Good Reads Lately

This year one of my 36 in 365 goals was to read 25 books from my goodreads list. I'm happy to say I've blown this one out of the water and am already on my 30th book with two months still left in the year. And only one of them did I have to listen to on double speed in order to finish in time for my book club meeting! Some are newer and some are older but hopefully this list of my favourites will help you find a book that you can't put down, because isn't that just the best? All of the summaries and images are copied from goodreads.com.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle's Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol...

We are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
Meet the Cooke family. Our narrator is Rosemary Cooke. As a child, she never stopped talking; as a young woman, she has wrapped herself in silence: the silence of intentional forgetting, of protective cover. Something happened, something so awful she has buried it in the recesses of her mind...

Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok
When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worked int he evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life like the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family's future resting on he shoulders, or her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition. Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles...

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist names Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten...


Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, "old same," in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she's painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments...

Wonder by R.J. Palacio

August Pullman was born with a facial deformity that prevented him from going to a mainstream school - until now. He's about to start 5th grade at Beecher Prep, and if you've ever been the new kid then you know how hard that can be. The thing is Auggie's just an ordinary kid, with an extraordinary face. But can he convince his new classmates that he's just like them, despite appearances?...

Have you read any of these titles? If not, give one a try and let me know how you like it!