Books of August

Well, here is September, already over half gone, and I'm just getting around to posting my August reads.

A book club choice and a good one.  It's a sweet story about a man who owns a bookstore on an island.  Filled with literary allusions and charming characters, it's a delightful read.  Maya, the daughter A.J. adopts, was left one morning in his bookstore.  During her childhood she often muses about places where other children were left--a butcher shop, a shoe store, for instance--and how lucky she was to be left in a bookstore.  My favorite character after A.J. was the police chief.  When we first meet him, he insists he's never been a reader, but later he starts a detectives' book club that meets at A.J.'s store. 

Another book club selection.  If you ever want to read about a thoroughly unlikeable title character, this is the book for  you.  Serena will stop at nothing, not even murder, to achieve her ambition to become a great timber baron.  Is she supposed to be a modern day Lady Macbeth who leads her equally ambitious but slightly less heartless  husband into carrying out her diabolical plans?  If you like characters with no redeeming qualities, this is the book for you.

I was suckered into reading this by a review on Amazon, so I bought it.  Why did I finish it?  One of my father's sayings was, "Never be a quitter," so I feel obligated to finish books I start, even when I don't like them.  (The one exception was Ulysses--I could not get into James Joyce).  Anyway, this is the story of some college students who play a "game" which they make up and which sort of haunts them for the rest of their lives.  It sounded intriguing but it definitely wasn't.  And I never understood the game.  This one gets a D minus.