Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott
With her trademark humor, wisdom, and honesty, Lamott tells us stories of daily life – shopping at the supermarket on her birthday and winning a free ham she doesn’t want; skiing with a dying friend who teaches her to fall; celebrating Thanksgiving with Sam and his dad; attending protest rallies. She watches the seasons come and go, and shares with us the comfort and insights that she draws from life around her even as she continues to panic and despair – and also to struggle, as all of us must, to make the world a safer, and more loving, place to live.
My junior year of college, in my Composition Theory and Practice course, we read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a collection of essays about the trials and tribulations of being a writer, and I fell in love. Lamott’s writing is accessible, honest, funny, and imbued with a really real sense of reflection. She’s not just telling funny stories; she makes points. She works to understand aspects of her life – of family, of loss, and of what she does for a living.
I bought Traveling Mercies and Plan B, her two books on faith (though she now has a third) for a colleague when I worked in Arizona, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t appreciate them because Lamott is light years away from a Bible-thumping, classical Christian that makes most reasonable people want to cross themselves. She’s reasonable and thoughtful and really works to reconcile life with what she believes, and I’m excited to read more of her.
Paper Towns by John Green
Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs back into his life – dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge – he follows. After their all-nighter ends and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues – and they’re for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees of the girl he thought he knew.
I read Looking for Alaska years ago, before Elle even knew who John Green was, and was absolutely taken away by how engrossing his story and characters were. When his second book, An Abundance of Katherines, came out, I looked it over and decided it really didn’t sound as interesting as Looking for Alaska. I decided to pass it by, and then sort of lost track of John Green.
But Paper Towns is lauded by fans of his (and I think Green himself) as his best book. I read the sample on my Kindle and was incredibly impressed by it. Needless to say, this is high on my list of summer reads.
I Am The Messenger by Markus Zusak
Meet Ed Kennedy—underage cabdriver, pathetic cardplayer, and useless at romance. He lives in a shack with his coffee-addicted dog, the Doorman, and he’s hopelessly in love with his best friend, Audrey. His life is one of peaceful routine and incompetence, until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery. That’s when the first Ace arrives. That’s when Ed becomes the messenger. . .
I mentioned this in a recent Book Babble of mine, but The Book Thief blew my mind and I have heard many of its fans say that I am the Messenger is an even better book. Despite this – and despite having owned a copy for years – I have never actually gotten around to reading it.
But the plot sounds incredibly interesting (mysterious, sort of conspiracy-theory-esque, or, like my mom called it, “almost like a superhero”) and I find Zusak to be an incredibly gifted storyteller, so I’m excited to dive into this book and see what it’s all about.
Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch
In his highly acclaimed novel The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch took us on an adrenaline-fueled adventure with a band of daring thieves led by con artist extraordinaire Locke Lamora. Now Lynch brings back his outrageous hero for a caper so death-defying, nothing short of a miracle will pull it off.
The first book in Lynch’s series, The Lies of Locke Lamora, is probably one of my favorite fantasy books of all time. I’d almost entirely stopped reading fantasy when Elle suggested I read Locke Lamora, and after I finished, I wondered why I’d ever stopped. Lynch creates a world that is one part Ocean’s Eleven and one part high fantasy, and I couldn’t put the first brick of a book down.
Because Lynch keeps delaying his next Locke Lamora book, I keep delaying reading Red Seas Under Red Skies. It’s like eating the last candy in a packet or using the last bit of toilet paper: once you do that, you’re out. But every time I see this book, sitting on my shelves, I just want to take it and read it cover to cover. I think it’s just time, now.
Dead in a Prairie House by William R. Drennan
In response to the scandal generated by his open affair with the proto-feminist and free love advocate Mamah Borthwick Cheney, Frank Lloyd Wright had begun to build Taliesin as a refuge and “love cottage” for himself and his mistress (both married at the time to others).
Conceived as the apotheosis of Wright’s prairie house style, the original Taliesin would stand in all its isolated glory for only a few months before the bloody slayings that rocked the nation and reduced the structure itself to a smoking hull.
While I lived in Arizona, I went on a tour of Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and school in Scottsdale, Arizona. My mother, who adores Wright and in fact has visited dozens of his houses over the years, forced us to spend a shameful amount of time in the gift shop, where I spotted this book. I’ve always been a bit of a true-crime junkie, and there is something especially interesting knowing that this topic has been mostly ignored over the years. Whether this will be an engaging piece of non-fiction or the kind of dull, sandpapery true-crime that will make my head explode, I’m not sure yet, but I’m willing to give it a try.
Heist Society by Ally Carter
When Katarina Bishop was three, her parents took her to the Louvre…to case it. For her seventh birthday, Katarina and her Uncle Eddie traveled to Austria…to steal the crown jewels. When Kat turned fifteen, she planned a con of her own—scamming her way into the best boarding school in the country, determined to leave the family business behind. Unfortunately, leaving “the life” for a normal life proves harder than she’d expected.
I like heist stories. Movies, books, TV shows, you name it: if it involves professional thieves doing what they do best, I am completely sucked in. Elle found the second book in this series by mostly-accident and having read the sample? I was hooked.
It feels to me like a summer read, too. Funny, airy, the kind of thing you want to read on your porch while your neighbor grills and you sip a drink with a little umbrella in it. Which is my goal, because I don’t spend enough time on my porch.
I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President by Josh Lieb
Twelve-year-old Oliver Watson’s got the IQ of a grilled cheese sandwich. Or so everyone in Omaha thinks. In reality, Oliver’s a mad evil genius on his way to world domination, and he’s used his great brain to make himself the third-richest person on earth! Then Oliver’s father—and archnemesis—makes a crack about the upcoming middle school election, and Oliver takes it as a personal challenge. He’ll run, and he’ll win! Turns out, though, that overthrowing foreign dictators is actually way easier than getting kids to like you. . . Can this evil genius win the class presidency and keep his true identity a secret, all in time to impress his dad?
My methodology for picking up this book involved going to Barnes & Nobles to pick up something else (I don’t even remember what, anymore), seeing it on the shelf, and knowing that I had to have it. It was blurbed by Jon Stewart. Of The Daily Show. How could I not pick it up and buy it?
It’s wickedly funny. I am not sure I even care about the plot, if only because the first three or four pages were actively hilarious. And maybe that makes me shallow, but sometimes, I need a laugh. Or several, which this book promises.
Eve Green by Susan Fletcher
Pregnant with her first child, Eve Green recalls her mother’s death when she was eight years old and her struggle to make sense of her parents’ mysterious romantic past. Eve is sent to live with her grandparents in rural Wales, where she finds comfort in friendships with Daniel, a quiet farmhand, and Billy, a disabled, reclusive friend of her mother’s. When a ravishing local girl disappears, one of Eve’s friends comes under suspicion. Eve will do everything she can to protect him, but at the risk of complicity in a matter she barely understands. This is a timeless and beautifully told story about family secrets and unresolved liaisons.
Once upon a time (and I don’t think Elle even knows this), I had a thing for Wales. So I went to the Tempe Public Library, searched for fiction about Wales, and brought home a massive stack of books to read. One of them was Eve Green, and clearly, I never read it.
Years passed, and since then, Elle has been on me to read Eve Green. I checked it out from the Topeka Public Library last summer – and returned it without reading it. I want to read it, I intend to read it, but I am a bit of an ADHD reader who, when she checks out a book, ends up reading something entirely different from what she checked out. So once again, I will add Eve Green to my summer reading plans – and hopefully actually read it this time around.
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski’s ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world of the circus: to Jacob it was both salvation and a living hell.
This is Elle’s doing. Despite the fact I bought this book years ago when asking for suggestions (yes, this is a pattern), I’ve never read it. It sits on my shelf, being pretty, and taking up space.
But Elle and I made a deal that if she read The Westing Game, I would read Water for Elephants. Thus, Water for Elephants is on my summer reading list and will get read, come hell or high water.
