Hey guys,
After a very successful March meeting (thanks to Seamus's excellent hosting skills and copious quantities of food!) it's that time of the month again - voting time!!!!
So far we've had three nominations for the April meeting of the bookclub:
The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games is a young adult novel written by Suzanne Collins. It was first published on September 14, 2008, by Scholastic, in hardcover.[1] It is written in the voice of sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic world in the country of Panem where the countries of North America once existed. The Capitol, a highly advanced metropolis, holds absolute power over the rest of the nation. The Hunger Games are an annual event in which one boy and one girl aged 12 to 18 from each of the 12 districts surrounding the Capitol are selected by lottery to compete in a televised battle in which only one person can survive.
Prague Cemetery
The protagonist of The Prague Cemetery is a professional forger, a malcontent who fakes documents for a living, and in this rambling, ramshackle picaresque novel, the bilious Captain Simone Simoni slithers across Europe in the pay of one secret service after another, claiming personal responsibility for the calumnies that provoked most of the political crises of the 19th century. He serves his apprenticeship during Italy's campaign to liberate itself from Austrian rule. Officially he joins the novelist Alexandre Dumas in embellishing the mystique of Garibaldi; secretly he demolishes the patriotic myth, exposing the fabled warrior as a short, bandy-legged mediocrity. Abandoning Sicily for Paris, he stirs up trouble during the Commune, and goes on to concoct the incriminating document that causes Dreyfus to be convicted of treason. Side excursions link him with the Turkish conman Osman Bey and with the Romanovs in their efforts to suppress the bomb-throwing nihilists. Simonini's customers and victims are all actual historical characters, which enables Eco to suggest that history is a tissue of fictions, not a tale told by an idiot but a text slickly pieced together by self-appointed authorities who should never be trusted.
The Mahon Report
The Tribunal of Inquiry Into Certain Planning Matters and Payments, commonly known as the Mahon Tribunal, was a public inquiry in Ireland established by Dáil Éireann in 1997 to investigate allegations of corrupt payments to politicians regarding political decisions. It mostly investigated planning permissions and land rezoning issues in the 1990s in the Dublin County Council area. Judge Alan Mahon was the final chair of the tribunal and its other members were Judge Mary Faherty and Judge Gerald Keys. The original Chairman, who was the sole member until just before his retirement, was Judge Feargus Flood, giving rise to the original common name of the Flood Tribunal. Using investigations to collect evidence and public hearings with witnesses, it investigated allegations made in the media prior to its establishment and allegations subsequently made to the tribunal itself. The tribunal ran from November 1997 to March 2012 and was the longest running and most expensive public inquiry held in Ireland, with costs forecast to reach between €250 million and €300 million. Public hearings concluded in September 2008, and following several delays due to legal challenges, the tribunal began preparing its final report. It published four interim reports, and the final report was published on 22 March 2012.
So nowcomes the fun bit - voting time!!!
