8 Must Reads Before The Summer’s Over
The lazy days of summer are almost over, but why not get in a few more must reads before schools get back in full swing and the temps start cooling off. Here are a few suggestions, and if those don’t hit your fancy, maybe something else will pop up in the also recommended column.
The Devil All The Time
Go To: Amazon / B&N
The second season of True Detective has not received the same love as the first, so if you are looking for a similar story to get you back in the creeped out mood, try The Devil All The Time. Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, it’s full of bizarre and compelling characters. From Amazon:
There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.
It’s one of those read all the way through books so be prepared to spend some time on it.
Ice Twins
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There’s always something a little creepy with twins. A year after one of their identical twin daughters, Lydia, dies in an accident, Angus and Sarah move to a tiny Scottish island, hoping to put their lives back together. But as winter approaches, Angus must travel for work and their surviving daughter is starting to act a bit strange. In fact, she claims this entire time she was Lydia after all and it was the other twin Kirstie that died. What exactly is going on with the Moorcroft family?
All The Light We Cannot See
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It’s set in WWII, but the story is so layered and intricate that you’ll feel connected to the characters in ways you didn’t realize you could. Marie is a little girl who goes blind, but her father makes a miniature of the neighborhood they live in so she can memorize it. He is a locksmith for the Museum of Natural History in Paris. They head for her uncle’s house when German forces move into Paris, and Marie’s father snags the museum’s greatest treasure with them. Marie eventually crosses paths with the orphan Werner who grew up in the Hitler Youth and their tales intertwine. From Amazon:
Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery
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If true crime is your thing, then check out Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery. A serial killer is still at large on Long Island and this book delivers a haunting and humanizing tale. From Amazon:
One late spring evening in 2010, Shannan Gilbert, after running through the oceanfront community of Oak Beach screaming for her life, went missing. No one who had heard of her disappearance thought much about what had happened to the twenty-four-year-old: she was a Craigslist prostitute who had been fleeing a scene—of what, no one could be sure. The Suffolk County Police, too, seemed to have paid little attention—until seven months later, when an unexpected discovery in a bramble alongside a nearby highway turned up four bodies, all evenly spaced, all wrapped in burlap. But none of them Shannan’s.
There’s something about true crime that grips you from the moment you pick it up. Check out this detailed look of internet prostitutes and get the behind the scenes look at their real lives, not just the sensational headlines.
Wool
Go To: Amazon / B&N
If you haven’t read this yet, you might want to check it out. It comes out of the rare set of independent authors that make it big without a publishing house. It’s a dystopian tale that we can’t seem to get enough of and the world is hard and mankind is clawing for survival. You can’t go outside and you can’t talk about how bad it is, but for those who refuse to follow the rules, they get exactly what they ask for, they’re allowed out. Many say it’s addictive so you’ll end up spending a lot of time on it because it’s a series. So buckle up and have fun.
The Kind Worth Killing
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Hailed as the next The Girl On A Train, two strangers meet and start discussing very intimate details about their lives. Ted complains about his wife who he is sure is cheating on him. Lily offers to help. Who would do such a thing after only meeting one time? Lily might be hiding something from her past and it just might come back to haunt them. From Entertainment Weekly:
”The next Gone Girl? There aren’t just two unreliable narrators, there are four. There isn’t just one enormous, game-changing twist. Try three. You’ll also lose count of all the sociopaths, they’re each deranged but oh so compelling.”
Ghost in the Wires
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Certainly an issue we’re all concerned about today, Kevin Mitnick was the world’s most famous hacker and on the most wanted list of the Feds. Now, he’s a consultant and he’s written a tell-all about his misadventures in cyberspace. Want to understand how to protect yourself, then read about the motives and methods of the ones who perpetrates the crimes.
The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – And Why
We’ve seen the Preppers shows and watched as they imagined one disaster after another. It always seemed as if they prepared for things that may never come close to happening to them. In this non-fiction book, Time magazine journalist covers some of the most devastating real-life disasters to find out how people actually reacted to see what we do right and what we do wrong. From NPR: “The thinking person’s manual for getting out alive.”
