Book Recommendations?

So we are going away for a few days in a couple weeks and it is going to be the best kind of respite -- the kind where I expect to be lounging about and reading quite a bit.

I am a voracious reader, and love many different types of books.  I would love some new recommendations if you have any.

To give you an idea of what I like:

I am currently reading A Crack in the Edge of the World, Bonfire of the Vanities and Guns Germs and Steel.

Recent books that I have recently read and liked:

I am Charlotte Simmons
The Historian
My Sister's Keeper (good, but disturbing)
Little Earthquakes
The Kite Runner
Middlesex
The Shadow of the Wind

Books that I have read recently and wasn't crazy about:

The Life of Pi
Everyone's Pretty
The Wonder Spot

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks.

Comments

[molly]

Bonfire of the Vanities is one of my ALL TIME favorites. At first I had trouble getting into the 80's culture aspect...but it is absolutely, thoroughly brilliant. Enjoy!

Recent reads I have enjoyed include:

Bel Canto, Ann Patchett
The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
Drop City, TC Boyle

Nominees for favorites of all time:
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Michael Chabon
Sometimes a Great Notion - Ken Kesey
Immortality - Milan Kundera

Poetry:
Mary Oliver, American Primitive

Oh and I just bought White Teeth, Zadie Smith.

[jen]

molly - it's actually your copy of bonfire of the vanities that i am reading! glad to hear you had trouble getting into it cause i am too -- i'll stick with it though.

[sam]

I read The Lovely Bones on vacation which I enjoyed.
I was reminded the other day whilst listening to NPR of The Tortilla Curtain which I read several years ago before I moved to the USA. I would love to read it again now I live here and it may be of extra interest to you because of your LA connections.

My favourite books - would last you more than a vacation. War and Peace/Anna Karenina kind of hefty tomes.

[Fatemeh]

How funny! I just asked this question via email of a few friends, at random, a few weeks ago.

One of my favorite "recent" reads was Bee Season, by Myla Goldberg.

I'm also a big fan of Michael Cunningham--Flesh & Blood is arguably my favorite book of his.

If you enjoyed the cultural aspects of Kite Runner, you might try Fortune Catcher. It's a bit more of a "romance-thriller" type of plotline, but it was a wonderful read and really captures the essence of Persian culture during the revolution.

In that same vein, try Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith by Gina Nahai. I found the prose somewhat similar to Isabel Allende's style. Gorgeous.

[Kathy]

The Lovely Bones was one of my very favorites. Another quirky and wonderful book is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, if you haven't already read it.

[Dr. Biggles]

Heh, you said Book. I have books. I'm supposed to be borrowing a 340 year old cookbook. But until then?
I need to find a fresh grain fed goat leg.

Biggles

[Kalyn]

Love the idea of book recommendations. I am reading The Constant Gardener and am completely engrossed in it.

[Marc]

Wow, what a huge question. Here are a few of my favorites:

Food and drink:
* Oranges, by John McPhee. A classic study of an amazing fruit.
* Why we eat what we eat, by Raymond Sakolov. How the European colonization of the Americasled to amazing changes in the eating and cooking. For example, before Columbus, Mexico had no cheese or beef, Italy had no tomatoes, Thailand had no chiles.

Non-fiction:
* Flu, by Gina Kolata. The story of the 1918 influenza pandemic and the quest to understand its potency.
* Living On the Wind, by Scott Weidensaul. Excellent book about bird migration.
* An Empire Wilderness, by Robert D. Kaplan. A hard-edged look at America's future: "travel writing with the force of prophecy".
* The Inland Sea, by Donald Richie. A classic travelogue about a westerner in Japan and Japan's inner battle between tradition and modernity.

Fiction:
* Novels or short stories by Wallace Stegner, one of the great writers of the modern American West
* P.G. Wodehouse (Code of the Woosters is a good place to start)

Art:
* Portraits by Michael Kimmelman (NY Times art critic). I purchased, but haven't read, his new book The Accidental Masterpiece.

[Gina]

Recent author I've fallen for is Nicolas Christopher - both Veronica and A Trip to the Stars were great. He's a poet so the language and imagary is just as good as the plot lines.

Fun, easy weekend read was La Cucina, A Story of Rapture by Lily Prior

And I just finished The Time Traveler's Wife. If you're good at falling into the "suspension of disbelief" and don't need a linear story, this was really captivating.

[Elizabeth]

a new (ish) book: The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss

an old book: B.F.'s Daughter, by John Marquand

[Shannon]

Some of my recent faves:

- The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larsen
- Ahab's Wife, by Sena Jeter Naslund
- You're An Animal, Viskovitz!, by Alesandro Boffa

[Todd]

Have you read Jasper Fforde's funny mystery series: The Eyre Affair; Lost in a Good Book; The Well of Lost Plots; and Something Rotten? I've gone through those, as well as "Robbing the Bees", on my last two trips for work. They make for good travel material.

[Beth - The Zen Foodist]

I'm reading the current Oprah book after a long drought of not reading much and I am racing through this book - A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. I'd definitely recommend that one!

[plentyo'moxie]

My $.02:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safen Foer

[Mark Little]

Most scoff when I mention them, but Patrick O'Brian's series of sea novels are a revelation, and not just for men. My wife would probably run off with Stephen Maturin given half a chance. Beginning with Master and Commander, they tell the story of what is almost a marriage between a Royal Navy Post Captain and "his particular friend" Stephen Maturin.

Here is what David Mamet had to say about O'Brian and his work ...
======================================================

Recently I put down O'Brian's sea novel "The Ionian Mission" and said to my wife, "This fellow has created characters and stories that are part of my life."

She said: "Write him a letter. He's in his 80's. Write him and thank him. And when you go to England, look him up, go tell him.

"How wonderful," she said, "to be alive, when he is still alive. Imagine living in the 1890's and being able to converse with Conan Doyle."

Well, I saw myself talking with Patrick O'Brian. "Sir," I would have said, "what a blow, the death of Barret Bonden." (Bonden, the coxswain, half-carries the wounded Captain Aubrey from the deck of a sinking privateer: "We'd best get back to the barky, sir, as this ship's going to Kingdom Come," the closing sentence of the novel.)

"Sir," I would have said, "I've read your Aubrey-Maturin series three or four times. When I was young I scoffed at stories of the Victorians who lived for the next issue of the Strand and the next tale of Sherlock Holmes; and I scoffed at the grown women and men who plagued Conan Doyle to rescind Holmes's death at the Reichenbach Falls. But I am blessed in having, in my generation, an equally thrilling set of heroes, and your characters have become a part of my life.

"Your minor characters," I would have said, "are especially dear to me: the mad Awkward Davis; Mrs. Fielding, the inexpert spy; old Mr. Herapath, the cowardly Boston loyalist; Christy-Palliere, the gallant French sea captain; and, of course, Barret Bonden, Captain Aubrey's coxswain." And I will not say I cried at his death, but I will not say I did not.

"And, Sir," I might have said, "I hope I do not overreach myself, but your prose is clear and spare as anyone could wish, quite as ironical as Mark Twain. . . ." And I hoped I should have the reserve to refrain from burdening him with a fan's fulsome, needless interpretation: that I could repay my debt with a straightforward statement of thanks.

The perfect medium for such, of course, is not the meeting, but the concise note.

So I sat at the breakfast table composing my note, and leafed through the newspaper and read of Patrick O'Brian's death.

His Aubrey-Maturin series, 20 novels of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, is a masterpiece. It will outlive most of today's putative literary gems as Sherlock Holmes has outlived Bulwer-Lytton, as Mark Twain has outlived Charles Reade. God bless the straightforward writer, and God bless those with the ability to amuse, provoke, surprise, shock, appall.

[Caroline@Bibliocook]

On the foodie side of things, my favourite read recently was Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World by Gina Mallet - it's definitely worth picking up, even if just for her evocative and sensual descriptions of food from the past.

Books aside, I've tagged you for the 23/5 Meme! There's more info here: http://www.bibliocook.com/archives/2005/10/235_meme.html

[Karen]

Amanda Davis' "Wonder When You'll Miss Me"

[elise]

Hi Jen,
I have a blog just for book recommendations -
http://www.elise.com/books/el/
The non-fiction you might like - anything by Kapuscinski, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Charlie Wilson's War
Fiction - Handling Sin (hilarious!), Ireland: A Novel, Master Butchers Singing Club.
Haven't added a review nor read a book (I liked) since Harry Potter earlier this summer. Read that one twice and was so depressed I stopped reading. Just finished "The other Bolyn Girl", but wouldn't recommend it.

[Nupur]

Some of my recent favorites (I, too, read voraciously!) :
1. Family matters - Rohinton Mistry
2. Purple Hibiscus- Chimamanda Adichi
3. A tree grows in Brooklyn- Betty Smith

[lisasd]

A second vote for The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver.