The best thing I’ve read this year was “The Help”.

My computer has been broken for a month (horrors! I have been using my kids’ computer) so I have plowed right through my gigantic pile of books that has been languishing for a very long time.

My favorites of the last month (in order):

Recipe for a Perfect Marriage by Morag Prunty (it’s fiction. And WONDERFUL! I don’t generally care for fiction but I loved this)

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I’ve been avoiding this one for a while but figured I needed to read it before the movie comes out. I so loved it (!!!) that I went straight to the bookstore and bought the sequel “Committed” which tops the list of most disliked books of the summer.

Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Weed that Strings . . . by Alan Bradley. The guy wrote his first novel (sweetness) at almost age 70. His books are the most charming mysteries.

Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani

My Life as an Experiment by A.J. Jacobs. A.J. is my very favorite humorist ever.

My least favorites:

Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert. It should be titled “A Survey of the Horribleness of Western Marriage”.

Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich. I really wanted to like this but she was just so all over the place. I couldn’t follow it.

I loved looking through the lists and writing down some to try to get from the library. I haven’t been reading much recently, concentration low and children are around. Next week we have book group and so I am struggling my way through Number 10 by Sue Townsend. I think it is meant to be funny, but I find it unpleasant to make fun of others so much as it is obviously based on real people. I recently reread and enjoyed A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly, and The Glassblower of Murano by Marina Fiorato.

Loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Peel Society. FELL IN LOVE with the characters. So charming.

Addicted to all things Brandon Sanderson, Jessica Day George…

Fablehaven the fifth book – YAY Brandon Mull. My fav of the series.

Reread Screwtape for book group – always love me some C.S. Lewis.

…and a plug for one of my fav YA books – Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt – many symbols of Christ…but only if you’re looking. A very lyrical story.

I want to be Sydney Bristow… if I was single, un-attached… I’d love to kick some a$$ in the defense of kids, truth and light.

Also… I was always idignant about the lack of recycling at BYU and UT when I was a student back then… that was back in the 90s. Coming from Calif…it’s always a way of life.

Love you C-DUB.

I mean, come on, Angelina Jolie is much sexier than Jennifer Aniston. I think I’d probably rather be friends with Jennifer, but it was a rhetorical question.

I loved The Help, Bloodroot, The Host; I also re-read East of Eden and thought once again what a great writer Steinbeck was. I didn’t like The Lost Symbol, either. I thought it was rather boring. I thought, “this is what all the hoopla was about?

I enjoyed Jodi Piccoult’s book about the boy with Autism. Can’t remember the title.

For myself, I want to be strong and uberheroic so I can get it all done.

On this summer, do you mean what I could do if I could do anything this summer, or what I wish I could do within reason? If the first, I’d like to go to Ireland and England and do genealogy research. If the second, I am doing what I can do within reason.

I just posted on the AML blog about lists, and your list reminds me of my list of things to talk about on my personal blog, as I think about them–so I’ll have something to post each week.

Hooray for lists! At least they help us feel that we are getting some of it done.

Do you really want to know what I’ve been reading? Probably not, but what the heck. The two best books I’ve read so far this summer are both by LDS authors: I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER by Dan Wells (amazing look at overcoming the natural man, among other things) and PRINCESS OF GLASS by Jessica Day George (wonderful little reinterpretation of Cinderella). Trashy book (which I read for one of my book clubs–I have three–doesn’t everyone?): DEAD UNTIL DARK by Charlaine Harris–interesting characters, but I don’t think I want to read any more in the series.

By the way, I liked THE HOST a lot, and am excited to hear that there are two sequels in the works. (Of course, I am first and foremost a science fiction and fantasy writer and reader, so my preferences may not be indicative of anything.)

I’m interested in hearing what you have to say about ABRAHAM LINCOLN, VAMPIRE HUNTER. After reading PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES I decided to be very wary of that particular kind of re-interpretation. Such books may be clever ideas, but if the execution is shoddy, I find I can’t get very excited about them.

Have read THE BOOK THIEF, and thought the choice of narrator was particularly interesting, and A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS, and loved that the author is male–how cool is that, after all? I also read THE HELP, but had a hard time because I could vividly imagine what would have happened to those women if they had ever been caught, and I really didn’t want to read about that.

Finally, I am always ready to suggest books that I have read recently and LOVED. So how about HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET by Jamie Ford, and THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG by Muriel Barbery, and WHEN CRICKETS CRY by Charles Martin?