Your Best Reads of the Second Quarter (April - June 2009)

Since I have a little time to spare and expect to be very busy for the next few weeks, I thought I'd start this best of the quarter thread. Traditionally, the idea is to aim for no more than five books and, equally traditionally, I have cheated on this!

With the caveat that I may add to this over the next two weeks, here's how the best books of the quarter are shaping up for me.

Fiction
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić
In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien
Nobody Move by Denis Johnson
The Karla trilogy by John Le Carré, including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People, particularly the last two

Nonfiction
The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen

It is still too early for me to say. I have more books to read for June. Back at the end of the month. :)

I think these are my top five, but I reserve the right to come back and amend if necessary before the end of the month!

Life and Fate by Vasiliĭ Grossman
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
Clara by Janice Galloway
Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić

Tongue: A Novel - Kyung-Ran Jo
Frida's Bed - Slavenka Drakulic
Counting Coup - G.D. Gearino
The Soloist - Mark Salzman
My Latest Grievance - Elinor Lipman

Although it is a little too soon to tell for sure, I think I can at least say these four will make it in to my top 5:

Blood Rites by Jim Butcher
Corambis by Sarah Monette
Drawn Together (an ebook) by Z.A. Maxfield
Backup by Jim Butcher (the short story that got me interested in picking up the Dresden series again)

I still may get a couple more reads in this month so I'll reserve judgment on my fifth choice, especially since I can't make up my mind at the moment.

edited to add

I'm going to make my fifth choice now: Camp Hell by Jordan Castillo Price.

I love Mary Oliver. I haven't read "Thirst."

Wake by Lisa McMann - good YA title; looking forward to reading the sequel Fade
Dracula by Bram Stoker - great gothic fun
Here Be Dragons by Sharon Kay Penman - good historical novel set mainly in 13th century Wales
Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres - the standout, beautifully written albeit with some too-divergent sections; filled with unforgettable characters; with some editing would go way up on a lot of lists
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, wonderfully sustained suspense; had to go back and re-read the mysterious opening of the book after finishing this one

As of today, these are my top five, in the order that I read them:

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
The Fat Man and Infinity by Antonio Lobo Antunes
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
The Armies by Evelio Rosero
Ravel by Jean Echenoz

Honorable mention:
Boven is het stil (The Twin) by Gerbrand Bakker
Frida's Bed by Slavenka Drakulic
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro

I expect that the book I'm currently reading, Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa, will make the top 5 list, so Ravel will probably be bumped to the Honorable Mention list.

7: jnwelch I love Penman's books and own a set of them to re-read every now and then. I highly recommend the next two books in the trilogy you have started Falls the Shadow and The Reckoning and also The Sunne in Splendor which is a stand alone book about the War of the Roses.

I have three books which rated 5/5 for me:

If I stay by Gayle Forman - Y/A
American Gods by Neil Gaiman - fantasy
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier classic/gothic mystery and romance.
edited to add:
The Outlander by Gil Adamson

Of course I would recommend those books to anyone to read.

Two runners up on 4 stars is:
The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow - fiction/American history (Red Scare)
Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond - non fiction / history of civilisations

I've been very fortunate, in having read many terrific books in the past 3 months, this is what I came up with:
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada easily a contender for best book of the year!
Peace Like A River by Leif Enger
Lost City of Z by David Grann
Guards by Ken Bruen
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Well, I agree with ficus, it is too soon to know for sure. I do know that
Isaac's Storm will make the list :)

#3, christiguc, I read Life and Fate a few years ago and consider it one of the most remarkable and best books I've ever read.

#10 msf59, Every Man Dies Alone was one of my best books of the first quarter.

I missed the first quarter thread, so here are two lists:

First Quarter:
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

Second Quarter:
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Music and Silence by Rose Tremain
Regeneration by Pat Barker
A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
(subject to change if I read something wonderful in the next 10 days)

(And I did make two changes, adding Regeneration and Birdsong.)

My best reads:
In cold blood by Truman Capote
Memoirs of a geisha by Arthur Golden
The joy luck club by Amy Tan

All and all, it wasn't a very spectacular 3 months of reading, but just okay. And maybe something excellent will come the next two weeks.

>1 rebeccanyc: Berlin Alexanderplatz is high up in my TBR-pile, so I'm looking forward to it now!

Isaac's Storm
Schuyler's Monster
Columbine

all nonfiction.. recommended.

eta

Columbine..

The Worst Hard Time

Last Waltz in Vienna

Lark & Termite

In This House of Brede

The Mammoth Cheese

I have 4 for now. Hopefully I'll read another so good by the end of the month that I'll have to come back and add it!

In the order I read them:
Uncle Tom's Cabin
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Girl with a Pearl Earring

Border Songs by Jim Lynch
The Spare Room by Helen Garner
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

and, if I hurry to finish, probably Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

Bonus: ABC3D by Marion Bataille, which takes two minutes to read (if you’re reading slowly and savoring it). Don’t want to hunt it down? -- watch it here (audio alert).

I've amended my list in #1 to include the whole Karla trilogy by John le Carré instead of just The Honourable Schoolboy, but other than that I don't expect the list to change unless I finish the book I'm reading, The Coldest March: Scott's Fatal Antarctic Expedition by the end of the month.

And I just edited my list as well, replacing A Number and Outlander with Regeneration and Birdsong. That was hard, however!

Wow, the second quarter is already over? I led myself to believe it had been a slow reading season because only one book pulled out of my memory when reading these posts, but now I go back and see all the wonderful things I've read...wow! They are, from best on:

Fiction
1. The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
3. Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
4. Dirty Little Angels by Chris Tusa
5. Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon

Nonfiction
1. Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love by Myron Uhlberg
2. Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties by Beth Kobliner
3. Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love by Jonathan Fields

1. The Dawkins Delusion? - by Alister E McGrath and Joanna Colicutt McGrath
2. Sherlock Holmes: the complete illustrated short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
4. Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
5. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Goes without saying that the first is non-fiction and the rest are fiction. I won't have finished The Idiot by the end of June but I've read enough to put it on the list.

So many to choose from this quarter, but if I must...

1. The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
2. Waiting by Ha Jian
3. The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
4. Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
5. 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

I think I can do mine now:

1. The Terror by Dan Simmons (4 1/2 stars)
2. The Reckoning by Sharon Kay Penman (4 1/2 stars)
3. The Quincunx by Charles Palliser (4 1/2 stars)
4. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (4 1/2 stars)
5. The Civil War, A Narrative: Fort Sumpter to Perryville by Shelby Foote (4)

I had a good quarter, these were my top favorites that I gave the highest rating:

1. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
2. Just the Sexiest Man Alive by Julie James
3. The Summer Garden by Paullina Simons

#10 msf59 - two of the books on your list this quarter are among my favorites -- Peace Like a River and The Book Thief. What a great quarter you've had!

But so have I!! Here are mine:

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips
The Last Bridge by Teri Coyne

and, a long all-time favorite that I re-read once again:

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

>You have a heck of a good list too! I'm just getting started on The Shadow of the Wind, so I'm sure I'll be reading The Angel's Game somewhere down the road. Middlesex was easily one the best I read last year! Here's to an even better 3rd qtr!

OK, I guess I'm finally ready to list my favorites for the quarter:

In no particular order:

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse** by Louise Erdrich
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Crow Lake by Mary Lawson

**Best of the best.

My top five for the second quarter, in the order I read them:

Corambis by Sarah Monette (which is pretty well a shoe-in for my Best of 2009 list)
Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop
Heir to the Shadows by Anne Bishop
Queen of the Darkness by Anne Bishop (if these three do end up on my Best of 2009 list, I'll count 'em as a series instead)
Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold

Okay, it's so close to the end of the quarter that I can't imagine I'll be lucky enough to read another 5-star rated book (tho if I do there's always the edit feature :) so here are my favorites in the order in which I read them:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (audio)
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death-Charlie Huston
The Cavalier of the Apocalypse-Susanne Alleyn (ARC by LTAuthor)

For the first 2/3 of the quarter, the only really special book I'd read was Oscar Wao. Then, in the past 3 weeks, I scored on the last three. These four were all extraordinarily good in quite different ways, and each is from a different genre.

I've got to say, since joining LT a few years ago, my reading horizon has expanded immeasurably even as my TBR list has lengthened alarmingly.

This quarter was very hard to trim it to 5 books. In no certain order.

People of the Book byGeraldine Brooks
All Other Nights by Dara Horn
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
I am the Messenger by Markus Zusak
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larson

I could list about 5-6 more. One More ?
Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

Lots of good reading lately. My top 5 for the second quarter are (in the order I read them):

Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips
The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips (no relation)
The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown
The Given Day by Dennis Lehane
The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins

These books blew me away (in no particular order):

The Plague of Doves
Let the Great World Spin
The Alchemist

These are my pick for the second quarter:

The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
St. Agnes' Stand by Thomas Eidson
Still Life by Louise Penny
Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

In no particular order:

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

all rated 5 stars.

Two rated 4.5 stars that still stand out to me are:

Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher and
The Help by Kathryn Stockett

These are not in any particular order:
Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street by Michael Davis
Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant
Between Here and April by Deborah Copaken Kogan
Going Down Jericho Road by Michael Honey
Praying for Sheetrock by Melissa Fay Greene

Greene's book, by the way, is perfect for the person who thinks s/he might not like nonfiction. The writing is beautiful, and it's an incredible story of individuals in a small Georgia town.

Read a lot of good, but not great, books this quarter. However, managed to find three with a 4.5 or 5 stars.

Lark and Termite (5 stars)
Sweetsmoke (4-1/2 stars)
Ptolemy's Gate (4-1/2 stars)

It was a slow quarter reading-wise (increasing work obligations), but I did have a few excellent reads.
Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler
Firefly Cloak by Sheri Reynolds
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
Columbine by Dave Cullen

My best reads now that the quarter is over:

Chanur's Legacy by C.J. Cherryh
The Snake Stone by Jason Goodwin
Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich
The Prophet Murders by Mehmet Murat Somer
The Cutting Season & Quiet Teacher by Arthur Rosenfeld

The Rosenfeld books really blend into 1.
2 are humorous: Fearless Fourteen and Chanur's Legacy
1 is difficult in terms of liking the content, but its very memorable: The Prophet Murders
The Snake Stone is the second in the series and better than the first, but I don't know if it can be appreciated as much without the first.

Non-Fiction:
The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson

Funny, interesting, informative, well written.

No particular order:

Choice Theory by William Glasser (non fiction) - truly one of the best "self help" books I've read in my 41 years of life.

Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder (non fiction) - how one man truly can change the world

Sweeping up Glass by Carolyn Wall (fiction) - wonderful surprise from an ARC

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson (fiction) - just exceptional fiction

Someone Knows my Name by Lawrence Hill (fiction) - great novel, historical fiction

This hasn't been my best reading quarter, but the best of the bunch are:

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by Jose Saramago
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare

41> Oh, but you've got some great classics there!

True. My best books of the quarter were wonderful, it's just that there weren't many great books to choose from.

#41 I've got Barchester Towers on my iPod. Looking forward to it.

First Quarter

Keeping the House by Ellen Baker
Angel Falls by Kristin Hannah
The Second Summer of Sisterhood by Ann Brashares
Testimony by Anita Shreve

Second Quarter

Fiction

Hush by Anne Frasier
The Innocent by Harlan Coben
Missing Pieces by Joy Fielding

Non-fiction

Inside the Mind of BTK by John Douglas
Murder in Little Egypt by Darcy O'Brien

As finished:

Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
Justine by Lawrence Durrell
À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust
Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
Light in August by William Faulkner 06/25/09

#46 oh wow, I remember ol' Rubashov from high school. I didn't really appreciate it then. maybe it's time for another look.

My own best book of 2Q09 was Mystic River.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

And 2 children's / YA books:
Blue Willow by Doris Gates
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

Thanks for starting the thread, rebeccanyc. I am more than a little distracted these days. Glad to see the tradition continues whether I remember or not:-)

Here are some of my great reads from April through June:

The Seamstress by Frances de Pontes Peebles. Starts out a little slow but becomes a splendid historical fiction about two sisters in 1930s Brazil.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. Forthcoming in September, this is a terrific parallel story to Oryx and Crake and somewhat more in keeping with our somewhat more optimistic times.

Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun. A short novel set in Morocco and Spain about leaving a country and how a country never leaves you.

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa. A quiet story of created families and the beauty of numbers. Set in Japan.

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. A wonderful rereading of a contemporary retelling with a twist of Grimm's"The Robber Bridegroom".

By the North Gate by Joyce Carol Oates is her first collection of short fiction, I believe. Most of the stories date in the 1960s. There were a few of these I found quite excellent.

and finally, Four Freedoms by John Crowley which tells the tale of some of the workers on the homefront during WWII. It read to me like a homage.

#49: I'm jealous that you're reading the new Atwood! Do you recommend it?

I didn't read much during the first quarter... But for the second quarter, the best were:

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga... I haven't enjoyed a novel this much in a very, very, very long time.

The Prisoner's Wife by asha bandele... I was moved by the sheer honesty and transparancy of her prose.

Behind My Eyes by Li-Young Lee... I haven't been reading nearly enough poetry as I used to, but Lee's work was an excellent place to begin. Lee reminded me why I loved poetry in the first place. Utter reality, undeniable truth doesn't take very many words.

I will be a very happy woman if my third quarter books are as great as my second quarter...

Like a few others here, I missed the first quarter, so I'm posting very late.

1st Quarter

Fruit:a Novel about a Boy and His Nipples, Brian Francis
Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West **currently my top book of the year**
Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf
Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh
The Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner

2nd Quarter

The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood
Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
Late Nights on Air, Elizabeth Hay
Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam, Peter Goldsworthy

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
This book replaced my favorite from January, which was Leftovers by Laura Wiess

I missed this thread, until just now, these are all from April-June. The first three books have a "favorites" tag from me.

1. To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
2. The Shadow of the Wind Carlos Ruiz Zafón
3. Storyteller : Being the Wanderings of Gwernin Kyuarwyd G. R. Grove
4. The Indifferent Stars Above : The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride Daniel James Brown
5. The Angel's Game Carlos Ruiz Zafón