Cleaning up my kindle prompted me to remember this thread & look back in. I agree with others here about The Tatooist of Auschiwitz. It ticked what I think of as the "i" boxes - insipid, irritating & inane. It is one of the few books I did not finish & wouldn't recommend. I do recommend We were the Lucky Ones.

Oakley: I love the Welsh Princes trilogy. It sent me down the Wikipedia rabbit hole to learn more about the real people from the books.

just finished The Huntress. I thought the main story was lame but loved the sub story about the Russian female pilots during WWII. Off to check some of her sources regarding the Night Witches.

This thread always provides interesting suggestions for books to read. Thanks to all for keeping this going. Edited to correct 2 spelling errors.

Finished Be Frank With Me last night and absolutely loved it! If you have any eccentric boys in your life, as I do, it adds another dimension of appreciation, I suspect. I'm sure in the past he would have been considered eccentric' Nowadays, most differences seem to have been slapped with a "diagnosis". Even though they don't mention one, it's not hard to guess what it might be. I adored him!

I thought the book was very well written, great characters, but too neatly/conveniently wrapped up at the end, which disappointed me a bit. Can't say much more than that without spoilers.

It was my book club pick and I've heard that others enjoyed it, too, but we haven't met as a group to discuss it yet. Am anxious to hear what others thought.

Finished There There by Tommy Orange yesterday. Not a book that you can say you enjoyed but this white person can say she's glad she read it. (FYI: For some reason this book does not show up on Goodreads when you do a title search. It does show up with an author search.)

From the NPR Books page: "In this heartrending debut by Tommy Orange, a member of the Cherokee and Arapaho tribes, we journey with an extraordinary cast of 'urban Indians' to a huge powwow in Oakland, California. From a daring opening essay to a harrowing finale, the novel is an explosion of poetry and violence, hope and despair. Questions of identity and authenticity, loss and discovery, tradition and escape are woven brilliantly together in this tour de force about the continuing shame of America's treatment of its Native people."

Next up for fiction is The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo.

I'm enjoying A Prayer for Owen Meany very much, but the reading seems to be going slowly...I don't know if it's dense pages or what, but I have to put it aside for An American Marriage for my book club....will get back to it later.

I didn’t care for An American Marriage at all. However our local library system does a book bracket every year around the time of the college basketball tournament, and American Marriage was the winner. Educated came in second, and I think It should have won. Anyway, I recently started The Night Circus by Erin Morganstern and I’m totally hooked. It’s more than 500 pages so my book club probably wouldn’t choose it, but the story is unlike any other and fascinating so far.

Ded, I agree about An American Marriage which I too read for a book club. (Almost everyone else thought it was superb. I still don't see what the big deal was about it).

I read Night Circus several years ago and though it is most definitely not my usual genre, I do remember thinking it was amazing. I kept thinking it should be a movie, and someone did mention that it was going to be one but I don't think anything happened with that. I was very impressed with that.

I have been struggling with Catch 22 and am now starting The Sympathizer which seems pretty good- heavy but good. Pulitzer Prize winner which to me doesn't bode well.

salonva: "Pulitzer Prize winner which to me doesn't bode well." Why is that? DH once made a similar comment and said that Pulitzers are often given as "lifetime achievement" awards so the particular book winning the prize may not be any good. Is that your thinking too?

Oooh, dedtired, I read The Night Circus when it first came out and just loved it.

I am really behind with reading this thread (ha-too much book reading?)

A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of my all time favorite books. I read it years ago and have been trying to get my bookclub to read it, to no avail.

I also have The Night Tiger on my list. And Oakley, Here Be Dragons looks really good.

There was another thread someone started a few months ago looking for recommendations for historical fiction. I don't remember who it was but I posted on that thread about Dorothy Dunnett, a prolific Scottish writer with an amazing repository of facts crammed into her exciting novels. She has 2 very famous series, The Lymond Chronicles, a 6 book series based primarily in mid-16th century European and the Mediterranean area, which is the story of a Scottish nobleman, Francis Crawford of Lymond, from 1547 through 1558. Lymond is a fictitious character, but almost all surrounding him are real people. Her other series is called The House of NIccoló, which is a series of 8 historical novels set in the mid-15th century European Renaissance.

DH and I have both read all of those and just love them. The history is accurate, and I have learned a lot from researching things she has written about. I am currently reading King Hereafter, also by Dunnett, which is about Macbeth, king of Scotland in the 11th century. I'm about halfway through that.

Her books can be dense, so not for everyone (I'm guessing my bookclub would not accept 500+ page books,) but they are not the least bit dull.

Roses, re the Pulitzer. Within the past 3 months or so I read Less (2018 winner) and The Underground Railroad (2017). While they were both decent books, I was shocked to see that they had been the most recent winners. I just looked at the list of winners, and there are many which I thought were really good books but not so many that I adored or thought were so outstanding.

I just finished Dark Fire by C.J. Sansom, second in the Matthew Shardlake series. I wouldn't call it a great book, but I enjoyed the London in 1540 setting, the minutiae of Tudor life.

salonva, I agree that the winners on the list that I've read (including Less) were okay but not great books. Which leads to a question to all: Are there any literary prizes that you follow because they consistently pick superb books? (With the "known" that there will almost always over the years be a semi-stinker or two that make the cut.)

Another thumbs up for The Night Circus. I re-read it to see if there were details/clues that I missed. I keep checking to see if she has released anything since then, but nothing. Just started The Bone Church, so far not bad but not great either. My hold list at the library is lengthy, wish some those books would hit my in box.

Did someone here recommend the nonfiction book The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington by Brad Meltzer? If so a big thank you! Started reading it this morning and I’m half done. Love when a fiction writer gets into nonfiction..

Just got a notice from my library that The Night Circus is waiting for me. I need to finish The Widower's Notebook first, but it's going quickly. More on that later.

Has any one read Washington Black? I would guess I heard about it here, but am not sure. I really, really want to like it, but omg! The writing is quite wonderful sometimes but the story??? It's like the author took a bunch of random events, random tragedies, random geographical locations, random people/characters, put them all in a hat, pulled a dozen of them out and tried to weave a story with all the disparate pieces. I seldom give up on books, but this might be one I leave behind.

The Widower's Notebook is very good. My husband died in 2004 and at first I wondered if I was past reading about someone else's grappling with loss and grief. I did a lot of that in the first few of years. But I read on. It was interesting from a widower's perspective. Some things are different, but there are others that were my exact experience, e.g., when supposedly good friends blithely fail to mention the deceased in any context, as if nothing had changed. In my own instance, I came to understand (if not like) that some folks cannot deal with talking about death. Scares the cr@p out of them.

Olychick - I just read a review about Washington Black on Goodreads and it looks really good. I hope it comes together for you - keep us posted please.

I disagree that Pulitzers are "lifetime achievement", in fact some Pulitzer winners were for first books. Jhumpa Lahiri, off the top of my head. I actually just looked up the last decade... given the ages of the authors and their body of work, it sure doesn't look like it to me.

I am reading Overstory and really like it so far. Just in the first chapter I found something memorable, a mark of a good book for me.

A number of years ago I set out to read all of the fiction Pulitzers; it turns out I am not the only one, there is a website for it: http://pulitzerproject.blogspot.com/

There are 84 books; I have 2 i still need to read, older ones. After this I will try to read one book from each Nobel winner.

Life is too short to read krappy books, this is my simple way of finding worthwhile ones.

2010

• 2010: Tinkers by Paul Harding 2nd book, first fiction
• 2011: A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, 4th book
• 2013: The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, 2nd book
• 2014: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, 3rd novel
• 2015: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, 2nd book
• 2016: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen[6], debut novel
• 2017: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, 6th book
• 2018: Less by Andrew Sean Greer, 4th book
• 2019: The Overstory by Richard Powers, 12th book

ETA - Bunny, so sorry about your earlier experiences as a widow. I struggle with talking to friends who have had any sort of "loss", for lack of a more accurate term. I am trying to work on it, because I find that while I don't want to talk about those things, the people experiencing them often do. That was a lesson, because I personally do *not* like to talk about anything negative in my life! I work at it now, especially since i know how often people with "loss" end up being excluded.

I recently finished The Lost Girls by Heather Young and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm almost finished with The First Time She Drowned by Kerry Kletter, which I understand to be a young adult book, but one that adults are rating highly as well. It's very well-written (and yet another story about a majorly dysfunctional family), and has held my attention from the start.

My next book will be Tulipomania by Mike Dash and I'm very much looking forward to this one. Here's a synopsis from Amazon:

A vivid narration of the history of the tulip, from its origins on the barren, windswept steppes of central Asia to its place of honor in the lush imperial gardens of Constantinople, to its starring moment as the most coveted—and beautiful—commodity in Europe. In the 1630s, visitors to the prosperous trading cities of the Netherlands couldn't help but notice that thousands of normally sober, hardworking Dutch citizens were caught up in an extraordinary frenzy of buying and selling. The object of this unprecedented speculation was the tulip, a delicate and exotic Eastern import that had bewitched horticulturists, noblemen, and tavern owners alike. For almost a year rare bulbs changed hands for incredible and ever-increasing sums, until single flowers were being sold for more than the cost of a house. Historians would come to call it tulipomania. It was the first futures market in history, and like so many of the ones that would follow, it crashed spectacularly, plunging speculators and investors into economic ruin and despair. This colorful cast of characters includes Turkish sultans, Yugoslav soldiers, French botanists, and Dutch tavern keepers—all centuries apart historically and worlds apart culturally, but with one thing in common: tulipomania.

Mtn, before my husband died, that was me. I didn't know what to say so I avoided the topic. I was afraid I'd upset someone. Hah! I found the opposite to be true. Anyway, not only did I discover I could talk about it, I was good at both talking about it and listening to others talk about it. I think it was instrumental in working through my grief, and boy, did I work at it. I was a hospice grief volunteer for several years afterwards. I could keep vigil when someone was in their final hours. Nobody could be more surprised about this than the person I was before.

Yup, Bunny, it is really hard to talk about sad/difficult topics but often our friends need us to. Kudos to you for your volunteer work!

skibby, I just looked at goodreads and really was shocked by the large number of 4 and 5 star ratings. I looked at the few 2 star ratings and am totally in sync with their thoughts about it. Too bad the story didn't live up to the quality of the writing. I've given up on it; life is too short.

Thanks for the update Olychick. I'm going to try it anyway but won't over-expect and maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. We're all looking for different things in our reading. I appreciate your feedback.

I've just started a brand new book, Women's Work: A Reckoning with Work and Home by Megan Stack, and I must say I am devouring it. I had previously read her first book, Every Man in This Village is a Liar: An Education in War, and devoured that as well. In both cases, the author fills the pages with beautifully wrought sentences. But even more compelling is the perspective she brings to ordinary events. In the book about war, she wrote about her experiences as a war correspondent in the years after 9/11, from the ground in Baghdad, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Yemen, Israel and more. But I found her observations to be so different than other similar pieces I've read. It is as if she parses through so much of the analysis that we gnash over and says what we never want to say: this war is stupid; all of these wars are stupid. In this new book, she writes about her experiences as a new mother after the birth of her first child while she is living in China with her husband, also a journalist. Although she had always been a fearless, hardworking woman, traveling to extremely dangerous locations all over the world for more than a decade, she is brought to her knees after she quits her job to stay home with the baby to finish the book she's been working on. She eloquently analyzes her new awareness of all the difficult, daily work that takes place in homes all over the world, borne by women, and often barely noticed by men, and how invisible it has been throughout history, how much it has shackled women though few describe it in those terms. Both books are excellent perspectives that make the reader think in new ways about things we think we understand.

skibby, please report back what you think of Washington Black.

Will do. Haven't been able to find it yet.

I really liked Washington Black. Not a straight forward story but I enjoy that when well done and I think this book qualifies. 4 stars from me.

To mtn : I don't agree with DH's assessment of the Pulitzer Prize winners. I do, however, think they don't necessarily represent the best, or even close to the best, from those years. Thus my question regarding literary prizes and those that people find do (fairly) consistently reward truly good books. I follow the Man Booker prize but don't always agree with their choices. Probably no one would always agree.

I just finished The Girl with Seven Names and enjoyed it. Ontop of the great escape, it was amazing to learn how programmed N. Koreans are/were.

Next up is a highly rated historical fiction book by William Andrews -Daughters of the Dragon. I’m looking forward to this read as it covers the time leading up to Korea becoming divided into north and south.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01DF0TM2S/ref=ya_aw_dod_pi?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Of Mtn's recent Pulitzer Prize list of books, I have not read Underground Railroad, started Less but didn't care for it and read/loved every other one. (Random aside: that list would be my starting point for the entire mysteriously dubbed literary fiction ramble quoted from another forum ;)

I brought The Lost Girls down to our weekend place, started it yesterday morning and inhaled it in one day, finishing last night. Wow. Thank you to IdaClaire and a few others who recommended this one, it was an amazing read. Minor semi-spoiler alert: I figured out the central dark secret fairly early on as it was telegraphed with various plot notes quite clearly, but I did not see the major twist at the very end coming at all. Beautifully written parallel stories about motherhood, protecting our children etc.

I'm reading The Butler Speaks now which seems to be a bit of a mash up about servant life and structure in the great houses of Britain and directions on how to live a gracious butler-ish lifestyle. It's ok if a bit oddly organized.

Tried to read Pretend I'm Dead and gave up on that fairly quickly. I think it was an Oprah book recommendation but both the plot and writing style were off putting. About a depressed woman with mental illness working as a housecleaner and volunteering at a needle exchange who first falls in love with an older junkie who breaks her heart, then moves from New England to Taos to start a cleaning business. I bailed before the move; the characters were so depressing and I couldn't see any point to the story anyway.

Next up is Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. I hope the book is useful though I must add I'm growing quite weary of the trend in book titles to start with a punchy word then string on a loooooonnnnnngggggggg extra phrase. It's ubiquitous in publishing now, and it really is becoming quite ridiculous. This book's title is a fairly good example ;)

With so many books to choose from, I have found the Pulitzers and Man Bookers to be a good place to start. I have certainly read books from those lists that I did not particularly enjoy, though. However, I don't think I ever read one from those lists that I found to be an utter waste of time, which used to happen when I picked more haphazardly.

To pick up on someone's dining reference earlier (Bunny?)-- sometimes I want a light snack, sometimes I want easy comfort food and sometimes I want an inventive meal I will remember always. I am the same with my reading. I value a well-written tale.. I value a good story and good characters and sometimes I just value the easy escape of something light. Mysteries and thrillers are most often my brain candy.

I have had a lot going on lately between work and recovery from my eye surgery (still ongoing)-- and some family members have had some pretty serious health issues so I have been turning to the lighter flavors lately.

I am still reading my way through the Dan Silva Gabriel Allon series.. and most recently I read Ruth Reichl's Save me the Plums. I would like to break from the Dan Silvas for a bit so I will have to check out some of the recommendations here.

Save me the Plums sounds great, Funky - thx!

I just started The Night Circus. We shall see.

Re. Ruth Reichl-I highly recommend all her books. She has a unique and very entertaining life story and way of expressing herself. Starting with Tender at the Bone, she has written a series of foodie memoirs about a life well lived, featuring her abiding passion for good food and good cooking.

Totally agree, Running. Love her voice! She’s had amazing experiences and jmany ups and downs— I appreciate her perspective. She’s passionate, down to earth, driven, resilient and REAL.

I loved Tender at the Bone as well! I have a few more to add to this month's list. I just finished Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottleib -she's a therapist and writes about her own experience in therapy after a breakup which blindsided her. I found it insightful and it has made me think maybe I should have invested in therapy for myself over the years, LOL. I'm listening to The Honey Bus, by Meredith May, and have discovered a new joy in life. Instead of reading a book on my kindle as I go to sleep, I'm listening to this book on SCRIBD, and it's like being read to sleep. I just set a sleeptimer for an hour -it's so nice to fall asleep this way. ! I've also just finished Elizabeth Berg's We Are All Welcome Here, which is a fictionalized version of a true-life event -a mother stricken by polio while pregnant, confined to an iron lung and then permanently paralyzed, who goes on to raise the daughter who was born of that pregnancy. A short book, but fascinating.

I bailed on The Night Circus after the first few chapters. There was something I wasn't liking about it and I couldn't put my finger on it. I then read some of the 1 and 2 star reviews at GoodReads, and I think I made the right decision, for me.

Just picked up The Girl With Seven Names.

So many great books, so little time to read them! I just put All the Light We Cannot See on my Kindle and am not very far into it, but am absolutely loving it. It is so beautifully written!

I also bought The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared from an eBay seller after a couple of people mentioned it in book club and started it last night. I had a hard time putting it down when bedtime rolled around, and had genuinely LOL'd a couple of times in just the first few pages. It's going to be a good one too.

Ida, All the Light is a wonderful book. I need to read it again.

I swap book recommendations with my dental hygienist three times a year. She loved The 100 Year Old Man.

I finished American Marriage and was unimpressed. 3 star at best. We'll be discussing at book group and I'll let you know what the group consensus is.

I just read Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. I've been waiting forever for it at the library and was hoping to choose it for our book group to read, but we've decided not to meet again until fall, so I went ahead and read it.

It was profoundly moving, complex and disturbing, yet wonderful to read; I couldn't put it down. I think it would be a great book club pick.

Has anyone else read Dodgers by Bill Beverly? Four young ( 20 to 13 years old) black men who are in the drug trade in Los Angeles are sent by their boss to the Midwest to kill someone for their boss. The story features one of the kids, the 15 year old, and his reaction to the country outside of the city where he was born and raised. Of course not all goes as planned. The book was praised for the writing, but I was impressed by the really good story. I'll give it a 3 1/2 stars rating.

Norar, so it’s not about baseball?

Not at all. The boss has them wear a Dodgers ball cap and t-shirt just so they look more like ordinary kids. That's the only mention of baseball.

Not about a particular book, but for the Anne Lamott fans/readers among us, she's embarked on a a major life passage!

All wishes for happiness to Annie, she's a quirky soul who certainly has waited a long time to experience this particular transition ;)

I love Anne Lamott! Have been following her engagement and wedding via Facebook. So happy for her.

I thought I would persist with Catch 22 but decided enough is enough (book club is tomorrow). I hope I try it again at some other time and it captures me. I only made it about halfway but I just couldn't.

The Sympathizer, well, had to force myself with that one too. This was another book club book and I was the only one of about 10 or 12 who did not think it was outstanding so it might just be my time of the year. It was a good book for sure, but while others marveled at his writing, which was really superb, I thought he really went to town with the quantity of words. I found myself skimming over some important parts because it was just so many words.

So today I just started The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin. Not sure what I think of it but it seems interesting for now. It takes place on the Lower East Side of NYC in 1969 so at least I have a fondness for the references.

I am sincerely hopeful that it was just these last 2 books which I did not enjoy and that I now will be enjoying reading again.

All the Light We Cannot See is one of the best in modern literature, IMO. I too want to go back and read it all over again. It’s lit with the internal light of a magical world that only great classics can conjure.

Salonva, I picked The Sympathizer for our book club last year and was the ONLY one who liked it! It is a long and grim slog of a book, that's for sure. So be comforted you are definitely not alone ;).

I just started the newest Joe Pickett book in the series by CJ Box. In keeping with my tradition for series books, I did not read the jacket blurb nor any reviews beforehand so not sure where the story is headed. However my favorite characters are all checking in, backstory from last book is being unpacked and as always I'm enjoying my literary comfort food. It's one of life's little joys, settling in at night to read a new book in a familiar and enjoyable series.