The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway Rating: 4.5/5 Date Read: August 2007 1. Hemingway’s first novel follows a gang of expatriates living in post-WWI Paris as they set off for a weekend in Spain for some drinking, flirting, and…
People of the Book Rating: 4/5 Date Read: July 2008 1. Brooks takes the tale of the Sarajevo Haggadah and creates stories surrounding it and its journey from 14th century Spain to the present day. As our main character discovers…
Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog* Rating: 4/5 Date Read: December 2008 1. When John and Jenny decide to get a dog (to test their parenting ability), they have no idea what they were in…
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa SeeRating: 5/5 Date Read: April 2008 1. Lily and Snow Flower are bound together as lifelong friends (“laotong“) in 19th-century China. They communicate through the secret language of nu shu, a language…
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol Translation: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Rating: 4/5 Date Read: August 2007 1. In Dead Souls, Chichikov, in an attempt to inflate his social standing, comes up with a scheme of purchasing from other landowner’s…
Atonement by Ian McEwan Rating: 4.5/5 Date Read: December 2007 1. Atonement is the story of how one little girl’s imagination tore apart an English family in 1935. Following the stories of two sisters and the boy they grew up…
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith Rating: 5/5 Date Read: January 2009 1. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was one of my favorite reads in 2009. And I think it can safely be somewhere on the all-time list.…
A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon Rating: 2/5 Date Read: May 2009 1. This is the story of George, who mistakes eczema for cancer and quickly becomes obsessed with it. His wife is having an affair, his daughter is…
A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby Rating: 4/5 Date Read: June 2008 1. The four narrators in A Long Way Down meet on a rooftop on New Year’s Eve where each has independently planned to commit suicide. They (obviously)…
Today I am introducing a new feature designed to highlight those books I read before I was blogging regularly. There are a lot of books I read (even as recently as 2009) that I just never featured on my books.…
