I pick up at least one free book a day from Amazon. I get the 3 email lists with all the great deals and freebies daily. Pixelofink.com, bookbub.com, and bookgorilla.com. So many wonderful free books offered daily. I have the kindle app on all of my devices which allows me to read any kindle books, but I can also read other formats like epub with my other reader apps like aldiko, there are free lists for those also out there. Today there are another 2 of the J.A. Konrath series for free and one for 99c. I now have just about that entire series by picking them up every time one was on for free. The main character is a woman detective, her name is Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels which is why the names of the books are all drink names. Dirty Martini - A Thriller Cherry Bomb - A Thriller Whiskey Sour - A Thriller

Virtually all of the books I have read in the last few years have been recommended here. Just a few stand-outs, ones I certainly would not have discovered on my own: The Far Pavillions - M.M. Kaye Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner Cloud Atlas - I had tried to read it, put it down as inpenetrable, tried again for a discussion here and now it one of my all-time favorites Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - like many people, I was not going to read it because of the hopelessly twee title. Have read it twice and am busy looking up the many literary references in this beautiful work. Harry Potter series - another work I wouldn't have read if RP hadn't liked it. Just about everything by George MacDonald Fraser, particularly his MacAuslan stories PG Wodehouse - his work needs no commentary from me! A great deal of poetry that has been posted over the years Paul Gallico - I would not have run across his work on my own. I'm sure I'm leaving out a lot of great stuff. It's fun to think back and remember.

Grelobe, I followed up your link. I'm not sure but I think that the town described is real. It seems to me that I've heard of it before. In any case, I wanted to share a quote from the review. Collins is a writer and also a lover of books. For him abandoning San Francisco is an easy choice because it's too expensive and because his neighbors, in their painstakingly restored Victorian houses, apparently never read. 'All those beautiful built-in bookshelves?' Collins says. 'They don't hold any books.' Indeed his real-estate agent tells him 'You have too many books in here. Home buyers don't like books . . . . Really. You should hide them.' Alas, if we every have to sell our house, there will be a problem. It is filled with books, and we have several built-in bookcases. I live about an hour away from SF, so perhaps this is true here, too. It is an area with a serious interest in education, so maybe it is not. I often see long lines at the public library. Perhaps built-in bookcases are like built-in swimming pools, very desirable to those who want them, and a burden to those who do not. Rosefolly

I just posted our selections on the 2011 Book Club choices thread. (I tried to post the list earlier, but my Firefox browser crashed just as I was finishing, so I turned off my computer in frustration.) Since you've asked in this thread, I'll repeat the list: Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah Biography Night (individual choice) Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor Our community One Read book (title as yet unknown) Half Broke Horses by Jeanette Walls Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick Shanghai Girls by Lisa See My group has already read several of the the suggestions that were offered in this thread, and generally we liked all of them, so I think we'd like the others as well. I will keep this list handy for future selections. Thanks again! -- Kathy