Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery
What to read when… …you just need a soft place to go to sleep. Do you have a “comfort” book? Something like mashed potatoes, or macaroni and cheese, or ice cream? A book you read on a bad day but with less calories? Or maybe a book you switch over to when you’re finishing Colson […]
West with Giraffes, by Lynda Rutledge
If your summer plans don’t include a road trip with giraffes while being chased by a murderous traveling circus and falling in love with the wrong person, what are you even doing? This book does an amazing job of pulling the reader out of our humdrum lives (or in Woody’s case, pulling him from a […]
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
What to Read When…you just need to breathe a bit. I’d just finished Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad which left me feeling…shaken (so much so that I still don’t know what to say about it; look for that blog post a little later). I needed a book I could relax into. Not something “light,” but […]
The 100-Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, by Jonas Jonasson
If you’ve been feeling old lately, that all the magic is gone from this world, and that life has no more beautiful surprises left for you…this is the book you need to read. This story is a delight from the very first scene when Allan (the 100-Year-Old-Man) does what all of us fantasize about doing […]
One Last Thing Before I Go, by Jonathan Tropper
I’m obviously interested in characters at the lowest point of their lives, making the worst choice of their lives, but how could one possibly make that funny? Incredibly, Tropper knows how, and his One Last Thing Before I Go was the most fun I’ve had with a story in a long time. Silver’s life is […]
The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
When Death tells you a story, you have to listen. Especially when Death is also a poet and stuck in a dead-end job from which he can never take a vacation. The story Death tells might be set in Nazi Germany and it might be about a little girl named Liesel who’s lost her brother […]
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
Any book that opens with fork-stabbed poodle-death is story that must be read, if only to give the author the chance to redeem himself, which Haddon does, and much, much more. With the creation of 15-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone—self-proclaimed poodle murder-solver, who uses an emoji chart to translate human emotion and quadratic equations to […]
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin
I was hooked on this book by the third page, and it’s because of this exchange: “You’ll notice I didn’t call you right away, Amelia,” he says. “I didn’t call you because I had met someone better, and when that didn’t work out, I decided to give you a second chance. So don’t be thinking […]