Top Ten Books At The Top Of My Summer TBR List

This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for our Top Ten Books on our summer TBR list.

1) Under the Dome – I caved, reading peer pressure from my King-along readers.

2) Gone With the Wind – A re-read before a trip to Atlanta.

3) The March – Another good one to read before Atlanta.

4) Don Quixote – It’s been on my list for so long!

5) Amazing Grace – After hearing the author speak, this one has been high on my list.

6) The Ocean at the End of the Lane – It’s Gaiman, I must get my hands on it!!!

7) About a Boy – One of the only Nick Hornby novels I haven’t read and I heard there is a TV show version being release this fall.

8) The Harry Potter series – I’m planning to re-read it before our trip to HP World in September!

9) The Comedy of Errors – Another Shakespeare play for the Let’s Read Plays challenge

10) The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet – A graphic novel for fun.

Image from here. 

Dirtyville Rhapsodies

Dirtyville Rhapsodies

by Josh Green

★★★★

This solid short story collection is packed with grim pictures of “normal” life. Each of the 18 stories clocks in between 10 and 15 pages, just long enough to give the reader a glimpse into the sordid lives of its characters. A cop on the brink of self-destruction, a desperate journalist, a junkie, a soldier, a honeymooning couple, Green catches each of them at their worst moment and then chronicles it for our amusement. The result is a powerful portrait of broken souls.

In “Missing Athena” we meet a grieving husband, trying to care for his son while longing for his wife. “Axis of Symmetry” paints a vicious picture of a jealous ex-husband. “The Abduction” breaks your heart. It’s hard to say exactly where this book hooks you, but it’s hard to put it down.

Each of the stories stands alone, but their subjects tend to have one common thread: unhappiness. Whether it’s a crumbling marriage or drug addiction, they’re all struggling with something. In Atlanta, the capital of the "Dirty South" people are just trying to make it through the day.

BOTTOM LINE: The beautiful writing and palpable descriptions make this a quick read and great collection.

“No one pays attention to calendars but there’s something in the Friday air you can taste, the sweet sugar of workaday liberation.”

Side Note: Men’s Health just listed the book as one of the top 11 best reads for the summer, alongside Stephen King and Dan Brown’s new novels.

Photo of Atlanta from here. 

Pairing Books with Movies: Tell the Wolves I'm Home

Tell the Wolves I’m Home

by Carol Rifka Brunt

★★★★★

This tender story is about June Elbus, a 14-year-old whose best friend is her eccentric Uncle Finn. It’s set in New York City in 1987 at the height of the AIDS crisis. Finn passes away from the disease and June is left reeling. She loses her bearings when he dies and she begins to question so many things she’s always taken for granted.

Greta is June’s talented older sister; the opposite of her in every way. The relationship between them is tenuous and strained. Most teenage sisters go through this period, but everything is heightened by this unexpected grief. There’s something visceral about dealing with grief while you are still trying to figure out who you are. The grief shapes you in some ways, it’s an undeniable guiding force on your formative years. It influences the way you see the world. Most teens feel invincible, but when you lose someone at that age I think it makes you understand that nothing in this world is permanent and it effects your actions for the rest of your life.  

One thing that stood out to me in the novel is the way the author beautifully conveys the raw vulnerability of your early teen years. It is so easy to feel childish and immature or self-conscious. You are balancing on the cusp of adulthood and you have the desperate desire to be both an adult and a child and it’s so hard to navigate that change. I remember being embarrassed by things I didn’t understand or things I felt. That embarrassment can quickly turn to defensiveness and the people who you’ve been closest to, your family, somehow become the enemy over night.

BOTTOM LINE: This book touched my heart in such a real way. I would highly recommend it and the audio is particularly good.

“That's the secret. If you always make sure you're exactly the person you hoped to be, if you always make sure you know only the very best people, then you won't care if you die tomorrow.”

“I thought of all the different kinds of love in the world. I could think of ten without even trying. The way parents love their kids, the way you love a puppy or chocolate ice cream or home or your favorite book or your sister. Or your uncle. There's those kinds of love and then there's the other kind. The falling kind.”

Pair with a viewing of the 2012 documentary How to Survive a Plague about the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Also watch Angels in America the 2003 miniseries version of the award-winning two part play. It stars everyone from Meryl Streep to Al Pacino and is a fictional account of the AIDS crisis from multiple points of view. It’s not that the novel is only about AIDS, but the documentary and miniseries give you some context for the atmosphere of fear that surrounded the disease in the 1980s.