Top Ten Books for #WorldBookDay

Pride and Prejudice is my all time favorite. I love the movie, the miniseries, and the book. I love the love story and the family dynamics. 

This is one of those books that I just want everyone to read. If you haven't read it I highly recommend it. It is witty and a super fun read about the disappearance of Bernadette. Her daughter then compiles email messages, official documents, and secret correspondence to try and find Bernadette.  It has a really different structure but it is carried out so well. 

I love Harry Potter. They are all great books but my absolute favorite is The Prisoner of Azkaban, probably because Sirius Black is my favorite character. We learn so much more about Harry's parents as he tries to find out what his relationship is to the notorious Sirius Black.

Of course I love this book because it is basically Downton Abbey in book form. It is so great and I wish I could read it all over for the first time. Cora has gone abroad to find a titled husband to go with her wealth. Eventually she finds herself  as the Duchess of Wareham and thrown into English Society. 

I. Love. Mindy. Kaling. She just gets it. Her book had me laughing out loud and totally identifying with everything she said. Mindy really shows readers her life and gives her observations on romance, friendship, and Hollywood, I am patiently waiting until the Fall for her next book to come out. 

This is another book where I wish I could read it again and not know what was going to happen. When Amy disappears, all roads lead to her husband Nick. Only he swears he didn't do it. As the story goes on more information is revealed. It is so twisted and so good. 

The Goldfinch was last year's Pulitzer Winner for Fiction and for good reason. It follows the life of orphan Theo Decker and his art theft. If you like character driven novels then this is definitely for you. 

Marina Keegan died five days after her graduation from Yale and The Opposite of Loneliness is a collection of her essays and short stories. This collection was so good it left me wanting a sequel. 

I am slowly making my way through these books and loving every second. Claire Randall gets thrown back in time to the 1700's and has to choose whether to stay with the highlander who loves her or try and get back to the Husband she left behind. I can't recommend these books enough.

When it comes to covers, it doesn't get much prettier than this one. This book tells the story of the tangled lives of an innkeeper, a hollywood star, and a producer. Walter created really likable characters and it was a fun read. 

At The Waters Edge by Sara Gruen

Genre: Historical Fiction 

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Pages: 368

Rating: ★★★


Synopsis
After embarrassing themselves at the social event of the year in high society Philadelphia on New Year’s Eve of 1942, Maddie and Ellis Hyde are cut off financially by Ellis’s father, a former army Colonel who is already embarrassed by his son’s inability to serve in WWII due to his being colorblind. To Maddie’s horror, Ellis decides that the only way to regain his father’s favor is to succeed in a venture his father attempted and very publicly failed at: he will hunt the famous Loch Ness monster and when he finds it he will restore his father’s name and return to his father’s good graces (and pocketbook). Joined by their friend Hank, a wealthy socialite, the three make their way to Scotland in the midst of war. Each day the two men go off to hunt the monster, while another monster, Hitler, is devastating Europe. And Maddie, now alone in a foreign country, must begin to figure out who she is and what she wants. The novel tells of Maddie’s social awakening: to the harsh realities of life, to the beauties of nature, to a connection with forces larger than herself, to female friendship, and finally, to love.

My Thoughts

This book started out really promising. I was loving the characters and the time period. Even though it does take place in 1942, the war isn't the central point, so it was interesting to see how the wealthy society people of Philadelphia stood out in comparison with the war. The attitudes of Ellis and Hank were deplorable (evading the draft, rudeness to the staff etc.) but Maddie's softness made up for it. 

Even though the plot line of the story seemed a little strange to me, I was really excited for them to go to Scotland to find the Loch Ness monster. Once they were in Scotland there was a huge shift in the plot. The monster hunting was put on the back burner and we began to see more of Maddie's daily life at the inn they were staying at and her relationships with the people she met. 

Eventually, the book became a tad cheesy and very predictable. The ending, as I predicted, was tied up in a neat bow which was annoying and cliche. Also, Gruen would dump random wartime statistics in paragraph long sections that did nothing at all to move the plot along. This only served to remind you that  it was in fact 1942 and not present day.

My Favorite Line

In all its beautiful, tragic fragility, there was still life, and those of us who'd been lucky enough to survive opened our arms wide and embraced it

Cartwheel by Jennifer duBois

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: Random House

Pages: 384

Rating: ★★


Synopsis

When Lily Hayes arrives in Buenos Aires for her semester abroad, she is enchanted by everything she encounters: the colorful buildings, the street food, the handsome, elusive man next door. Her studious roommate Katy is a bit of a bore, but Lily didn’t come to Argentina to hang out with other Americans.
 
Five weeks later, Katy is found brutally murdered in their shared home, and Lily is the prime suspect. But who is Lily Hayes? It depends on who’s asking. As the case takes shape—revealing deceptions, secrets, and suspicious DNA—Lily appears alternately sinister and guileless through the eyes of those around her: the media, her family, the man who loves her and the man who seeks her conviction. With mordant wit and keen emotional insight, Cartwheel offers a prismatic investigation of the ways we decide what to see—and to believe—in one another and ourselves.

My Thoughts

I really wanted to like this, but I just couldn't. 

I thought it would be an easy, breezy mysterious read but it wasn't. It jumps around between dates and point of views and backstories that I couldn't have cared less about. I wanted to hear the story from Lily's voice and chronologically, but that never happened. Instead, I learned about the failing marriage of the defense attorney and the Hayes family history. I found myself skipping entire sections of chapters simply because I didn't care about the characters nor did they have anything to do with moving the plot along. Instead of really developing the characters that were at the center of the plot, duBois developed all the  characters I didn't really care about. 

This book is based on the Amanda Knox trial in Italy and just like in any trial, the only person who knows what really happens at the end of the book is Lily Hayes. This annoyed me because I felt like I devoted a lot of time and effort to this book and at the end I don't even know anything for sure. 

My Favorite Line

Everybody should have someone whose belief in them in unwavering, unconditional, always.

The Circle by Dave Eggers

Genre: Fiction 

Publisher: Knopf

Pages: 508

Rating: ★★★


Synopsis

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency. As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO. Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in America--even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge. 

My Thoughts

If you, like myself, are a member if Generation Y, then you absolutely have to read this book. The Circle has been sitting in my to-read list for about a year, but I finally got around to reading it. It was absolutely eye-opening and so interesting to read. The ending of the story was a little unfulfilling to me, but in the end its not really the story that you're paying attention to...its the role technology plays in our lives and how it can turn to control us. 

This book is a dystopian satire of the way the internet and social media could be. This book was almost shocking because of the troubling ideas and themes - mostly, because we live in a world where The Circle (a kind of Google, Facebook, Apple super company) could absolutely happen. 

There were so many times when I was reading that I thought that the world could so easily turn to this place where we only live within the confines of the internet. It has been compared many times to Orwell's 1984, and I couldn't agree more. This novel's release is perfectly timed for a world that could very quickly head toward the destruction that is described. 

My Favorite Line 

You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You're at a  table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you're staring at a screen, searching for strangers in Dubai.