From My Book Shelf: What I am reading this week

I am an avid reader of good fiction – maybe even some that is not so good. My book club read “Cutting for Stone” by Abraham Verghese this month, and it was excellent. It is long – you might even say epic at more than 600 pages. It spans decades, continents, careers, political upheaval, etc. I couldn’t put it down. It is about the children of a nun and a doctor born in Ethiopia at the mission hospital they serve. Both boys are brilliant doctors but take very different paths in life.

Over the weekend, I read two books that were quick reads but very enjoyable – and funny. Adriana Trigiani is writing a trilogy about an Italian family, the Roncallis, who are shoemakers in New York. I enjoyed these very much and can’t wait for the third. The heroine visits Italy in the first book, “Very Valentine” and Italy and Argentina in the second, “Brava Valentine.” All the while, she is struggling to make her family’s custom wedding shoe manufacturing business profitable. I learned quite a bit about shoes that I never knew.

I started “Shoot the Moon” by Billie Letts last night and had to read a bit before work this morning. The story sounds interesting – a young mother is murdered and her 10 month old son is missing and presumed dead. Thirty years later, the grown up son returns to the town to find his mother, having no idea that she is dead or how he came to live with the parents who raised him. Billie Letts tells a great story, and the people in her novels always seem very real. And they are generally Southern, which makes the stories all the more interesting to me. Anyway, I am excited to get home and get settled in to read tonight.

So, give one of these a try if you’re looking for something to read. And let me know if you are reading something that I should put on my reading list.