Hmmm...I'm torn about what would constitute a good book forum. Just MHO, but I think there can be an intimidating factor that is off-putting on some book forums. As I mentioned in my post above, even my best friends and I don't always agree on what constitutes a good book. But because of our history of friendship, we don't feel hurt or harshly judged when someone says, "that book didn't do it for me." It's especially hard to convey a difference of opinion when it's delivered in a post. Sometimes I re-read things I've posted which I've meant to sound funny or wry, and am worried that my tone might have been misinterpreted. So how about this - For now, how about a thread where we can list books that we've enjoyed recently, and some of our all-time favorites? Without giving away too much, we can give some general info and maybe alert people if they contain coarse language/graphic violence/sex, etc. I mention this because my MIL often passes on "CSI"-type mystery novels that she enjoys to me. I'm not especially prudish, but I do a lot of my reading at night instead of watching TV and I've found that reading books with disturbing themes like child abuse/decapitations/rapes, etc. are too disrupting to my sleep to read at bedtime. What prompted my OP is that I just finished a heartwarming read and was looking for something good to start on. Seeing a list of what you've all been reading is a good place to start looking. I'd already been thinking about "Snowball" that gina w mentioned above. I may download a chapter on the Kindle to check it out. Do any of you have other suggestions on how to approach starting a thread?

Here is my list of 12 first-choice TBR books and how I did with this challenge: * Tell Me Where it Hurts - Dr. Nick Trout - Read * Finding Manana - Mirta Ojito - Read * Journey Through Britain - John Hilleby - Read * And Ladies of the Club - Santemeyer - Didn't Finish * The Various Haunts of Men - Susan Hill * New Grub Street - Gissing (Hi PAM!) * Mapp & Lucia - EF Benson - Read * The Road to Wellness - TC Boyle - Read * Writing Home - Alan Bennett * The Great Mortality - John Kelly - Read * The Knife Man - Wendy Moore * Moscow Stories - Graham Alternate List: * Kim - Rudyard Kipling - Didn't Finish * Watership Down - Richard Adams * Under an English Heaven - Robert Radcliffe - Read * Divisidaro - Michael Ondaatje - Read * Cross Country with Grandma - Karen Testa * An Imaginative Experience - Mary Wesley * Night - Elie Wiesel - Read * A Ship of Paper -- Scott Spencer * Waterland - Graham Swift - Read * Stillmeadow Sampler - Taber * Wuthering Heights - Bronte - Read * Cry, Beloved Country - Alan Paton So, I was quite happy with that. Some of these titles have rolled over to the 2011 TBR list, so we'll see if this year can get them completed. Elliot, Chris and Veronica - how did you fare?

Just had our first book club meeting after summer hiatus; books discussed were Go Set a Watchman and To Kill a Mockingbird. Of the 9 present, 8 rated GSAW 'meh'. One HATED it. I was that one...IMO it was not a book. It was a very early, very very very badly written mess of an idea that was read by a genius editor who spotted a nugget of gold in the childhood reminiscences and managed to wrestle Harper Lee into pulling together TKAM. By all accounts Lee (very rightly) never wanted Watchman published. Frankly, after reading both books I suspect Harper Lee never wrote another book because Mockingbird was more or less a heaven sent combination of editing and one Big Idea, and I doubt she was capable of creating anything else. Anyway, now she is blind, deaf and has dementia. Her sister Alice, a sharp and protective woman (a lawyer herself). who watched over Harper Lee died last year and suddenly two months later her now-fully-in-control attorney discovers and sells the new book for publication. I call bu**sh*t on the whole thing. It isn't a book, just a cash grab and it should never have seen the light of day. Actually reminded me of when I attempted to read Fifty Shades of Grey. I can handle off-putting themes, I can handle unsympathetic characters. But I can't handle bad writing and in both cases, the writing was so execrable I simply couldn't hear anything else. I mean, 'the musky smell of clean Negroes'...I can't even.

I have slowly been working my way through that "50 Best Science-Fiction and Fantasy" list that i posted here a couple years ago (I've now read 41 of the 50), so not surprisingly, two of my 'best of 2015' are from that list: Ubik, Philip K Dick - in a world of telepaths and precognitives playing with your perceptions, what is real and what is not? The last page still leaves you wondering! The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester - although written in the 50's, the story and ideas are as good today, in fact, Bester uses SF ideas that have now become standard in all SF. Bester described it as "Count of Monte Cristo" in space and it was a thrill ride to read. When I finished, all I could do was sit there, breathless, and say WOW. :) The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Living with a Tawny Owl, Martin Windrow - thanks to whomever mentioned this last year. I owned a parrot for 30 years, and this book captures all the charm, work and heartache of keeping a bird as a pet. Silently, and Very Fast, Catherynne Valente, a Locus-award winning novella about an artificial intelligence. The AI tells the story (although it takes a while to figure that out), from its first development as a house monitor program, through a multi-generational evolution with the original programmer's descendants, when the question still remains - is this a true intelligence or merely programmed responses, yet how does it differ from the learned responses of a human. Interspersed with several creation myths & fairy tales told from the perspective of the AI. Fascinating. Valente knows her stuff. Babel-17, Samuel Delany - I tried twice to read Delany's Dahlgren, which is on all of the 'best of' lists, but gave up and tried his earlier Hugo & Nebula winner, Babel-17, which uses the concept language drives perception. A page-turner that kept surprising me. I noticed that The Martian showed up multiple times above; I enjoyed it very much but found that the explication of all Watney's ingenious solutions eventually got tedious. And anyone at NASA can tell that the NASA center Weir talked to the most was JPL (just as with Tess Gerritsen's Gravity, you knew she did her research at Johnson Space Center)! Being at Headquarters (which every NASA center loves to hate), I found it amusing that in both novels HQ was portrayed as the villain/obstacle to overcome.