On My Shelf

I believe you can decorate with books. I believe all shelf space is best used for books. More importantly, I believe that books open the mind in ways that other media cannot. I believe the experience and the knowledge they lend are irreplaceable. Some of my favorite adventures as a child happened within the pages of my favorite books, and I've been thrilled as an adult to discover that to many of those worlds (except Narnia) you can always return.

As Thomas Jefferson once wrote in a letter to John Adams, "I cannot live without books."

Here's what I've been reading lately:

A Discovery of Witches, Deborah Harkness

Shadow of Night, Deborah Harkness
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern
The Sisters Brothers, Patrick DeWitt
The Return of Captain John Emmett, Elizabeth Speller
Wild Abandon, Joe Dunthorne
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides
Home, Marilynne Robinson
Out of Oz, Gregory Maguire
A Lion Among Men, Gregory Maguire
Son of a Witch, Gregory Maguire
Wicked, Gregory Maguire
Pirate King, Laurie R. King
The Language of Flowers, Vanessa Diffenbaugh
Galore, Michael Crummey
Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin
The Peach Keeper, Sarah Addison Allen
The Memorist, M. J. Rose
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, Helen Simonson
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Jamie Ford
Cutting For Stone, Abraham Vergese
Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout
the Sherlock Holmes canon, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
the Harry Potter series (an embarrassing number of times), J.K. Rowling