Summer Reading List

This is the beginning of my summer reading list.....inspired by many, many list of recommended books. I look forward to lazy Sunday afternoons when it's too hot to be out side, to read.

1. Twilight Saga: I've read it. I've loved it. I'm obessesed with it. I am SURE I will read it time and time again. Easy read, AMAZING LOVE story.

(text source: Amazon.com)


2. Little, Big: J. Crowley
John Crowley's masterful Little, Big is the epic story of Smoky Barnable, an anonymous young man who travels by foot from the City to a place called Edgewood—not found on any map—to marry Daily Alice Drinkawater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family, living in a house that is many houses on the magical border of an otherworld. It is a story of fantastic love and heartrending loss; of impossible things and unshakable destinies; and of the great Tale that envelops us all. It is a wonder.


3. South of Broad: P. Conroy
An unlikely group of Charlestonian teens forms a friendship in 1969, just as the certainties and verities of southern society are quaked by the social and political forces unleashed earlier in the decade. They come from all walks of life, from the privileged homes of the aristocracy, from an orphanage, from a broken home where an alcoholic mother and her twins live in fear of a murderous father, from the home of public high school’s first black football coach, and from the home of the same school’s principal. The group’s fulcrum, Leopold Bloom King, second son of an ex-nun Joyce scholar, who is also the school’s principal, and a science-teacher father, is just climbing out of childhood mental illness after having discovered his handsome, popular, athletic, scholarly older brother dead from suicide. Over the next two decades, these friends find success in journalism, the bar, law enforcement, music, and Hollywood. Echoing some themes from his earlier novels, Conroy fleshes out the almost impossibly dramatic details of each of the friends’ lives in this vast, intricate story, and he reveals truths about love, lust, classism, racism, religion, and what it means to be shaped by a particular place, be it Charleston, South Carolina, or anywhere else in the U.S. --Mark Knoblauch


4. Best Friends Forever: J. Weiner
Addie Downs and Valerie Adler will be best friends forever. That's what Addie believes after Valerie moves across the street when they're both nine years old. But in the wake of betrayal during their teenage years, Val is swept into the popular crowd, while mousy, sullen Addie becomes her school's scapegoat.

Flash-forward fifteen years. Valerie Adler has found a measure of fame and fortune working as the weathergirl at the local TV station. Addie Downs lives alone in her parents' house in their small hometown of Pleasant Ridge, Illinois, caring for a troubled brother and trying to meet Prince Charming on the Internet. She's just returned from Bad Date #6 when she opens her door to find her long-gone best friend standing there, a terrified look on her face and blood on the sleeve of her coat. "Something horrible has happened," Val tells Addie, "and you're the only one who can help."

Best Friends Forever is a grand, hilarious, edge-of-your-seat adventure; a story about betrayal and loyalty, family history and small-town secrets. It's about living through tragedy, finding love where you least expect it, and the ties that keep best friends together.


5. Queen takes King: C. Lavangie Grazer:
Jackson Power. A name like the man himself: aggressive, ambitious, bullish. The prodigal son, heir to millions, built his own Manhattan real estate empire and revels in seeing his moniker -- Power! -- on glittering skyscrapers around the city that never sleeps. Beneath his desk in the towering Power headquarters, Jacks has a stack of newspapers and photographs of himself, shaking hands with the most famous men and women of his generation. Here's a man who's always loved to see his name in ink. Until now.
Cynthia Hunsaker Power. She is the epitome of elegance and society. The perfect foil for a man of Jacks's stature -- his first and only wife, he'd proudly tell any of his Master of the Universe (read: Gargoyle) friends. The former prima ballerina arrived in New York at eighteen, off the bus from Missouri, brimming with talent, beauty, and drive. She met a struggling painter, fell in love, and only later learned she'd won the Power lottery. Now she sits on the New York Ballet Theater board, effortlessly outdoing herself with one gala after another. But the press coverage of the Power silver anniversary party at the Waldorf takes the cake.

Jacks Power appears twice in the New York Post the next morning -- once gallantly dancing with his wife of twenty-five years, Cynthia; and once hand in hand with Lara Sizemore, morning television star, exiting her Upper West Side apartment building that very same night.

To Jackson Power, Lara is everything his wife Cynthia is not -- wild, voluptuous, mysterious, and self-sustaining. A new passion has swept Jacks off his well-shoed feet -- and she is Lara Sizemore. He is ready for the divorce, ready to marry his mistress, America's Sweetheart. But Cynthia isn't ready to be swept out of the picture quite so easily.

Let the Divorce Games begin.

Whether they're changing the locks on each other in their Park Avenue triplex or sabotaging each other's dinner parties, it's The People's Billionaire vs. The Ballerina, in a split-up that will trump the most scandalous divorces known to polite New York society. Cynthia's got their twenty-five-year-old artist daughter, Vivienne, in her camp; Jacks has the young bartending playwright Adrian, whom he intends to pay to seduce Cynthia into an easy split. But Cynthia might have a few tricks up her well-tailored Chanel sleeve, and she -- like Jacks -- is prepared to use every weapon in her divorce arsenal to win the game. It's a battle of wits, of charm, of two of the biggest egos -- and personalities and bank accounts -- in Manhattan, and neither side will go down without a fight.

From beloved and best selling author Gigi Levangie Grazer comes a sexy, sassy, smart new novel, Queen Takes King.

6. Trouble: K. Christensen
At the start, this feels like a stylishly sexy, midlife-upheaval novel featuring upscale New Yorkers––a spa treatment for the mind. Not so fast. This is mordant and sly Christensen, author of the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning The Great Man (2007). And, sure enough, her new novel metamorphoses into a scouring tale of psychological paradox. Josie, a 45-year-old therapist, is struck, as though with a god’s lightning bolt, by the realization that her marriage is over. At the same time, her longtime friend, rock star Raquel, is being shredded for her affair with a much younger actor, and the worst of her tormentors is a famously vicious gossip blogger. As Christensen keenly assesses the particular damage wrought by cyber slander, Raquel flees to Mexico City, and Josie joins her there, thrilled to be piloted through the metropolis’ high life on a river of tequila. As Josie reawakens to life’s pleasures, Raquel shuts down. What sort of shrink is Josie? She seems clueless about people’s feelings. Bewitching readers with a narcotic blend of eroticism and suspense, Christensen raises unsettling questions about our inability to understand ourselves or others and marvels over our consuming fascination with ritualized confrontation, whether it’s the voraciousness of the paparazzi or the ancient drama of the bullfight. --Donna Seaman

7. Shanghai Girls: L. See
For readers of the phenomenal bestsellers Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love--a stunning new novel from Lisa See about two sisters who leave Shanghai to find new lives in 1930s Los Angeles.

May and Pearl, two sisters living in Shanghai in the mid-1930s, are beautiful, sophisticated, and well-educated, but their family is on the verge of bankruptcy. Hoping to improve their social standing, May and Pearl’s parents arrange for their daughters to marry “Gold Mountain men” who have come from Los Angeles to find brides.

But when the sisters leave China and arrive at Angel’s Island (the Ellis Island of the West)--where they are detained, interrogated, and humiliated for months--they feel the harsh reality of leaving home. And when May discovers she’s pregnant the situation becomes even more desperate. The sisters make a pact that no one can ever know.

A novel about two sisters, two cultures, and the struggle to find a new life in America while bound to the old, Shanghai Girls is a fresh, fascinating adventure from beloved and bestselling author Lisa See.


8. TBD...This is just beginning. I will keep adding to this list.

Love you mum,
k