What I Have Been Reading: Some Books You Might Enjoy

According to the Goodreads website, I have read 36 books so far this year; I challenged myself to read 52. I always outread my challenge. I need to keep track of what I read on the Goodreads site because I cannot ever remember what I have read, and I wouldn’t want to reread something by mistake! It has happened, and sometimes I don’t even realize I have read the book before until I’m way into it.

I just finished American Carnage by Fred Gutenberg whose daughter was one of the students murdered in the Parkland shooting. He has been a strong advocate for stricter common sense gun laws ever since. He actually co-wrote the book with another author whose name escapes me, and I haven’t heard of. I gave the book four out of five stars. It was interesting with lots of facts and lots of common sense. The problem with the book was that I sometimes felt as if I was reading the same information over and over again. I don’t know how the authors worked together, but it seemed as if one of them wrote a section and then the other wrote the same information.  However, especially if you aren’t a close follower of the news and politics, I would recommend it. 

I don’t usually read many thrillers. I must have seen Falling on a recommended list. Five stars. Great book. It is written by T. J. Newman, who is a woman. I wonder if she uses her initials so people will think she is a man (like S.E. Hinton did back in the 1960s when she wrote The Outsiders). Guilty as charged. I somehow assumed the author was male. It is an airplane thriller, and the author is a former flight attendant. Her other book is Drowning, another equally wonderful airplane thriller. Another five stars.

I read I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai for an online book club I sometimes attend. I will admit it is very well researched and written, but it was a lot. A lot of characters, a lot of things happened, just a lot. I didn’t love it, and I didn’t really dislike it. I just thought it was a little hard to push through.  But everyone in the book club liked it. I generally go for a little easier read than I can race through.

Telephone by Everett Percival is an unusual book. I read it for “sort of a book club,” where there is no discussion, but there is a conversation with the author . I liked the book, but I didn’t like the ending. When I saw the interview, I discovered there are three different versions of the book, all alike but with different endings. And you don’t know which book you are getting. The author did not want people to realize there were three different versions. Hopefully, there was a version with a better ending than the one I read.

Mary Kubica wrote two excellent thrillers that I recently read:  Local Woman Missing and Just the Nicest Couple. Both recommended.

I don’t think I had ever read Isabel Allende until recently when she was one of the authors in conversation (it’s through California Book Club, sponsored by the Alta Journal). I loved the conversation with her, but not the book, which was House of the Spirits. But then I read her Soul of a Woman and loved that one. 

The Boy and the Dog by Seishu Hase is a really enjoyable book — and easy to get through. I read it for the online book club. It was my first meeting (and of course I didn’t remember much about the book since I had finished it a couple of weeks before), so I didn’t participate, just listened in. The common thought was that it was kind of simple, but good. I liked it. 

I gave five stars to For Those Who Are Lost, an excellent historical fiction by Julia Bryan Thomas. Another really good historical fiction I would recommend is Lessons by Ian McEwan.

In the past few years Liane Moriarty has become really popular, mostly for her initial bestseller Big Little Lies. I loved that one, and loved her few following books even more, including The Husband’s Secret and What Alice Forgot. But I didn’t love her most recent books like Truly, Madly, Guilty, which I gave three stars to.

Here are a few other books I read recently and liked. These are aimed mostly at women readers:

• The Happy Place by Emily Henry
• The Homewreckers by Mary Kay Andrews
• Better Than Fiction by Alexa Martin
• Miss Demeanor by Elinor Lipman. I gave only three stars to this one (I did like her previous books more), but I mention her because she went to the same college as I did; she was one year ahead of me. 

If you have read a great book (or a terrible one) recently, send me some info about it to my email at bigwords101@yahoo.com (or through the website contact form). Please do not write about it in the blog comments. If I get enough responses, I will write a blog post about your choices.