Books for...Miscellanea!

Greetings, latent bibliophiles! I know you are clamoring for this last installment of books for you to read while on top of mountains (the first three were originally part of a failed Books To Read Atop Everest section), in airports, in trees, wherever. These are all the books on my tattered brainstorming paper that didn’t make it into one of my more clever categories.

Lucky for you, this will not be my absolute last foray into the cutthroat world of telling people what books to read: I am working on a list of fun and breezy books for, uh, older readers. It is tentatively titled “To Be Paired With Chardonnay: Jackie Wood’s Fun List of Low-Stress Books for People Who Like Harry Potter and Eat, Pray, Love.” It should be finished and posted here in the next week or so. Cheers!

Anyway, here it goes:

BOOKS FOR…

…EVERYWHERE ELSE!

• INTO THE WILD by Jon Krakauer: The enlightening and difficult true story of a young man who leaves society to wander around the US in a car, then a canoe, then on foot, this book call into question the merits of traditional values and whether or not they can work for everyone. This would be a good book to read with a group: people receive the often painful story very differently whether they identify more with the son McCandless or his flawed and largely clueless parents. The movie is lovely and visually stunning, but the book is the more graceful and complete picture of a young man both brave and lost.

• THREE CUPS OF TEA by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin: The story of one man’s mission to found schools for children in rural Pakistan as a way to counteract anti-American and jihadist sentiment, this is a story of much adventure and more heart. I highly recommend it: as you can read here, the book had quite a deep effect on me.

• HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins: If you are ever skeptical of the merit of books written for young adults, read this one. Set in a quasi-apocalyptic future North America, this wry and kinetic read follows the government-mandated Games, a sporting event in which two youths from each area of the country fight in a wilderness arena until only one is left alive. This is a one-sitting read: keenly observed and disturbingly current, I just couldn’t put it down.

• THE GLASS CASTLE by Jeannette Walls: My favorite memoir after Eat, Pray, Love, this honest, enlightening, and often painful story chronicles the writer’s highly dysfunctional family and childhood. Though she looks at her travails with humor and heart, this book made me so, so glad to be as boring as I am. It’s fun and easy to read, but the reader is still moved and learns something: the best kind of summer book.

• PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER by Stephen Chbosky: This funny, smart, and trippy (in more ways than one) read chronicles the high-school Charlie as he writes letters to an unknown recipient about the struggles and triumphs of his life as an American teenager. Featuring mix tapes, drug use, and other youthful antics, this book has more dark surprises than you would ever expect from its MTV Books publisher and the lime-green cover. One of the first books written specifically for young people that was loved by adult and lauded by critics, its cult following is richly deserved.

There you have it, dear readership! Thank you for following all 51-odd book suggestions, I hope you take a few and enjoy. And thank you also for visiting my site: according my handy-dandy free hit counter, nearly two hundred and thirty people have at least glanced at these brief bibliographic paragraphs. That’s awesome! I’m tickled that you all like books as much as I do. Please tell you friends and family about this list if you ever run out of books to suggest, and I am always open to starting it up again when you cross all these off of your “want-to-read” widget on your Facebook profile. Thanks again, cheers, and happy reading! Anna