More Good Books I've Read Over Here

So, I finished Rachel's Holiday. It was pretty good...one of those books that leaves me bawling and with a headache, but I'd rather be crying over a book or movie than something more important, I guess. Some of my favorite and most memorable books and movies make me cry floods.
As I've promised, I will outline some of the other good books I've read during my deployment. In no way are they going to be in the order that I read them or am I going to order them at all. I really have no favorite out of these books, and I've certainly read a lot more than these while here, but these are the ones worth writing about.

Rosie Dunne by Cecilia Ahern

This is the second book I've read by Cecilia Ahern, and most likely not the last. I had been eyeing P.S. I Love You in the bookstores for months after it came out in hardback waiting for it to come out in paperback, so it'd be cheaper and a little easier to read because I prefer paperback. When I finally did read P.S. I Love You, there was a postcard inside advertising her new book, Rosie Dunne. P.S. I Love You was an AWESOME book, so of course I watched out on Amazon and such for Rosie Dunne to come out. Of course, I had hoped to get that in paperback also, but I ended up buying the hardback copy.
Rosie Dunne is about the title character and her best friend Alex, who just happens to be a guy. They're perfect for each other, but life gets in the way of things a bit. The whole story is told through emails, letters, cards and other correspondence, which puts a neat spin on it all and it makes me wish I was better about writing by keeping in touch with people. It's even hard for me to write emails most of the time, let alone snail mail!

The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve

These next two books are Oprah's Book Club books. One of my very first "adult books" was She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb in seventh grade, and just about every Oprah's Book Club book I've read since then has been really, really good.
The Pilot's Wife is about a woman who tries to find out what happened to her husband when his plane went down in the North Atlantic off the coast of Ireland on a flight from Ireland to the U.S., and her discoveries turn her world upside down. The story is shrouded in mystery and includes a lot of twists and turns and the end is quite surprising, making you ask yourself how well you actually know the people closest to you. Great read.

Icy Sparks by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

As mentioned above, Icy Sparks in another Oprah's Book Club book. It's about an orphan girl named Icy Sparks who lives with her grandparents in Eastern Kentucky. Anyway, Icy Sparks is told in first person, and it tells the story of her struggle with Tourette Syndrome as a young girl. It takes place in the 1950's, and throughout her childhood, no one could diagnose her, and she was frequently the subject of ridicule. The story is narrated by the adult Icy and her story is extremely heart-wrenching and at the same time, heart-warming. Reading this book brought back memories of another fabulous book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon.



Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog by John Grogan

Marley and Me was kind of a random book I ordered off of Amazon. I was buying some headphones for my mom and to get free shipping, I bought Marley and Me for myself. Sounded like a neat story, which it definitely was.
Marley and Me tells the story of the author and the antics of his hyperactive yellow Labrador retriever named Marley. When the author and his wife get married, they decide to get a puppy as a trial-run before parenthood, and Marley sure turns out to be a handful! He destroys their house, gets kicked out of obedience school, and defaces a pristine doggy beach. However, he is a loyal and trusted companion of the author and his wife throughout Marley's life and the growing of their family. This book had me alternating between laughing so hard I woke my roommates and bawling my eyes out. Very good book. Really made me miss having a pet.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

Prep is about a girl from small-town Indiana who spends her high school years away from her family at an elite boarding school in Massachusetts. Lee Fiora was one of the top students in her class back in South Bend, but she becomes a little less than average when she goes to Ault. During her four years there, she doesn't really fit in, which makes life hard for her, but she eventually finds her place in the food chain. She feels distanced from her parents back in Indiana, makes and loses friends, and disgraces herself and her school in a very public way. Prep defines social classes extremely well and it makes us all remember the excruciating pain it is to be a teenager.
One of my roommates reccommended this book to me. It was hard to put down.


I'm A Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson is one of today's favorite travel writers. I bought this book on October 10, 2002, the day I graduated from basic training, and it was kind of hard for me to get through because I had other things going on, but I finally finished it here on deployment. It's actually a really good book to just pick up and start reading from anywhere actually.
Bill Bryson lived for 25 years in England and then decided to move with his family back to his native America in 1995. The first few years of living in New Hampshire, he wrote a column in an English newspaper about his experiences and the differences between the two countries and his experiences with getting to know his own country again. I'm A Stranger Here Myself is pretty much a compilation of those columns. Some of his anecdotes will make you cry and other will make you laugh hysterically.

Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner

I read Good In Bed while I was in California, and that became one of my favorite books ever, so I've tried to read all of Jennifer Weiner's books so far. I read In Her Shoes while I was at JRTC, and that was a goodie too. I can't wait to see the movie and read her two newest books, Goodnight Nobody and The Guy Not Taken. She really has a knack for making interesting, multi-layered characters.
Little Earthquakes is about the trials and tribulations of first-time motherhood and trying to deal with family problems at the same time. It tells the stories of four very different women, all new mothers, who live very different lives but become good friends. One is a chef and can't stand her mother-in-law who dresses her new daughter in horrible clothes, another is an event planner whose husband lost his job right before the baby comes so she has to go back to work after her baby's born, there's a wife of a famous basketball player who had cheated on her. These three women met at a prenatal yoga class and became fast friends. Also entering their circle is a Hollywood starlet who comes back to her native Philadelphia to get over the shock of a terrible tragedy.


Like I said before, I've read a bunch of books while I've been over here, but these are the ones I remember most right off the top of my head, and these are the ones actually worth reading. I do have a weakness for trashy romance novels that I can get through in just a couple days, and I've read my fair share of those. Their pull kind of fascinates me, actually. The formula is basically the same for all of them, and they all end just about the same way, but I can't help but read them. Maybe it's the sense of accomplishment that I get from being able to read them so quickly? I don't know.