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A Few Great Book Titles

Monaco’s List (I’ve *’d my all-time faves)

The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obrecht

The sometimes crushing power of myth, story, and memory is explored in the brilliant debut of Obreht, the youngest of the New Yorker's 20-under-40. Natalia Stefanovi, a doctor living (and, in between suspensions, practicing) in an unnamed country that's a ringer for Obreht's native Croatia, crosses the border in search of answers about the death of her beloved grandfather, who raised her on tales from the village he grew up in, and where, following German bombardment in 1941, a tiger escaped from the zoo in a nearby city and befriended a mysterious deaf-mute woman. The evolving story of the tiger's wife, as the deaf-mute becomes known, forms one of three strands that sustain the novel, the other two being Natalia's efforts to care for orphans and a wayward family who, to lift a curse, are searching for the bones of a long-dead relative; and several of her grandfather's stories about Gavran Gailé, the deathless man, whose appearances coincide with catastrophe and who may hold the key to all the stories that ensnare Natalia. Obreht is an expert at depicting history through aftermath, people through the love they inspire, and place through the stories that endure; the reflected world she creates is both immediately recognizable and a legend in its own right. Obreht is talented far beyond her years, and her unsentimental faith in language, dream, and memory is a pleasure.

The Call by Yannick Murphy

The daily rhythm of a veterinarian’s family in rural New England is shaken when a hunting accident leaves their eldest son in a coma. With the lives of his loved ones unhinged, the veterinarian struggles to maintain stability while searching for the man responsible. But in the midst of their great trial an unexpected visitor arrives, requesting a favor that will have profound consequences—testing a loving father’s patience, humor, and resolve and forcing husband and wife to come to terms with what “family” truly means.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very curious photographs.
It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.
A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows.

*Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Girl Who Played with Fire, and Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson

All across America, readers are talking about Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novels, set in Sweden and featuring Lisbeth Salander—“one of the most original and memorable heroines to surface in a recent thriller” (The New York Times). The trilogy is an international sensation that will grab you and keep you “reading with eyes wide open” (San Francisco Chronicle). “[It] is intricately plotted, lavishly detailed but written with a breakneck pace and verve” (The Independent, U.K.), but “be warned: the trilogy is seriously addictive.” (The Guardian, U.K.).

*Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

With its spotlight on elephants, Gruen's romantic page-turner hinges on the human-animal bonds that drove her debut and its sequel (Riding Lessons and Flying Changes)—but without the mass appeal that horses hold. The novel, told in flashback by nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski, recounts the wild and wonderful period he spent with the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, a traveling circus he joined during the Great Depression. When 23-year-old Jankowski learns that his parents have been killed in a car crash, leaving him penniless, he drops out of Cornell veterinary school and parlays his expertise with animals into a job with the circus, where he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures[...] He also falls in love with Marlena, one of the show's star performers—a romance complicated by Marlena's husband, the unbalanced, sadistic circus boss who beats both his wife and the animals Jankowski cares for. Despite her often clichéd prose and the predictability of the story's ending, Gruen skillfully humanizes the midgets, drunks, rubes and freaks who populate her book.

*The Help by Karen Stockett

Four peerless actors render an array of sharply defined black and white characters in the nascent years of the civil rights movement. They each handle a variety of Southern accents with aplomb and draw out the daily humiliation and pain the maids are subject to, as well as their abiding affection for their white charges. The actors handle the narration and dialogue so well that no character is ever stereotyped, the humor is always delightful, and the listener is led through the multilayered stories of maids and mistresses. The novel is a superb intertwining of personal and political history in Jackson, Miss., in the early 1960s, but this reading gives it a deeper and fuller power.

*Thousand Splendid Suns by Kahild Housseini

It's difficult to imagine a harder first act to follow than The Kite Runner: a debut novel by an unknown writer about a country many readers knew little about that has gone on to have over four million copies in print worldwide. But when preview copies of Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, started circulating at Amazon.com, readers reacted with a unanimous enthusiasm that few of us could remember seeing before. As special as The Kite Runner was, those readers said, A Thousand Splendid Suns is more so, bringing Hosseini's compassionate storytelling and his sense of personal and national tragedy to a tale of two women that is weighted equally with despair and grave hope.

*Little Bee by Chris Cleave

We don't want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. The story starts there, but the book doesn't. And it's what happens afterward that is most important. Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

*The Passage by Justin Cronin

An epic and gripping tale of catastrophe and survival, The Passage is the story of Amy—abandoned by her mother at the age of six, pursued and then imprisoned by the shadowy figures behind a government experiment of apocalyptic proportions. But Special Agent Brad Wolgast, the lawman sent to track her down, is disarmed by the curiously quiet girl—and risks everything to save her. As the experiment goes nightmarishly wrong, Wolgast secures her escape—but he can’t stop society’s collapse. And as Amy walks alone, across miles and decades, into a future dark with violence and despair, she is filled with the mysterious and terrifying knowledge that only she has the power to save the ruined world.

The Space Between Us by Thirty Umrigar

Poignant, evocative, and unforgettable, The Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet familiar world. Set in modern-day India, it is the story of two compelling and achingly real women: Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife whose opulent surroundings hide the shame and disappointment of her abusive marriage, and Bhima, a stoic illiterate hardened by a life of despair and loss, who has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years. A powerful and perceptive literary masterwork, author Thrity Umrigar's extraordinary novel demonstrates how the lives of the rich and poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and how the strong bonds of womanhood are eternally opposed by the divisions of class and culture.

The Last Child by John Hart

Thirteen year-old Johnny Merrimon had the perfect life: a warm home and loving parents; a twin sister, Alyssa, with whom he shared an irreplaceable bond. He knew nothing of loss, until the day Alyssa vanished from the side of a lonely street. Now, a year later, Johnny finds himself isolated and alone, failed by the people he’d been taught since birth to trust. No one else believes that Alyssa is still alive, but Johnny is certain that she is---confident in a way that he can never fully explain.
Then a second child goes missing . . .
Undeterred by Hunt’s threats or his mother’s pleas, Johnny enlists the help of his last friend, and together they plunge into the wild, to a forgotten place with a history of violence that goes back more than a hundred years. There, they meet a giant of a man, an escaped convict on his own tragic quest. What they learn from him will shatter every notion Johnny had about the fate of his sister; it will lead them to another far place, to a truth that will test both boys to the limit.
Traveling the wilderness between innocence and hard wisdom, between hopelessness and faith, The Last Child leaves all categories behind and establishes John Hart as a writer of unique power.

*Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Lily is haunted by memories–of who she once was, and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness.
In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (“women’s writing”). Some girls were paired with laotongs, “old sames,” in emotional matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments.
With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed and they become “old sames” at the tender age of seven. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a brilliantly realistic journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as deeply moving as it is sorrowful. With the period detail and deep resonance of Memoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged novel delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendship.

Devil’s Teeth by Susan Casey

From its startling opening description of scientists racing to the bloody scene where a shark has decapitated a seal, this memoir–cum–natural and cultural history of the Farallon Islands—"the spookiest, wildest place on Earth"—plunges readers into the thrills of shark watching. Casey's three-week solo stay on a yacht anchored in shark waters is itself an adventure, with the author evacuating just hours before the yacht disappeared in a storm. Her suspenseful narrative perfectly matches the drama and mystery of these islands, their resident sharks and the scientists who love them.

*The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

Freelance writer Walls doesn't pull her punches. She opens her memoir by describing looking out the window of her taxi, wondering if she's "overdressed for the evening" and spotting her mother on the sidewalk, "rooting through a Dumpster." Walls's parents—just two of the unforgettable characters in this excellent, unusual book—were a matched pair of eccentrics, and raising four children didn't conventionalize either of them. Her father was a self-taught man, a would-be inventor who could stay longer at a poker table than at most jobs and had "a little bit of a drinking situation," as her mother put it. With a fantastic storytelling knack, Walls describes her artist mom's great gift for rationalizing. Apartment walls so thin they heard all their neighbors? What a bonus—they'd "pick up a little Spanish without even studying." Why feed their pets? They'd be helping them "by not allowing them to become dependent." One by one, each child escaped to New York City. Still, it wasn't long before their parents appeared on their doorsteps. "Why not?" Mom said. "Being homeless is an adventure."

*Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres

Journalist Scheeres offers a frank and compelling portrait of growing up as a white girl with two adopted black brothers in 1970s rural Indiana, and of her later stay with one of them at a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. The book takes its title from a homemade sign that Scheeres and the brother closest to her in age and temperament, David, spot one day on a road in the Hoosier countryside, proclaiming, "This here is: JESUS LAND." And while religion is omnipresent both at their school and in the home of their devout parents, the two rarely find themselves the beneficiaries of anything resembling Christian love. One of the elements that make Scheeres's book so successful is her distanced, uncritical tone in relaying deeply personal and clearly painful events from her life. Tinged with sadness yet pervaded by a sense of triumph, Scheeres's book is a crisply written and earnest examination of the meaning of family and Christian values, and announces the author as a writer to watch.

*The Innocent Man by John Grisham

John Grisham tackles nonfiction for the first time with The Innocent Man, a true tale about murder and injustice in a small town (that reads like one of his own bestselling novels). The Innocent Man chronicles the story of Ron Williamson, how he was arrested and charged with a crime he did not commit, how his case was (mis)handled and how an innocent man was sent to death row. Grisham's first work of nonfiction is shocking, disturbing, and enthralling--a must read for fiction and nonfiction fans.

Indefensible by David Feige

This tragicomic exposé is a roller-coaster ride through the world of justice in the South Bronx. Former trial chief of the Bronx Defenders, Feige takes us through a typically harrowing day as a public defender, dealing with arbitrary judges and clients who are often victims of the judicial system. By a combination of skill and stealth, Feige negotiates the best deal he can get for his clients. In Feige's account, the power of judges—many of whom, he says, are political hacks—triumphs over almost everything else. One judge demanded that all Jews be removed from jury selection because they wouldn't be able to be present on Yom Kippur. To keep up with 75–100 cases at a time. Feige "reinvents" the rules so he can race from one court building to another. We follow the fortunes of dozens of cases, from the ridiculous (Michael, jailed for simply walking a friend's unvaccinated dog) to the tragic ( Jaron, charged with stabbing his cousin). But it's the failure of the system to free the innocent that haunts the author. In this dramatic first book, Feige skillfully shares his wisdom and his humanity and sheds light on a justice system that too often works irrationally.

*The Color of Water by James McBride

Read this book ... and please don't be put off by its pallid subtitle, A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, which doesn't begin to do justice to the utterly unique and moving story contained within. The Color of Water tells the remarkable story of Ruth McBride Jordan, the two good men she married, and the 12 good children she raised. Jordan, born Rachel Shilsky, a Polish Jew, immigrated to America soon after birth; as an adult she moved to New York City, leaving her family and faith behind in Virginia. Jordan met and married a black man, making her isolation even more profound. The book is a success story, a testament to one woman's true heart, solid values, and indomitable will. Ruth Jordan battled not only racism but also poverty to raise her children and, despite being sorely tested, never wavered. In telling her story--along with her son's--The Color of Water addresses racial identity with compassion, insight, and realism. It is, in a word, inspiring, and you will finish it with unalloyed admiration for a flawed but remarkable individual. And, perhaps, a little more faith in us all.

*Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz
The author was a Yale student biking cross-country during the summer of 1977 when she and her roommate were attacked by an axe-wielding cowboy while camping in Oregon. Jentz escaped with a gashed arm, while her friend was nearly blinded from head injuries. Fifteen years later, in 1992, Jentz returns to the scene of the attack to repair the psychic wound and attempt to close the case. Dogged in her pursuit of the truth (though largely abandoning the subtitle's promise of introspection), Jentz interviews the witnesses who saw her stumble out of Cline Falls State Park that June night; she scrutinizes police files and discovers the halfhearted investigation of suspects, learning about several horrific killings that took place in Oregon then. Jentz even befriends the former girlfriends of one suspect who becomes frighteningly plausible as the culprit. She finally tracks down the local cowboy known for carving his initials into his axe handle; though he can no longer be prosecuted for the attack, the satisfaction of seeing him convicted for another offense is a bittersweet vindication. While a thorough, forthright detective, screenwriter Jentz tends to meander and includes unnecessary detail. Still, her story is chilling and will enthrall true crime readers.

Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s  by John Elder Robison

If one looked at only Robison's impish sense of humor (he once ordered a blow-up sex doll to be delivered to his junior-high-school teacher—at school), or his success as a classic-car restorer, it might be impossible to believe he has the high-functioning form of autism spectrum disorder called Asperger's syndrome. Clues abound, however, in his account of a youth encompassing serious inability to make and keep friends; early genius at pyrotechnics, electronics, and math; and pet names such as Poodle for his dog and Snort and Varmint for his baby brother. Much later, he calls his wife Unit Two. It is easy to recognize these telltale traits today, but Robison went undiagnosed until he was 40. In the 1960s, he was variously labeled lazy, weird, and, worse, sociopathic. Consequently, his childhood memories too often read like a kid's worst nightmares. Not only did his parents fail to understand the root of his socialization problems but they were also virtually as dysfunctional as the pair Augusten Burroughs portrays in Running with Scissors (2002). 'Nough said? Not nearly. Robison's memoir is must reading for its unblinking (as only an Aspergian can) glimpse into the life of a person who had to wait decades for the medical community to catch up with him.

The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon

On the sixteenth page of this incisive memoir, eighth-grader Brent Runyon drenches his bathrobe with gasoline and ("Should I do it? Yes.") sets himself on fire. The burns cover 85 percent of his body and require six months of painful skin grafts and equally invasive mental-health rehabilitation. From the beginning, readers are immersed in the mind of 14-year-old Brent as he struggles to heal body and mind, his experiences given devastating immediacy in a first-person, present-tense voice that judders from uncensored teenage attitude and poignant anxiety to little-boy sweetness. And throughout is anguish over his suicide attempt and its impact on his family: "I have this guilt feeling all over me, like oil on one of those birds in Alaska." Runyon has, perhaps, written the defining book of a new genre, one that gazes unflinchingly at boys on the emotional edge. Some excruciatingly painful moments notwithstanding, this can and should be read by young adults, as much for its literary merit as for its authentic perspective on what it means to attempt suicide, and, despite the resulting scars, be unable to remember why.

Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah

Snow White's stepmother looks like a pussycat compared to the monster under which Adeline Yen Mah suffered. The author's memoir of life in mainland China and--after the 1949 revolution--Hong Kong is a gruesome chronicle of nonstop emotional abuse from her wealthy father and his beautiful, cruel second wife. Chinese proverbs scattered throughout the text pithily covey the traditional world view that prompted Adeline's subservience. Had she not escaped to America, where she experienced a fulfilling medical career and a happy marriage, her story would be unbearable; instead, it's grimly fascinating: Falling Leaves is an Asian Mommie Dearest.

Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil  by Deborah Rodriguez

A terrific opening chapter—colorful, suspenseful, funny—ushers readers into the curious closed world of Afghan women. A wedding is about to take place, arranged, of course, but there is a potentially dire secret—the bride is not technically a virgin. How Rodriguez, an admirably resourceful and dynamic woman, set to marry a nice Afghan man, solves this problem makes a great story, embellished as it is with all the traditional wedding preparations. Rodriguez went to Afghanistan in 2002, just after the fall of the Taliban, volunteering as a nurse's aide, but soon found that her skills as a trained hairdresser were far more in demand, both for the Western workers and, as word got out, Afghans. On a trip back to the U.S., she persuaded companies in the beauty industry to donate 10,000 boxes of products and supplies to ship to Kabul, and instantly she started a training school. Political problems ensued ("too much laughing within the school"), financial problems, cultural misunderstandings and finally the government closed the school and salon—though the reader will suspect that the endlessly ingenious Rodriguez, using her book as a wedge against authority, will triumph in the end.

A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah

This absorbing account by a young man who, as a boy of 12, gets swept up in Sierra Leone's civil war goes beyond even the best journalistic efforts in revealing the life and mind of a child abducted into the horrors of warfare. Beah's harrowing journey transforms him overnight from a child enthralled by American hip-hop music and dance to an internal refugee bereft of family, wandering from village to village in a country grown deeply divided by the indiscriminate atrocities of unruly, sociopathic rebel and army forces. Beah then finds himself in the army—in a drug-filled life of casual mass slaughter that lasts until he is 15, when he's brought to a rehabilitation center sponsored by UNICEF and partnering NGOs. Told in clear, accessible language by a young writer with a gifted literary voice, this memoir seems destined to become a classic firsthand account of war and the ongoing plight of child soldiers in conflicts worldwide.

Without a Map by Meredith Hall

It was 1965 when Hall was expelled from her New Hampshire high school, shunned by all her friends, made to leave her mother's home, and kept hidden from sight in her father's house—all because she was a sexually naïve 16-year-old, pregnant by a college boy who wasn't all that interested in her anyway. And in this memoir, chapters of which have been published in magazines, Hall narrates this bittersweet tale of loss. After childbirth her baby was put up for adoption so fast, she never had even a glimpse of him. She finished high school at a nearby boarding school, then soon wandered to Europe and eventually found herself just walking, alone, from country to country. Somewhere in the Middle East she scraped bottom and repatriated herself. She accumulated another lover and had two children, before her first son, the one she was forced to abandon, made contact. Making peace with him was deeply healing. This painful memoir builds to a quiet resolution, as Hall comes to grips with her own aging, the complexities of forgiveness and the continuity of life.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

This book chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores–those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tuscon to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. For teens who grew up on supermarket offerings, the notion not only of growing one's own produce but also of harvesting one's own poultry was as foreign as the concept that different foods relate to different seasons.

*The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive--even thrive--in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta's family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution--and her cells' strange survival--left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion. For a decade, Skloot doggedly but compassionately gathered the threads of these stories, slowly gaining the trust of the family while helping them learn the truth about Henrietta, and with their aid she tells a rich and haunting story that asks the questions, Who owns our bodies? And who carries our memories?

A Piece of Cake – Cupcake Brown

Cupcake (La'Vette) Brown went from the relative security of life in a working-class neighborhood of San Diego to hardship and uncertainty when, at the age of 11, her mother died. Her estranged biological father lost interest when an expected insurance payout didn't materialize, and Cupcake and her brother were left with a merciless foster mother and her abusive son. Unable to take the mistreatment, Cupcake drifted into a life of prostitution, drug addiction, gang affiliation, stealing, homelessness, and any available means of survival. Her salvation comes in an unlikely group of fellow addicts who encourage her to change. Brown takes the same fortitude it took to survive the streets and uses it to become a lawyer. Her story of survival and triumph is incredible and often rough. Readers who like gritty, urban nonfiction will enjoy this book.

A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana – Haven Kimmel

It's a cliché‚ to say that a good memoir reads like a well-crafted work of fiction, but Kimmel's smooth, impeccably humorous prose evokes her childhood as vividly as any novel. Born in 1965, she grew up in Mooreland, Ind., a place that by some "mysterious and powerful mathematical principle" perpetually retains a population of 300, a place where there's no point learning the street names because it's just as easy to say, "We live at the four-way stop sign." Hers is less a formal autobiography than a collection of vignettes comprising the things a small child would remember: sick birds, a new bike, reading comics at the drugstore, the mean old lady down the street. The truths of childhood are rendered in lush yet simple prose; here's Zippy describing a friend who hates wearing girls' clothes: "Julie in a dress was like the rest of us in quicksand." Over and over, we encounter pearls of third-grade wisdom revealed in a child's assured voice: "There are a finite number of times one can safely climb the same tree in a single day"; or, regarding Jesus, "Everyone around me was flat-out in love with him, and who wouldn't be? He was good with animals, he loved his mother, and he wasn't afraid of blind people."

*Freakanomics – Levitt and Dubner

Forget your image of an economist as a crusty professor worried about fluctuating interest rates: Levitt focuses his attention on more intimate real-world issues, like whether reading to your baby will make her a better student. Recognition by fellow economists as one of the best young minds in his field led to a profile in the New York Times, written by Dubner, and that original article serves as a broad outline for an expanded look at Levitt's search for the hidden incentives behind all sorts of behavior. There isn't really a grand theory of everything here, except perhaps the suggestion that self-styled experts have a vested interest in promoting conventional wisdom even when it's wrong. Instead, Dubner and Levitt deconstruct everything from the organizational structure of drug-dealing gangs to baby-naming patterns. While some chapters might seem frivolous, others touch on more serious issues, including a detailed look at Levitt's controversial linkage between the legalization of abortion and a reduced crime rate two decades later. Underlying all these research subjects is a belief that complex phenomena can be understood if we find the right perspective. Levitt has a knack for making that principle relevant to our daily lives, which could make this book a hit.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me and Other Concerns by Mindy Kaling

Mindy Kaling has lived many lives: the obedient child of immigrant professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben Affleck–impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and, finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her friends and coworkers with the sentence “Can I just say one last thing about this, and then I swear I’ll shut up about it?” In Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Mindy invites readers on a tour of her life and her unscientific observations on romance, friendship, and Hollywood, with several conveniently placed stopping points for you to run errands and make phone calls.

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Bossy Pants by Tina Fey

Tina Fey’s new book Bossypants is short, messy, and impossibly funny (an apt description of the comedian herself). From her humble roots growing up in Pennsylvania to her days doing amateur improv in Chicago to her early sketches on Saturday Night Live, Fey gives us a fascinating glimpse behind the curtain of modern comedy with equal doses of wit, candor, and self-deprecation. Some of the funniest chapters feature the differences between male and female comedy writers ("men urinate in cups"), her cruise ship honeymoon ("it’s very Poseidon Adventure"), and advice about breastfeeding ("I had an obligation to my child to pretend to try"). But the chaos of Fey’s life is best detailed when she’s dividing her efforts equally between rehearsing her Sarah Palin impression, trying to get Oprah to appear on 30 Rock, and planning her daughter’s Peter Pan-themed birthday. Bossypants gets to the heart of why Tina Fey remains universally adored: she embodies the hectic, too-many-things-to-juggle lifestyle we all have, but instead of complaining about it, she can just laugh it off.

Stories I Only Tell My Friends By Rob Lowe

A teen idol at fifteen, an international icon and founder of the Brat Pack at twenty, and one of Hollywood's top stars to this day, Rob Lowe chronicles his experiences as a painfully misunderstood child actor in Ohio uprooted to the wild counterculture of mid-seventies Malibu, where he embarked on his unrelenting pursuit of a career in Hollywood. The Outsiders placed Lowe at the birth of the modern youth movement in the entertainment industry. Never mean-spirited or salacious, Lowe delivers unexpected glimpses into his successes, disappointments, relationships, and one-of-a-kind encounters with people who shaped our world over the last twenty-five years. These stories are as entertaining as they are unforgettable.

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. The story of the author’s Irish-Catholic poverty stricken childhood.

Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native
American legends, this is the story of Codi Noline, who returns to her hometown, Grace,
Arizona, to confront her past and her ailing, distant father. Also try The Poisonwood Bible.

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver.  A young girl from Kentucky wants to avoid the pitfalls of her friends: early marriage, pregnancy, being tied down.  So she leaves town in her second hand Volkswagen to start her life out West.  She has stopped for dinner at a cheap restaurant – when an Indian woman thrusts a baby at her, and begs her to raise it.  Great story.  Great characters.  I loved it.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. A great book—a look at a futuristic society that has some scary parallels to our own world.

*Chinese Cinderella: the True Story of an Unwanted Daughter by Adeline Mah. Wu Mei, also called Adeline, is the Fifth Younger Sister of her family, and the one who bears the blame for all their bad fortune. In her inspirational tale of survival in 1940’s China, she triumphs against all odds.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Considered by many to be Steinbeck’s best, this novel is a
retelling of the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel, but it’s set in the Salinas Valley during the early years of the 20th century. An amazing book that you won’t be able to put down!

Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. This is an all-out attack on the fast food industry. Schlosser
takes on this new American icon and questions the industry’s treatment of teen workers and
animals, as well as the globalization of fast food culture. You might never eat a Big Mac again!

Feed by M.T. Anderson. A brilliantly ironic satire set in a future world where television and
computers are connected directly into people's brains when they are babies. This world is seen
through the voice of a boy who is a product of this society, where empty-headed kids are driven
by the desire for more, more, more! Sound familiar?

*Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk Yes, it was a book before it was a movie! The book, as is usually the case, is even better than the already great film. Other titles by Palahniuk you may enjoy: Survivor and Invisible Monsters.

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. Considered by many to be Hemingway’s best, this tale of rebellion and love takes place during the Spanish Civil War.

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. A fictional account of a young girl who worked in the studio of the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. This book is full of wonderful historical facts about painting and life in seventeenth century Holland.

Grendel by Gardner. Beowulf legend told from the monster’s point of view.

*The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Join Douglas Adams's hapless hero Arthur Dent as he travels the galaxy with his intrepid pal Ford Prefect, getting into horrible messes and generally wreaking hilarious havoc.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Drawing on the life and work of Virginia Woolf, this is the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicts and demands of love, inheritance, friendship, and family.

The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Gothic story of a family dealing with the effects of the past on its present condition.

*The Inferno by Dante Alighieri. Dante's extraordinary vision of Hell, with all its terror, pathos, and sardonic humor, and its penetrating analyses of the psychology of sin and the ills that plague society.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. A bestseller about four Chinese-American women and their struggles to exist in two cultures. Beautifully crafted, it will make you want to hug your mother.

*Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Pi Patel sets sail for America, but when the ship sinks, he escapes on a lifeboat and is lost at sea with a dwindling number of animals, until only he and a hungry Bengal tiger remain.
 
*Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden Novel tells the fictional story of Chiyo, a young Japanese girl, whose family, unable to support her, sell her to a geisha house in the city of Kyoto during the 1930s. A geisha is a professional female companion for men in Japan, trained in music, dancing, and the art of conversation. The geisha training is a life of virtual slavery, and Chiyo finds herself working as maid to a malevolent geisha called Hatsumomo who, jealous of Chiyo’s beauty, makes her life utterly miserable. A great book that you will not be able to put down!

Mythology by Edith Hamilton The classic text on Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology.

Old Man and the Sea by Earnest Hemingway. Symbolic story of an old fisherman who catches a giant marlin, only to have sharks strip it to the bones.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. Modern day Thoreau.

Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.  Missionary Nathan Price along with his wife and four daughters go to Africa in 1959.  The story is told through the points of view of the four daughters – I love that narrative style – some of you may not.  They land in the middle of the political upheaval of the Congo as it tries to wrest independence from Belgium.  The story is quite thought-provoking.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Social comedy about the belief that one must maintain a balance between energy and reason.

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. Find out why it’s better to be feared than loved.

*Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane The author has created a luminous tale about how childhood fear turns into fantasy and fantasy turns into fact. Breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up--in Ireland or anywhere--that has ever been written.

Savage Inequalities by Jonathon Kozol. Kozol believes that children from poor families are cheated out of a future by grossly underequipped, understaffed and underfunded schools in U.S. inner cities and less affluent suburbs. Kozol found that racial segregation has intensified since 1954. Even in the suburbs, he charges, the slotting of minority children into lower "tracks" sets up a differential, two-tier system that diminishes poor children's horizons and aspirations.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. A bizarre yet fascinating look at how scientists and others have made use of human cadavers throughout the ages.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Story of a man who is motivated by fear and rage, a figure comparable to Greek tragic heroes.

*The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien The best collection of short stories I’ve ever read—these are about the Vietnam War.

Paper Daughter by M. Elaine Mar. From surviving racist harassment in the schoolyard to trying to flip her straight hair like Farrah Fawcett, from hiding her parents' heritage to arriving alone at Harvard University, Mar's story is at once an unforgettable personal journey and an unflinching, brutal look at the realities of the American Dream.

Snyder’s Suggestions

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Vonnegut's trademark satiric, dark humor in this anti-war book inspired by his experiences during WWII.

Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King Five interconnected, sequential narratives set in the years from 1960-1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War.

Polsinelli’s All time Favorites

Dune by Frank Herbert

Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha, Thich Nhat Hanh

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

Any of the Ohio River Trilogy by Zane Grey --, Spirit of the Border.  Betty Zane, or The Last Trail  (the are listed in chronological order)

Shogun or Taipan by James Clavell

The Once and Future King T.H. White

Ptasznik’s Selection:

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman

The book discusses the benefits of outsourcing and global economic interdependency. The media, politicians, and most Americans view outsourcing as an economic obstacle. This book shows the benefits of free trade.

Trimble’s Selection:

I just finished House Rules, by Jodi Picoult, and it was amazing! It is definitely my new "favorite"!

House Rules by Jodi Picoult. A teen with Asperger's syndrome, and an obsession with crime scenes and forensic analysis, finds himself in a precarious situation. This book is a real page-turner! The rich characters, and fascinating story, make it a quick read. 

Steytler’s Suggestions:

I belong to two book clubs. When I pick the book, I try to have it about some place far away, by a foreign author or about the arts or artists....this is not a hard and fast rule, because I like fantasy and murder mysteries too!
Authors and books I have read this year:  Authors:  Toni Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Donna Leon, Geraldine Brooks
Books:  A Reliable Wife, The Paris Wife, The Help, Cutting for Stone, Hunger Games, Year of the Hare, History of Love, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Water for Elephants, Clara and Mr. Tiffany.

Weaver’s Favorites:

My favs are:  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Angels and Demons by Dan Brown.  I also like most of Picoult's work; Defending Jacob (William Landay) had a profound and now even more profound impact on me; I enjoyed reading The Hunger Games  trilogy by Collins; I actually like The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck; I recently read Redeeming Love (Francine Rivers)), and am currently reading The Shack (William P Young). I also recommend Deadline by Chris Crutcher for upperclassmen to read.

Kolcum’s Suggestions:

Sarah's Key (de Rosnay) -- historical fiction on the Holocaust
Glass Castle (Walls) -- the true story of Jeannette Walls's dysfunctional family life
Tuesdays with Morrie (Albom) -- feel good story of appreciating the good in life, but goes beyond just ordinary "feel good story"
Safe Haven (Sparks) -- typical Nicholas Sparks romance novel, but one of his better ones with great twist to it
Three Weeks with My Brother (Sparks) -- his only non-fiction piece which gives meaning to his other romance novels
Water for Elephants (Gruen) -- Jacob's life with the circus, and the relationships he develops with Marlena and Rosie
I am the Messenger (Zusak) -- Ed Kennedy tries to unravel the mystery of anonymous messages he's been receiving
Hunger Games, To Kill a Mockingbird