Best Summer Reads-Now That it is Fall!

I read like a madwoman this summer. I read for my life and my soul. As I look back these are my favorite books. They surprise me!

1) A River Runs Through It, Norman MacLean: I had seen the movie but never read the book. Exquisitely written, a gem of a book. The prose is as clear and pure and distilled as the Montana rivers he writes about. For anyone who has a sibling they love like crazy, but cannot help, this book will make you weep.

Here is a beautiful excerpt:

Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

Wow.

2) The "His Dark Materials" trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), by Phillip Pullman: I found this when I was in the kids section of the library and decided to do some scouting for future reads for Theo. I was hooked. I read all three back to back and read every second I had for our entire beach vacation. They blew me away. I couldn't believe they were for children. The writing is better than in 95% of adult fiction, the story better than in 97% of adult fiction, and the philosophical ideas he tackles--of God, love, power, the soul--are the stuff of the greatest literature on earth. He says he was inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost.
Indeed I was so bewitched I began to wonder if I am indeed still a 12 year old girl, trapped in the body of a 42-year-old woman.

Here is what Pullman said about children's literature in a New Yorker profile (This made me feel better about being so smitten by a young adult novel)

Pullman’s appreciation for moral seriousness in fiction has made him deeply frustrated with adult contemporary literature. When “The Golden Compass” won the 1995 Carnegie Medal, a prize awarded by British librarians to the year’s best children’s book, he gave a speech in which he proclaimed, “There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.” He explained, “In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. . . . The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do.”

3) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz: If you have not read this, run, don't walk, and buy it now. The sheer inventiveness and energy of the prose will have you laughing and marveling from page one. Nothing I can say would do this book justice. It is like a new multi-cultural genre all its own.