Oddly enough I don't get much time to read (which is ironic because I'm a librarian) but I have been reading Willa Cather's books. My Antonia is her best known, but there are others I enjoyed just as much--Shadows on the Rock, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Lucy Gayheart, Lost Lady are some. Right now I'm reading Of Human Bondage (no, not an S&M theme

If you like mysteries, Harlan Coben has an excellent series--Tell No One, Caught, Just One Look, etc. He also has a series about a sports agent who solves crimes, but in my opinion those are not as good.

For the poster who likes fantasy type novels--try Watership Down. I've read it several times and always cry at the end.

Just now it isColleen Mc Coulloughs Antony and Cleopatra , a very well written book.
Thanks to my Parents I have been an Avid Reader , during my 6 Years in the Merchant Navy
I managed to read every book in ea.Ships Library . Be it History , Mysteries , Science
Fiction or Philosophy as long as they are well written and entertaining . Unfortunately Adam , you have sidetracked me , and thank God that you did , my Brain was getting rusty in retirement .Keep writing and I will keep notes for future enjoyment .

The book HUNGER by Knut Hamsun is the best book I have ever read and I have 1000s its about a man who is a writer and is down on his luck and sometime dying of hunger, is he trying to die or is he bad with money, read it and let me know what you think.

Since I last posted I've been reading mostly non-fiction. The one novel I read was by Jose Saramago, a Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize a few years back. The book, "Death with Interruptions," is a curious story about a fictional country where an anthropomorphic "Death" (a hooded and robed skeleton with a female personality) mysteriously stops working. The resultant turmoil that ensues in this country is sometimes thoughtful, sometimes mind-boggling and often humorous. The conclusion is difficult to imagine, but then it's a fantasy...
I also finished reading "A Band of Brothers" by Stephen Ambrose - the story of one company of soldiers who in WWII parachuted into Normandy and later were involved in the Battle of the Bulge and finally were the first allied group to overtake Hitler's hideaway at Berchtesgaden - a good read if you like factual war stories.
Biographies are a favorite of mine, especially if they are well written. I just finished "The First American" by H. W. Brands. It chronicles the life of Benjamin Franklin. It is an intimate and thoughtful portrayal of the man who, probably more than any other single person, was responsible for the experiment in governance that most of us Americans in the USA pretty much take for granted. It's over 700 pages, but they go fast - well worth the read.

I love to read realistic fiction. Right now I am reading Between Sundays. It is very good.
Author is Kingsbury.........nice and light........summertime.......today was last day of school.........with students.......I love summer

I just finished a wonderful book - Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay. It switches back and forth between July 1942 and 2002 in Paris. It follows Sarah, a young Jewish girl that is "rounded up" along with 4,000 other Jewish men, women, and children and Julia, an American reporter researching the events that took place 60 years earlier.

and Hardymum - my husband and I love Harlan Coben!! We've been reading him for a while.

I noticed that you told people that you liked reading books. Like yourself, I LOVE reading books. I read a lot of fiction but lately I seem to be leaning towards non-fiction (lots of biographies, world history etc.) My majors at university were Computing Science and Math but since I graduated about a billion years ago, I've started reading more on those subjects. Computing Science seems to be progressing at an incredibly fast rate and no matter how much I read, I still feel like I'm falling behind.

Just finished a great book by Jared Diamond - "Guns, Germs, and Steel - The Fates of Human Societies" - This book won the Pulitzer Prize and it's easy to see why - it's fascinating! He's a bio-geographer and has done most of his work in New Guinea, but he pulls together an amazing amount of material into a relatively short (440 pages) book and concludes that societies develop the way they do not because of the inherent abilities of the people in them but because of the environmental resources available to them. Well worth the read.

Dick - Sounds like a good one! That will go on my wish list. I'm reading and enjoying a nonfiction right now - Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. It is the parent-recommended-summer-reading selection for the school my children attend.

Thanks for the mention of two books I've wanted to get to for some time, "A Band of Brothers", and "Guns, Germs and Steel"... I'm about a hundred pages of finishing Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", (which I should have read in college, but would not have appreciated as much as I have now). Timeless, and truly epic, and well worth the last several days days I've spent with it.

Selected "Guns, Germs and Steel" from the stacks today. Finished "My Epic Tale" (Atlas Shrugged) and am now ready to get back to a bit of non-fiction... Would like to have had a copy of "A Band of Brother's" in my hands to dive into, but the only thing listed as available was an audio recording and a DVD of the book. Nothing aside from that... Hmmmm.

Usedart - I read Atlas Shrugged a few years ago as my "read at least one classic a year" personal challenge, and I loved the language of the book. Her choice of words and phrasing is delicious! I would recommend The Fountainhead by Rand as well, but make sure to give yourself a healthy break in-between. It's about half the size, but you still want to have some distance between the two books. I just got the third Stieg Larsson - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I'm devouring it.

Here's an interesting book that was on the NYT best seller list a couple years ago. "The Zookeeper's Wife" by Diane Ackerman. It's based on the diary of Antonina Zabinski who, with her husband Jan, ran the Warsaw, Poland zoo. They lost most of their animals during the Nazi invasion and occupation of WWII, but they used their surviving zoo facilities (including empty cages) to harbor fugitive Jews and support the underground army throughout the war. An amazing story!

Just finished a book by David Sedaris - "Me Talk Pretty One Day" - It's a series of autobiographical essays about childhood experiences in North Carolina and adulthood experiences in New York and Paris. I read it because a couple friends said they had never laughed so hard. Well, I found it humorous, but I think I laughed out loud only once. It could be that my funny bone is a little harder to reach than most, so if you are an easy laugher this may be a book for you.

I really enjoy inspirational books, The Seat of the Soul was exceptional, feel good reading.

I'm back to reading novels. Just finished a good one by Chang-Rae Lee, "Aloft." The author is a Korean-American and I expected a cross-cultural theme when I bought the book, I was surprised (though not unpleasantly) to find the protagonist to be an Italian-American living in suburban Long Island. The book is narrated by the central character who is very introspective. It deals much with the strength of family. A very good read.