But what have you read for me laaatelyyyyyy? (LIFO, this year)
August
The Tenth Circle	Jodi Picoult	My first Jodi Picoult, because I've generally looked down my nose at her as being not literary enough and too... Sophie Kinsella. Too girly, too easy, too candy. But I gotta say, this didn't suck. I read it in a few days, the perfect few days for it, needing to ignore my own pain by living in someone else's. A good vacation-from-your-head kind of book, in its suck-you-in ability (not in its light subject matter - rape? murder? fun!). Thanks to Marisa for lending it to me!
July (not much time to read at camp!)
What now	Ann Patchett	I love you, Marni. You too, Ann.
The Known World	Edward P Jones	I must say, the mind reels.
June
The Pursuit of Alice Thrift	Elinor Lipman	She's hit or miss... I'd say this was a miss.
The Genizah at the House of Shepher	Tamar Yellin	Another free book! Sent to me as an early review by Library Thing. The second book in two months to employ the expression "chalk and cheese" which I had hitherto never heard. He had his books spread ostentatiously on the table when his guest arrived, to create the impression of a great scholar, though in fact he was nothing of the kind. Raphaelovitch had read a great many books in his time, but was hampered by his inability to remember any of them. All he could recall were the titles, of which he kept a careful list tucked inside his sleeve for emergencies. He read at speed, believing that the mind could retain more that way. Apart from the standard texts he never went over a book twice, since anything of importance must have been stored in his brain the way sedimentary rocks are laid down by time. On the other hand, any book, once read, became his possession, and he could not bear to part with it.
The Discomfort Zone	Jonathan Franzen	This is a memoir which I believed, until page 30 or so, to be a novel. Once the realization hit that it was actually non-fiction, I felt a deep disappointment, though if I had been enjoying the read, and I had, what did it matter? It mattered because I had been expecting all the bits of life I'd been ingesting to ultimately Lead To Something, the way they invariably will in a good piece of genre fiction, narrative fiction. A good Tolstoy, where all those different lives would ultimately been seen to be inextricably intertwined, a good Dickens in which the handsome stranger in part two is later proven to be the son of the widow of the powerful landowner sent to jail in part one, a good John Irving in which the beating begins in the first paragraph and doesn't ease up the slightest bit for the next 250 pages. I'd already read The Corrections, after all; I knew what to expect. No, it's a memoir, and I still enjoyed it and read it to its finish, but without the expectations of It All Coming Together, and of course, it didn't. It wasn't fiction, it was Life. And the realization that accompanied all of this, that Life is actually life and that my own too, will be a memoir and not a novel, well, out of this hole I have not yet climbed.
May
Water for Elephants	Sara Gruen	I think I didn't like it as much as everyone else, but I liked it.
Lost in a Good Book	Jasper Fforde	"Thursday, that's not possible!" "Anything Is possible right now. We're in the middle of an isolated high-coincidental localized entropic field decreasement." "We're in a what?" "We're in a pseudoscientific technobabble." "Ah! One of those."
The Pillars of the Earth	Ken Follett	So unbelievably good. 900+ pages and it ended too soon.
April
Imagine Me & You	Billy Mernit
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn	Betty Smith
March
Gigi	Colette	Absolutely lovely. Simply delightful.
Step-Ball-Change	Jeanne Ray	A simple pleasure to pass the time during jury dury; a wonderful little birthday present. Within the first few pages of this book, my theme song, my favorite song, was mentioned. And later, a delightful character named Erica! And of course, a dance teacher. Loved it. (Jeanne Ray is Ann Patchett's mother!)
Eat, Pray, Love	Elizabeth Gilbert	I LOVED this book, despite its popularity :)
The Wisdom of Big Bird	Caroll Spinney and J Milligan	(and the Dark Genius of Oscar the Grouch): Lessons from a Life in Feathers
Shadow of the Wind	Carlos Ruiz Zafón	This book was not my style, exactly, in that it was a little too flowery (wayyyyy too many adjectives, wayyyyy too many similes, even for a metaphorphile like me), a little too gothic, medieval, something. I probably would have truly fallen in love with this book had I read it at a different period of my life, back when I was more into this style of writing. Despite all that, though, I did still really like it. You can't go too wrong with a mystery about lost books and secret authors, and there were many surprises and twists in the plot that I didn't anticipate. It was a book I could stay awake late into the night to read, and a book I could be excited to get back into after time away - that's a great review, from me. I might have enjoyed it more if I'd have made a character guide as I went along, though; I got a little lost in all the who's-who and what relationships everyone bore to one another. Thank you, Lewis!!
February
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories	Nikolai Gogol	Finally read all the other stories, in addition to "The Overcoat", again.
Me & Emma	Elizabeth Flock	Without giving it away, I'll tell you that this book uses a technique I've seen a lot lately, yet it never fails to surprise me! See also Good Cop, Bad Cop.
How to Eat Like a Hot Chick	Jodi Lipper and Cerina Vincent	Bought it. Read it. Hated it. Returned it.
The Break-up Diet .	Annette Fix	An advance copy that I reviewed for Library Thing. Hooray for free books!
January
Skinny Bitch	Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman
Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn't Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out	with an introduction by Lemony Snicket	The first book ever for which it's been easier to type in the ISBN instead of the title or author to find it on amazon... I love McSweeneys.
Amphigorey Too	Edward Gorey
The Clique	Lisi Harrison	Um, don't ask. Unless you want to see my rendition of "My Favorite Things". Don't be confused: this book is not one of them.
Girl With a Pearl Earring	Tracy Chevalier

I have here lists of just about every book I've read in past years, though some years are nicely formatted and some are a big mess. One day I'll get them all looking nice, but when? Oh yeah, the 23rd...

Here we go. This is some thrilling stuff, folks! We have: 2007 and 2006, pretty clean, and 2005, very messy. We have 2004, also messy but slightly more interesting. Here is 2003 and 2002, which I think aren't as bad.

Hey, what's your favorite book ever? What would you recommend as a Great Book to just about anyone? E-me!

By the way, the reason these books are all hyperlinked to their pages on amazon.com is that I'm an amazon.com "associate", meaning that if you click through to amazon using any of the links on this page and then buy *anything* (even if it's NOT the item I have hyperlinked), then I get "credit" for having referred you in and I get some little percent of what you spend. So I LOVE IT WHEN YOU CLICK THROUGH! Please do it all the time, every time you want to buy something on amazon, come here first! You're the best!