The Books That I Read

I’m a big reader and by that I don’t mean that I plow through 1,000 books a year. No, I’m a slow reader–a deliberate reader–but I’m always reading something.

please comment on YOUR favorites
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The Bungalow
by Sarah Jio

Twenty-one year old Anne who has trained as a nurse and is newly engaged, decides to spend a year as a nurse in Bora Bora during the war in 1942. She goes with her best friend Kitty and there she finds a new love, and a beach hut said to be haunted by the locals and once owned by the famous painter Paul Gauguin. What follows is a scandal and a murder that is never resolved until many years later when she is telling her story to her granddaughter and at last returns to Bora Bora to find closure.

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The Dovekeepers

by Alice Hoffman

Captivating tale of the dovekeepers of Masada. The characters, each special in her own way, tell their story of how they came to be in Masada and their days seeking freedom from the Romans.
I loved this book. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt such emotion for the characters and story. Thanks Alice Hoffman for giving Masada a voice.
One of the most thoughtful & well-written books I’ve ever read. Definitely one of my top 10 favorites of all time. I highly recommend it, I couldn’t put this one down.

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Once We Were Brothers
by Ronald H. Balson

Balson takes the reader on an emotional ride, with some of Ben Solomon’s story very vivid and heart wrenching. This was a book I could not put down and finished in 3 days.
* From the back cover:
From Nazi-occupied Poland to a Chicago Courtroom.

The story is a tale of two boys and a family that struggles to survive in war torn Poland. It is also the story of a young lawyer who must face not only a powerful adversary, but her own self doubts.
Two lives, two worlds and sixty years all on course to collide in a fast paced legal thriller.

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The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern

I’m so disappointed in this book. I was expecting it to be one of those great experiences where you’re just sucked into the story and you never want to put it down. I actually had to push myself to get through it.
I never felt invested in the characters. I never particularly cared about what little plot there was. I kept waiting for something to grab my attention, but it never happened.
Celia and Marco had been groomed since youth by their mentors to be fierce competitors in a magical game where only one would be left standing. I thought I was going to read this amazing book that was going to build up to a great confrontation between two mysterious mystical magicians! And I kept reading…and waiting…and reading…and waiting… until the story was over and I’d been totally cheated out of time I could have spent reading an actual GOOD book. The story ended up dragging on and got to the point where I had to re-read several pages then wondered why I even bothered, sadly, this story about The Big Top ended up being a Big Let Down.

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The Hundred-Foot Journey
by Richard C. Morais

This book caught my eye because it combined two loves, food and reading.

This was a Wonderful story of Family, Food, Friendship and Finding ones way. The only down side, I was hungry the entire time I was reading! and realized this story would be best read on a full stomach!

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Island Beneath The Sea
Isabel Allende

The history of 1770- 1810 Haiti and Louisiana is told through the eyes of a mulatto house slave on a sugar plantation. The story follows the lives of her children and her master. Not my usual reading. Very interestering, very sad, but I am glad I read it. I am also glad I am finished it. It was Good but very long and very slow.

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The Street Of A Thousand Blossoms

Gail Tsukiyama delivers a compelling read!

From back cover:

“Japan, 1939. Two orphaned brothers are growing up with the loving grandparents who inspire them to dream of a future firmly rooted in tradition. The older boy, Hiroshi, shows early signs of promise at the national obsession of sumo wrestling, while Kenji is fascinated by the art of Noh Theater masks. But as the ripples of war spread, the brothers must put their dreams on hold-and then forge their own paths in a new Japan.

Meanwhile, the two young daughters of a renowned sumo master find their lives increasingly intertwined with the rising fortunes of their father’s star pupil, Hiroshi.

In an exquisitely moving story that spans almost thirty years, Gail Tsukiyama draws us into an unforgettable world of tradition and change, loss and renewal, and the enduring strength of family ties in the face of war.”

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The Holcroft Covenant
Robert Ludlum

I love this book. The plot… actually simple: an ordinary man, named Noel Holcroft, whose job as an architect never dreamed that someday he would be face to face with the ultimate choices, the one that will altered his life forever. Starting with him receiving a letter from some authority in Swiss Bank who told him that his father, his bioligical father, the one he and his mother abandoned for almost 30 years left him a great sum of money a total of $780 million dollars to be inherited by him and two other strangers. The three of them are direct descendants of Nazi’s generals who back in 1945 tried and failed to to overthrown Hitler. And so these 3 generals thinking there might be away to redeem what the German have done to many of the Jews all over German by embezzled money from Treasury department and kept them in a bank in Swiss to be opened 30 years later by their descendants.
For Noel Holcroft turns out this to be not an easy job. Aside from tracking the other two descendant, Noel soon enmeshed in deadly trap spun by the Sonnenkinder – The Children of the Sun – who will stop at nothing to stop Noel, get the money and ressurrect The Fourth Reich.
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The Devil Colony
by James Rollins

I love books by James Rollins. Specifically, I love the books in his Sigma Series. Having said that, I think that this book is one of the best in his Sigma Series. Over the course of the series, you are introduced to characters who have pretty much reappeared throughout every one of the seven books. What I especially love, is that no one character is the main focus of the novel where he/she single-handedly solves the worlds problems and holds off the evil foe. Each of the main character’s in this series has their specialty and individual talents and they use them to form one hell of a team.

James Rollins is the author of six thrillers in the bestselling Sigma Force series Sandstorm, Map of Bones, Black Order, The Judas Strain, The Last Oracle, and The Doomsday Key.

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A Prisoner of Birth
by Jeffrey Archer

Danny Cartwright is doomed by circumstance. After 4 Cambridge friends decide to make him the patsy for a murder one of them had committed, illiterate Danny is tried, convicted, and sentenced to 22 years at Belmarsh Prison. Mind-tormenting incarceration gives him ample opportunity to polish his reading skills and plot his taste for revenge.

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State of Wonder
by Ann Patchett

Dr. Marina Singh, a research scientist with a pharmaceutical company, is sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have all but disappeared in the Amazon while working on what is destined to be an extremely valuable new drug, the development of which has already cost the company a fortune. Nothing about Marina’s assignment is easy: not only does no one know where Dr. Swenson is, but the last person who was sent to find her, Marina’s research partner Anders Eckman, died before he could complete his mission. Marina embarks on an odyssey into the insect-infested jungle in hopes of finding her former mentor as well as answers to several troubling questions about her friend’s death, the state of her company’s future, and her own past.

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A Little Love Story: by Roland Merullo

A love story written from the man’s point of view. His new love interest has cystic fibrosis – an agonizing terminal disease. Even though the story is sad, Merullo has an odd sense of humor which I loved.
Janet Rossi is very smart and unusually attractive, an aide to the governor of Massachusetts, but she suffers from an illness that makes her, as she puts it, “not exactly a good long-term investment.” Jake Entwhistle is a few years older, a carpenter and portrait painter, smart and good-looking too, but with a shadow over his romantic history. After meeting by accident – literally – when Janet backs into Jake’s antique truck, they begin a love affair marked by courage, humor, a deep and erotic intimacy… and modern complications

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Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

Amazing – simply amazing! I couldn’t put this down. I loved Henry, a Chinese-American boy during WWII, trying to figure if he’s Chinese or American, really being neither, and falling for a Japanese American girl. Beautifully written.

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Let’s Take the Long Way Home:
A Memoir of Friendship
by Gail Caldwell
It started with this line “It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.” This book grabbed my heart and I stayed up later than I should have to finish this beautiful telling of a friendship between two literary women (Gail Caldwell and Caroline Knapp, The friendship was intense, long-lasting, and built on shared interests including the very tender bonds that they have with their dogs, their past alcoholism, and their love of rowing. Grab your best friend and read the book together.
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Fortune is a Woman by Elizabeth Adler
The three met in the aftermath of San Francisco’s devastating 1906 earthquake — the Mandarin Lai Tsin, a runaway American heiress, and a young Englishwoman. Against all odds they made their dreams come true, building one of the world’s largest trading companies and most luxurious hotels… They had only each other — and bloody secrets to bury even as they rose to dizzying heights.

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A Dog’s Purpose by W.Bruce Cameron

This is the remarkable story of one endearing dog’s search for his purpose over the course of several lives. More than just another charming dog story, A Dog’s Purpose touches on the universal quest for an answer to life’s most basic question: Why are we here?
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Green City In The Sun by Barbara Wood
Set in Kenya, in 1919, this book is of a British family, the Trevertons, who settle on an estate on the homeland of Kikuyu and the antagonism that develops between them and the tribe’s own medicine woman, whose powers they disregard
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Still Alice by Lisa Genova
Alice Howland – Harvard professor, gifted researcher and lecturer, wife, and mother of three grown children. One day, Alice sets out for a run and soon realizes she has no idea how to find her way home. It’s a route she has taken for years, but nothing looks familiar. She is utterly lost. Is her forgetfulness the result of menopausal symptoms? A ministroke? A neurological cancer? After a few doctors’ appointments and medical tests, Alice has her diagnosis, and it’s a shocker — she has early-onset Alzheimer’s diseasea.
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The Forgotten Garden
by Kate Morton
I REALLY liked this novel on many levels. It was a sweeping epic, sweeping between continents and among generations. We start with a young girl, abandoned aboard a ship from England to Australia. Through the course of the book, we make our way back a generation and forward two; from Australia back to London and out to the Cornish coast. I found the jumping about disconcerting at first – you spend a chapter or two in 1907, then to 2005, then 1975, then back again.
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Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

This is an historical fiction novel set in Germany during World War II. Anna is an eighteen year old girl who falls in love with a Jewish doctor and finds the courage to finally stand up to her domineering father, a Nazi sympathizer and altogether unkind man, and hide her lover in her own home. When her father turns him over to the Gestapo, Anna leaves and lives and works with a woman who works with the Resistance Movement.

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Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen
Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski’s ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own na…moreThough he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski’s ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world of the circus: to Jacob it was both salvation and a living hell.
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Ape House
by Sara Gruen

I loved WATER FOR ELEPHANTS and unfortunately can not say the same thing for this book. Although is was an entertaining read and obviously well researched, it did not have the character and flow of her previous book. there were too many topics in this book … animal research, animal rights, reality television, prostitution, pornography, meth labs, the “Hollywood experience” and one too many relationship issues.

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Cutting For Stone
by Abraham Verghese

Marion and Shiva Stone are identical, formerly conjoined twins born in Ethiopia to an Indian nun who dies in childbirth and an English surgeon who abandons them. They are raised in the Ethiopian hospital where they were born by two doctors and a cadre of servants, nuns and priests. They grow up to become surgeons like their biological father and adoptive parents.
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The Linnet Bird
by Linda Holeman
Linny Ingram seems the perfect society wife: pretty, gracious, subservient. But appearances can be deceptive. Linny Ingram was born Linny Gow, an orphan raised in the gray slums of Liverpool. Sold into prostitution by her stepfather when she was only eleven, Linny clung to the belief that she was meant for something more, something better, than life on the cold, dangerous streets.

A stroke of luck granted Linny the chance to re-create herself as a proper middle-class young lady, allowing her to join “the fishing fleet”—young women of good birth who sailed to India in search of husbands.
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Let The Great World Spin
by Colum McCann

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

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The Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls

is a memoir written by gossip columnist Jeanette Walls, which details her unconventional childhood growing up with an alcoholic father and a mother who seems to be mentally ill. Walls begins the book by explaining what has prompted her to write about her family: after she has “made it” and become a successful writer living in New York, she comes across her mother picking trash out of a dumpster and, in shame, slinks down in her taxi seat and pretends not to see or know her. Later, Walls confronts her mother, asking what she is supposed to tell people about her parents, and her mother replies, “Just tell the truth. That’s simple enough.”
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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
was a charming and touching novel. The book is written in the form of letters by a colorful and likeable cast of characters. It was interesting to learn a little bit about life on the British Island of Guernsey during its German occupation of WWII.
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The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
by Kim Edwards

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is a story about a secret–a terrible, life-altering secret running central to the story and in the lives of the characters. In spite of spanning only twenty-five years, it has an epic feel. A lot happens. We first meet Norah and David Henry on the stormy night she gives birth to twins. The boy, Paul, is born healthy. The second, an unexpected daughter, is born with Down’s Syndrome. While his wife lay unconscious, David, a doctor who presides over the deliveries because their doctor is unable to get to them due to the snowstorm, makes the decision to tell his wife the second child died. Trying to spare his wife the pain and suffering of having a child who, in his mind would surely die an early death, hands the baby to his nurse, Caroline Gill. He instructs her to take the child to an institution. Caroline finds she cannot leave the baby in this place, moves away and raises “Phoebe” on her own. This sets the stage for the terrible secret David must live with and the consequences it has on his family.
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Beat the Reaper
by Josh Bazell

Great mix of medical thriller and mob revenge tale. Main character is a foul-mouthed and very funny former hit man who’s hiding out as a doctor in a run-down hospital. If his former boss/mentor finds him, it means he’s probably dead. I was hooked immediately and especially liked his hilarious and ironic footnotes.
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A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog
by Dean Koontz
Loved this book! I haven’t read any of Dean Koontz’s books, but was given this one from my son.
What a great story and he wrote this story so well. It made me laugh in so many places and I felt like I knew his furry daughter, Trixie. I think his insights to dogs and their intelligence (and everything) is really so incredible. I have been a dog lover and mom for most of my life and I share in many of his experiences with Trixie.

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The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

tells the story of two families—one black, one white
Boston.. at the end of the First World War, unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads between past and future.
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The Disappeared by Kim Echlin

Although this story takes place against the backdrop of the devastating Pol Pot genocide in Cambodia, it is not so much a social commentary on that dark era as it is a beautiful, haunting, tragic love story. It’s a story of love and loss, reunion and separation, loyalty and betrayal, sacrifice, secrets and longing.

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Roses by Leila Meacham
This is what I call a good old-fashioned read. Leila Meacham’s family saga, set in East Texas covering the years from 1914–1985, tells the story of Mary Toliver,a 16-year-old heiress, who is completely and wholly devoted to her family’s cotton plantation for her entire life. This book has been compared to a Texas “Gone with the Wind” and I must say that Mary could truly be compared to Scarlett.
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