Summer Reading Recommendations

In July, Roberta Rubin, owner of the Book Stall walked around with me and gave me her summer reading suggestions for the book club, they are as follows below:

Caleb's Crossing  Geraldine Brooks
Years of Wonder, also Geraldine Brooks
People of the Book, also Geraldine Brooks
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford
Broken for you, Stephanie Kallos
Still Alice, Lisa Genova
Mariette in Ecstasy, Ron Hansen
Ten Thousand Saints, Elenor Henderson
Children of Fire, Ursula Hegi  (Author of Stones from the River)

Also,
The following books were compiled at the June book club.  Each one is better than the next.
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett sets her new novel deep in the Amazon jungle, where a drug researcher has been sent from the U.S. to find her former mentor, a formidable scientist who disappeared while working on what is destined to be a valuable new drug.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid's story is an elegant and chilling short novel about a Pakistani man fresh out of Princeton working as a financial analyst.  He is working towards the 'American Dream'.  After  the 9/11 attacks everything changes and we see everything changes.

Townie by Andre Dubus III  After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and everyday violence. To protect himself and those he loved, Andre started pumping iron and learned to use his fists so well that he became the kind of man who could send others to the hospital with one punch, and did. Irresistibly drawn to stand up for the underdog, he was on a fast track to getting killed or killing someone else. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds between town and gown, between the hard drinking, drugging, and fighting of townies and the ambitions of well-fed students debating books and ideas, couldn t have been more stark or more difficult for a son to communicate to a father. Only by finally putting pen to paper himself did young Andre come into his own, discovering the power of empathy in channeling the stories of others and ultimately bridging the rift between his father and himself.An unforgettable book, Townie is a riveting and profound meditation on physical violence and the failures and triumphs of love.

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson (Devil in the White City)The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.  A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance—and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition.


Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand.  On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood.  Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared.  It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard.  So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.  The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini.  In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails.  As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that had carried him to the Berlin Olympics and within sight of the four-minute mile.  But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.  Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond, a trial even greater.  Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion.  His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.

Three Stages of Amazement by Carol Edgarian.  Many love stories end in marriage; rare is the love story that begins with one—already promised, already worn.  Set in San Francisco during the first year of Obama’s presidency, Three Stages of Amazement deftly charts the struggles and triumphs of Lena Rusch and her husband Charlie Pepper, still believe they can have it all--sex, love, marriage, children, career, brilliance. But life delivers surprises and tests--a stillborn child, an economic crash, a ruthless business rival and the attentions of an old lover. Touched by tragedy and by ordinary hopes unmet, Lena and Charlie must face, for the first time in their lives, real limitation.

Dreams of Joy, Lisa See continues the story from her previous novel, 'Shanghai Girls': A Chinese American girl seeks her father and spends three years in the People's Republic during the Great Leap Forward starting in the 1950s.

Evening, by Susan Minot July 1954. An island off the coast of Maine. Ann Grant—a 25-year-old New York career girl—is a bridesmaid at her best friend's lavish wedding. Also present is a man named Harris Arden, whom Ann has never met . . After three marriages and five children, Ann Lord lies in an upstairs bedroom of a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What comes to her, eclipsing a stream of doctor's visits and friends stopping by and grown children overheard whispering from the next room, is a rush of memories from a weekend 40 years ago in Maine, when she fell in love with a passion that even now throws a shadow onto the rest of her life. In Evening, Susan Minot gives us a novel of spellbinding power on the nature of memory and love.