Suggestions and Poll for September-December 2008

[Elspeth]

This thread is to gather suggestions for book club choices for September-December 2008. In order to limit the number of suggestions and not have a poll with 100 choices, we're asking for suggestions of books on the following two topics: Scandinavian royalty and Medieval monarchy. Ideally we'll end up with two books on each topic for the four-month period, but if one topic is vastly more popular than the other, we could get a three-one split.

The books on Scandinavian royalty can include books about individual Scandinavian countries, books about Scandinavian monarchies as a whole, histories, biographies of contemporary or historical royal figures, or anything else that you happen to find interesting. Please stick with nonfiction this time around; we're planning to have a historical fiction topic in one of the upcoming periods.

The books on medieval monarchy can include biographies, books about wars and conquests, political histories, books about social or religious issues - again, just about anything with a royal-related theme as long is it's nonfiction. The cutoff date should be somewhere inthe 15th century, depending on the country. For books about medieval Britain, the cutoff would probably be the end of the Plantagenet dynasty.

The thread will be open for suggestions until 21 June, at which point we'll choose up to 12 of the suggested books and open a poll like the one we had for the May-August choices. The poll will run till the middle of July, when we'll announce the choices for September-December. That should give everyone plenty of time to find copies of the books they're interested in reading and to read the first one ahead of time if they want to.

When you suggest books, please don't just give titles and authors; give us some idea of what the book is about and why you'd be interested in reading it. Feel free to link to the Amazon or Barnes & Noble (or whatever) page where the book is listed. You can also paste the Amazon book description (not one of the copyrighted ones from Publisher's Weekly or whatever - the Amazon one itself) if you don't want to explain in your own words why you find the book interesting.