If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to read more, here are ten awesome books you should consider reading next year. You will not be sorry.
1. Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick
Matthew Quick was born in 1976 in Philadelphia, where he spent the first years of his life. He is a philological graduated and taught for many years literature and filmography of at a high school in New Jersey. He coached football and basketball and worked as a tour guide in Peras and Ecuador. He started a pen-pal correspondence with students from Namibia and counseled young people with adjustment difficulties.
In 2004 he decided to give up his teaching career to devote himself to literature. In 2007 he completed a master of creative writing at Goddard College. His bestseller, The Silver Linings Playbook, was followed by three books: Sorta Like a Rock Star, Boy 21 and Forgive me, Leonard Peacock.
Writer translated into over twenty-five languages, Matthew Quick has been a finalist in the PEN / Hemingway Award and was nominated for the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He currently lives in Massachusetts with his wife, pianist Alicia Bessette.
2. Fangirl by Rainbow Rowel
Rainbow Rowell from Nebrask, says the most dangerous technology for literature is the mobile phone. Since your characters have a cell phone, there’s no way for them to lose or do not find each other when visiting Empire State Building, said the writer. When she wrote the novel for teenagers Fangirl, the author wanted to tell a romantic story about people communicating via email and SMS, people who spend the entire day with laptops in hands.
3. Reality Boy by A.S. King
“Gerald Faust knows exactly when he started feeling angry: the day his mother invited a reality television crew into his five-year-old life. Twelve years later, he’s still haunted by his rage-filled youth—which the entire world got to watch from every imaginable angle—and his anger issues have resulted in violent outbursts, zero friends, and clueless adults dumping him in the special education room at school”. Via GoodReads
4. Teeth by Hannah Moskowitz
“The big house is haunted. Maybe we’re all haunted.
I only take the legends seriously at night. The house is rocking, and the stories are the only thing to keep me company. Stories, me, and ocean, and however the hell many magic fish, while my family sleeps downstairs and my real life sleeps a thousand miles away”.
And the ocean seems to cry at night, bringing to the surface unuttered pain, in the form of a scream.
5. If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan
In Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death, 17-year-olds Sahar and Nasrin love each other in secret. After Nasrin’s parents announce their daughter’s arranged marriage, Sahar proposes a drastic solution.
6. And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
Hosseini invites us to take a journey, during more than half a century, through family generations and relationships with the nonchalance of a normal host with quirks and weaknesses of his family. You will see poor Afghanistan, and ‘50s Kabul, you will join the characters in Paris, San Francisco and the island of Tinos. Sometimes you will approve their actions, but often you’ll wonder about their radical decisions that trample love.
7. Red Doc by Anne Carson
“I have never read a poet where there was such a sense that the material was so unruly it might overwhelm its creator. It is this that makes Carson exciting… She writes with spendthrift ease” Kate Kellaway, The Observer
“To engage so originally and compellingly with a story first told more than 3,000 years ago, is astonishing: her ambition is one thing, the fact that it is so completely achieved is, frankly, something else. Carson is, simply, one of the very best” Sarah Crown, The Guardian
8. The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
The 2013 National Book Award winner tells the story of radical John Brown from the perspective of a slave boy.
9. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton (born 24 September 1985) is a New Zealand author. Her second novel, The Luminaries, won the 2013 Man Booker Prize. According to The Guardian, Catton jokes about her novel calling her work “publisher’ nightmare” for logistical reasons, saying she was forced to buy a new bag to be able to accommodate the volume. After the result was made public, the writer confessed that the editors were pleased that the final manuscript was sufficiently short “not to collapse under its own weight”.
10. Ostrich by Matt Greene
“Alex has a story to tell. He just doesn’t know what kind of story it is yet. He’s got a lot of the concerns every 12-year-old has but lately, ever since his brain surgery, everyone in his life is behaving more than a little mysteriously. He’s certain there’s something rotten at the heart of his parents’ marriage, and when his beloved hamster Jaws 2 starts acting up as well he decides it’s time to investigate.
So begins the journey that will take him to the limits of his understanding and take you back to the wonder and conviction of your own adolescence, to a time when you understood the world so much better than it understood you”. Via Amazon
