Before I go into the subject of fun reading books, I wanted to share with you a little personal history.  I moved to Weston in 1998 just before getting married and while working full-time as an executive recruiter for Reebok International, Ltd.  It was until October 1999 that I had my first child, and at this point, I wasn’t very networked in the community.  In other words, I barely had any friends….  Once my daughter was born, and I had scaled down my work schedule significantly, I decided to attend every WCCA (Weston Community Children’s Association) event, Newcomers event, Wellesley Mother’s Forum event and more.  I was determined to build a life – and a group of close friends - for myself and my family in the burbs.  As part of this initiative, I started a book club in Weston with a group of good friends in 2001.  Sadly the book club has disbanded – I think we are all over-scheduled at this time in our lives – but we had an awesome 10-year run, and I wanted to share with you a list of some of our favorites over the years as well as some that I read outside of the book club as we were gearing down.  Here are the mostly fiction faves (in no particular order):

• The Help, by Kathryn Stockett – I’ve never run into a person who didn’t love this book about the intermingling and interconnectedness of the lives of white and black families in Jackson, Mississippi in the late 1960s.  This is currently #6 on the New York Times Best Sellers List.
• The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory – this was a unanimous favorite in our book club; a saucy, steamy historical non-fiction account of life in the time of Henry VIII from the perspective of Anne Boleyn’s sister, Mary.
• The Lace Reader, by Brunonia Barry - part of the reason I loved this was because it takes place in Salem, MA, and is filled with mind twists, intrigue and mystery surrounding a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace and who have a long-standing history of secrets that unravel during the course of the book.
• Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen – a tale of those in the circus life during the Great Depression.  This is currently #1 on the New York Times Best Sellers List and has also been made into a movie, featuring Robert Pattinson as Jacob, the protagonist, and Reese Witherspoon as Marlena, Jacob’s love interest
• The Road, by Cormac McCarthy – this is a disturbing book and hard to get through but it truly is a story of pure and unconditional love for one’s child.
• The Man Who Turned Into Himself, by David Ambrose – another story of mind twists, secrets and intrigue which leaves you unsure of what is real and not real.  Could a parallel universe really exist?
• The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak – once again, I have never met anyone who has read this book and didn’t love it.  The book is narrated by Death himself and set in Nazi Germany.
• In The Woods, by Tana French – this too is filled with mind twists, intrigue, mystery and secrets – can you tell that I love these themes?  The story starts with the murder of a 12-year-old girl and links to a disappearance of two children twenty years before in the same suburb of Dublin, Ireland.
• Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout – a series of short stories with Olive Kitteridge as the common character and link throughout all of the stories.
• Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford – I absolutely loved this book; it really was a bittersweet tale (hence the title) of a Chinese boy and Japanese girl who fall in love in Seattle at the time when the Japanese were being sent to the internment camps.
• A Stranger Like You, by Elizabeth Brundage – I found this in the ultra-cool Books & Books in South Beach, FL, and I loved it.  Set in Los Angeles, this story is a twisted tale of several very different people whose lives strangely and disastrously intersect.
• The Girl With The Dragon Tatto and The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson – #23 and #25, respectively, on the New York Times Best Seller List. I’ve read both of these, and I don’t know which I liked better.  Lisbeth Salander, a reclusive, computer hacker, and Mikael Blomkvist, a famed journalist, pair up to solve disappearances, murder mysteries and much more in the world of evil. I have not read the third book in the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, which is currently #12 on the New York Times Best Seller List.
• The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y.K. Lee – the story of a piano teacher in Hong Kong in the 1950s who becomes involved with a man whose secretive past makes its way into her present day life.
• A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey – we all probably remember the “Oprah” controversy with this book about addiction and rehab, but I loved it whatever it was – truth, fiction or a mixture of both.
• Drowning Ruth, by Christina Schwarz – another book filled with mystery and deep family secrets that surround the tragic drowning of Ruth’s mother.
• The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger – in my opinion, the movie did not do justice to this book about a man who continually and consistently travels through time into and out of his wife’s life.

I must admit as I contemplate these favorite books of mine, I am having a bit of trouble remembering the whole story, all of the characters and some of the subtleties of the plot.  In fact, I’m thinking it may be time for a re-read of some of these.   But anyway, I digress….  Back to the subject at hand – do you have other favorites and/or have you read any of these?  I’m also curious to hear your thoughts on the electronic aspect of reading a book.  Many have made the switch from holding a tangible book to using a kindle.  What is your preference?  I can’t wait to hear….