What I’m Currently Reading

I’ve always been a big reader, I love to get lost in a story. Shopping at the bookstore without a game plan is as dangerous as a hungry trip to the grocery store for me. I love to find new books to read, discover new authors, find out what other people are reading and spend a lot of money on books apparently. I should really get a library card again! I want to start this series of sharing what I’m currently reading a few times a year. I know that is what I enjoy reading on other people’s blogs, sometimes I like what they recommend.

Here are eight titles I think are worthy of your bookmark.

Please let me know what books you’ve read lately! I love to hear what ones you recommend… I also still love these books from last spring and these summer reads.

Happy reading!

8 Books I’m Currently Reading

Humans of New York: Stories

by Brandon Stanton

If you already follow him on Instagram or his blog, you will love this book. He dives deeper into the lives of strangers in his latest volume. The photos are as moving as ever, but it’s the stories of the people in them that will stay with you. The candid conversations are as wildly diverse as the New Yorkers he interviews.

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

by Elizabeth Gilbert

This was recommended to me by a friend (hey Oli!) The first thing to know about the Eat, Pray, Love author’s foray into self-help is that anyone can reap priceless benefits from reading it. Gilbert’s advice strikes a balance between adult practicality and a childlike sense of wonder. She empowers you to escape the grip of your own self-doubt and fear and revel in the big, brave magic of self-expression and creativity.

The Dogist

by Elias Weiss Friedman

Based on Friedman’s popular blog of the same name which I follow religiously! Who can resist cute pictures of dogs? This photography book will delight any dog-lover and maybe convert the ones who aren’t. My brother gave this to me as a gift and I love flip through it. It’s full of pictures of every kind of canine imaginable. And the creatively shot portraits are alternately funny, spirited, regal, adorable, and soul-stirring.

Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

If you like The Affair, (like who doesn’t?) you’ll love this National Book Award finalist from the best-selling Arcadia author. Love, secrecy, sex, betrayal and indeed, fury infuse this masterfully crafted dual-narrative of a husband and wife who experience their marriage disarmingly differently from each other. Just like that torrid, sexy tv show we all love to watch.

The Past

by Tessa Hadley

A family drama set apart by Hadley’s exquisite writing and mastery of character. Four adult siblings meet up for their annual reunion at their grandparents’ country home, which they now may have to sell. High tensions, tangled passions, and childhood memories are all key ingredients to this engrossing work.

The Expatriates

by Janice Y.K. Lee

This book follows the lives of three American women living in the same expat community in Hong Kong. A recent Columbia graduate, a lonely housewife struggling to have a child and a once-happily-married mother of three who has suffered a terrible loss. These women and their stories will pull at every string in your heart.

Queen of Spies: Daphne Park, Britain’s Cold War Spy Master

by Paddy Hayes

A true story about a female version of James Bond?! Um Hell Ya! In this work of nonfiction that reads like a thriller, Paddy Hayes takes you into the world of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and its transformation from World War II through the Cold War. At the helm of Hayes’ book is Daphne Park, one of its most outstanding and unusual operatives. A woman in the male-dominated realm of secret intelligence during a time of dark paranoia, Park busted her way through the ranks, eventually becoming one of the SIS’s seven Area Controllers, the most senior operational rank.  Hello, is this who M is based on?

Eternity Street

by John Mack Faragher

A long time ago, Los Angeles was a lawless, violent city better known for its murder rate than for its orange groves. Some may say that hasn’t changed, but that’s a different story. Faragher, a Yale historian, follows L.A.’s tumultous rise from its origins as a small Mexican pueblo at the edge of the loosely governed frontier in the 19th century.