Glacier

Great thread....
Our Book Club is currently reading "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver. The Kingsolver family lives on the land on a farm in Virginia's Appalachian mountains.

I was hesitant to read it as I couldn't imagine reading a book about food but I was wrong - it is very well written and it will change my buying habits. The author can be a little preachy at times but it's a fascinating look at organic farming and how corporations have changed the way we eat. Most of our food travels 1,000 miles before it arrives on our table. You will never look at your food the same way again!

Glacier

I purchased this book at a bookstore in northern Wisconsin based on their recommendations and loved it. As far as I know it is only available from the site below or used at Amazon. (or travel to Red Berry books in Northern Wisconsin!)

Five Friends Books - Fall to Grace

It is definitely on my list of all time favorite books I've read.

Two young boys from very different backgrounds meet and become friends because of tragedies in each of their lives. Much of it takes place in northern Minnesota. I read it last summer and can still remember all the characters. I hope there is a sequel. (edit - the author is Kerry Casey not Case - can't edit the title)

TimeCruncher

One of the most chilling books I have read in the past six months is Jules Verne’s "lost" novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century.

According to a number of credible sources, Verne wrote this futuristic novel in 1863. Verne’s publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, considered the novel’s theme to be too pessimistic (and potentially damaging to Verne’s rising literary career) to be published at that time. Verne followed Hetzel’s advice, and shelved the manuscript indefinitely. The manuscript was subsequently discovered by Verne’s great-grandson in 1989, and the novel was finally published (in French) in 1994. An English translation was published three years later.

Paris in the Twentieth Century, the story of a young man who is cold-bloodedly “weeded-out” by a society where intellectualism and creativity have become thoroughly corporatized, shook me to my core. The parallels between Verne’s futuristic 20th Century Paris (in which the sole purpose of privately-funded and corporate-controlled "public" education is to produce future cogs for the internationally “borderless” corporate wheel) and today’s creeping privatization, corporatization, and globalization of public elementary/secondary schools and public colleges/universities, are shocking.

If you are the parent of a son or daughter currently attending (or planning to attend) a public educational institution, I recommend that you read this novel. It will open your eyes, and if you are a public education advocate, I guarantee that you will be appalled by what you see.

alwaysamom

epistrophy, thank you for those recommendations for short story collections. I have a friend who is a writer and I'm going to buy those for her, as short stories are her favorites. She has always told me that a good short story is the most difficult type of writing to produce.

glacier, thank you for mentioning the Kerry Casey book. An acquaintance told me about it recently, too, and I meant to order it but it had slipped my mind. Today will be the day to do that, and I'll look forward to reading it in a few weeks when my H and I are going to take a vacation at Cape Cod.

garland

Not a new book, but one I never read before: White Noise, by Don DeLillo. Story gets pretty out there, though interesting. The writing itself is fantastic. I wanted to steal every other line.

DefyingGravity04

Just had to comment on John Green. I love him and Abundence of Katherines and Looking for Alaska. LFA is actually being made into a movie.
Just had to throw in a suggestion:
Certain Girls by Jennifer Weiner:
A really feel good book about the relationship between a mother and her daughter, trying to plan the daughters Bat Mitzvah. It is the sequel to her first book Good in Bed.

epistrophy

Another collection of short stories that's been getting under my skin lately is Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson's (winner of this years's National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke).

What are these interconnected stories "about"? Well, let's see: they're "about" voice - the voice of a first-person narrator who's sometimes sentimental, sometimes bitter, often funny, as he recounts his misadventures in and out of love, in and out of bars, with and without drugs.

I recently read one of these stories, "Work," in the anthology I mentioned in my last post, edited by Richard Ford, then wanted to hear more of that voice. Here's the first paragraph of that story:

(Johnson's kinetic, driven, I-did-this-I-did-that prose sometimes reminds me a bit of Kerouac.)

Amazon.com: Jesus' Son: Stories by: Denis Johnson: Books

tokenadult

Amazon.com: The Nature of Paleolithic Art: R. Dale Guthrie: Books

An AMAZING book. It's about much more than what the title says it's about.

wbow

i just got a sony portable reader for mother's day. no more lugging books through airports! i've downloaded the new books by leif enger and chris bohjalian....can't wait to try it out

Jolynne Smyth

It's an old one, but I just read "The Joy Luck Club" (for book club) & really liked it a lot!

wbow--is Chris Bohjalian the author of "The Midwife?" That was an interesting one.

wbow

here's a listing of his published works--

i never read midwives--but i really did enjoy "before you know kindness" and "the double bind"

A Killing in the Real World (1988)
Hangman (1991)
Past the Bleachers (1992)
Water Witches (1995)
Midwives (1997)
The Law of Similars (1999)
Trans-Sister Radio (2000)
The Buffalo Soldier (2002)
Idyll Banter: Weekly Excursions to a Very Small Town (2003)
Before You Know Kindness (2005)
The Double Bind (2007)
Skeletons at the Feast (2008)

epistrophy

bcnmom

Wow, so many great books! I've gotten some great suggestions from this thread. I've read many of the ones listed here and loved them. So, a couple I haven't seen mentioned:

"Lay of the Land" by Richard Ford (his best one yet, imho)
"The Glass Palace", "The Hungry Tide", "Circle of Reason", all by Amitav Ghosh (love him, can you tell?)

and, my favorite book of all time, "Fugitive Pieces" by Anne Michaels

mammall

Just read The Good Earth for the very first time because D2 read it over spring break and I got jealous of how much she was enjoying it. Just enormously satisfying in every way.

seiclan

I just finished "Exile" by Richard North Patterson. I could not put this book down (all 728 pages of it)! The book was about a Jewish American lawyer who, while preparing to run for congress, gets swept into defending a Palestinian woman (with whom he had an secret affair back in law school) for the murder of the Israeli Prime Minister (which took place in the US). Very well researched novel and a real page turner!