Reference

Where I heard about things I’m going to read

Musings of a Bookish Kitty

Nightwalker , Jocelyn Drake – a vampire who can start fires teams up with a vampire hunter to eliminate a monster threat

Imaginary Friends , edited by John Marco and Martin H. Greenberg – short stories about imaginary friends

A Jolly Good Fellow , Stephen V. Masse – a kidnapper and little kid kidnappee become BFF

The Weight of a Mustard Seed , Wendell Stevenson – about Iraq and its oppressive regime

Imani

How the Dead Dream , Lydia Millet – a man obsessed with money begins breaking into zoos to hang out with endangered animals

The Library at Night , Alberto Manguel – stuff about libraries

Books and Other Thoughts

The Midas Box , GP Taylor (Victorian orphan goes to work at hotel and has spiffy cover art)

A Drowned Maiden’s Hair – 1900s orphan gets adopted by mysterious old woman

Jacky Faber books by LA Meyer, starting with Bloody Jack - most wondrous heroine ever

Ballads , Charles Vess – retellings of ballads by people

The Joys of Love , Madeleine L’Engle

The Magic Thief , Sarah Prineas – kid picks an old guy’s pocket and finds magic things

Flora Segunda , Ysabeau Wilce – a good book with a library and a butler and a good heroine

The Magic Half , asfa – a little girl can time-travel through a piece of glass to her same house in another century, where another little girl lives and there is a wicked villain and time travel, hooray!

The Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl, Barry Lyga – a bullied kid who writes graphic novels meets a Goth chick

The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Dawkins, Barbara Kerley & Henry Selznick – an illustrated biography of a back-in-the-day guy who tried to show the public what dinosaurs would have looked like!!

Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything in It, Sundee T. Frazier – a curious child decides to discover why his mother does not talk to her father

Well Witched, Frances Hardinge (Verdigris Deep in the UK) – three children become responsible for granting a wishing well’s wishes, and it deals seriously with family issues and the writing is lovely

The Enchantment Emporium, Tanya Huff – a broken hearted sacked girl inherits her grandmother’s magic shop!

The Robe of Skulls, Vivian French – a wicked sorceress decides she wants a robe of skulls, and hatches a clever plot to get the money for it

Lament, Maggie Stiefvater – a talented young harpist meets a music partner that makes her better but he has spooky fairy secrets

The Ghost’s Child, Sonya Hartnett – an old woman finds a child in her house and he asks questions and she says him the story of her life, a two-year sea voyage, reluctance to be married, and so forth

The Ghost in the Swing, Janet Patton Smith – a girl goes off to live at her aunt’s big spooky house and befriends a ghost

The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney, Suzanne Harper – a little girl who can see ghosts (but doesn’t want anyone to know) goes to a brand new school

A Life in Books

Will Storr vs. the Supernatural , Will Storr – interesting creepy supernatural things

Away , Amy Bloom – epic and well-characterized book about a woman escaping from Russian pogroms and searching for her daugher

The Man in the Picture , Susan Hill – a scary scary story with a Cambridge professor and a Venetian painting with a carnival inside

Riding in the Shadows of Saints , Jana Richman – an ex-Mormon takes a bike ride on the Mormon Trail

Goodbye, Chunky Rice , Craig Thompson – a little turtle goes on an adventure

Foreign Correspondence, Geraldine Brooks – a memoir about her childhood pen friends & going to find them as an adult

Caribousmom

Resistance, Owen Shears – four Welsh women find their husbands gone off to resist the Nazis, a party of whom show up

The Memory of Water , Karen White – a special-ed teacher comes home to South Carolina to help her nephew and there are family secrets

The Condition , Jennifer Haigh (Turner’s)

The Reader , Bernhard Schlink – also on Megan’s list; the shaping love of his life is a Nazi war criminal

Music and Silence , Rose Tremain – the king of Denmark’s wife has a great big scandalous wicked affair, among other things, and is a good narrator

The Heretic Queen , Michelle Moran – referring to Nefertiti!

Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name , Vendela Vida – turns out, there are indigenous people in Scandinavia. Did you know? I didn’t know.

The Secret River , Kate Grenville – a kid goes off into penal servitude in 19th-century Australia, and there is racial tension

The Year of Fog , Michelle Richmond – a woman loses her stepdaughter on the beach

The Believers , Zoe Heller – politics and religion in a clever and dysfunctional family

In Hovering Flight , Joyce Hinnefeld – mothers and friends and daughters

Bleeding Heart Square , Andrew Taylor – literary London whodunnit between the wars with multiple viewpoints

The Brightest Moon of the Century , Christopher Meeks – a nerdy 14-15 y/o boy goes off to a private school and tries to figure things out about life and being a person.  as one does.

Galway Bay , Mary Ann Kelly – a story about an Irish family over many years

The Mechanics of Falling , Catherine Brady – stories about moments when people’s stable lives suddenly shift and send them into free fall, story titles are good, “Looking for the Female Tenet,” “Last of the True Believers”

Dirty Little Angels , Chris Tulsa – a sixteen-year-old puts her faith in a failed preacher and ex-con

Everyone is Beautiful , Katherine Center – a married woman with children struggles with the compromises she’s made with her life and it’s funny and moving

The Bright Side of Disaster , Katherine Center – a woman called Jenny is nine months pregnant and her baby daddy leaves

The School of Essential Ingredients, Erica Bauermeister – eight different people all come together to get cooking lessons from a woman who owns a restaurant

Follow Me, Joanna Scott – a woman called Sally abandons her baby on her parents’ table; years later, the story is retold with various family members

Christine Falls, Benjamin Black but really John Banfield – a dysfunctional Dublin pathologist solves mysteries!

Last Night in Montreal, Emily St. John Mandel – a little girl abducted as a child has trouble being an adult

The Local News, Miriam Gershow – a girl’s brother disappears, and she grows up

Finding Nouf, Zoe Ferraris – a mystery about a Saudi Arabian girl that goes missing

The House on Fortune Street, Margot Livesay – four characters all narrate different section and each has a literary godparent 

Naked Without Books

The Petting Zoo , Brett Singer – wildly dysfunctional college romance

The Girl in a Swing , Richard Adams – an unsettling story about a man who falls wildly in love and gradually begins to realize that Something Is Not Right

The Oxford Murders , Guillermo Martinez – two Oxford mathematicians try to catch a serial killer

Is There a Doctor in the Zoo ?, David Taylor – a zoo vet!

Sisters , John J. Fialka – nuns in the making of America

Geranium Cat

Lunatic Villas , Marian Engel – a woman supports her many children by writing a column, and there is a neighborhood where everyone knows each other

Yellowknife , Steve Zipp – a Canadian community of eccentrics!

The Angel in the Corner , Monica Dickens – a young woman makes a disastrous marriage to escape her domineering mother

Angela Thirkell – writes Barsetshire novels that are reminiscent of Austen, Wodehouse, & Pym

Eleanor Farjeon, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard
Richmal Crompton, Just William
Gwynedd Rae, Mostly Mary
Norman Hunter, The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm
John Masefield, The Box of Delights
Elinor Brent-Dyer, The Chalet School and Jo
Maria Gleit, Child of China
Geoffrey Trease, Cue for Treason
Pamela Brown, The Swish of the Curtain
Mary Treadgold, We Couldn’t Leave Dinah
Margot Pardoe, Bunkle Began It
Burgess Drake, The Book of Lyonne
Monica Edwards, Spirit of Punchbowl Farm
William Mayne, A Swarm in May
Gerald Durrell, The New Noah
Diana Pullein-Thompson, Riding with the Lyntons
Ian Serraillier, The Silver Sword
Henry Treece, The Children’s Crusade
Phillipa Pearce, A Dog So Small
John Rowe Townsend, Hell’s Edge
Nicholas Stuart Gray, Grimbold’s Other World
Roger Lancelyn Green, The Luck of Troy
Russell Hoban, The Mouse and His Child
Victoria Walker, Winter of Enchantment
Elisabeth Beresford, Vanishing Magic
Penelope Farmer, A Castle of Bone
Nina Bawden, Carrie’s War
Helen Cresswell, Lizzie Dripping
Penelope Lively, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe
Jill Murphy, The Worst Witch
Robert Westall, The Machine Gunners

The Autumn Castle , Kim Wilkins – a faery story with Grimm themes

Family Roundabout , Richmal Crompton – intertwined stories of two wealthy families

Opening Night , Ngaio Marsh – a murder in a provincial theatre

James Thurber’s fairy tales!

After the Armistice Ball, Catriona McPherson – 1920s mystery about a bored British landowner’s wife who sets out to investigate a murder

an adventure in reading

Random Passage , Bernice Morgan – a woman investigates her heritage in the outposts of Newfoundland

Cloud of Bone , Bernice Morgan – intertwined stories of WWII Navy guy, native tribes of Newfoundland, and present-day anthropologist

Owls in the Family , Farley Mowatt – kids’ book about two boys who find pet owls

Housekeeping vs the Dirt , Nick Hornby – collection of essays about books

Mudbound , Hillary Jordan – a black family and a white family in post-WWII Mississippi

A Case of Exploding Mangoes – an espionage type novel about the death of a Pakistani dictator

How to be a Canadian - Canadian satire!

Hotel du Lac , Anita Brookner – a novelist comes to a European hotel and there are other people there too, dealing with various things from their lives

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher , Kate Summerscale (true Victorian crimey detective story)

The Night Country , Stewart O’Nan – dead kids narrate because there’s more to the accident that killed them than you think

Bel Canto , Ann Patchett – kidnapping hostage situation where everyone gets bored and the rebels and hostages get to be friends

Last Days of Summer , Steve Kluger – epistolary YA novel about a kid who becomes penpals with a Giants third baseman

Shakespeare Wrote for Money , Nick Hornsby – love the title

Beat the Reaper , Josh Bazell – an asshole doctor in witness protection gets discovered and there are medical footnotes

DeNiro’s Game , Rawi Hage – Lebanese teenagers try to be men during the civil war

The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins

Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro – Kazuo Ishiguro!  Hooray!

The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa – a professor with short-term memory problems and and there is a housekeeper and there’s math and all kinds of things

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, Don Robertson – a nine-year-old boy decides to skip school in Cleveland on the day of a great big gas explosion

Clara Cullen, Richard B. Wright – an epistolary novel where a single Ontario woman in the Depression writes letters to her radio actress sister

SassyMonkey

Children of War , Susan Goodman – looks at WWII from the memories of the children alive then

Debs at War , Anne de Courcy – exactly what it sounds like!

Daughters of Eden , Charlotte Bingham – story of four different British women during WWII

The Luxe , Anna Godberson – an amusing entertaining book with pretty dresses

The Spell Book of Listen Taylor , Jaclyn Moriarty – a book it’s better if you don’t know anything about it when you read it – hmmmm.

Colleen Gleason – vampire books that I might or might not like

A Perfect Mess , Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman – a book about order in disorder

Jessie Graham Flower – writes a rather sweet series about a sweet and winning girl called Grace Harlowe

The Love Season , Elin Hilderbrand – a young woman goes to live with her estranged godmother who is a chef in Nantucket

Nothing but the Truth, Justina Chen Headley – a YA novel about a half-white half-Asian girl who goes to Stanford math camp

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming , Joshilyn Jackson – family that is not exactly the Brady Bunch, at least one death, and things being all twisty-turny

The Explosionist , Jenny Davidson – alternate 1930s Scotland where things are different

Babylon Rolling , Amanda Boyden – a book about New Orleans.  We like New Orleans.

Practical Magic , Alice Hoffman

A Reader’s Journal

Latitudes of Melt , Joan Clark – a wee Newfoundland baby is found floating in an ice patch, and it grows up all through the 20th century

John Dunning – mysteries about an ex-cop who runs a bookstore

Barometer Rising , Hugh MacLennan – a story about Nova Scotians over eight days in WWI

The Ninth Life of Louis Drax , Liz Jensen – every year something violent happens to a 9-year-old

Triangle , Katharine Weber – the last survivor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory has died and a historian studies her story for discrepancies and so forth

Hallelujah , J. Scott Featherstone – a story about Handel and his fame and London society

The Absence of Nectar , Kathy Hepinstall – two siblings fear that their religious stepfather is trying to poison them

The Ship That Flew , Hilda Lewis – a boy gets a magic ship that can fly through place and time; written in 1939

The Madonnas of Leningrad , Debra Dean – a Soviet immigrant has Alzheimer’s and was a museum tour guide at the start of WWII

Admit One , Emmett James (memoir of a British boy who wants to be an American movie star)

A Garden Carried in the Pocket

Spirit Gate , Kate Eliott – an extra good fantasy saga

David Webber – exciting and good space opera series

An Absolute Gentleman , R.M. Kinder – a polished, suspenseful novel about a killer

Silent in the Grave , Deanna Raybourn – an amusing and fun mystery at a Christmas house party

Shadows and Lies , Marjorie Eccles – a woman who has lost her memory in 1910 tries to remember it by writing in an exercise book, and there are murders and South Africa and suffrage!

Kept: A Victorian Mystery , D.J. Taylor – read this over!

Dreamers of the Day , Mary Doria Russell – a spinster travels to Egypt during the Cairo Peace Conference and meets all the relevant parties to the situation

The Stone Gods , Jeanette Winterson – a dystopian future myth

Garden Spells , Sarah Addison Allen

O’ Artful Death , Sarah Stewart Taylor – art historian specializing in funeral art and there is a mystery with an old old gravestone!

Wild Life , Molly Gloss – 1905 mother of five writes women’s adventure stories and it’s a novel

The Blackstone Key , Rose Melikan – Gothic novel lite

How We Choose to Be Happy , Rick Foster and Greg Hicks

Jacqueline Winspear

The Mighty Queens of Freeville , Amy Dickinson – memoir of an advice columnist with a wonderful family (Books & Cooks also)

Talking to the Dead: Kate and Maggie Fox and the Rise of Spiritualism , Barbara Weisberg

The Seance , John Harwood – Gothic ghost story with old mansions, seances, and a monk

Where Memories Lie , Deborah Crombie – good mystery with art and stuff

The Brain that Changes Itself , Norman Doidge – just what it sounds like

The Lost Hours , Karen White – a girl finds a box with papers in it, after her grandparents are gone

The Thief , Megan Whalen Turner

Cecilian Vespers, Anne Emery – part of a series of books about monks who solve mysteries and Vatican II is discussed and they solve mysteries and have a monky school

The Book of Rapture, Nikki Gemmell – a political prisoner woman writes secret memoirs discussing her children and the project that brought her to where she is

The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, Sean Dixon – a strange little book that was a play first and is very odd and interesting

Between the Covers

Lady Audley’s Secret , Mary Elizabeth Braddon -

Weeds in the Garden of Words , Kate Burridge – an interesting book all about the English language and how it’s developed

Stargazing: Memoirs of a Young Lighthouse Keeper , Peter Hill – minding a lighthouse in 1973

The Woman in Black , Susan Hill – a spooky classic ghost story – yum

The Forgotten Garden, Kate Morton – a woman’s grandmother dies and leaves her a Cornish cottage, and it turns out she wasn’t her real grandmother and nobody knows where she came from

The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, A.S. Byatt – four short story retellings of fairy tales

Estella’s Revenge

The Journal of Dora Damage , Belinda Starling – a woman in the 1800s takes over her husband’s bookbinding business and binds pornographic books

The Call of the Weird , Louis Theroux – travels in American subcultures!

Quiet Please , Scott Douglass – a book all about libraries

Big Fish , Daniel Wallace

Mister Sandman , Barbara Gowdy – a family in 1950s Toronto and all their weirdness

Mail Order Bride , Mark Kalesniko (just what it sounds like – really excellent graphic novel evidently)

The Partly Cloudy Patriot , Sarah Vowell – wonderful essays of continuing wonderfulness

Evernight , Claudia Gray – yet another teen vampire book, but a good one and with boarding school

Books and Cooks

House-Bound , Winifred Peck – a 1942 woman can’t find a housekeeper so she decides to keep her own house

Mothernight , Sarah Stovell – a girl banished to boarding school comes back to her family and there are secrets

The Dark Lantern , Gerri Brightwell – a Victorian woman takes a job as a maid, and her mistress uses her as a spy

The Suicide Index , Joan Wickersham (she deals with her father’s suicide – in memoir form!)

Song of the Cuckoo Bird , Amulya Malladi (intergenerational saga in India!)

When We Were Romans , Matthew Kneale – horrifying family story told by a nine-year-old who also reads stories about Roman generals and emperors

Dusty Answer , Rosamond Lehmann – a very shocking book from the 1920s

The Observations , Jane Harris – Victorian historical fiction that is meant to be very good

The Ghost Map , Steven Johnson – And the Band Played On for London cholera

The Various Haunts of Men , Susan Hill – another excellent England mystery book

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County , Tiffany Baker

The Piano Teacher , Janice Lee – a young married woman goes to Hong Kong in 1952 and teaches English and has an affair

Bread Alone , Judith Ryan Hendrick – a woman runs away from an unhappy marriage and makes bread

Keeping the House , Ellen Baker – a fifties housewife is dissatisfied

Climbing the Mango Trees , Madhur Jaffrey – a memoir of growing up in India, with WWII and Partition

Windfall, Penny Vincenzi – a big fat trashy fun book about 1930s Britain and a woman who gets an inheritance

The Walking People, Mary Beth Keane – an Irish girl and her sister go to America with a gypsy, and later on she tries to keep a secret from her children

The Midwife, Jennifer Worth – a memoir about a woman who was a midwife in London’s East End in the 1950s

Silvertown, Melanie McGrath – the author writes about her grandparents, who lived in the East End at the turn of the century

Those Who Save Us, a girl fears she is the child of a Nazi soldier and tries to find out about her mother’s past

Reading is my Superpower

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks , E. Lockhart – a young girl takes on the all-boys secret society at her boarding school

The Sister , Poppy Adams – an old woman’s sister comes back for the first time since she was young

Madapple , Christina Meldrum – a troubled woman accused of murder tries to sort out her life

Cyndere’s Midnight , Jeffrey Overstreet – off away saving the world

Impossible , Nancy Werlin – the Scarborough Fair ballad story

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before , David Yoo – a dorky kid gets the cool girl

Life After Genius , M. Ann Jacoby – an extremely clever boy who is madly young and in college

Two Rivers , T. Greenwood – a widower takes in a pregnant teenager

Everything You Know , Zoe Heller – a British journalist acquitted of his wife’s murder goes to Mexico to think about things

The Warded Man , Peter Brett – demons terrorize the humans until three orphans fight back

Laura Rider’s Masterpiece , Jane Hamilton – a would-be writer and her husband write letters to a radio personality to make her fall in love with the husband

Past Imperative, Dave Duncan -An upper class young man on trial for murder in WWI England finds his destiny entwined with a girl on the road with a traveling troupe of actors in an alternate vaguely medieval world ruled by capricious and contentious gods.

The House of Power, Patrick Carman -Atherton is a world with three levels, which have always remained apart; however, when the top level begins to sink the entire society is threatened and a young boy may be the only one with the key to survival

The Unseen, Alexandra Sokoloff – a psychologist at Duke decides to retry an old experiment in a spooky haunted house wooooooo

The Unit, Ninni Holmqvist – spare parts people like The Island and Never Let Me Go, but translated

Eyes Like Stars, Lisa Mantchev – a girl in a theatre company has to prove that she belongs there!

Another Faust, Daniel and Dina Nayeri – five teenagers with different powers in a Manhattan boarding school!

Trish’s Diary

The Given Day , Dennis Lehane – loads of different things with baseball and Babe Ruth and racism and stuff

Someone Not Really Her Mother , Harriet Scott Chessman – a brief book about a woman with Alzheimer’s trying to tell her daughter about her past

Far World , J. Scott Savage – everyone but this one girl can do magic in one world; and in another world, a boy is the only one who can

The Heretic’s Daughter , Kathleen Kent – there is a witch trial

Somebody Else’s Daughter , Elizabeth Brundage – multiple points of view!

The Blood of Flowers , Anita Amirrezvani – a 1620s Turkish? Iranian? I forget?  girl!

The Help , Kathryn Stockett – two black maids and a white woman have a secret project during MLK time

I Know This Much Is True , Wally Lamb – two brothers and one is paranoid schiz

The Middle Place , Kelly Corrigan – a memoir about a girl in the middle place of her life, with a good father

Beside a Burning Sea, John Shors – a group of WWII people are stranded on an island after their hospital shop is bombed and ONE OF THEM IS A TRAITOR

Thirteen Reasons Why, Jay Asher – a girl commits suicide and sends tapes to twelve people about why she did it

Nothing but Ghosts, Beth Kephart – a girl who’s lost her mum takes a summer job with gardens and her dad’s a paintings restorer, and she unravels mysteries

Nymeth

Strangers , Taichi Namada – scriptwriter and living and dead worlds intertwine

Maps and Legends , Michael Chabon – essays about books and writing

Bad Science , Ben Goldacre – lays out the basic principles of science so you’ll know when things are bullshit

Heartbreak Soup , Gilbert Hernandez – a comic set in a fictional Latin American town

Ethel and Ernest, Raymond Briggs – a graphic novel to tell the story of the author’s parents lives

The Secret Life of Words, Henry Hitchings – what it sounds like! apparently v. accessible and friendly

Enchanted Hunters, Maria Tatar – why kids like stories, how reading helps them, the role of horror

The Stuff of Life, Mark Schultz et.al. – a graphic novel about genetics and DNA!!

The Purity Myth, Jessica Valenti – the American obsession with purity, abstinence classes, rape laws

Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List, Rachel Cohn and David Levithan – two best friends struggle with sexuality and feelings and all sotrs of things

Lost at Sea, Bryan Lee O’Malley – a graphic novel about an eighteen-year-old girl who believes a cat stole her soul and she goes on a road trip with her friends

The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar – book about fairy tales, and how the Grimm brothers sanitized them!

Nights at the Circus, Angela – a Victorian fairy tale about a circus lady who hatched from an egg and the writing is beautiful

Reasonable Creatures, Katha Politt – a collection of excellent essays about women & feminism; also Virginity or Death!

Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, Shyam Selvadurai – a Sri Lankan adopted boy struggles to come to terms with his sexuality

The 13 Clocks, James Thurber

Salamander Dream, Hope Larson – a graphic novel about a girl with an imaginary salamander friend

Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin – a story narrated by Aeneas’s wife that isn’t Creusa, v. lovely

Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente – a sexually transmitted city! and it follows four characters and it reminds Nymeth of Mirrormask

Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood – a fictionalization of a Victorian maybe-murderess

Bayou, Jeremy Love – an extra-good graphic novel that is maybe a CLASSIC

Saplings, Noel Streatfeild

Mortal Love, Elizabeth Hand – parallel storylines between Victorian artists and now; plus lost paintings and Swinburne and Lady Wilde

The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, Louise Murphy – really dark unsettling telling of this story, set in Nazi Poland

Bluestockings, Jane Robinson – nonfiction about the first wave of women allowed in university

Day of Tears, Julius Lester – fictionalized account of the largest slave auction in America; told from many different points of view

Remembrance, Theresa Breslin – all about a Scottish family of teenagers at the start of WWI

Foreign Circus Library

Telex from Cuba , Rachel Kushner – vivid characters in the troubling revolution in Cuba times

Lorna Landvik

Waiter Rant , Steve Dublanica – just what it sounds like

Scott Westerfield

Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter – Catholic graduate reads Yiddish texts

The Lost City of Z , David Grann – nonfiction about trying to discover what happened to this one Amazon explorer

King of the Screwups , K.L. Going – a young man has parental mental abuse

Someday My Prince Will Come , Jerramy Fine – a memoir about a girl who goes to London because she wants to become a princess

Darling Jim, Christian Moerk – a diabolical itinerant storyteller gets involved with three sisters who end up dead; there is a diary and an exciting plot

The Chosen One, Carol Lynch Williams – a thirteen-year-old in a polygamist cult is supposed to get engaged

Bella, Anne and Edward Syfreet – a frightening antique doll enmeshes two girls in scary things

East of the Sun, Julia Gregson – three British women travel to India towards the end of the Raj

Gifts of War, MacKenzie Ford – a British soldier promises a German one to bring back a photo of him to his British girlfriend but the British soldier falls in love with her and it’s all a big well-characterized mess

Lucky Girl, Mei-Ling Hopgood – an adopted American girl’s birth family contacts her wanting her back in their lives

Spiced, Dalia Jurgensen – a memoir of a woman who leaves her 9-to-5 to become a chef

Dog Ear Diary

Burmese Days , George Orwell – novel based on Orwell’s time as an imperial officer in Burma

Moo , Jane Smiley – dry wit about life in an agricultural college

Pregnancy Stories , Cecelia Cancellaro – just as it sounds

Seal Child , Sylvia Peck – a little girl becomes BFF with a selkie

My Old Man and the Sea , Daniel and David Hays – a father and son have alternating diary entries when they go sailing around Cape Horn in a boat they built themselves

No Man Knows My History , Fawn M. Brodie – an in-depth biography of Joseph Smith

The Other End of the Leash – how dogs interpret what we do.  Like hugging them.  Poor Nora.

The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan – possibly less applicable to women these days?

Ariel, Steven R. Boyett – a guy and a lady and a unicorn all team up to fight evil in a post-apocalyptic world

The Fur Person, May Sarton – all about how a cat finds a home, and what cats do and think and like (I miss my Shadow cat)

Cider with Rosie, Laurie Lee – a gentle slow book about growing up in a small English village

West with the Night, Beryl Markham – excellent memoirs that I could have read sooner than this, darn it!

Daughters of the Sunstone, Sydney Van Scyoc – a trilogy of sci-fi-ish stories set way in the future with vivid characters

The Old Country, Mordecai Gerstein – a little girl gets transformed into a fox and must figure out how to get switched back.  During war.

Amy’s Eyes, Richard Kennedy – a little girl with a sailor doll turns into a doll herself and goes off on piratey adventures

Hillbilly Gothic, Adrienne Martini – a memoir of a woman’s struggle with postpartum depression

Epiphany

The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness , Joel ben Izzy – a memoir, with storytelling in

A Northern Light , Jennifer Donnelly – a girl is supposed to destroy some secret letters that might explain a mysterious incident

A Guy’s Moleskin Notebook

Chess Story , Stefan Zweig – the story of chess players under Nazis

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin – an Irish immigrant girl falls in love in America

The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry – an old woman at a mental hospital, it’s unclear why she’s there or what happened with her incarceration, Protestant/Catholic tension, etc. etc.

The Writing on My Forehead, Nafisa Haji – a girl called Saira discovered family secrets when she was sixteen, and grows up to be a journalist

The German Woman, Paul Griner – an intricate tale of an Englishwoman and a German-extracted American during the two World Wars

Educating Petunia

The World in Half, Cristina Henriquez – a girl finds her father’s love letters to her mother, who now has Alzheimer’s, and goes on a quest to Panama to discover her heritage

The Well and the Mine, Gin Phillips – a little girl sees a stranger drop a baby down a well, and the family is mystified by it during the Depression in Alabama

State of Denmark

Principles of Uncertainty, Maira Kalman – such cool illustrations, I love it

Forever, Judy Blume – everyone says it is totally memorable

Testimony, Anita Shreve – multiple narrators tell about an sex tape/statutory rape incident at a private school

Ramya’s Bookshelf

Sarah’s Key, Tatiana De Rosnay – a girl in the Holocaust hides her brother in a closet and promises to come back, and a modern person finds her story

The Toss of a Lemon, Padma Viswanathan – a Brahmin family from India over a number of years

The Space Between Us, Thrity Umrigar – a book about the divide between rich and poor women in India, with excellently well-developed characters

Stainless Steel Droppings

Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman – essays about books

Riot Burns Leaves

An Embarrassment of Riches, Gerald Hansen – a North Irish woman wins the lottery and a massive family comes looking to get some money

Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami – a fourth-grade teacher is madly in love with his manic friend and he feels all sad and unfulfilled

Phoenix, Osamu Tezuka – a beeyootiful story about two refugees (one a shapeshifting alien!) fleeing a totalitarian regime

The Shipwreck of a Nation, Peter Nennhaus – a German writes about World War II and Hitler’s rise to power

Critical Mass, Kathleen Henry – a fiction book about how Catholicism is crap about women and sex

Word Lily

The Only True Genius in the Family, Jennie Nash – a grown-up woman struggles with being caught between a genius father and a genius daughter

Scoop, Evelyn Waugh – it’s funny!  Evelyn Waugh is funny!

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, Allison Hoover Bartlett – nonfiction about a book thief being tracked down by a detective

*always*dream*

Trapped in Time, Ruth Chew – two little kids get transported back to Civil War times and there are illustrations!

Siberia, Ann Halam – a girl in prison camp in a dystopian world with no nice animals & her mum talks about a better world

2 Kids and Tired

Side Yard Superhero, Rick Niece – memoir about a kid in a small town and his very best friend

Confessions of a Trauma Junkie, Sherry Jones Mayo – memoir of a paramedic

the stacks my destination

We Speak No Treason, Rosemary Hawley Jarman – a book about Richard III and the Wars of the Roses from the povs of several different people

Love and Rockets (graphic novel)

Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children (graphic novel)

As Meat Loves Salt, Maria McCann – a 1645 man called Jacob falls under suspicion for murder on the eve of his wedding and hijinks ensue.  I love hijinks.

The Oracle Glass, Judith Merkle Riley – a little crippled girl gets raised by a proper French fortune teller or something, and she tries to find her place in the court of the Sun King

books I done read

Waxing the Tadpole, Elizabeth Little – extremely hilarious book about words

How Doctors Think, Jeremy Groopman – useful to know and not dull at all

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon – a fantastically subtle murder mystery in an alternate post-WWII America

Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever, Joel Defner – a memoir – what it sounds like

Sophisticated Dorkiness

Audrey, Wait!, Robin Benway – a girl called Audrey breaks up with a musician and he writes a song about it that becomes famous

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion – she writes a memoir about the year following her husband’s sudden unexpected death

Bart’s Bookshelf

James Bow – writes a series about two people who meet book characters and travel in time and have other good adventures

The Secret Hour, Scott Westerfield – a group of kids have special powers and get an extra hour at midnight that nobody else gets and they fight evil

One Day, David Nicholls – the same day every year for twenty years in the lives of two best friends who maybe luuuv each other

Care’s Online Bookshelf

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie – an Indian kid goes off the reservation to a white school

Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World, Lawrence and and Nancy Goldstone

The Vintner’s Luck, Elizabeth Knox – a fallen angel & a vintner meet once a year and strange things happen

Bibliophile by the Sea

No One You Know, Michelle Richmond – twenty years after her math prodigy sister is murdered, a girl tries to figure out what happened, and also someone fictionalized the story of her sister’s death

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Alan Bradley – a 1950s British girl called Flavia is interested in chemistry and her family is eccentric and she solves a mystery like Nancy Drew

The Magicians, Lev Grossman – a college boy learns to use magic and gets involved in a world that was supposed to be fictional but turns out to be real!

The House on Sugar Beach, Helene Cooper – a memoir of a wealthy Liberian girl with an adoptive sister that she lost when there was a big Liberian coup

Unfinished Desires, Gail Godwin – not out until December; boarding school girls that make friends in the 50s and then look back on their lives

Mathilda Savitch, Victor Lodatao – a girl whose sister died decides to find out how and why & nearly has to become her sister to do it

Books of Mee

Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee – a professor in trouble for sleeping with a student goes to South Africa to live with his daughter; it is smoothly written and not super litrary

Page 247

Burma Chronicles, Guy DeLisle – a graphic novel memoir of a guy married to a woman in Doctors Without Borders and they live in Burma and he teaches an animation class

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, Reif Larson – a twelve-year-old prodigy mapmaker goes to Washington to get an award; there are maps and notes in the margins & pretty illustrations

A Student of Weather, Elizabeth Hay – two Canadian sisters in the dustbowl are very different and a stranger comes to town and betrayal things happen

Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker – record of events and decisions leading up to WWII; in speeches and diaries and letters and things

The Book of Secrets, MG. Vassanji – a retired Indian schoolteacher in colonial East Africa in the late 1800s receives a diary that has been hidden

Worthwhile Books

A Chance to Die, Elizabeth Elliott – a biography of a Christian missionary woman in India

Farm Lane Books

Random Acts of Heroic Love, Danny Scheinmann – a modern young man loses his girlfriend and an old-time POW tries to escape

Tragedy at Law, Cyril Hare – the poshest Englishest wearing-funny-wigs-est mystery of all time

The Other Hand, Chris Cleave – a normal British mum and a Nigerian woman seeking asylum become friends – called Little Bee in the US

The Glass House – Jackie’s pick to win the Booker Prize this year

Stone’s Fall, Iain Pears – a man dies and we go backwards in time to discover why; lots of twisty twists like Fingersmith

Margery Sharp – the same lady who wrote Rescuers has written many other things that are even more delightful!

Page 247

Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species, Sean Carroll – stories from the history of geology & zoology & all sorts of lovely things

Graceling, Kristin Cashore – a young woman with a power forms an underground organization to stop her own & others’ exploitation, hooray!

Tales from the Reading Room

Mistress of Nothing, Kate Pullinger – a lady’s maid moves with her mistress to Egypt and she falls in love with the dragoman and it’s wonderful

A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor – a travel book where the guy stays at three separate monasteries

S. Krishna’s Books

The Post-Birthday World, Lionel Shriver – a woman in a long-term relationship kisses someone or she doesn’t – alternate outcomes

After You, Julie Buxbaum – a woman goes to London to help her best friend’s daughter after her friend dies & they read The Secret Garden!

Old Masters, New Worlds, Cynthia Saltzman – all about how fancyposh Americans acquired works by the Old Masters & brought them here

BirdBrained Book Blog

The Anybodies, N.E. Bode – a very sweet friendly book about a little girl with dull parents who had been swapped at birth

Time Switch, Matt Chamings – time travel and steampunkish Victorians, and two kids in a house with a ghost boy (sort of)

Keeping Time, Colby Rodowski – uses “Greensleeves” to travel back and forth in time

Bride of the Book God

Pashazade, Jon Courtenay Grimwood – the Germans won WWI, and a half-American half-Emir (Emirs are fun!) is supposed to be married off but there’s crime and it’s fun

Chris Priestley writes Gothic tales

Gunnerkrigg Court – a graphic novel set at a boarding school, with magic and Minotaurs

Random Jottings

Sacred Hearts, Sarah Dunant – a nun during the Council of Trent time wants to escape and be with her lover

The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam, Chris Ewan – a thief tells about his thieving times in Amsterdam!

Kisses on a Postcard, Terence Frisby – a memoir of a little evacuee to Cornwall during WWII

A Striped Armchair

The Ghost Orchid, Carol Goodman – a debut artist finds spooky scariness in a Victorian mansion on a Gothic retreat

Grange House, Sarah Blake – a ghostly haunted spooky hotel in 1896 Maine

Madeleine’s Ghost, Robert Girardi – a New Orleans grad students moves into a haunted apartment & the narrative goes between past and present

I’m Looking Through You, Jennifer Finney Boylan – a transgendered woman’s memoir about growing up in a haunted house

Complications, Atul Gawande – a series of well-written essays about what it is like to be a doctor

Spell of the Tiger, Sy Montgomery – all about Sundarbans and their relationships with tigers that hunt people (grrr)

Paper Town, John Green – John Green!  Road trips!

Palace Walk and Palace of Desire and the third one, Naguib Mahfouz – very excellent series with Cairo and families

The Law and the Lady, Wilkie Collins – a woman sets out to prove that her husband is innocent of poisoning his first wife

Presenting Lenore

The Prophecy of the Sisters, Michelle Zink – first in a trilogy about two sisters who are pitted against each other due to a prophecy, and it’s set in 1890s NY

My Friend Amy

Jacqueline Woodson – writes wonderful books for young adults (I think)

bookshelves of doom

Kate Ross writes a series of mysteries about a dandy shady-background mystery-solver with dandyish British humor

Stuck in a Book

Beg, Borrow, Steal, Michael Greenberg – a memoir about a struggling writer in New York (collected columns really)

Rhapsody in Books

The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, Christine Coleman – an old lady escapes from her nursing home and goes a-hitch-hiking

King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild – all about the Belgian occupation of the Congo and all the terrible things they did

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Douglas A. Blackmon – won a Pulitzer and it’s just what it says on the tin

The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh – a family saga type book from 1885 to the World Wars about the British colonies in Burma and Malaysia

Love at Goon Park, Deborah Blum – a book about the “cloth monkey” primate research

We Be Reading

God is an Englishman, R. F. Delderfield – a Raj officer heads back to Victorian England to have a proper Victorian life with his wife and stuff

The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes – nonfic about the progress of science in the Georgian/Regency times

BOOK SNOB

The Tortoise and the Hare, Elizabeth Jenkins – right after WWII a barrister’s wife gets cheated on and everybody is sympathetic

At Home with Books

My Life in France, Julia Child – apparently quite delightful!

Alita Reads

Holly’s Inbox, Holly Denham

My Porch

Oleander Jacaranda, Penelope Lively – author’s memoir of her childhood in Cairo and then England in the 1930s

Savidge Reads

Negotiations with the Dead, Margaret Atwood – book on writers and writing

The Paper House, Carlos Maria Dominguez – novella about a parcel that gets delivered for a dead girl, and there is book collecting stuff

Bibliofreak

Dismantled, Jennifer McMahon – four artists graduate arty college & adopt nihilism & stuff goes awry

Save Ophelia

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, Jonathan L. Howard – a dude sells his soul to learn necromancy; it never pays to do this

Fyrefly’s Book Blog

Who Hates Whom, Bob Harris – Current events!  And who wants to blow up everyone else!