I enjoy putting together wish list for books I want to read and this month’s list was a lot of fun to put together. It came to me a few weeks ago to explore books that were published the year I was born. Alas, I had two minds about this. One: If I do this, it will reveal my age! Two: What the heck. Live a little. I went with the latter. Ha! A few of these were made into movies which I have seen. I thought it would be great to read the books. There are so many interesting titles during 1976 that I am wanting to take a look at. Who knows? I might do another wish list post like this in the future. Feel free to use this idea for your book blogging. Cheers!
Stephanie M. Hopkins
The Great Santini by Pat Conroy
Step into the powerhouse life of Bull Meecham. He’s all Marine — fighter pilot, king of the clouds, and absolute ruler of his family. Lillian is his wife — beautiful, southern-bred, with a core of velvet steel. Without her cool head, her kids would be in real trouble. Ben is the oldest, a born athlete whose best never satisfies the big man. Ben’s got to stand up, even fight back, against a father who doesn’t give in — not to his men, not to his wife, and certainly not to his son. Bull Meecham is undoubtedly Pat Conroy’s most explosive character — a man you should hate, but a man you will love.
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories by Norman Maclean
Just as Norman Maclean writes at the end of “A River Runs through It” that he is “haunted by waters,” so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.
Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, “cats,” or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.
The Deep by Peter Benchley
A young couple go to Bermuda on their honeymoon. They dive on the reefs offshore, looking for the wreck of a sunken ship. What they find lures them into a strange and increasingly terrifying encounter with past and present, a struggle for salvage and survival along the floor of the sea, in the deep.
Adolf Hitler by John Willard Toland
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Toland’s classic, definitive biography of Adolf Hitler remains the most thorough, readable, accessible, and, as much as possible, objective account of the life of a man whose evil effect on the world in the twentieth century will always be felt.
Toland’s research provided one of the final opportunities for a historian to conduct personal interviews with over two hundred individuals intimately associated with Hitler. At a certain distance yet still with access to many of the people who enabled and who opposed the führer and his Third Reich, Toland strove to treat this life as if Hitler lived and died a hundred years before instead of within his own memory. From childhood and obscurity to his desperate end, Adolf Hitler emerges as, in Toland’s words, “far more complex and contradictory . . . obsessed by his dream of cleansing Europe Jews . . . a hybrid of Prometheus and Lucifer.
In My Father’s House by Corrie ten Boom
Corrie ten Boom’s ‘prequel’ to the classic The Hiding Place Concentrating upon her family and their life in Holland before the war, this inspiring and revealing book describes in moving detail living above the family watch shop in Harlem and her memories of the family together before their lives changed for ever with the advent of war and persecution. Corrie believed that this life helped prepare them for carrying out God’s work later and gave her the strength to survive the war, brutal hardship and persecution and begin her worldwide ministry. This much loved book is being re-issued in B format with a contemporary cover.
Here are some of the wish lists from a few of my friends this month:
Erin @ Flashlight Commentary
Colleen @ A Literary Vacation
Heather @ The Maiden’s Court
Magdalena @ A Bookaholic Swede
Holly @ 2 Kids and Tired-Coming soon
Whispers from the Dead by Karen Ann Hopkins
Last Hope Island
London Calling by Sara Sheridan
Jo Montfort is beautiful and rich, and soon—like all the girls in her class—she’ll graduate from finishing school and be married off to a wealthy bachelor. Which is the last thing she wants. Jo secretly dreams of becoming a writer—a newspaper reporter like the trailblazing Nellie Bly.
Published August 6th 2013 by William Morrow Paperbacks
HarperCollins UK, HarperImpulse
While my current focus of American History is on what many call, “The American Civil War” (1861-1865), I am also interested in the beginnings of the American Industry. I am thoroughly fascinated with colonial craftsmanship. From time to time while studying the civil war, I often mark and file research material that relate for other stories I have a mind to write about or explore. On Amazon I came across, Colonial Craftsmen: And the Beginnings of American Industry by Edwin Tunis and was thrilled! I have been looking for something like this for a while. I have added it to my wish-list research pile of books I want to purchase next year or the years after. For all you American History enthusiast, I thought this might be of interest of you.
Memorial Day, 1938: New York socialite Lily Dane has just returned with her family to the idyllic oceanfront community of Seaview, Rhode Island, expecting another placid summer season among the familiar traditions and friendships that sustained her after heartbreak.
Layered Pages 