I’m an avid reader. There’s nothing I love more than getting sucked into an amazing story. If there happens to be multiple books in a series; all the better. As a kid I loved reading what most girls read in the late 1980s: The Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High. I loved Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books and the Little House books from Laura Ingalls Wilder (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every episode of Little House on the Prairie on TV).
When my mom realized I could finish a Babysitter’s Club book in a few hours, she lent me her copy of All Around the Town by Mary Higgins Clark. It’s been more than 20 years since I read it and I can still remember the storyline. The next book of hers I read was A Cry in the Night and I was seriously hooked on her books. I probably read more than a dozen Mary Higgins Clark novels before I finished seventh grade. All throughout my teens and twenties, I read novels from Patricia Cornwell, Michael Crichton, Sue Grafton, Michael Connelly, and more that I’m not remembering right now. I remember cutting class in community college to camp out in the library when I was nearing the end of a really great novel; Patricia Cornwell was the reason for many of those days.
This week I learned that beloved author Mary Higgins Clark passed away at the age of 92. She was the author whose words hooked me into so many fascinating stories and I believe she was the one who cemented my love for reading.
I wanted to share some of my favorite books. These are the books or series that I can go back and reread over and over when I don’t have something new to read. For a very long time, I wasn’t ever able to reread a novel. So to make a list of books that I have loved enough to re-love, that’s really saying something.
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SERIES:
The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon - These will suck you in and you won’t be able to tell what day it is. It’s historical fiction mixed with romance, drama, mystery, and a smidge of science-fiction thrown in. I know some folks dislike the length, each novel is over 1000 pages, complaining that the author spends too much time with the day-to-day stuff that the main characters go through. That’s the stuff I really love; the stuff that makes me understand what 18th century living was really like, and how it could be for someone who’s lived in the 20th century. There are currently eight novels, and number nine is supposedly due out some time in 2020. Oh and there’s a show. It’s kind of amazing.
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher - I was never a huge fan of fantasy books. Hard-to-pronounce names to keep track of often lost me as a reader. A long-time friend told me I’d like the Dresden Files. “They’re not your typical fantasy books” she told me. I picked up the first four and was hooked by about the middle of book two. Wizard Harry Dresden is such a grounded and relatable character in a very believable world that is both real life and fantasy. Fantasy characters from different religions, mythologies, and more all play a part. There are sixteen books in the series (!!). Book number twelve ended in such a dramatic fashion, I’ve read a few fans wonder if the author is running out of stories for our wary wizard. Gawd, I hope not!
The All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness - These are awesome stories about witches, vampires, daemons, history, science, genealogy, love, action, and holy crap just go read them. You won’t be sorry. The author takes these fantasy characters and weaves a tale that makes it all sound completely plausible in our world and makes me really look at people and wonder if they’re hiding the fact that they’re really a witch or a daemon. BBC is making these into a TV show, the first season can be viewed now. It’s incredibly short, cramming a wonderful novel into just eight episodes, but they really did an amazing job.
The Anne Trilogy by Posie Graeme-Evans - The Innocent, the first book in this trilogy, was one of the first historical fiction books I ever read. It’s a wonderful story that takes place during the War of the Roses in 15th century England. The second book takes place in Brugge, Belgium and is described so beautifully. The author manages to talk politics in short enough spurts to not lose my interest and the main heroine is such a wonderful and relatable woman.
STAND-ALONE NOVELS:
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant - This was the first novel I read that delved into Biblical fiction. It tells the life of Dinah; the only daughter of Jacob from the book of Genesis. In the Bible she’s barely mentioned, but this fictional tale starts with the lives of her mother Leah and sisters. I read it before I became a mom and I loved it so much that I hoped to have a daughter and name her Dinah. That never happened (I ended up with boys!), but I have reread this novel many times since becoming a mom and the book took on a whole other dimension of wonderful and heartbreaking.
The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman - After reading The Red Tent, The Dovekeepers was a novel that Amazon suggested I might like. Yup, I did. An amazing story about four very different women from very different backgrounds who find themselves all living on Masada; a fortified city high atop a plateau in Israel and inhabited by Jewish people who were expelled from Jerusalem in the first century CE. The Jewish people were hiding there when Roman soldiers began to invade. Because Masada is on top of a mesa, it took months for the Romans to build a ramp. By the time they got there, 960 Jews had committed mass suicide. Two women and five children were found alive.
The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant - A wonderful historical fiction (I was on a big kick in my early 30s) that I have fallen in love with after rereading when I became a mother. Alessandra (my name in Italian) is such a beautiful character living in a turbulent and exuberant time in Renaissance Florence, Italy. It goes on about how the Medici family were big patrons of art and the rise in popularity of the friar Savonarola and the eventual Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s ultimately a story of how a headstrong woman would have fared in that tumultuous time.
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins - One of my oldest friends loaned me a copy of this book one day when we were in our mid-20s. She didn’t preface it with anything other than, “it’s kind of wacky, but you’ll like it.” Yes it was, and yes I did! The author weaves a seemingly disjointed series of tales that include a Dark Ages king who decides he doesn’t want to die, an Indian woman whom he falls in love with, pagan gods, a Paris perfumer, and beets. Toward the end the stories come together in a very satisfying way and asks lots of great questions about religion and immortality.
The Romanov Prophecy by Steve Berry - My mom says I was named after the last Czarina of Russia; Alexandra. The story of her family has always fascinated me along with the mysteries of whether any of her children survived their execution. Steve Berry took what is known about their story and wove it into a wonderful work of fiction. At the end of the novel, he sites all of the sources for the truths in his story too. That weaving of history, theories, and fiction has made me a persistent fan of his books. But The Romanov Prophecy was the first one I ever read, and the one I can reread over and over.
The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone - Probably the only biography I have read that wasn’t assigned reading for school. I have always been a fan of Michelangelo; even when I was a teenager. One day my mom was watching a Charlton Heston film by the same title and I was intrigued. I stumbled upon the biography one day when killing time at the library in between college classes. I happened to be taking an art history class that semester and checked the book out. It so beautifully explains the struggles that most artists go through, the dilemmas of creating art for oneself versus patrons and paying clients. While Michelangelo is known for painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, did you know he didn’t want to do it? And he didn’t think he was a very good painter? He was a sculptor! Go read the book. Even if you aren’t an artist, if you have any appreciation for his art, you’ll enjoy the book.
What would you list as your favorite novels? Ones you can go back and reread when you want?
