Looking for good summer read, what are you reading now? and what is your favorite?
 

I have read a similar thread many times but thought maybe a new one would give some ideas for summer reading? Do you have a favorite that you are reading now?

Hi, jelane. You might get better response to this by starting it on the Music, Movies and Books forum. Well, maybe not. But it would be a good thing for that forum! ;)

there's a post just like this that spans a couple of years. I think there's over 300 responses. BTW- I'm reading Alice Steinbach's "Without Reservations - The travels of an Independent Woman".

i just read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It is about her travels to Rome, then India, then Bali in Indonesia. I highly recommend it as it is well written, very insightful and impossible to put down.

"Necropolis - London and its Dead" by Catharine Arnold. Oddly interesting.

I've just finished the series by Lian Hearn:
Tales of the Otori Clan.

The first novel is "Across the Nightingale Floor". Verrry good story of romance and the warrior classes of medieval Japan.

There are two more books in the series. I really enjoyed them.

Since you are posting this on the Europe forum, I'm going to suggest Suite Francaise a novel written in the early part of WWII that depicts small town France in the early years of the war. Excellent!

I would highly recommend Breaking Trail: A Climbing Life by Arlene Blum. If you read her first book about climbing Annapurna, you will love this one.

Love Suite Francaise and Without reservations too! Also loved Venetian Dreaming and On Rue Tatin. All very European.

Here's another vote for Suite Francaise. PJK

Just read Suite francaise also which was really good. BUT followed this with Thread of Grace - set in Liguria end of WWII - this was spectacular!!

"Gentlemen and Players," by the author of "Chocolat." Very good; set in England.

I am enjoying The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak. Absurdistan was also great.

Sandi, thanks for the book suggestion of Without Reservations, I took seven suggestions to my book club last evening and we chose this book, we had to do a tie breaker between this and House of Mondavi.

I recently read "Blindness" and "Seeing" by Jose Saramago. Both were excellent.

"Without Reservations" is almost like reading someone's trip report, just written better. Easy read and her descriptions of familiar places took me back. Looking forward to the follow-up book of hers, I believe titled Educating Alice.

I'm in the middle of <i>The Ghost Map</i> by Steven Johnson. The book is about a cholera outbreak in 1850s London and the forensic work done to figure out how it's spread.

Sounds very technical but it is very readable and engaging - and gives a very good sense of what it was like to live in Victorian London.

I second Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabth Gilbert

these have been out for some time, but were good reads:
The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Naf
The History of Love by Nicole Krause

I am just starting Ohran Pamuk's memoir Instanbul: Memories and the City.

I have been rereading Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time series and enjoying that again.

Can anyone recommend books about real life escapes. Something like Papillon or I escaped from Auswich. I really enjoyed those.