For the Love of Lit

Posts Tagged ‘summer reading’

Jennifer Weiner is one of my favorite chick lit authors, not to mention one of my favorite authors, period.  I couldn’t wait to read her newest book when it came out recently!

“Fly Away Home” is about a high-powered New York City family – Richard, Sylvie, and daughters Diana and Lizzie.  Richard is a State Senator who (”ripped from the headlines”!) gets caught having an affair with an intern then admits to helping her get a job.  When Sylvie, his dedicated and loyal wife of many years, finds out, she can’t bear to be with him any longer.  She realizes that she has molded herself to fit in as a politician’s wife and is sick of the act.  She flees to her family’s house by the beach where she spent so much time growing up.  She sheds the designer skirt suits, Spanx, and hair straightening to revert back to her wavy hair, comfy clothes, and no-makeup-ed face.

At this same time, Richard and Sylvie’s oldest daughter, Diana, a married mother of one and an emergency department physician, is in the middle of a heated love affair with a younger med student at the hospital.  She admits that she had “arranged” her own married and never really loved her husband but decided to marry him because he cared for her and she didn’t think he would ever hurt her and she thought she would grow to love him.  During this time, Diana’s younger sister, Lizzie, gets released from rehab for drug and alcohol use and moves in with Diana to be the nanny to her son.

When things start to go wrong for both of the girls, they also retreat to the beach house with their mother.  Sylvie, by the way, is having the time of her life being independent, learning how to cook, and doing things that she was never able to do as the wife of a prominent politician.

The story doesn’t end there, but you’ll just have to go out and buy it if you want to know what I left out!  I really really liked this book – each chapter was told in the perspective of one of the female characters, Sylvie, Diana, or Lizzie, but never Richard.  I like when an author does something interesting like that to mix it up a little bit.  I enjoyed the characters as well because they were all so different and had their ups and downs at different points in the book.

Jennifer Weiner has written six other books, all of which I own and loved.  You may recognize her one title, “In Her Shoes“, which was made into a movie a few years ago starring Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette (which by the way was not as good as the actual book – if you’ve seen the movie but not read the book yet, please go out and read it!).

Amazon has announced what they think are the Best Books of the Year… So Far…

… But am I a total loser or something?  I have not read ANY of these and not even heard of most of them!  The only one that I’ve even heard of is the Steig Larsson book, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.”  I’ve been meaning to read that trilogy, but other things/books/authors have taken precedent and I haven’t gotten around to buying them yet.

Has anyone read any of the ones on their top 10 list?  Or the Fiction or Nonfiction list?  Maybe I just have particular taste in genres and authors, but I thought I would have at least heard something about some of these.  It’s just a random list that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but still.  I like looking at these lists sometimes to get recommendations if I run out of books to download.

Still looking for some new books to get for your vacation?  Here’s Amazon’s list of summer reads.  Some of them sound really good!  Amazon Wish List, here I come!

Jane Green is one of my favorite authors and when her newest book came out a few weeks ago, I had already pre-purchased it for my Kindle and started reading as soon as it was delivered/downloaded!  This is her 12th book, by the way!

The story starts with a New York City health food chef, Steffi, who offers to dog-sit for Malcolm, a customer of the restaurant where she works.  Her wannabe rock star boyfriend hates dogs, so it’s just perfect timing that they’d be on the outs.  When Steffi decides that maybe she needs a change from the hustle and bustle of the city, she also takes Malcolm up on the offer to stay at his farmhouse in the country, which happens to be located pretty close to where Steffi’s sister lives and she thinks it would be nice to see Callie and her family more often.  Steffi LOVES living at the farmhouse and begins to make friends with the locals and starts to sell her cooked and baked goods at a local store.

She starts spending more time with her sister Callie, who is a happily married mother of two who also is a professional photographer on the side.  Soon after Callie’s family throws her a party to celebrate her birthday and the 4th anniversary of surviving breast cancer, she starts to get horrible headaches and blackouts.  After she sees her oncologist, who is also a close friend, it is determined that the cancer is back and has spread to her brain.  She knows that she does not have much time to live, so she tries to make the best of the time she has left with her family, and her friend and family rally around her to make her last days as happy and comfortable for her as possible.

This is not exactly a happy, light, fun summer read, but that shouldn’t discourage you from not reading it (even though it may have made me cry a little).  It DOES get emotional and sad in the second half of the book, but it also shows you the power of family and friends and love.  It is also inspiring to see how strong a person can be when they are facing something so difficult.  All of the characters seemed so… real, and their emotions and reactions to Callie’s diagnosis really made the story seem realistic.  The story was loosely inspired by Jane Green’s friend’s battle with cancer.

As I mentioned above, this is Jane Green’s 12th novel.  I think I’ve read almost every single one of her books and hope she keeps on writing!!

My local paper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, just published a list of fiction and non-fiction books for summer called “Summer Reading: From beach blankets to cool mountain evenings, vacation days call for a good book“.   You can click on that link and go and read the whole article and descriptions of each book, but here is a quick list of the books and links to the books on Amazon:

Fiction:

• “Spies of the Balkans” by Alan Furst
• “A Fierce Radiance” by Lauren Belfer
• “Truth” by Peter Temple
• “Seven Year Switch” by Claire Cook
• “The One That I Want” by Allison Winn Scotch (I just read this and loved it!)
• “The Outer Banks House” by Diann Ducharme
• “My Name Is Memory” by Ann Brashares
• “American Music” by Jane Mendelsohn
• “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake” by Aimee Bender
• “A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan
• “Broken” by Karen Slaughter
• “Everything” by Kevin Canty
• “The Same River Twice” by Ted Mooney
• “Kraken” by China Mieville

Non-fiction:

• “Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century” by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger
• “Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America” by Jack Rakove
• “Broke, USA” by Gary Rivlin
• “The Facebook Effect” by David Kirkpatrick
• “The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Bighorn” by Nathaniel Philbrick
• “Three Chords for Beauty’s Sake: The Life of Artie Shaw” by Tom Nolan
• “The Promise: President Obama, Year One” by Jonathan Alter
• “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in A Connected Age” by Clay Shirky
• “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” by Nicholas Carr

Need a last minute Father’s Day gift?  I’m sure a lot of bookworm dads out there may like some of these titles!

Are you going to go out and pick up any of these books for your summer vacation?  Or do you already have a stack of books in your beach bag ready to go?  Please feel free to share your recommendations!