Top 3 Reads June 2008

Hmmm.... I ended up with spies, dogs, and Alzheimer's as themes for my top three.

* The Spies of Warsaw, Alan Furst. It's kind of rewarding seeing Furst show up on some best-seller lists after all the years he's been doing this.

* The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein. The feel-good tearjerker of the year.

* The Story of Forgetting, Stefan Merrill Block. I still have a hard time believing this was a debut.

And, I'll throw in two not-for-everyone picks. Both have immigration, displaced people themes. The Hakawati, Rabih Alameddine. Lebanon. It combines A Thousand and One Nights type stories with the lives of four generations of a modern Lebanese family. The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon. Bosnia. This one is hard to pigeonhole. It goes back to pogroms in Eastern Europe then comes to Chicago in the early 20th century and has a 21st century voice also. It is not a comforting read but it is strong stuff indeed.

Hmm, maybe I should have tried to get down to three for June before the painful task that was picking 5 for the quarter. Here are my choices (in order):

1. My Father's Paradise by Ariel Sabar - This was my May ER book and it was great, a son telling his father's amazing story. Essentially a family memoir.

2. Regina's Closet by Diana M. Raab - another family memoir. Diana's grandmother committed suicide when Diana was very young. When she is an adult, her mother passes on the grandmother's journal, which Diana works through. It was fantastic!

3. The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry - I'm not really sure how to describe this book, but it was great!

Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst was a very close 4th. It might have switched places with The Lace Reader if I had read it more recently (it was my first book completed in June)

I am anxious to read Lace Reader, but waiting til payday....

Oh! not out yet? lucky you an ARC?

Guess I wait longer..

Actually all of those were either ARCs or books for review. Regina's Closet is the only one I think is already out. Alive in Necropolis is mid-July, The Lace Reader end of July, and I believe that My Father's Paradise comes out in September.

Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

I can't narrow it down below four:

The Blind Assassin -- Margaret Atwood
Half of a Yellow Sun -- Chimanmanda Ngozi Adichi
Mudbound -- Hillary Jordan
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox -- Maggie O'Farrell

Oh my, doesn't this speak volumes: I had only one great read in the month, The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. But I did also have some fun, flip-through diversions in TV Sets by Mark Bennett and Sitcom Style by Diana Friedman.

>7 teelgee: teelgee, glad to see your thumbs up for Half of a Yellow Sun. I ended up traveling when I started it, and it was too big a hardcover to drag along. Hope to get back to it in July.

I only have 2 for June - The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls and Stone Creek by Victoria Lustbader, an ER book.

Too many good ones this month. But, here goes...

1) If On A Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
2) Three Plays: Blithe Spirit, Hay Fever, Private Lives - Noel Coward
3) The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Here are the three I liked the best in June:

Small Island by Andrea Levy (Jamaica, England, WWII)

The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen (Influenza 1918 in Pacific NW))

Bright of the Sky by Kay Kenyon (First book of The Entire and the Rose series - SF) - I have the second book already to read in July. Terrific series.

I only read one book that I would classify as excellent in the month of June, and that was Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Alcestiad by Thornton Wilder was good and entertaining, but I didn't love it the way I loved the Ishiguro.

I Shall Not Want by Julia Spencer-Fleming.

A little slow this month, but three of the four I read were fantastic. In the order read and reverse order of preference:

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

My top 3 this month are:
1) Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
2) Miles From Nowhere by Barbera Savage
3) The Golem's Eye by Jonathan Stroud

My top 3 for June:

1. China Road by Rob Gifford (nonfiction)
2. Why Mermaids Sing by C.S. Harris (historical mystery)
3. The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff (fiction; shortlisted for the 2008 Orange Broadband Award for New Writers)

Edited to correct Orange award designation

I read 8 books in June, nothing but fiction, and there were a couple of great ones, as well as a couple I was conspicuously disappointed with, but these were the best:

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout was one of the best novel-in-short stories I've ever read, I loved Olive and think most other readers will too.

The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III was a page-turning blockbuster of a novel, probably not for everyone, but for me it was riveting down to the last page.

Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles was a short book but grandly surprising, both wickedly funny and extremely sad, and couldn't have enjoyed it more.

Father and Son by Larry Brown was a re-read for July's Deep South reading group and was glued to it for 2 days, found it powerfully addictive, and don't think Brown ever wrote a finer novel.

I was keenly disappointed with The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. The first 300 pages of it were really exceptional, but at some point its credibility just vanished, probably because Wroblewski seemed so determined to adhere to the Hamlet schematic, and this fragile story of boy/dogs/family simply couldn't bear the weight and imposition of Shakespeare's rather lurid plot.

Even with 150 pages to go, I can already say that Joyce Carol Oates' grand satire My Sister, My Love will definitely join my Favorites list this year. And yes, it's too long, but it's all presented at such breakneck speed you never notice, the pages keep flying by, and once again I'm totally in awe of JCO.

I didn't read enough in June to have a meaningful Top Three, but my favourite book was easily: The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser

I did have three this month that stood out:

The Grapes of Wrath, a re-read
Enrique's Journey, for the LT Global Reading Group
The Cellist of Sarajevo an LT recommendation

Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalianfiction
Sol's Story by Richard Chardkoffnonfiction
Gully's Travels by Tor Seidler YA

The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block
The Genizah at the House of Shepher by Tamar Yellin
The Road by Cormac McCarthy

In an entirely unranked order, they are:

* Judge Sewall's Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience
* The Man in the Iron Mask
* Twelfth Night

I finished Peter Ackroyd's The Life of Thomas More on the 5th. While it's well-written and all that, I found it a little dense (though not in the sense of Victorian wordiness, which is a whole other plot structure, as it were). Between the density and the fact that the month I spent reading it barely overlaps June, I'm relegating it to honorable-mention status.

Swordmage - my June ER book
The God Delusion
The White Mary

My top 3 are:

Tatiana and Alexander by Paullina Simons
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips

#20, I finished Skeletons at the Feast last night and suspect that it will be near the top for July reads for me.

#22, Quite a reading month you had with the Salem witch hunts and Man in the Iron Mask.

>25 ktleyed: I'm reading Gods Behaving Badly now. Quite cute so far!

My top three for June, in order:

Shadows Return by Lynn Flewelling
Feast of Fools by Rachel Caine
Strangers by Taichi Yamada

My honorable mention is At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill that I had a very hard time reading due to the Irish dialect and slang used, but really enjoyed anyway.

Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
Old Man's War by John Scalzi
Sojourn by Jana G. Oliver time travel to the Victorian era

And an honorable mention to an excellent free romance novella, Ember by Bettie Sharpe, which is available at the author's website.
http://www.bettiesharpe.com/reads/Ember/index.htm

This Charming Man by Marian Keyes
The Sound of Language Amulya Malladi
Earthly Pleasures by Karen Neches

I have reviews of all of these (as well as many others) on my blog
http://skrishnasbooks.blogspot.com/

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
The Thirteenth Tale
Magical Thinking

I have a review of The Gargoyle on my brand-new blog http://readerville.wordpress.com

Many more reviews to come!