Book Haul: Recommendations (Part 2)

Stacking the Shelves is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews. I get to show off all the books I’ve gotten recently. Way back at the beginning of the year, I asked for book recommendations. Here are some of the books that you recommended I read. Sorry, I didn’t write down who recommended which book because I’m a lazy, terrible person, but thank you for the recommendations!

Your Recommendations (Part 2)

The Post-Birthday World – Lionel Shriver

Using a playful parallel-universe structure, The Post-Birthday World follows one woman's future as it unfolds under the influence of two drastically different men.

Children's book illustrator Irina McGovern enjoys a quiet and settled life in London with her partner, fellow American expatriate Lawrence Trainer, a smart, loyal, disciplined intellectual at a prestigious think tank. To their small circle of friends, their relationship is rock solid. Until the night Irina unaccountably finds herself dying to kiss another man: their old friend from South London, the stylish, extravagant, passionate top-ranking snooker player Ramsey Acton. The decision to give in to temptation will have consequences for her career, her relationships with family and friends, and perhaps most importantly the texture of her daily life.

A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them—in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul—they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation.

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Despite their class differences, Amir, the son of a wealthy businessman, and Hassan, his devoted sidekick and the son of Amir's household servant, play together, cause mischief together, and compete in the annual kite-fighting tournament—Amir flying the kite, and Hassan running down the kites they fell. But one day, Amir betrays Hassan, and his betrayal grows increasingly devastating as their tale continues. Amir will spend much of his life coming to terms with his initial and subsequent acts of cowardice, and finally seek to make reparations.

Borderliners – Peter Høeg

Strange things are happening at The Biehl School when this elite academy opens its doors to a group of orphans and reform school rejects, kids at the end of the system's tether. But the school is run by a peculiar set of rules, in which every minute is regimented and controlled. The children soon suspect that they are guinea pigs in a bizarre social experiment, and that their only hope of escape is to break through a dangerous threshold of time and space.

The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus – Lee Strobel

A former reporter for The Chicago Tribune and former atheist presents a tough-minded investigation of Christian beliefs, interviewing today's scientists, historians, and philosophers to gather compelling evidence for the truth about Jesus.

Have you read any of these? What did you think?