A Few Books I'm Looking Forward to Reading!

I know this comes as no surprise to anyone, but I'm excited for Maggie Stiefvater's Forever coming out next summer. I'm not excited about summer (we still have unbearable temperatures here) but I am REALLY excited for this book. No synopsis yet. Forever releases July 12th, 2011 from Scholastic.



This book looks pretty amazing to me and looks like it explores all the themes I so enjoy reading about. It releases October 5th from Knopf.

About the Book: Hattie Kong—the spirited offspring of a descendant of Confucius and an American missionary to China—has, in her fiftieth year of living in the United States, lost both her husband and her best friend to cancer. It is an utterly devastating loss, of course, and also heartbreakingly absurd: a little, she thinks, “like having twins. She got to book the same church with the same pianist for both funerals and did think she should have gotten some sort of twofer from the crematorium.”

But now, two years later, it is time for Hattie to start over. She moves to the town of Riverlake, where she is soon joined by an immigrant Cambodian family on the run from their inner-city troubles, as well as—quite unexpectedly—by a just-retired neuroscientist ex-lover named Carter Hatch. All of them are, like Hattie, looking for a new start in a town that might once have represented the rock-solid base of American life but that is itself challenged, in 2001, by cell-phone towers and chain stores, struggling family farms and fundamentalist Christians.

What Hattie makes of this situation is at the center of a novel that asks deep and absorbing questions about religion, home, America, what neighbors are, what love is, and, in the largest sense, what “worlds” we make of the world.



I'm one of a possible minority who loved The Reader for so many reasons, so I'm looking forward to The Weekend from Bernhard Schlink which also sounds quite interesting.

About the Book: Old friends and lovers reunite for a weekend in a secluded country home after spending decades apart. They excavate old memories and pass clandestine judgments on the wildly divergent paths they’ve taken since their youth. But this isn’t just any reunion, and their conversations about the old days aren’t your typical reminiscences: After twenty-four years, Jörg, a convicted murderer and terrorist, has been released from prison. The announcement of his pardon sends shock waves throughout the country, but before the announcement, his friends - some of whom were Baader-Meinhof sympathizers or those who clung to them - gather for his first weekend of freedom. They are invited by Jörg’s devoted sister, Christiane, whose overwhelming concern for her brother’s safety is matched only by the unrelenting pull of Marko, a unnervingly passionate young man intent on having Jörg continue to fight for the cause. The Weekend releases October 12th, from Pantheon.

I also subscribe the freebie version of Publisher's Lunch and they send out some of the weekly deals. I found these books that look fantastic--I'll be keeping an eye out:

Director of Yale University Press John Donatich's debut novel, THE VARIATIONS, one priest's crisis of faith told at the intersection of music, love, and religion when he must reconcile his struggling belief in God with his burgeoning relationship with the daughter of gifted piano teacher, to Jack Macrae at Holt, in a pre-empt, by Bill Clegg at William Morris Endeavor

OH COME ON! Sounds like it was WRITTEN for me! ;)

And you know I love some impossible love:
Natasa Dragnic's EVERY DAY, EVERY HOUR, pitched as reminiscent of The Solitude of Prime Numbers and The Time Traveler's Wife set in Croatia and Paris, about a couple who are meant to be together, but fate keeps them apart; beginning with their meeting as children, when a young boy faints at the sight of his beguiling kindergarten classmate, and following the brief episodes when they reconnect over the course of their lives, through marriages and children, careers and personal tragedies, to Stephen Morrison at Viking, with Alexis Washam editing, by Gesche Wendebourg at DVA

And this YA series:
CLA Award-winning author Lesley Livingston's trilogy STARLING, pitched as a supernatural Bourne Identity that blends Norse, Egyptian, and Greek mythologies with paranormal elements, to Laura Arnold at Harper Children's, by Jessica Regel at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency

I think mythology makes for some good storytelling.

Any of these look good to you? What books are you looking forward?