The Wilder Life, by Wendy McClure

The author was as much of a Laura fan as a child as I, but she says she grew out of it, only to rediscover the books soon after the death of her mother. She and her husband make the rounds of all the extant Laura houses on a journey to rediscover the 1880s and her childhood. Good book, a bit 'skimmy' but fun for Little House die-hards like me.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu

On a Day Like This, by Peter Stamm

Hmmm, this book reminds me of The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, though the story is quite different. It's just about a very European and angsty man.

Beyond that, it's a story of coasting through life in an emotion-free zone until shocked out of it by the possibility of change and the discovery that everything that has happenend in the past decade has been a holding pattern. Oh, and it's about love. I think. And it takes place (mostly) in Paris.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer (on CD)

Disclaimer 1: I tried reading Foer's Everything Is Illuminated which sounded wonderful...till I tried read it. Gave up; too weird.

Disclaimer 2: I wouldn't have read this book with my eyes. It's also very weird. But the narrators are excellent in this version, and I was hooked on the kid...the main character.

The kid, Oskar Schell is precocious in the extreme. At age 9 he knows far more than he 'should' about many things, including the death of his father in the World Trade Center tragedy. Oskar discovers a key in his father's closet months after his death, and spends the next several months searching for the owner of the lock based on some very slim evidence.

Interwoven in the main story are the stories of Oskar's grandmother and grandfather--separate stories but both equally sad and poignant that also begin with bombs, bombs that were dropped on Dresden over 60 years ago.

Wonderful stories, really fabulous characterizations of all the very different people. This is probably the first book I've ever read that made me think that living in New York City might not be such a bad thing.