The Raft

I love books.  I love reading a really great book.  What defines a really great book is subject to what's going on in my world at the time and why I'm reading it.
But I have a hard time finding a greater escape or a more satisfying return...

For example, I think "Kiss Goodnight, Sam" is an excellent book.  One of my all-time favorites, in fact.  I used to read it to Abby almost every night for a solid year of her babyhood.  She loved it, I loved it and I will save that book forever.

 

Another example of that is "Your Kind of Mommy" which I still read on occasion.

Good examples of fiction that read like real life because they're "loosely based" on the author's real life but not technically non-fiction include "Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons".  That was the first book I read for my Book Club and it opened my world of reading as a 30-something woman.  Really.

I am not the Classic Literature type.  I can appreciate some really good ones that I actually read in high school but I have a mental block against either reading them again or reading any that I was supposed to and never did. 

Another one is the one I just finished (only a week after our official Book Club meeting about it!) - "The Help".  Terrific book.  I was hesitant at first because it takes place in the 1960's.  Considering I was born in 1976, I didn't think I'd like it, didn't think I could "relate".  Dumb.
I did like it.  Loved it.
And I could relate.  With all of the characters, really...  from the tough-talking Minny to the wisdom-sharing Aibileen to the ignorant turned liberal Skeeter  to the openly-racist and shallow Hilly.

I have read more and more non-fiction but it has to be current and often include some sort of violence or abuse.  I don't know how that makes me sound but it's true.
"Columbine" was a great one.  It went deep into the entire event on April 20, 1999.  It started a couple of years prior and ended a couple of years after.  It explained things that the news did not.  It made me feel better about that day and those kids and it also fed that little desire to see and hear about that awful, tragic event that you hate to admit you really want to hear and see.

Memoirs are cool, too.  Those are technically non-fiction, too, but different.  It's weird how I can be so into a book with very little point (if any point at all) except to talk about oneself.  Books that have nothing to do with me, that have almost no relation to my life at all.

huh.
I guess that's why, guess I just figured it out.  It's fun to watch someone else live their life.  Essentially, it's blogging with a binding and a cover.

A couple of those I read recently: