Great Reads

Have you read any good books lately?  I'd love to hear about them... please send me some good titles to pick-up.

David and I have been reading about a book a week lately.  I'm loving it.  It's so calming and relaxing.  It's really improving my well-being.  The best part is that we are reading books and then trading with each other and its giving us so many interesting things to talk about.  You know more than the typical, "Did you hear about..." or "How was work today?" It's got us talking about things like parenting styles, post apocalyptic America, time travel, history, theology, philosophy, and much much more.  Its fun to share that with each other.  It's our own private book club, and I feel closer to David because of it.

In the past month, we've both finished, in no particular order: World Made By Hand, it's sequel, The Witch of Hebron, The Glass Castle, it's sequel Half Broke Horses, My Life in France, World Without End (which is the sort of sequel to Ken Follett's Pillar of the Earth, which David is currently reading- the mini-series is good too), and The Shack.   I feel like I'm missing one?  Hmmm....

They were all excellent.  I am in love with all of them.  Especially The World Made By hand and its sequel The Witch of Hebron.  The author, James Kunstler has such a clear vision for the post-apocalyptic world his characters are living in that I didn't want either of the books to end, but I was satisfied with the ending of both books.  It certainly makes one think...

The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses were also books that neither David or I could put down.  Jeanette Walls memoir of her life is so amazing that many times while reading the book, both David and I had to stop reading just to express our frustration.  I told my sister-in-law Marlee about them and she read The Glass Castle in one evening.  I bet she didn't get any sleep that night!  But its SO worth it!  

The only book of the above list I had even a slightly hard time reading was The Shack, because it starts out so incredibly dark, and then it gets preachy and a little too obvious for me.  I think David felt the same way.  No offense to the people who loved it, because there are many who did, but as I read, I kept saying to myself, "duh."  As David said, maybe the reader just had to be someone who had experience something similar- a great loss or a life-altering/faith-questioning experience to really appreciate and understand the book on a deeper level.  Or maybe my beliefs about God, and religion have changed so much that I look at the world differently these days?  Or maybe I'm just not that deep!  The topic of my faith in a higher power is definitely going to be saved for another blog post... but until then, back to books.

I've just started a book I picked up at the Borders Bookstore going out of business sale called A Visit From the Goon Squad. And my sister-in-law and mother-in-law both told me to read The Paris Wife about Ernest Hemingway's first wife Hadley.  I might run out to Border's or to the library to see if they still have a copy today.  Also, my friend Dayna was the person to recommend most of the other books to me and she's also recommend the book The Road.  I haven't started it yet.  I have to work myself up to it because I saw the movie last year, and I'm still having nightmares about it... but I oddly still want to read it.

I'd love good recommendations for other reads... so be sure to comment!  Happy reading!