What to Read: Volume 2

If you know me in real life, you know I am a book nerd and proud of it.  As a kid, I saved my allowance until I had enough to buy a paperback at Waldenbooks and then devoured it in about 2 days.  Clearly that's why I had so many friends.  ;-)

Every so often, I like to share some books that I enjoyed reading since it seems like every week that I get asked for a book recommendation.  Here are some of my recent favorites:

 

One Day by David Nicholls
I absolutely loved this story, and it is now being made into a movie starring Anne Hathaway.  I highly suggest you read it before the movie butchers the story (although the trailer does look promising, movies always leave out important stuff).  I laid in bed laughing and then crying and was so sad when I ran out of pages to read.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson
I've posted about Bill Bryson before because he is one of my all-time favorite authors.  If you are the type of person who is interested in history and how people lived a long time ago, you'll love this book and its ability to turn you into a source of useful facts for bar trivia.  It's really long, but the chapters are somewhat unrelated so you can read little bits here and there.  I now know things like how forks came to be, and how babies were delivered when male doctors weren't allowed to touch female patients.

Figures in Silk by Vanora Bennett
I love historical fiction, and am trying to move beyond the Tudor era since I know those story lines so well (Anne never lives).  I had loved Vanora Bennett's first book after snatching it up from the clearance table, and was so excited to get her new book last year, only to have it sit on my shelf for 6 months while I planned a wedding.  I thought this story was fascinating, and I stayed up far too late the week that I read it.  The historical details are pretty accurate, if you're a stickler for those things, and the characters were not like any I'd read about before.

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I read this with my book club last year and still think about it often.  It's a very haunting memoir written by a woman who has survived more terrible things than I could wrap by head around.  It definitely makes you realize how lucky you are to be reading this on a computer period, and you'll want to cheer for her as she turns her life around. 

Do you have any book recommendations?  I can't wait to read Bossypants and The Help, but am making myself work through my existing stack before buying anything new.  It's hard.  :(