Books for Our Summer Reads – Part Two

Growing up, we couldn’t wait for that first summer visit to the library! We were allowed to check out more books than during the school year but I still had a hard time staying within the newly expanded limit. I still look forward to my library trips and I always like to have a stack of books ‘at-the-ready’ for all the opportunities to lose myself in someone else’s story. Here’s 5 from my summer read list:

Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I have listened to the audio book on one of my many roadtrips and fell in love. My husband and I watched the movie and I fell in love again. Now, I am going to read the book and I think I have a feeling what is going to happen. The Amazon summary: Markus Zusak’s unforgettable story is about the ability of books to feed the soul. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. 

Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm by Mardi Jo Link

There are so many things that ‘speak’ to me in the summary of this memoir. My dad grew up on a farm and my uncle (Dad’s brother) still works the farm and tends to the barn and keeps up the house. He is one of the best story tellers I know. I fantasize about living on the farm and probably romanticize it a bit too much but still……I have zucchini growing in my garden, I was once a newly single mother after 20 years of marriage, and we have a farm in our family – just saying! Someone wrote my story before I got around to it!!!
Summary: When Mardi finds herself a newly single mother after twenty years of marriage, she makes a seemingly impossible resolution: to stay in her century-old farmhouse and continue raising her three boys on well-water, chopping wood, and dirt. Armed with an unflagging sense of humor and relentless optimism that would put Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm to shame, Link and her resolute accomplices struggle through one long hard year of blizzards, foxes, bargain cooking, rampaging poultry, and a zucchini-growing contest to keep the life they love. “A heroic-comic saga of single motherhood and pure stubbornness.” -Garrion Keillor.

Things Remembered by Georgia Bockoven

Got this steal in the used-book section of our local Barnes and Noble – I always feel so wonderful when I find a book I have on my list and its on sale!!! This one spoke to me in it’s tale of returning home and caring for elderly loved ones. Again, someone has written my book first!
An Amazon quote: “Bockoven is magic.” A fabulous repackaging of this deeply emotional novel from the bestselling author of Beach House and Another Summer, Georgia Bockoven’s Things Remembered is a heartrending tale of family and the healing power of love. This intensely moving story follows a young woman’s difficult homecoming to Northern California where, despite painful memories of her past, she must make peace with her ailing grandmother before it’s too late. An enduring masterwork of women’s fiction, Things Remembered is Georgia Bockoven at her very best. They say you can’t go home again—but Bockoven fans will find this heartfelt return to be well worth the journey, as will readers of Elin Hilderbrand, Juliette Fay, and Karen White.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
This book looks and sounds fun. Sometimes I just pick something up because it speaks – fun! This one though may support that old adage – you can’t judge a book by it’s cover. The summary makes me think it may be a bit more serious than my original thought but the format of the book, which varies throughout (memo’s, transcripts, narrative, dialogue, etc) is WAY fun.
Amazon summary: Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette’s intensifying allergy to Seattle–and people in general–has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence–creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter’s role in an absurd world.

Looking for Alaska by John Green

Technically classified as a young adult novel, I still am excited to be reading this one. John Green also authored ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ which has become quite a popular book and more recently a movie. However, when I picked this one up I didn’t initially make the connection. Summer reads are supposed to be a bit different than what we might normally read so this fits that aspect perfectly.

Amazon Summary: Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then. . . .     After. Nothing is ever the same.

Man! I LOVE books. – M

What’s on YOUR summer reading list?