A Glorious Freedom: Older Women Leading Extraordinary Lives by Lisa Congdon

I've already recommended this book to a TON of people, so you might as well just go out and get ahold of a copy now.

This book is chock full of short biographies, brief essays, interviews, quotes, and illustrated portraits. The women featured have all done amazing things, and none of them "made it" until they were well into adulthood (No child prodigy here! Some of them didn't even get started until they were 70+ years old). You'll know a bit about some of them, but you won't have heard of every woman featured (I spent a lot of time Googling while I was reading), and there's something in every story to fascinate.

And the takeaway is this: we regularly live to be 90+ in modern society, so what are you going to do with the 30+ years after "retirement"? Why are you waiting to start doing the things you really desire?

The Mountain by Paul Yoon

Six short stories make up this small collection, a pocket-sized bit of literature: A homeless woman goes to work in a camera factory. A nurse steals morphine from her patients. A woman discovers a plane crash and the pilot's body. A hotel maid wanders away for a day's adventure.

I read until the end, but I can't say I necessarily enjoyed this one. The stories are all very dark, mostly sad, and without much resolution. I don't usually mind that much, but I really wanted there to be something here that shone a light of hope, in the end.

It's beautifully written, and the characters are heartbreakingly real. Just very, very sad.

Every Exquisite Thing by Matthew Quick

Nanette can't keep pleasing everyone else at the detriment of her own desires, but can she face the disappointment of her teammates and parents? Alex has decided to fight back against the bullies, but that might not be the best way to express individualism.

Have you ever read a book that absolutely changed your life? For the characters in this YA novel, a cult classic, out-of-print paperback leads to a different perspective on being one of the generic human crowd. But how much can you "quit" and still be alright?

This book isn't as dark as Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, but it's certainly no spring June walk in the park. Metamorphosis is hard work and not always pretty. (Let's hope Quick does better in handling the enthusiasm of his readers than his character Booker did.)

I adore Quick's writing, and his characters are amazingly nuanced, flawed and very relatable. These kids are searching for something - searching for themselves - and the way they work through it brings love and light but also unpleasantness and drama to their lives.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

Two Chinese teens sent to be "re-educated" during the communist Cultural Revolution gain a whole different kind of enlightenment through a suitcase of elicit Western literature.

Through film and novels, the boys learn storytelling and gain experiences they can't otherwise obtain in their limited, censored lives. They, in turn, offer this same cultural broadening to a new friend, the tailor's daughter,

I didn't expect this book to be funny and sweet, but that's the first thing that comes to mind when trying to summarize this book. Of course, it's also expectedly horrifying at the work and conditions in which the villagers live ... but the real story is in the friendship, hijinx, and loves.

I loved this novella - it's another book about loving books - and the story is told briskly in a series of short chapters and vignettes about their lives. It's rich with details: you can perfectly visualize the coats they're wearing, and the fine suitcase leather is almost real to the touch.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

After his wife's death, a small-town book snob's soul begins to shrivel up; he's drinking himself to death, and his prickly personality isn't helping the bookstore stay afloat (he openly despises most of the clientele). But a woman, a baby, and his tight-knit community will eventually force A.J. to live, to grow, and maybe even to try new genres.

This is a captivating, lovely story and a book geek's dream: A.J. has opinions (and so do his customers) and the more well-read you are the more entertaining you'll find those references. It's a refreshing breeze of a book, with flawed, real "human" characters and a brisk pace.

It was hard to put down - and honestly, I finished it in just a couple sittings.

The White Garden by Stephanie Barron

I've never been a Virginia Woolf fan, so I probably wouldn't have picked up this book myself - but it was the book club's choice this month. And actually, I quite enjoyed it!

An American landscape specialist visits England to view a famous garden in order to recreate it for a client. In researching the garden's history, she makes a shocking discovery - a diary that could be an unknown Virginia Woolf manuscript.

"The White Garden" then takes a cue from Dan Brown's "DaVinci Code" by turning into a literary quest for answers that spans England: through university libraries, rare book collections, and even a secret society. The expert and the novice find there's a sexual tension between them, but can't be distracted until the answers are found ...

OK, so it's not really deep cloak-and-dagger adventure. But it was more fun and twisty than I'd expected. And they spend enough time "explaining things" for the "dumb American" that you don't have to be a Anglophile or Woolf scholar to understand and enjoy the tale.