What book are you reading?

[Gorges]

Currently reading Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri. I'm about 30 pages in and realized I read it before, probably about 5 years ago. I'm going to keep reading anyway.

Just finished reading A Gentleman in Moscow. What a charming book. I truly loved every page of it.

[Wintergirl80]

About two weeks ago I finished "The Home for Unwanted Girls" by Joanna Goodman. It really wasn't something I'd normally read, some parts were difficult, but overall a good story.

[crd08]

30 Before 30: how I Made a Mess of My 20's, and You Can Too

[AZgarden]

Giving up on the White/Williams/Willig book "The Forgotten Room." And I am only about 50 pages to the end. Three different women, 3 different time periods, one special room in a mansion. The authors want you to believe they are all related somehow, but my brain just cannot figure out how.

[ClaraC]

I just reread The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, by Dominic Dunne. I had read it in the 80's and enjoyed it then.

It's about the very upper elite of society in New York in the 50's. The Social Register, 21, the best parties in the finest homes, and a show girl who marries into aristocracy.

Entertaining and engaging. I do think the book should have ended 3/4 of the way through when the climax happens and is resolved. The last quarter could be handled in a one page epilogue.

Still, entertaining reading.

[Wintergirl80]

Originally Posted by ClaraC

That book came up on my Amazon suggested list.

It looks, though, like many books like that it would have been better served as a New York Times or National Geographic feature article and not a whole book.

Did the book hold together for the long haul, once you understood the premise?

It was a very interesting book. I must say I didn't previously know about the radium girls or how they suffered due to exposure to radium. Another poster here recommended it and I borrowed it from the library and read it in a weekend.

There is too much information to be contained to a feature article in my opinion.

[JDM55]

Before completing African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, I started reading the Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa.

[phonelady61]

I absolutely can recommend a piece of the world what a book you can remember . I always say if a book can make you cry and laugh and cry again now that is a good book .

[Tracysherm]

I'm now reading my 3rd e-book by Eliza Graham. I tend to like British historical fiction, and a couple weeks ago I saw a free first-reads kindle book called The Lines We Leave Behind, offered by this author I'd never read, and I downloaded it on a whim.


It's a mystery of sorts, about a woman in a psychiatric hospital in England trying to put her memories back together about her experiences years ago in the Balkans in WWII. It was enough to make me look up more info on what was happening in the Balkans during WWII (whenever I read or watch anything about historical events, I go on long internet research tangents). I enjoyed the woman's story, and how the threads of mystery got somewhat tied up at the end.

Then I saw another e-book of hers, not free but only $1.99, called Another Day Gone. This involves a present day woman in England unraveling mysteries in her own family dating back to the 1930s, and it incorporates the history of 20th century IRA attacks in England. Again, I liked the journey as well as the satisfying ending.


So today I just bought a third e-book by Graham, also $1.99, called The One That I Was. This one is about a woman who's a nurse hired to care for an elderly man who had been brought to England as a child, a Jewish refugee, at the beginning of WWII. We start to learn how this man's history and her family history are intertwined.


If you like mysteries that involve history, and a woman solving a mystery by digging up facts from the past, often with her own family members/ancestors, and going back and forth from present to past events (like with Kate Morton books) then you might like this author.

[banjomike]

I'm just beginning The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson i bought the book in 2012 when it first came out, and am just now reading it.

It's the story of a North Korean whose father runs an orphanage when he's a child, and becomes a professional kidnapper for his government after he grows up. Can't say much more than that about it yet, but I just learned the novel won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and if the rest of the book is as good as the beginning, I think I'm in for a thrill ride.

I just finished the illustrated trilogy Berlin by Jason Lutes, and found it extremely powerful. Lutes is a great storyteller and illustrator, and spent 25 years on 3 books: Berlin, City of Stones, Berlin, City of Smoke, and Berlin, City of Light.

The books are a literal portrait of Berlin in the critical years at the end of the Weimar Republic during the rise of Hitler. The story centers around a rather large cast of characters who show what everyday life was in Berlin then, and how they all change as Hitler rises to power.

All the cityscapes that are drawn in the series, the costumes, and the speech (an English approximation of Berliner's speech) is so accurately rendered that the books are now being used as guide maps for a tour of the city that no longer exists, which has made them extremely popular in Germany. Some of the characters are real, others fictional.

Lutes became interested in the subject when he was a senior in high school, spent many years researching before he ever began to draw, and worked on the series ever since until it's completion this year. It's simply an astonishing reading experience.