Well, if it helps to sway you, Crossing to Safety and Angle of Repose were two of the very few books I brought with me when we moved overseas…with very long flights, I rely on my Kindle, but I’ll always want actual books for those two.
I liked *Crossing to Safety *, but actually didn’t find it that memorable. I’ve always thought that *Angle of Repose * had a great title.
Has anyone read Jon Hassler? ( *Staggerford *, *A Green Journey *.) He passed away a few years ago, he’s probably my favorite mid-west author. His books mostly take place in the same town and major characters in one often turn up as minor characters in other books.
Thanks for all the advice about Stegner!
Haha, Mathmom I like the title Angle of Repose too. It suddenly just occurred to me that it might have something to do with architecture. 
Hm, I’m trying to think of other books that have great titles, irrespective of whether I have read them. One is a book I actually recently read: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts. That one lived up to its title.
Stegnar’s Crossing to Safety is one of my favorite books. I preferred it to Angle of Repose.
Yes, @mathmom, Jon Hassler is wonderful. I always think of his novels as a cup of hot tea on a cold, wintry morning. You wrap your hands around the mug for warmth, and slowly get cozy in a way that also engages your heart and mind.
Do you need to read Hessler’s novels in order?
I’m sure it helps, but I didn’t. Dear James should be read after A Green Journey, but most are not really sequels and they all can stand alone.
Well, I finished Crossing to Safety and have been mulling it over for a few days. It is an intensely absorbing book.
The thing that bothers me about it is the magic wand of money. It seems like cheating. It’s like mystery series in which the protagonist had a magic friend. Do people know what I mean?
Another big Stegner fan here. Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety are two of my all-time favorite books. Like @Jaylynn I read it once when it was first published and again recently through a far more mature lens. In my much younger reading I was mostly fascinated by the “couples friends” aspect, but the second read had me thinking about issues of aging.
In my re-reading I underlined this passage as it seemed so perfectly to describe what happens to so many of us as life goes on:
“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”
Isn’t this pretty universal to aging? We can’t know what lies ahead. So @Consolation while I see what you’re saying about “cheating” I think it’s also fair to say that while the magic money makes them more able to deal with their problems it can’t entirely solve them.
Book lovers heads up - settlement dispersed today in ebook price fixing
http://9to5mac.com/2016/06/20/apple-ebook-settlements-consumer-payouts-begin/
^^Check your email if you use Amazon … I got $120 in credits from the settlement. Note: 1 year expiration.
Not sure if anyone has mentioned this one before, but my book club just read A Backpack, A Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka, a memoir by Lev Golinkin. One of the best we’ve read this year! Funny, heartbreaking, amusing, terrifying.
Would not be surprised to see this become required reading for HS or college classes…
From Goodreads:
“Lev Golinkin’s memoir is the vivid, darkly comic, and poignant story of a young boy in the confusing and often chilling final decade of the Soviet Union. It’s also the story of Lev Golinkin, the American man who finally confronts his buried past by returning to Austria and Eastern Europe to track down the strangers who made his escape possible . . . and say thank you. Golinkin’s search for personal identity set against the relentless currents of history is more than a memoir—it’s a portrait of a lost era. This is a thrilling tale of escape and survival, a deeply personal look at the life of a Jewish child caught in the last gasp of the Soviet Union, and a provocative investigation into the power of hatred and the search for belonging.”
I found $150 credit on my Amazon account. Now to decide what books to buy! 
Loved Crossing To Safety!
Has anyone else read Kerry Casey’s Fall To Grace books? I really enjoy them. Just picked up the third book, Slender Wishes, and am liking reading it here in MN where it takes place. Here is a brief description:
Where was God on the morning of October 15th as two 13-year-olds knelt beside their dead fathers?
Fall to Grace opens unforgettably when Joseph, an Ojibwe farm boy, stands at the car wreck that killed his father. Sixty miles away, Cory, a city kid on a fishing trip, survives a boating accident that takes his father’s life. Now two boys the same age have lost their fathers on the same day.
The story bends and twists through eight years, revealing the true impact of this tragic coincidence. For the hard-luck young priest who brings the boys together, it takes beating alcoholism and re-examining his calling to discover true love and grace. For the reclusive widow trapped between emptiness and forbidden love, grace proves to be elusive. And for the boys who grow to become best friends and star teammates in college, the very existence of grace is something they couldn’t have disagreed on more.
Fall to Grace is picturesque, spiritual, and reflective—while never forgetting its first obligation: to be a flat-out page-turner. The story takes you to the far edges of loss where love can do surprising things for those willing to reach again. And it reminds us, none too gently, that only angels fall from grace. The rest of us fall toward it.
@gosmom, thank you, that sounds really good!
@jaylynn (and anyone else who enjoyed “The Girl With All the Gifts”) - the trailer for the movie of the same name is now out, and it looks pretty good. The buzz for the movie is really heating up.
I just hope it’s half as good as the book was…
Ooooh!
I finished the author’s second book (“Fellside”) and liked it much less that Girl. There were some intriguing ideas and some gorgeous writing but overall not nearly as wonderful. Sad.
Too bad! I have " fellside" on my bookshelf right now - I was going to start it after I finish “the city of mirrors.”
I’ll still read it but it’s too bad. I liked “girl” so much.
You folks should get Amazon credits just for the number of books I’ve purchased after reading your recommendations here! Just started Crossing to Safety and am loving it so far. I have no idea how I have not read Stegner but I’m grateful for getting to know him now. His description in one passage of what happens when you ring a doorbell…wow, just beautiful.
@scout59 – there were actually some very interesting ideas and writing. Don’t let my opinion affect you. And we must talk after you’re done with City of Mirrors!!
@jaylynn - I finished “City of Mirrors” last night. I am really conflicted about that book - parts of it were beautifully written and engaging, but other parts I absolutely loathed. I was so turned off by that 100-page (or was it longer) digression in the middle, and I found the epilogue a little tiresome until the very end. I also found the voice of Zero/Fanning to be too smarmy and contrived.
I was interested in what happened to the all the characters from “The Passage” and “The Twelve” but on balance, I wasn’t really a fan of the book…which apparently makes me a grumpy outlier. Everyone else seemed to love it!