December Readers Recommend

Pym
Silver Sparrow
The Illumination
Open City
11/22/63
This Beautiful Life
Salvage the Bones
Humiliation
The Inverted Forest
Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in the Seventies
Wildwood

October Readers Recommend

The Year of the Flood
Happy Baby
Ask the Dust
Last Exit to Brooklyn
Rat Girl
Fallen
When the Emperor Was Divine
Horns
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

October Readers Recommend

The Art of Fielding
Before I Go To Sleep
Mating
The Marriage Plot
The Leftovers
The Night Circus
Love Walked In
A Stolen Life
The Forgotten Waltz
The Language of Flowers
The Buddha in the Attic
The Dovekeepers

The Magicians

Ok, so I'm outing myself as a total nerd right now, but it's October and with Halloween approaching, it seems appropriate to admit my love of fantasy and magic.  I just finished The Magicians by Lev Grossman and instantly went into a panic over whether there was a sequel in the works.  Thankfully, The Magician King had just come out and I breezed through that one as well.  Oh, it was such a nerdy, nerdy treat to plow through these magical coming of age romps.

I would have to describe these as Harry Potteresque, but with a naughty twist.  The characters in these books party and have sex and use profanity.  The premise is similar to Rowlings' with a group of gifted chilldren attending a magical school and perfecting their witchy abilities.  But after graduation, we get to see how they unleash their new skills on the real world and try to pass as normal citizens.  It's not easy for them, and they find themselves seeking magical stimuli that can only be found in a parallel universe called Fillory.

I don't want to give too much information about these kids' adventures, but I do highly recommend these books.  I love a good imagination and the opportunity to escape to an entirely different world in a book.  The author even looks a bit mystical in his author's photo on the back cover.  He's got an ethereal looking spark in his eye.  Let's just hope he's got novel number three in the works.  I'm on pins and needles.

September Readers Recommend

I'm sorry this is a little late, but here you go.  I've been having trouble linking up to Amazon, so bear with me.  Thanks!

Codex
Mohawk
Madeleine is Sleeping
I Am Charlotte Simmons
IQ84
My Sister Life
A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
The Bad Seed
Oryx and Crake
The Women of Brewster Place
Noah's Compass

August Readers Recommend

The Night Circus
Bright Before Us
The Instructions
The Lonely Polygamist
Shadow Tag
The Cry of the Sloth
A Reliable Wife
The Things Between Us
The Flying Troutmans
The Family Fang
Role Models
The Magicians

Sophie's Choice

My friend Kerry recommended this one.  I almost never read a book after I've seen the movie, but Kerry reads like a fiend and has excellent taste, so when she told me to run, not walk, and buy Sophie's Choice, I did just that.  And I'm so happy I did.  

I'm sure most people have seen the film, which is also outstanding, but there's so much more depth to the book.  And humor!  How could you successfully incorporate fantastic humor into a story that devastating?  This was my first experience with William Styron, and it set me off on a Styron spree.  I followed Sophie's Choice with Lie Down in Darkness, a brilliant novel written at the age of twenty-six.  Astonishing talent.  I  also just finished his memoir about living with depression called Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness.  

Although his writing is extraordinary, I have to move away from him for a bit because his material is so upsetting.  I need to read it in intervals.  It's all hauntingly beautiful, but absolutely soul-crushing.  Next up is The Confessions of Nat Turner, which apparently caused quite a racial stir when published.  Start with Sophie's Choice.  It's brilliant.