A Reader Loved This Book: Wednesday Good Read Recommendation

This is the week for posting from our readers, which I love. After a while, I tire of hearing my own voice and we always love to hear YOUR voice. Nancy Simpson recommends Same Kind of Different As Me. Her book club read it and loved it. Her comments: "True story. Wonderful characters. So many details for discussion. Makes you really think." That's a great book review - succinct but enticing! Per her recommendation, I've already acquired the book and it's on my "to read" stack. Thanks Nancy. Okay, we would love more book recommendations from you. To get you motivated, here's a prompt: send us your favorite summer read. Surely you've finished it by now, right? lisa@miamagazine.net, or post a comment here. Happy Reading!

Your Turn: Wednesday's Good Read Recommendation

It's time for our YOU, Mia reader, to weigh in:
What is a book you would recommend without hesitation? Can you tell us about it? You don't need to write a book review, just give us the name of the book, the author, and what you loved about it. You can even give us the blurb from the dust jacket! We want your Wednesday Good Read Recommendations and we need your voice. Send your recommendation to lisa@miamagazine.net. We want to start posting our readers' favorite books each Wednesday. So...are you in?

A Heavy Read: Wednesday's Good Read Recommendation is "Pillars of the Earth"

What am I reading on vacation? The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett. It’s just under 1,000 pages, so I’ve been trying to wade through this one for about six months. I never could get past the first three chapters because it was just so intimidating. But once I got to Chapter Four, I was hooked. Do I care about the building of cathedrals in medieval England? No, not really. Am I a sucker for love stories? Actually, I’m not. So what is it about this heavy book that keeps me reading? Follett is a great writer, and so he makes me care about the building of cathedrals in medieval England and about the star-crossed lovers. We have nine days left and I’m on page 709. Will I finish? Yes I will. However, before heading back home, I may donate my softback copy to the local library here in Pagosa Springs so I don’t have to haul it back home. So that’s our Wednesday Good Read Recommendation this week. Pick it up...if you can carry it!

Cutting for Stone: Wednesday’s Good Read Recommendation

The video trailer for this novel calls it “an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.” I loved it. It’s the story of twin boys born to an Indian nun in Ethiopia. That should get you curious. The novelist, Abraham Verghese, is a physician who teaches at the Stanford University School of Medicine, but he is also a gentle and masterful storyteller. I agree with the reviewer who said that it is actually possible to live within it for the brief time one spends with this book. He adds, “You may never leave the chair.” I did stay up very late one night to finish it and I was not disappointed. This is a perfect novel for summer. It’s our Good Read Recommendation for today.

We would love to have your Good Read Recommendations to post! Email lisa@miamagazine.net with a paragraph about a great book you would recommend. If you need some ideas for great books to read, check out the New York Journal of Books website.

What To Get the Graduate Who Has Everything: Tuesday's Good Read Recommendation: A Short Guide to a Happy Life

Spoiler alert: If you're graduating from college this year and you sent me an announcement, you will receive this book from me. It's a quick read. It takes me about one evening to read it, which is about every six months. This book is literally ON my shelf as a display because I love the cover, the title, the author, and of course, the content. So here is my pitch for the book, an excerpt straight from the dust jacket:

Life is made of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came of us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won't happen. We have to teach ourselves how to live, really live...to love the journey, not the destination.

So, here is the most prominent book on my personal bookshelf. And there you have your Tuesday Good Read Recommendation.

And by the way, Happy Graduation to our intern Nicole Pride. She's been a huge help to us this semester, and I hope we've been the same for her. No surprises on the gift though.

The "miserable Irish Catholic childhood" is the subject of Tuesday's Good Read Recommendation: Angela's Ashes

Today's book recommendation is one of my favorite books and one that is worthy of reading over and over again (three times for me). From the dustjacket:

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland, Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy - exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling - does nurture Frank in the one thing he can provide: a story.

This is an oldie, but a great memoir worth reading if you haven't already.

Tuesday's Good Read Recommendation!

The Power of a Few Queens: Want a Good Read? It's Tuesday and it's on our Bookshelf!

Today, we're recommending The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter, and the Town that Raised Them. I read this book in two days. It gets our highest recommendation from the Mia bookshelf!

From Publisher's Weekly review:

"I didn't become an advice columnist on purpose..." writes Dickinson (author of the syndicated column Ask Amy) in her chapter titled "Failing Up." In the summer of 2002, after spending months living off of her credit cards between freelance writing jobs, Dickinson sent in an audition column to the Chicago Tribune and became the paper's replacement for the late Ann Landers. Here, Dickinson traces her own personal history, as well as the history of her mother's family whose members make up the Mighty Queens of Freeville, N.Y., the small town where Dickinson was raised, and where she raised her own daughter between stints in London; New York City; Washington, D.C.; and Chicago. Dickinson writes with an honesty that is at once folksy and intelligent, and brings to life all of the struggles of raising a child (Dickinson was a single mother) and the challenges and rewards of having a supportive extended family. "I'm surrounded by people who are not impressed with me", Dickinson humorously laments. "They don't care that my syndicated column has twenty-two million readers." Dickinsons irresistible memoir reads like a letter from an upbeat best friend.

Hairstyling in Afghanistan: Want a Good Read? It's Tuesday and It's On Our Bookshelf!

Tuesdays are nondescript, without the distinction of "first day of the week" or "hump day" or "TGIF". Even Thursday is distinct because it's the day before Friday! But Tuesday? Sigh. So we want to give you something to look forward to. We're beginning a new Tuesday post. Every week, we'll recommend a good book. If we read a good book, it's tends to stay on our bookshelves. So we're going to share those much-loved books with you. You can write on Monday and find a good book on Tuesday. That should get your week off to a good start, right?

Today, we're recommending Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil.



From the dustjacket:
Soon after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, Deborah Rodriguez went to Afghanistan as part of a group offering humanitarian aid to this war-torn nation. Surrounded by men and women whose skills - as doctors, nurses, and therapists - seemed eminently more practical than her own, Rodriguez, a hairdresser and mother of two from Michigan, despaired of being of any real use. Yet she soon found she had a gift for befriending Afghans, and once her profession became known she was eagerly sought out by Westerners desperate for a good haircut and by Afgahn women, who have a long and proud tradition of running their own beauty salons. Thus an idea was born.

There you go. It's your Good Read Tuesday recommendation. It's on our Bookshelf, read and loved.
Let us know what's on YOUR bookshelf!

Happy Tuesday!