Thanks, Heather. I saw your link, but I hadn't had a chance to click it yet. And, probably would've forgotten to go back.

Maybe we could let Wolfram have the honor of picking the very first book from our suggestions (or one of his own) so that people can get it right away, and then figure out a system to pick books 2 and 3? He had a hard proposal, and got it passed, in the face of much resistance

I like this idea.

I like that idea, too, if Wolfram does!

ETA: How about we put Book Title Suggestions in Bold so they're easy to pick out.

Thanks for the great review, Heather, that sounds interesting. No matter how we hammer out the process, I'm really excited about this thread.

Wolfram picking is fine with me too.

Looked up all the other books and will not be put out whichever one is picked.

I'll construct something more substantial later on if people want me to, but...oh, Amazon.com has a pretty nice blurb for The Remains of the Day.

The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second World War, Stevens is oblivious of the real life that goes on around him -- oblivious, for instance, of the fact that his aristocrat employer is a Nazi sympathizer. Still, there are even larger matters at stake in this heartbreaking, pitch-perfect novel -- namely, Stevens' own ability to allow some bit of life-affirming love into his tightly repressed existence.

And I guess I'll steal something for Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? as well. I, like, Jen, am lazy.

A disillusioned, middle-aged woman's remembrance of an ephemeral teenage friendship is triggered by eating cervelles in a Parisian restaurant in Moore's acerbic, witty and affecting third novel (after Like Life). While vacationing in Paris, narrator Berie Carr, whose marriage is stuck in a bleakly funny state of suspended collapse, looks back to her girlhood in Horsehearts, an Adirondack tourist town near the Canadian border. There in the summer of 1972, she was a skinny, 15-year-old misfit who rejected her parents and idolized her sassy, sexually precocious friend Sils, who played Cinderella at a theme park called Storyland where Berie was a cashier. In a series of flashbacks, Berie recounts [okay, that's far too spoilery for my tastes]. Moore's bitterly funny hymn to vanished adolescence is suffused with droll wordplay, allegorical images of lost innocence and fairy-tale witchery and a poignant awareness of how life's significant events often prove dismally anticlimactic.

You know, it's really bizarre how neither of these descriptions would have gotten me to read these books. The former I read because it was the Ac Dec book, and the latter I read because it was Lorrie Moore. Perhaps I shouldn't discount books that don't seem like my "type," cause I wouldn't have said either of these would have been.

I know what you mean. The descriptions only give away a bit of the plot, and a sense of what it was like for the reviewer to read the book. There are at least 20 different things that can endear a book to me most reviews touch on maybe one of them.

I'm leaning towards the randomization way of picking, because trying to consense/persuade folks to read a book could take ages. While I loathe change and leaving my book comfort zone, I'm willing to try something utterly new here.

I'm going to recommend Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen. Here's some of what Amazon has to say.

"A novel about convent life at the turn of the century? Hardly the makings of a page-turner, yet Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy is a gripping, even life-changing book. For the Sisters of the Crucifixion, each day is a ceaseless round of work, study, and prayer--one hardly separated from the other. ... Into this idyll comes Mariette--young, pretty, devout, but, as her father says, perhaps "too high-strung" for the convent. Prone to "trances, hallucinations, unnatural piety, great extremes of temperament, and, as he put it, 'inner wrenchings,'" Mariette scalds her hands with hot water as penance, threads barbed wire underneath her breasts while she sleeps, and is convinced Jesus speaks to her. Her very glamour disturbs the gentle rhythm of the nuns' lives. But when she begins bleeding from unexplained wounds in her hands, feet, and sides, the convent is thrown into an uproar. ... Mariette in Ecstasy is a brief, precious book, not a single word in excess, not a single word left out."

And Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin. This is the book description.

"...a fresh twist on the classic Jekyll and Hyde story, a novel told from the perspective of Mary Reilly, Dr. Jekyll's dutiful and intelligent housemaid. Faithfully weaving in details from Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, Martin introduces an original and captivating character: Mary is a survivor–scarred but still strong–familiar with evil, yet brimming with devotion and love. As a bond grows between Mary and her tortured employer ... Mary ultimately proves the lengths to which she'll go to protect him. ... this familiar tale is made more terrifying than we remember it, more complex than we imagined possible."

Both books are available on Amazon, although I don't know about local libraries, and both books are available used. And the novel Mary Reilly is, like, light years better than the movie Julia Roberts and John Malkovich tried to make of it.

P-C, you have read Self-Help, I'm guessing?