Wednesday, May 6, 2015

cover to cover


At some point a couple years ago I decided to read more books. I don't exactly remember when, but I e-mailed Katie and asked her for some good ones to start with, as she is The Book Queen. She sent me an excellent list, I put it in the Notepad app on my phone (way back when it looked like this, *shudder*) and I forgot about it.

And then magically, without even realizing it, I was checking books off the list. And then I was ADDING books to the list. IT WAS A MIRACLE, Dear Reader! A book reading miracle.

So with that I give you my List of Things to Read. It is presented to you exactly as it is on my phone: definitely not in alphabetized, possibly with some misspellings, added to whenever I hear about something interesting, read in no particular order, checked off with the emoji checkmark when I am finished. It's a crazy system but it works for me.

CRAZY LIST OF BOOKS:
The Age of Miracles - Karen Thompson Walker 
Seating Arrangements - Maggie Shipstead ✔
Art of Fielding - Chad Harbach 
The Red House - Mark Haddon*
This Bright River - Patrick Sommerville
The Leftovers - Tom Perotta 
Dare Me - Megan Abbott 
The Newlyweds - Nell Freudenberger 
Prospect Park - Amy Sohn ✔
Blood Bones & Butter - NF Hamilton
Swamplandia - Karen Russell 
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig
This is How You Lose Her - Junot Díaz 
Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn ✔
Dark Places - Gillian Flynn
The Memory Keeper's Daughter - Kim Edwards
The Best of Everything - Rona Jaffe
Fin & Lady - Cathleen Schine
Eleanor & Park - Rainbow Rowell
Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern 
From the Mouth of the Whale - Sjón
Blood Will Out - Walter Kirn
The Vactioners- Emma Straub
The Marriage Plot - Jeffery Eugenides 
Wild - Cheryl Strayed
The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel  **
Wildalone - Krassi Zourkova
The Bone Clocks - David Mitchell
The Circle - Dave Eggers 
Southern Reach Trilogy - Jeff VanderMeer (Book 1 finished, Book 2 started)
Commencement - Jay Courtney Sullivan
The Fever - Megan Abbott
The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins ***
Wolf in White Van - John Darnielle 
The Anatomy of Dreams - Chloe Benjamin
Delicious Foods - James Hannaham
The Country of Ice Cream Star - Sandra Newman
The Passage - Justin Cronin
The MaddAddam Trilogy - Margaret Atwood

If you'd like to start your own crazy list, might I suggest checking out NPR's Book Concierge? I got a tonnnn of additions to my list from wading through these great little widgets. Also sometimes a book gets added just because it has a cool cover. I'M NOT SORRY.

Moral of the story: GIVE ME YOUR BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS. If you can't tell I'm all over the place as far as taste goes, so I'm game for pretty much anything.

*I started reading this book over Thanksgiving two years ago, left it in a hotel room in Ohio, paid the fine at the library and never picked up another copy to finish it. The memory haunts me still.

** My most recent conquest, now I only want to read dystopian novels and think about how terrible I would be at surviving in such a world.

***Just checked my LAPL account - I'm currently 696th in line to get a copy of this bad boy, which isn't bad considering when I placed the hold the number of people waiting was seriously more than 1,000.

No comments:

Post a Comment