EP Youngblood
Twelve Stones: Notes on a Miraculous Journey by Barbara Carole. I can't put it down!

Beacar-
The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle - David Wroblewski
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan
The Hour I First Believed - Wally Lamb
Me Talk Pretty One Day - Sedaris
The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields

Essa -
Seeking Sara Summers a woman who must become authentic
Body Wars (Maine)
A Breath Floats By (Hudson)
The Shack
Anne Broelyn
The Painter's Gift (Holt)

Imiinthemiddle: Right now I am reading Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden, and am really enjoying it.

SOK: I'm working my way through award-winners ... right now I'm reading The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (and loving it.) I'm also listening to Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor in the car.

Catie:
Life of Pi by Yann Martel

IggyMommy 1/19/07:
I just finished Next by Michael Crichton. There was too much bad language and sex. But the book was fascinating and I couldn't put it down. I finished it in one day. It's a fascintaing fictional novel about the subject of genetics. It shows the complications of this very NOW subject.

I also just finished First Men To The Moon by H.G. Wells. Written in 1901 Wells had to really use his imagination and it was funny to see how he thought it would be and how it really is.

Now I've started Mount Dragon by Lincoln Childs and Douglas Preston. I love anything by these guys.

LibrarianJack:
Today is a relatively melancholy day; I devoured Candyfreak by Steve Almond and am craving more. If you've got a sweet tooth, this book is a must read! Almond takes you on a chocolaty, nostalgic trip through the history of candy bar companies in the U.S. This is not your bore-me-to-sleep history text, however, it's an hysterical account of Almond's obsession with candy and his quest to find a bit of happiness via his childhood chocolaty favorites.

Almond takes you inside a few of the smaller, regional candy companies around the U.S. in efforts of recording their pasts from triumphs during to the candy boom of the mid 1900's to today where they're struggling to keep their doors open amidst the pressure from the Big Three: Mars, Hershey, and Nestlé. Many of these company's have been around since the late 1800's, and most of their original recipes remain intact.

Linda:
Underworld by Don DeLillo. Just started it, so no comments just yet.

IggyMommy 1/12/07:
Hide and Seek With Angels: A Life of J.M. Barrie by Lisa Chaney
Ever want to know who wrote Peter Pan? I've only seen the Disney movie and never even thought about the book. When this new biography came out I was intrigued and checked it out at the library. Hope it's good!

I just finished Archie and Amelie, Love and Madness in the Gilded Age by Donna Lucey. It was an interesting read. Archie Chanler was a descendant of John Jacob Astor. Amelie Rives was a daughter of an engineer and lived at the family plantation in Virginia. They had lost their fortune in The War but had managed to hold onto the house and land. Amelie was supposedly one of the most beautiful women in her time. She had the family, the beauty, and she was ambitious. She dreamed of becoming a writer and did publish a risque novel that was a bestseller. But it gave her a "Vamp" reputation and she played it to the hilt by flirting with every man she thought would be useful to her. She was very proud, vain, spoiled and a master manipulator. Archie was the eldest of 7 or 8 children who were left orphaned when their mother died young at age 37 and their father died suddenly a few years later. He was handsome, healthy, well educated as a lawyer, and one of the richest men in the world. He fell in love with Amelie but their marriage didn't last. Both of them ended up insane and alone. It was very sad. Everything the world had to give and these two squandered their lives. As King Solomon said in his book, Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities, All is vanity...Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, For this is man's all."

MsPenrod:
Walk This Way, the autobiography of Aerosmith and Wild Ducks Flying Backwards by Tom Robbins (I love this author!)

Sand Dune Reader:
Eating Fried Eggs with Chopsticks by Polly Evans and Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan.

Califia74:
The Darkest Child by Delores Phillips. Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy. Enough by Juan Williams.

LibrarianJack:
I'm smack dab in the middle of Lies at the Altar: The Truth about Great Marriages by Dr. Robin L. Smith. I'm getting married next April, and this book practically jumped off the shelf at me. As with any advice, I take what I need and leave the rest. I'm finding many great points that I've never addressed in the past. Dr. Smith provides unique exercises that seem to work, and she gives specific questions to ask before getting married. Give it a try if you're thinking of taking the plunge!

IggyMommy: 12/8/06 Utopia by Lincoln Child. A new amusement park with incredible state of the art technology is being stalked by a terrorist group demanding their newest technology. Great read! I really like Lincoln Child and his co-writer, Douglas Preston. I just finished A World Made Straight by Ron Rash. His newest book. Do a Google search on "Shelton Laurel Massacre" before reading this. Reading about the incident will give you a deeper insight into the background of this book. Ron Rash is a Southern writer who grew up in the western NC mountains and he writes fiction that is based on his knowledge of that area. Shelton Laurel is a real place and the massacre during the Civil War was a real event. Some of my own family were from there and experienced these gut wrenching times and it changed them forever just as it did the characters in this book based in the 1970's.

SunDiego: Just finished The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters. What a trip! If you like a combination of sci-fi, fantasy, and can suspend your credulity for 600 pages, this is a great read!

JKLibrarian: Malinche by Laura Esquivel. It's a historical fiction novel about Malinalli, Cortez's guide and translator. Long believed to be a traitor to her people, this novel paints her in a much more complex and sympathetic light. I am not as enthralled with it as I have been with Esquivel's other works, but it is certainly worth the read.

Rosencrantz: The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen. She has been described as Graham Greene meets Virginia Woolf. The prose is very dense, but incredibly poetic. It's about London during the bombings of WWII, and discovering how little you can ever really know about the people you love. I highly recommend it.
Yes, and I'm also rereading The Sisters by Mary S. Lovell. It's a beautifully written biography about the Mitford family, whose many daughters became the talk of England in the first half of the 20th century. The lives these women led were amazing. I usually find biographies boring, but this one is so good that I have to read it again.
Also, The Ordinary Princess by M.M. Kaye. This was my absolute favorite book when I was a little girl, and I still read it every year or two to recapture the magic. The illustrations, also done by M.M. Kaye, are so whimsical and lovely, and the story is precious.
And I'm making my boyfriend read The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, and consequently reading it again myself. This is a hard-boiled crime classic.

Anon: All Mortal Flesh by Julia Spencer Fleming. This series has great upstate NY atmosphere, Episopalian church politics, a dark mystery and great sexual attraction between the married police chief and the Episcopal priest (younger woman, formal army helicopter pilot).

Erica2 on 11/30/06: The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn; The Heart Has Reasons by Mark Klempner; Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism by Richard Robbins. See below for my comments.

IggyMommy on 11/18/06: Obsessed by Ted Dekker, H.G. Wells science fiction omnibus and A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.

Anon: Turn, Magic Wheel by Dawn Powell. It's wonderful.

SOK said: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee is on my nightstand. (See http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1890228,00.html.) Next up is The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar.

I'm also listening to The Accidental Tourist on CD on my commute.

Kylerhea said:
I'm finishing The Looming Tower:Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, and have just started The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo, strange bedfellows indeed. On my nightstand also is my MP3 player, because I usually have something I'm listening to. I just finished Running with Scissors for my book club this way, and now I have loaded The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax, which I read many years ago and will provide a friendly familiar contrast to the last listened to "book". The MP3 also has some of Nancy's podcasts and some NPR stuff, too. Looming and Edward Tulane were recommendations from Nancy from a podcast or her website, and I was grateful to be pointed to such great finds.

As for my "waiting to be read" pile, it is a large and dynamic stack, with titles going on and coming off (and getting lost) all the time.

Heidi said:
I've just cracked open Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd. It's fascinating! An early Christmas gift that I'm thoroughly enjoying..

Laurie said: I'm reading Forget The Cures, Find The Cause by Rayna Gangi. What a wonderful journey and an important book to have, especially if you have kids and also if you ae concerned at all about your health. She's such a good writer that I've ordered her other book, Mary Jemison, White Woman of The Seneca, for next week's bed time read.

Indigotima says: Right now it's Babbit by Sinclair Lewis; it's a copy that my mother had when she was in school.

Julie says: Brothers by Da Chen. Brand new, this book will grab you from page one. It's the story of two young men, born at the same time and both fathered by a powerful general. One brother is born to the general's wife and is raised in luxury, groomed as a leader himself. The other is born to a country woman who had a brief affair with the general and who throws herself off a cliff after the birth. The parallell of these two very different lives is utterly enthralling.

Winnie has checked and she has:
In Search of Shakespeare by Michael Woods
Father Christmas by Raymod Briggs (for when I'm too tired to read)
Parallel Lines by Ian Marchant; subtitled "every girl's big book of trains"

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith and Intuition, by Allegra Goodman. Both about academia, even if ithat is not the main thrust of each of the novels. --KBSarah

Plumsicle said:
Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko, which is turning out to be the best creative-thinking technique book out there. I never thought I had a creative cell in me until I started reading this book. A notebook is highly recommended to go through the exercises and catch those new ideas.
History in the Making by Kyle Ward. Illustrates how the recount of the same historical events in textbooks changes over time. Very eye-opening.
The Devils Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger. Want to read the book before I see the movie.
Very random, I know.....

Megan said:
To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee - I haven't read this for ages and it has been so lovely revisiting it. Also just finished 5 people you meet in heaven by Mitch Albom and God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Gingerman:

I have Uriel's Machine, and The Truth, on my nightstand right now. In the car, I'm rereading, after 30 years, The King Must Die, by Mary Renault. She's a really great story teller.

See also:

Critter's Mom's Nightstand Reading