Just a few books I'm interested in reading
1- Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata- my friend, PV2 Newkirk, recommended this one in one of his letters.
2- Notes from My Travels: Visits with Refugees in Africa, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Ecuador
by Angelina Jolie
3- A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers by Harold Schechter, David Everitt
4- Psychopath Keith Ablow- Fiction
5- Lethal Intent: The Shocking True Story of One of America's Most Notorious Serial Killers by Sue Russell- Book Info- In Lethal Intent: The Shocking True Story of One of America's Most Notorious Serial Killers, Sue Russell investigates one of America's most cold-blooded female serial killers, Aileen Carol Wournos. Wuornos, a hitchhiking prostitute who had a difficult and cruel childhood plagued by abuse and drug use, murdered 7 men in a 13 month period in 1989 and 1990 in Florida. Lethal Intent explores Wournos' abandonment by her mother, the crimes of her father, and the events that set her on a path of destruction that led to her execution on Oct. 9, 2002.
6- No Daddy Don't by Irene Pence
7- Abandoned Prayers: An Incredible True Story of Murder, Obsession, and Amish Secrets by Gregg Olsen- Book Info- On Christmas Eve in 1985, a hunter found a young boy's body along an icy corn field in Nebraska. The residents of Chester, Nebraska buried him as "Little Boy Blue," unclaimed and unidentified-until a phone call from Ohio two years later led authorities to Eli Stutzman, the boy's father.
Eli Stutzman, the son of an Amish bishop, was by all appearances a dedicated farmer and family man in the country's strictest religious sect. But behind his quiet façade was a man involved with pornography, sadomasochism, and drugs. After the suspicious death of his pregnant wife, Stutzman took his preschool-age son, Danny, and hit the road on a sexual odyssey ending with his conviction for murder. But the mystery of Eli Stutzman and the fate of his son didn't end on the barren Nebraska plains. It was just beginning...
8- Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
9- Three Junes by Julia Glass- Book Info- This artfully constructed debut novel is told in three parts, each set in the month of June. As she tells the tales of love, loss, and the bonds between members of a complicated Scottish family, Julia Glass poignantly explores the role of fate and serendipity in bringing people together, as well as the communication gaps and shuttered emotions that often keep them apart.
10-Life Of Pi by Yann Martel
11-Hula by Liia Shea- Book Info- For two young girls in the early 1960s, the family backyard is both playground and prison. Steamy, verdant, cloistered - the yard's secret places tantalize the imagination, but also reveal disturbing glimpses of a war-haunted father and dreamy, distant mother. The younger sister narrates, introducing us to her older sister's ritual taunts, her mother's increasing withdrawal, her father's volatile temper. Told over the course of two hot summers, the story builds in power and portent as the girls' sexuality surfaces and the parents' marriage strains toward its end. Voyeuristic, at times surreal, Shea's lyrical first novel probes the dark corner where adolescent fantasies and terrors converge.
12-Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides- Book Info- In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides finds herself drawn to a classmate at her girls' school in Grosse Point, Michigan. That passion -- along with her failure to develop -- leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. The explanation for this is a rare genetic mutation -- and a guilty secret -- that have followed Callie's grandparents from the crumbling Ottoman Empire to Prohibition-era Detroit and beyond, outlasting the glory days of the Motor City, the race riots of 1967, and the family's second migration, into the foreign country known as suburbia. Thanks to the gene, Callie is part girl, part boy. And even though the gene's epic travels have ended, her own odyssey has only begun.
13-Thing Of Beauty by Stephen M. Fried- Book Info- At age seventeen, Gia Carangi was working the counter at her father's Philadelphia luncheonette, Hoagie City. Within a year, Gia was one of the top models of the late 1970's, gracing the covers of Cosmopolitan and Vogue, partying at New York's Studio 54 and the Mudd Club, and redefining the industry's standard of beauty. She was the darling of moguls and movie stars, royalty and rockers. Gia was also a girl in pain, desperate for her mother's approval-and a drug addict on a tragic slide toward oblivion, who started going directly from $10,000-a-day fashion shoots to the heroin shooting galleries on New York's Lower East Side. Finally blackballed from modeling, Gia entered a vastly different world on the streets of New york and Atlantic City, and later in a rehab clinic. At twenty-six, she became on of the first women in America to die of AIDS, a hospital welfare case visited only by rehab friends and what remained of her family.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews with Gia's gamily, lovers, friends, and colleagues, Thing of Beauty creates a poignant portrait of an unforgettable character-and a powerful narrative about beauty and sexuality, fame and objectification, mothers and daughters, love and death.
14-Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood
by Julie Gregory- Book Info- From early childhood, Julie Gregory was continually X-rayed, medicated, and operated on - in the vain pursuit of an illness that was created in her mother's mind. Munchausen by proxy (MBP) is the world's most hidden and dangerous form of child abuse, in which the caretaker - almost always the mother - invents or induces symptoms in her child because she craves the attention of medical professionals. Many MBP children die, but Julie Gregory not only survived, she escaped the powerful orbit of her mother's madness and rebuilt her identity as a vibrant, healthy young woman.
Sickened is a memoir that speaks in an original and distinctive midwestern voice, rising to indelible scenes in prose of scathing beauty and fierce humor. Punctuated with Julie's actual medical records, it re-creates the bizarre cocoon of her family's isolated double-wide trailer, their wild shopping sprees and gun-waving confrontations, the astonishing naivete of medical professionals and social workers. It also exposes the twisted bonds of terror and love that roped Julie's family together - including the love that made a child willing to sacrifice herself to win her mother's happiness.
15-Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
16- Running with Scissors: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs- Book Info- Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules; there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, and Valium was eaten like Pez. And when things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock-therapy machine under the stairs...
17-Crosses by Shelley Stoehr- Book Info- Cutting/Fiction
18-Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
19- Peasants in Arms: War and Peace in the Mountains of Nicaragua, 1979-1994- by Lynn Horton- Book Info- Quilali, a rural community in the heart of Nicaragua's mountainous interior, is also the center of a war zone that has seen ongoing conflict since the 1980s. Drawing on the testimonies of local people, from contra collaborators and ex-combatants to pro-Sandinista peasants, this dynamic account of a generation of rural instability explores the growing divisions between the peasants who took up arms in defense of revolutionary programs and ideals, such as land reform and equality, and those who opposed the Sandinistas. Peasants in Arms details the role of local elites in organizing the first anti-Sandinista uprising in 1980 and their subsequent rise to positions of field command in the contras. It then explores the internal factors that led a majority of peasants to turn against the revolution and examines the ways in which the military draft and family and community pressures reinforced conflict and undermined Sandinista policy shifts that attempted to win back peasant support.
20-Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush by John W. Dean Book Info- John Dean knows what happens behind closed doors at the White House. As counsel to President Richard Nixon, he witnessed the malignant influence of excessive secrecy and its corruption of good intentions. Pundits and partisans can point fingers. Only Dean can reveal with true insider knowledge the dangers of a presidency that has crossed the line. In Worse than Watergate, Dean presents a stunning indictment of George W. Bush's administration. He assembles overwhelming evidence of its obsessive secrecy and the dire and dangerous consequences resulting from a return to Nixonian governing. Worse than Watergate connects the dots, explaining the hidden agenda of a White House shrouded in secrecy and a presidency that seeks to remain unaccountable.
21-El país bajo mi piel (The Country Under My Skin)- by Gioconda Belli- You guys probably wouldn't be interested if you're 1)Not Nicaraguan, or 2)Don't care about the guerilla and sandinistas, or the Nicaraguan government.
22- Silence by Endo Shasaku- Story about Christian persecution/execution in Japan.
23-Ernest Guevara, tambien conocido como el Che by Paco Ignacio Taibo II- Cheguevara's Biography
24-Adios Muchachos: Una Memoria de la Revolucion Sandinista (Adios Muchacos: A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution) by Sergio Ramirez- Something for my dad to read to me. :-p
Any more suggestions? Post a comment, if so.