Summer Reading is still at the top of our list of things to do now….
APRIL AND OLIVER by Tess Callahan is on my list. The story of two people who grew up like brother and sister and what happens when they are drawn back together after a family tragedy. The writing is beautiful and insightful; the characters are complex and surprising; and the plot is not what you think.
More books from my “Circle of Trust”
From Madeline Lee…
I am notoriously bad at this, because I forget what I have recently read. However, THE COMMONER by John Burnham Schwartz – a wonderful sense of being inside Japanese society just pre-war and post-war, THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett, (not as good as it could have been, but a great look at the lives of black maids in the South, harder on the white characters), WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED by Gail Collins, (it’s my life as a girl, a woman, a feminist, a voter), and THREE CUPS OF TEA by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (such an extraordinary job of making it seem like a first-person book, though it is not, and an inspiring story (in terms of what the protagonist has done for girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan) and a depressing one (in terms of how wrong our foreign policy in those regions obviously is.
And, how could I have forgotten? STILL ALICE by Lisa Genova, moving, deeply affecting, impossible to stop reading…
From Mary Eileen Williams…
The two books my book group is reading this summer:
A SUMMER OF HUMMINGBIRDS: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade by Christopher Benfey and AMSTERDAM by Ian McEwan.
Enjoy!
For more suggestions, see our previous list, click here