ok, so in my YA Adult reading group we are just finishing Across teh Universe by Beth Revis, Great Suprise Read. On my own I'm reading Then Came You, byu Jennifer Weiner. Totally not my normal book!! !

thanks so much for your participation here tonight, annie! it's just what we need! i'm reading scholarly articles about something at the moment and want to pull my hair out from the vocab. not interesting enough to share. but i'm hoping to get to something better soon!

Lots of reading ideas posted here :-) I am joining a book club and seems we need a kick jump push start and I can use what has been shared here! thanks so much :-) I currently am reading The China Study (The most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted) by T. Colin Campbell, PhD and Thomas M. Campbell II, MD.   All I can say is WOW. If you are pro active about your health, your diet, and wondering ???? about a lot of fad diets and just what is truth vs hype this book may help ... I am loving it and so is my husband.

maryanne!  Advice for bookclubs, mix it up!! I'm always changing main character genders, time periods, mysteries, Dystopian, crime, mainstream, non fictions etc..

thanks for posting you guys! keep it comin'!

Thanks Annie ... the last book club that I was in died with one book! I am not the organizer just a participant :-)

Maryanne!! You should start your own!!  You can even ask a local library or bookshop to host a spot to have it if you don't want to use your house.  We use my bookshop!! Bring in food and beverrages of all sorts and have fun!!  Our adult group votes on books they love and we assign out about 9 months.  It works like this.  Everyone brings books they love or printouts of summarys and everyone votes by cheking off on a piece of paper near the book. At the end the books with the most checks win!  MY YA group.. I pick the books for now and like I said change it up my topic all the time!  Good Luck!! Fall is a great time to start!! Everyone is getting into new routines!! It may also help to keep the date a standard.. like mine is the last thursday of every month.. works great for planning.

Just finished reading All Things At Once by Mika Brzkzinski (I know one one of Lisa W's favorites!) - it helped me understand why she is so driven.  Her parents were both over-achievers, her mother an artist, her father a foreign affairs specialist, and they established huge expectations that she absorbed and placed on herself to be the perfect wife and mother as well as professionally.  She was the conciliator in her strong-opinioned family, which is where she acquired the skills she now uses hosting a news show.  She had to go through a major injury to her infant daughter (exhausted from graveyard shift she fell down stairs while holding the baby) and a complete professional set-back to start over from scratch both in her view of her roles and her career.  Her 2nd lucky break was Joe Scarborough wanting her for his show and the rest is history.

hi robin! thanks for this review....she does annoy me, but i respect her. and i'm always interested in people's life story! if i had more time, i would read bio's all day! :-) that's very interesting about how she came to be the mika we know now.

She had a very unusual upbringing.  Her parents being foreign (and her mother a member of a prominent European political family), things were done very differently.  She talked of playing with Amy Carter at the White House and had very nice things to say about Rosalyn Carter, who was always trying to wash her face & comb her hair; she was a huge tomboy.  One time, her mother found a deer beside the road that had just been hit by a car and she cooked it up and served it up at a diplomatic dinner.  Another time, when she was 11, she was riding her horse home and was assaulted by a derelict; she escaped and spread the alarm but the guy was never caught and later assaulted another girl in the neighborhood.  Years later, she was contacted to ID him in a line-up but it wasn't the same person.  She annoyed me while reading the book, because she drives herself so hard and sets such high expectations of herself.  She is very fortunate that her husband is completely understanding of her foibles.   

finished "The Assassin" by Stephen Coonts at 5:30 this morning. Typical can not put down book.

Just finished "The things they carried" by Tim O'Brien ..it was very good so  I now have "If I die in a combat zone" by the same author on the way...

I'm in the middle of RED, WHITE AND BLUE, by Susan Isaacs.  It's a well-written saga of a Jewish immigrant family and two detectives who are its offspring, who meet each other only when they are each assigned to the same hate group murder case.

Well, I am currently reading Cloud Atlas, Wicked, and Entering the Castle. I must say Cloud Atlas took some warming up to but now I am in love with it. Wicked is Wickedly wonderful! Entering the Castle is like having a private retreat between you and your soul in your own home ... love it! I wish I had nothing to do but read what I choose plus read all that others post here.

i love that you guys are contributing here! thans for these entries. i would like your suggestions of how to spread the word about our book group and how to make it even more interesting and fun ?

Just finishing Runcible's The Crusades

On audio, I'm listening to Say You're Sorry by Michael Robotham.  On Kindle I'm reading Close Your Eyes Tight by John Verdon.  And in paper I'm reading Say Nice Things About Detroit by Scott Lasser.

thanks, julie! how are they?

I listen to a lot of books because I can fit in a audio book while I am busy with my task where getting the time to sit with a book is a bit more difficult. Just like Julie I am using all 3 venues for book consumption! Wicked is audio and Kindle, Cloud Atlas is both audio and paper (I switch between both) and Entering the Castle is paper.

i, too, am finding alternate methods for reading. i rarely sit with a paper book in the old fashioned way. i love audio, because i ican do something with my hands and it's also easier on my eyes. my eyes are strained from so much computer :-)

I just finished Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander, MD, where he relates his near death experience. I've always been fascinated by spirituality and metaphysics and lean strongly toward believing in life after death. This book nudged me even farther in the direction of that belief.

Tho I read it about a year ago, Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna is great. So is Cutting for Stone.

I just received my copy of Alice Munro's "Dear Life." I'll be starting that tonight. I've never been disappointed by Munro's fiction, though her last collection ("Too Much Happiness") didn't engage me the way her earlier work has.

thanks for posting, tom! nice to have you on board. i don't know alice munro's work, so this will be good to check out. what's her style?

bettina, i almost missed your post! i have been wondering about that book on heaven....would you say it leaned scientific or corny? 

http://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Jefferson-The-Art-Power/dp/1400067669/...
a lot of folks on here might like this new book on jefferson by jon meacham

New fro 2013!  I'm reading two.. When she woke and Black Mirror!

I read something recently that was fascinating and touching.  It's called THREE CUPS OF TEA and it's the account of Greg Mortenson, a mountain climber turned humanitarian who brought schools, irrigation and potable water to remote mountain villages in Pakistan and Afghanistan, from the 1990s until after the start of the American war with Afghanistan.

I recently finished two books, both of which I'd recommend highly. First is The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. In it, she tells the story of The Great Migration, the movement of African Americans from the south to the north and west. The migration took place over many decades (from about 1913 to 1960). Most of the folks who left the south were fleeing Jim Crow--in many cases, literally for their lives--and in doing so created the great centers of African American culture in cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit and LA. To me this is an essential piece of American history that most White folks know nothing about, which is a shame. Wilkerson is a gifted writer who presents history as narrative. Through the stories of three people, we learn not only what it meant to be Black in the south under Jim Crow and how brave and perilous these journeys were, but also how folks reestablished the communities they had left behind and changed the places where they resettled. Really just an amazing book. 

The second book is called Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which won its author, Katherine Boo, the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2012. It reads like fiction but it is the true story of an Indian American women rediscovering her family in Mumbai as she tells the story of a Mumbai slum that still exists. It's beautifully written and, for someone like me who loves learning about other cultures, just a fascinating story. 

I have a few other books going right now, but I'll review them another time. 

thanks so much for your book posts, gang!! keep 'em coming! 

Pamela, Three Cups of Tea is a great book, I agree. Greg's accounts of how he came to be so active in Afghanistan are incredible. There is a lot of controversy now about him and whether he really did do all he says and whether he was truly held hostage etc.

Shara, I will add those two books to my wish list. Having lived in the south in the early 60's I have memories of outright racism including an encounter my mother had with the KKK and still find it hard to imagine the suffering so many people endured simply because of the outward appearance.

I had to look up Mumbai! See, just reading your review I learned something! Thanks!

Just finished Every Last One by Anna Quindlen. Gripping, violent, heart-wrenching, damnably hard to put down-- It's mind-blowing to think that the same woman can write such disturbing fiction and turn around and create A Short Guide to a Happy Life.

I'm new to this group, but loving it. After reading about halfway through, my Amazon wishlist has doubled in length! Of course, I'm compelled to offer my own favorite non-fiction. Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd details her exploration of a God beyond the traditional paternalistic figure of her upbringing. Kidd was once a contributing editor in for Norman Vincent Peale's magazine Guideposts, but in her 40s she found herself needing to look further. She has become vastly popular for her novels such as Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid's Tale, but Daughter remains my personal favorite.

welcome to the group, cindi! i'm so happy you are reviewing anna quindlen. se is one heck of a writer, isn't she? how is it that she is so good at writing fiction AND amazing essays! so much talent in one honest and wise woman. i really like her. did you happen to see her on one of those 3 hours with the author things on cspan's book thingies? she was amazing!

Maryann, you'll have to let me know what you think if you read either of them. I just finished rereading Anne Rice's Witching Hour Trilogy (The Witching Hour, Lasher and Taltos) cause I hadn't read them for a few years. Sometimes I want to read for pure escapism and Rice does that well for me. I do get kinda irritated at her abundance of purple prose at times. She writes such gorgeous sentence but sometimes I swear she's getting paid by the word as she meanders and repeats herself. But she's a hell of a storyteller, really good at creating a world and drawing the reader into it. 

Now I need something new to read, and am casting about for a book to fall in love with. I love Dickens and my favorite modern authors are John Irving, TC Boyle and Marge Piercy, among others. I love historical fiction too. I've been thinking about reading Herman Wouk's Winds of War  (and then War and Remembrance, which I've never read. I'm not sure Wouk's style is for me though...Anyone have suggestions? 

If any of you like design books (far from fiction, i realize)...i recommend interior designer nate berkus' book "the things that matter". nate is extremely honest about what losing his partner in the tsunami has done to him and for him. the book is about surrounding our environment with "the things that matter" and not just "stuff"

what are you reading, folks? 

After buying it months ago, I'm FINALLY about halfway through The New Jim Crow-- Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Hardly a page goes by that I'm not picking up my highlighter and marking a sentence o two that moves me to the core. It's an incredible read-- just wish I didn't feel so overwhelmed by the complete enormity of the injustice. Where does anyone even begin to work towards reform?

thanks for sharing this, cindi! i wouldn't have known it was out there. books like this do sometimes take all our strength to read. but what is the opposite of not learning about injustice? i think it's turning a blind eye. and that is what makes the injustice happen in the first place. so not only thanks for sharing, but thanks for reading!!!

Thanks for the heads up Cindi, and thanks for the acknowledgement, Wiffle! We are the greatest maker and filler of jails in the Western world and it's time Americans started recognizing that and discussing solutions!

YES, pamela!...and how about that judge that was just put away in pennsylvania for jailing kids for money? we have a serious "jailing for profit" problem, and the more it is exposed the better. we should be judged as a society by how we treat those without a voice!

At this point it seems as if the US would rather create profit enterprises than working Americans.  Unfortunately, we ARE "judged as a society by how we treat those without a voice" -- by Europeans and Asians.  They're usually amazed when they come here and see peace rallies.

we can be quite barbaric, and the world knows it. we need to take a cold hard look at ourselves..how we treat those in prison, how we treat the poor, how we treat children, how we treat women, how we treat the sick, etc. we need to make changes

I like the idea of starting with the small stuff-- just how we treat people on a day-to-day basis. But sometimes I want to grab this country by the ears and shake it, because there are so many things we are doing wrong, and yet I hear us being so arrogant with other countries about their flaws when our own back yards are such a mess. "The mote in your own eye". . . When I read about the frequency of stop and frisk, the wide discretion of DAs in charging (whites use drugs at least as much as people of color, but are charged far less frequently or severely), the way that a felony on a person's record results in ineligibility for public housing, employment, and voting, the fact that prisoners are forced to work for miniscule wages but are charged for prison costs, probationary expenses, and court fees, so they can end up liable for debts they can't pay-- all of this conspires to create a permanent undercaste in American society. And that doesn't even begin to address the issue of private companies operating prisons and lobbying for "law and order" penalties to keep them fully occupied, and profitable-- or that longer prison terms if anything increase the likelihood of repeat offenses-- or that the bulk of nonviolent offenders are in prison for drug or alcohol-related problems, and that treatment costs only a fraction what prison costs. I've been involved in Treatment Instead of Prison work, so some I've what I've learned has gone beyond this book. Still, Michelle Alexander's research is well-presented and gripping, and I wish everyone would read this book.

i don't want to get all religious here, because wiffledust is not about religious stuff, but there is a reason why Jesus talked about the prisoners. just sayin'

a book i want to recommend for us.."The Unwinding" by George Packer. Here are some of the Amazon reviews: 

Praise for The Unwinding:

“Exemplary journalism . . . A foundational document in the literature of the end of America.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

“A broad and compelling perspective on a nation in crisis . . . an illuminating, in-depth, sometimes frightening view of the complexities of decline and the enduring hope of recovery.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“Trenchant . . . [the] brief biographies of seminal figures that shaped the current state of affairs offer the book’s fiercest prose, such as in Packer’s brutal takedown of Robert Rubin, secretary of the Treasury during some key 1990s financial deregulation that amplified the severity of the Great Recession of 2008. Packer has a keen eye for the big story in the small moment, writing about our fraying social fabric with talent that matches his dismay.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The Unwinding . . . echoes the symphonic rage of the celebrated television series The Wire . . . a tremendous work of reporting that pushes past abstractions and recycled debates . . . Whatever one’s views on American decline generally, it is difficult to put the book down without . . . a conviction that we can do better. And yet if it is a story of despair, it is also a story of resilience. Packer’s subjects make good and bad decisions, enjoy lucky breaks and misfortune, eke it out, give in, and try harder. The lives they lead are worth describing in detail, not only because they are instructive but also because they are beautiful.”
—The Washington Monthly

“[A] sprawling, trenchant narrative . . . Packer is a thorough, insightful journalist, and his in-depth profiles provide a window into American life as a whole . . . The Unwinding is a harrowing and bracing panoramic look at American society—things are bad everywhere, for everyone, but there’s still a sense of optimism. Through hard work and dedication we can pull ourselves out of the financial, political, and social mess we’ve created and become stronger as individuals and ultimately as a society.”
—The Brooklyn Rail

“George Packer has crafted a unique, irresistible contraption of a book. Not since John Dos Passos’s celebrated U.S.A. trilogy, which The Unwindingrecollects and rivals, has a writer so cunningly plumbed the seething undercurrents of American life. The result is a sad but delicious jazz-tempo requiem for the post–World War II American social contract. You will often laugh through your tears at these tales of lives of ever-less-quiet desperation in a land going ever-more-noisily berserk.”
—David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Freedom from Fear and Over Here

Looks fascinating, Lisa, even if it isn't exactly beach reading! ;-)

In other news, wanted to recommend to my other fellow voracious readers something called bookbub.com. You sign up with your e-mail address and check off the kinds of books you enjoy (horror, biography, memoir, etc.), and you get a daily e-mail with a link to a free or deeply discounted Kindle book. Sure, some may be ho-hum, but others are well-reviewed with hundreds of ratings-- got one recently with high praise from Maya Angelou! Most links are only good for a couple of days. My sister-in-law recommended it, and after a few weeks I've probably accumulated 3-6 months of reading! What could it hurt?

not beach reading, but the kind of stuff folks here would like i hope! :-) 

thanks for the suggestion of bookbub, cindi! we all need to read and discuss. the more we read, the more interesting we are to others and to ourselves! 

Bookbub sounds good, Cindi! I'm working on another Susan Isaacs cop novel, LILY WHITE. It's fun.

so glad you guys stopped by today. please share our reading group and help to get folks active! thanks!