^ Liked the White Tiger, as well – for the same reasons you put so well.
Just finished Cooking Made Us Human, after a great evening featuring the author, Harvard professor, Richard Wrangham, discussing the book and other topics.
Very interesting premise and a quick, fascinating read.
Way back in April alwaysamom suggested this book. It took me forever to get started reading it and I read it rather slowly even after I got it (typical for me with non-fiction), but I finally finished it up. I really enjoyed it, though I found Colt a bit of a stuffed-shirt a lot of the time (though that was part of the point.) It was particular amusing to read because I know the area he is talking about very well. My mother comes from an old Boston family that has its own collection of shared houses, but our “Big House” went out of the family in the last generation. The house we now share at the Cape used to be a boathouse - rather than being 9000 square feet, it’s probably barely 1000. But like the Colt house, it’s at the end of a long driveway, and also has views of Bassetts Island and Scraggy Neck. I took tennis lessons on a court where he describes a tennis match, and my kids learned to sail at the sailing school on Wing’s Neck. Much of the time I was nodding with him, while other times I was irritated by his generalizations about WASP culture. Anyway an interesting read.
Just finished “Lolita” by Nabokov. It’s funny. I have attempted to read “Lolita” several times since high school and simply could not get past the first 50 pages. I picked it up again a few days ago and I could not put it down! His language just swept me away. I guess after thirty years of trying, I was ready for “Lolita”!
As I mentioned a while back, in response to the enthusiastic recommendations here, I bought North and South – both the book and the DVD – for my wife for Mother’s Day. Both were, I’m happy to report, big, big hits with my Jane-Austen-loving wife.
I’m so glad to hear it! North and South is one of my all-time favorite book/DVD combinations. It’s a darker story than anything you’ll find in Jane Austen (I am also an Austen lover), but occasionally it’s healthy to shed a few cathartic tears.
Just finished So Big by Edna Ferber. It’s the first selection for a summer Book Club here at the beach. Turns out I can’t make the discussion meeting, but it was still a good book. Somehow, I’d never heard of it before.
mathmom, I’m glad you got to read The Big House. I agree with your description of Colt, he annoyed me through much of the book, even though I enjoyed reading it. 
I, too, enjoyed Sarah’s Key. I’m currently reading Billie Letts’ Made In the USA. I have always enjoyed her books, and her son who is a playwright is someone I know so it’s fun to read his mom’s books!
It looks like I won’t get to my North and South dvds and book til later in the summer now but with all these great reviews, I’m really looking forward to them.
I just finished “Shanghai Girls” by Lisa See. Very good story.
Just have to share the title of a book I read and loved. City of Thieves, by David Benioff. It’s his grandfather’s story of one week in and around Leningrad during WWII. Great tale, well told.
CBBBlinker, I loved So Big by Ferber. Fantastic writing. I thought it was remarkable.
Just finished “Call Me by Your Name: A Novel” by Andre Aciman. It was an incredible read.
I read the Holt book to to balance the book written by his wife, Anne Fadiman. I got interested in them as a couple.
Her book is more compelling for me: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. It’s about the Hmong meeting US modern medicine and the misunderstandings on both sides and the failure to help one little girl with her seizures. Sad but revealing and very well written.
I am glad to be reminded of The Lost. But honestly, I am so behind in books I’ve promised myself to read, I’m not sure if it would be nice to myself to get myself another.
[Text</a> on the beach - the 50 best summer reads ever | Books | The Observer](<a href=“http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/05/summer-reading-books-recommendations]Text”>Text on the beach - the 50 best summer reads ever | Best books | The Guardian)
^Among the new entries, I can certainly recommend Ishiguro’s Nocturnes. I believe this collection of short stories, his first, won’t come out in the US until September. For those of you who enjoyed his novels or the movie “Remains of the Day”, you can see how Ishiguro’s characters can be readily distilled into shorter stories without losing the heartbreaking impact of each ending. That is about what you get in these short stories.
[Oxford</a> American :: EDITORS’ PICKS: BOOKS](<a href=“http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2009/jul/08/editors-picks-books/]Oxford”>http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2009/jul/08/editors-picks-books/)
For those of you that prefer non-fiction, I highly recommend Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. It’s a book that is extremely difficult to put down. Another outstanding work of non-fiction I recently read is 1491.
FallGirl - I too just finished Shanghai Girls (Lisa See). I thought it was brilliant. Historical fiction set in the mid 1930s up to the late 1950s. The author’s great grandfather is Chinese and she certainly goes above and beyond in her research for the historical aspect (FallGirl, did you read the acknowledgments?). She paints a great visual. I’ll be looking into her other books.
Since historical fiction is my favorite genre, I especially enjoyed this book. 2 thumbs way up.
Big non-fiction fan here! Just finished a fascinating look at a horrendous Victorian murder: “The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher” by Kate Summerscale. Highly recommended if you’re at all interested in detection, detective fiction, Victorian family life, or media sensationalism of crime. The Victorians had their versions of Nancy Grace and Jane What’s-her-name too (in addition to all their other tribulations).
Now reading “What Happens Next” by Marc Norman (who won a screenwriting Oscar for “Shakespeare in Love”). It’s a history of screenwriting that starts in the silent era and continues to the present day. Great anecdotes about classic Hollywood, the technology of movies, how Hollywood both led and followed the cultural changes of the 20th century. Really enjoying it!
This is a double post of something I posted yesterday on another thread.
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Well, following up on my last post, having now read the first 80+ pages of Revolutionary Road, I can report that it is some of the bleakest fiction I have ever read, conjuring a world so airless and joyless as to be, it would seem, utterly uninhabitable – except for the fact that, alas, it is inhabited, and by characters who, like all of us, tell themselves stories about who they are and what their lives are about in order to carry on with the everyday business of life.
If you’ve read this novel and didn’t find it worthwhile, I have no interest in trying to change your mind. And I can’t speak to the movie (though I’ve seen, in skimming some reviews, including one in the Baltimore Sun, that one take on the movie is to say that it fails to live up to the book [which is of course an old and familiar story in movie adaptations]). But having read nearly a hundred pages of this novel, it has left me with a knot in the pit of my stomach, and I say that as an expression of praise for the power and clarity and grace of Yates’ writing. As the novelist Richard Price puts it in the introduction to this volume, “the beauty and the genius of . . . [Yates’] voice lies in how its gently inexorable tone so eerily mirrors the muffled helplessness of the characters themselves.” I have the distinct feeling that this is a book that will stay with me long after I have finished it.
I enjoyed Revolutionary Road…as far as it went. As the book progressed, the ending was apparent to me, and I was disappointed that it would never be set in the city they had spent so much time talking and dreaming about.
Just read City of Thieves–set in and around Leningrad during WWII. By David Benioff, it’s his grandfather’s story, somewhat embellished. Great, memorable read!