Skip to main content

A Year of Interesting Books

I've read a lot of excellent books this past year. Most of them were for book club, but some were books of my own choosing. And I have to say that the majority of the books I read over the year were very enjoyable. There were only a few that I didn't connect with and want to finish as soon as possible.

I'd like to share a list of the books I've read within the last year or so, and I'll include a very basic rating on a 5-point scale. I intend to take the time over the coming months to write reviews of some of these books, as well as those that I read in the future. It will take me a while, so if you see a book on the list that you'd like to hear about soon, please let me know and I'll work on those first.

*****Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

*****Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games) by Suzanne Collins

*****Moloka'i by Alan Brennert

*****Still Alice by Lisa Genova

*****The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, with Jeffrey Zaslow

*****The Nazi Officer's Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust by Susan Dworkin

****A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

****Sarah's Key: A Novel by Tatiana de Rosnay

****The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew--Three Women Search for Understanding by Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver and Priscilla Warner

****The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

****The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

****The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

****The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

****The Space Between Us: A Novel by Thrity Umrigar

****The Story of Forgetting: A Novel by Stefan Merrill Block

***Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress: A Novel by Dai Sijie

***Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales

***Riding Lessons: A Novel by Sara Gruen

***The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel by Dianne Setterfield

***The Tree-Sitter: A Novel by Suzanne Matson

I don't generally finish a book that I'm not enjoying, so you won't see any 1-2 star books here. Going forward, I'll include these types of books even if I start them and don't finish. But my previously read list just includes the books I enjoyed enough to get through.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Teaching My Little BookWormOctober 22, 2009 at 8:24 PM

    cool my bookworms book nook is slowly becoming a mommy blog: menu plans, book reviews, and books we are reading! :) I'm following so i can hear about what your reading

    ReplyDelete
  2. JulieOctober 23, 2009 at 10:30 AM

    Thanks for mentioning your book nook. I hadn't noticed it before. I'll have to start following too. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. BettyOctober 26, 2009 at 5:20 PM

    Wow, what a great list of books. I've read about 1/3 of them and I'll look forward to reading your reviews on the others. A really fun book that I'm currently reading is "Mystic in a Minivan" by Kristen White. It's a modern day parable designed to teach women about the spiritual nature inside us all. I'm really enjoying!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks for stopping by! I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Popular posts from this blog

Getting back to blogging

It seems that blogging has dropped to the bottom of my list for the past year, and was pretty low for the year or two prior to that. I love to read, and am continuing to do so, but as my regular readers know I haven't been around much. My last blog post was almost a year ago!!

There are many things that have taken me away from blogging. Work has been much more challenging and interesting these past few years, but that means I really don't want to get back on the computer when I get home at night - or on the weekends.

Family life has been more busy with kids having multiple activities in the evenings, leaving little time to just hang out and write about the books that I read.

I will admit to a bit of a Facebook addiction, which means way too much time spent scrolling through my newsfeed instead of doing something more productive. This is one of the things I'm working on and hoping that this will free up some time for getting back to the blog.

Overall, life is good. Work is …
Post a Comment
Read more

Banned Books Week: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park

This is the end of Banned Books Week and unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to write about banned books this year. But I did want to include at least one post about it, so today I wanted to share one of the book series that it seems most people are surprised to find on the list: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park.

According to Wikipedia:
The Junie B. Jones series came in at #71 on the American Library Association's list of the Top 100 Banned or Challenged Books from 2000-2009. Reasons cited are poor social values taught by the books and Junie B. Jones not being considered a good role model due to her mouthiness and bad spelling/grammar. This is an interesting example of a banned book. Many times there are serious, controversial topics featured in books that are challenged. Things like homosexuality, drugs, vulgar language, etc. You can actually understand why people may not want their children to read those books, and why they may challenge their inclusion in school libra…
10 comments
Read more

April Reading Review

Where exactly did April go? I swear it was just the middle of March and now it's May. Once again, I'm going to provide a quick review of each of the books I read last month. For the last two weeks of the month, I participated in the Spring Into Horror Readathon hosted by Michelle at Seasons of Reading. The only rule was that you had to read at least one book that was horror, thriller, etc. I read one book that qualified. With the exception of the first book in my list, the books I mention below were read during the readathon


My book club's May selection was Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I had started reading this nonfiction book about the author's work representing men, women and children who were on death row in March but finished the book in April. This is an eye-opening story that everyone at my book club discussion agreed should be required reading for law schools and police officers and even legislators who are making the laws related to judgements. I learned to…
3 comments
Read more