Top Ten 2014 Books I Missed & Tuesday Intro (West of Sunset by Stewart O’Nan)

Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish that asks bloggers to create Top Ten lists on a variety of bookish topics. This week’s topic is…

Top Ten 2014 Books I Missed

Top 10 2014 Books I Missed

Fiction

All Day and A Night by Alafair Burke (June 10, 2014)
A new murder case with ties to a convicted serial killer leads Detective Ellie Hatcher into a twisting investigation with explosive and deadly results in this superb mystery from the “terrific web spinner” (Entertainment Weekly)

Goodnight June by Sarah Jio (May 27, 2014)
Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Songs) is an adored childhood classic, but its real origins are lost to history. In Goodnight June, Sarah Jio offers a suspenseful and heartfelt take on how the “great green room” might have come to be. (Amazon)

The Book of Unknown Americans by Christina Henriquez (June 3, 2014)
A boy and a girl who fall in love. Two families whose hopes collide with destiny. An extraordinary novel that offers a resonant new definition of what it means to be American. (Amazon)

The Distance by Helen Giltrow (September 9, 2014)
A dark, ultra-contemporary, and relentlessly paced debut thriller about a London society woman trying to put her secret criminal past behind her, and the hit man who comes to her with an impossible job she can’t refuse. (Amazon)

That Night by Chevy Stevens (June 17, 2014)
As a teenager, Toni Murphy had a life full of typical adolescent complications: a boyfriend she adored, a younger sister she couldn’t relate to, a strained relationship with her parents, and classmates who seemed hell-bent on making her life miserable. Things weren’t easy, but Toni could never have predicted how horrific they would become until her younger sister was brutally murdered one summer night. Toni and her boyfriend, Ryan, were convicted of the murder and sent to prison. Now thirty-four, Toni, is out on parole and back in her hometown, struggling to adjust to a new life on the outside. (Amazon)

Nonfiction

Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade by Walter Kirn (March 10, 2014)
In the summer of 1998, Walter Kirn—then an aspiring novelist struggling with impending fatherhood and a dissolving marriage—set out on a peculiar, fateful errand: to personally deliver a crippled hunting dog from his home in Montana to the New York apartment of one Clark Rockefeller, a secretive young banker and art collector who had adopted the dog over the Internet. Thus began a fifteen-year relationship that drew Kirn deep into the fun-house world of an outlandish, eccentric son of privilege who ultimately would be unmasked as a brazen serial impostor, child kidnapper, and brutal murderer. (Amazon)

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell (January 23, 2014)
The autumn of 1922 found F. Scott Fitzgerald at the height of his fame, days from turning twenty-six years old, and returning to New York for the publication of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age. A spokesman for America’s carefree younger generation, Fitzgerald found a home in the glamorous and reckless streets of New York. Here, in the final incredible months of 1922, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald drank and quarreled and partied amid financial scandals, literary milestones, car crashes, and celebrity disgraces.

Yet the Fitzgeralds’ triumphant return to New York coincided with another event: the discovery of a brutal double murder in nearby New Jersey, a crime made all the more horrible by the farce of a police investigation—which failed to accomplish anything beyond generating enormous publicity for the newfound celebrity participants. Proclaimed the “crime of the decade” even as its proceedings dragged on for years, the Mills-Hall murder has been wholly forgotten today. But the enormous impact of this bizarre crime can still be felt in The Great Gatsby, a novel Fitzgerald began planning that autumn of 1922 and whose plot he ultimately set within that fateful year. (Amazon)

The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan by Jenny Nordberg (September 16, 2014)
In Afghanistan, a culture ruled almost entirely by men, the birth of a son is cause for celebration and the arrival of a daughter is often mourned as misfortune. A bacha posh (literally translated from Dari as “dressed up like a boy”) is a third kind of child – a girl temporarily raised as a boy and presented as such to the outside world. (Amazon)

Young Adult

Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer (September 30, 2014)
Reeve has been gone for almost a year and Jam is still mourning.
When a journal-writing assignment leads Jam into a mysterious other world she and her classmates call Belzhar, she discovers a realm where the untainted past is restored, and she can feel Reeve’s arms around her once again. But, as the pages of her journal begin to fill up, Jam must to confront hidden truths and ultimately decide what she’s willing to sacrifice to reclaim her loss. (Amazon)

I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson (September 16, 2014)
Jude and her twin brother, Noah, are incredibly close. […] But three years later, Jude and Noah are barely speaking. Something has happened to wreck the twins in different and dramatic ways . . . until Jude meets a cocky, broken, beautiful boy, as well as someone else—an even more unpredictable new force in her life. The early years are Noah’s story to tell. The later years are Jude’s. What the twins don’t realize is that they each have only half the story, and if they could just find their way back to one another, they’d have a chance to remake their world. (Amazon)

First Chapter First Paragraph

 

Every Tuesday, fellow blogger Bibliophile By the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where bloggers share the first paragraph of the book they are currently reading or thinking about reading soon.

West of Sunset, Stewart O'Nan

I’m almost finished with West of Sunset and it’s been fine, but no better than that. Now that I’m close to the end, I’m starting to get bored. I think I expected more of Zelda than I got in this book.

Plot Summary from Amazon
In 1937, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a troubled, uncertain man whose literary success was long over. In poor health, with his wife consigned to a mental asylum and his finances in ruins, he struggled to make a new start as a screenwriter in Hollywood. By December 1940, he would be dead of a heart attack.

Those last three years of Fitzgerald’s life, often obscured by the legend of his earlier Jazz Age glamour, are the focus of Stewart O’Nan’s gorgeously and gracefully written novel. With flashbacks to key moments from Fitzgerald’s past, the story follows him as he arrives on the MGM lot, falls in love with brassy gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, begins work on The Last Tycoon, and tries to maintain a semblance of family life with the absent Zelda and daughter, Scottie.

Here’s the first paragraph of Chapter 1:

That spring he holed up in the Smokies, in a tired resort hotel by the asylum so he could be closer to her. A bout of pneumonia over Christmas had provoked a flare-up of his TB, and he was still recovering. The mountain air was supposed to help. Days he wrote in his bathrobe, drinking Coca-Cola to keep himself going, holding off on the gin till nightfall – a small point of pride – sipping on the dark verandah as couples strolled among the fireflies rising from the golf course. Outside of town, Highland Hospital crowned the ridge line, a spired Gothic palace in the clouds worthy of bewitched princesses. He couldn’t afford it, as he couldn’t afford the other private clinics they’d tried, but he pleaded poverty and hashed out of discount with the trustees, begging the money from his agent – an onerous form of credit, borrowing against stories he’d yet to imagine.

What do you think? Would you keep reading? Stay tuned for my full review…


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22 Comments

  1. Beth F wrote:

    I have this one coming to me. I love O’Nan and I like the topic. Hope I have better luck.

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  2. Several of these are on my TBR list. If only there were more hours in the day for READING. You MUST read I’ll Give You the Sun, a thought-provoking, poignant read. If you listen to audiobooks, this one is a good one to listen to. Have a good day.

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      I know, right?! That’s what I need – more reading time! And I’ve heard wonderful things about I’ll Give You the Sun…I’m not usually a YA person, so I didn’t pick it up right when it came out, but apparently it has crossover appeal.

      Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  3. I’ll Give You the Sun has been gracing a lot of lists today and I highly recommend it! Such a unique and powerful story! Jandy Nelson has a gift!

    Nicole @ The Quiet Concert

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  4. I am always fascinated by the Fitzgeralds and books about them. This one does sound good. Thanks for sharing.

    Here’s mine: “ALL DAY AND A NIGHT”

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  5. Sounds like an interesting, but sad story. From your list of 10 missed, I’ve read only one. That Night and loved it.

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  6. West of Sunset is on my wish list. I, too, am fascinated by the Fitzgeralds.

    My Tuesday post: http://www.bookclublibrarian.com/2015/01/first-chapter-first-paragraph-89.html

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  7. The only one on your list that I’ve read is The Underground Girls of Kabul and I highly recommend it. I also highly recommend <a href=http://mytime2read.blogspot.com/2014/05/review-pearl-that-broke-its-shell.html The Pearl That Broke Its Shell. Same subject, but fiction. I actually read it first and loved it, so I HAD to read The Underground Girls of Kabul when I saw it!

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  8. I got an ARC of Belzhar at BEA last summer and hate that I haven’t read it yet! So that is one for me too.
    Check out my Top 10

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  9. Well, great…thanks for the reminder of all I missed, Sarah. Hahahaha!!! Just kidding, just kidding. I really did forget about a couple of these that I’d been interested in reading: Goodnight June, The Distance, and The Book of Unknown Americans. There are just too many!

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
    • admin wrote:

      Ha! I know, right?! These Top 10 Tuesdays always crush my TBR list!

      Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  10. The story of the Fitzgeralds is sad but fascinating. I would have to keep reading! Thanks for stopping by my blog today!

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  11. I am not a huge F. Scott Fitzgerald fan and am not sure I would want be interested enough to read this one.

    Many of the books on your top ten list this week sound good! I want to read more by Alafair Burke at some point and Sarah Jio’s book looks like something I would like.

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  12. Cleo wrote:

    I’m beginning to realise that there will never be enough time to read all the books I want to – there are a few on your list I missed. I’m not so keen on SF but still enjoyed your post on West of Sunset .

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  13. I was surprised by how much I liked The Book of Unknown Americans. It was a super quick read for me that almost felt a bit like a YA crossover, but had some great depth, too.

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  14. I know virtually nothing about the Fitzgeralds, and the opening made me curious. I’d keep reading. Sorry to hear the book isn’t holding your interest.
    Thank you for visiting my blog and taking the time to leave a comment.
    andy @ TEXAS TWANG.

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  15. You HAVE to get to The Underground Girls of Kabul! This was one of my top books I read last year and potentially one of my favorites I have ever read, especially for nonfiction. The writing is fantastic and the content is remarkable.

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  16. kelley wrote:

    I’ll watch for your review. I’ve only read “The Great Gatsby”, I didn’t like it that well so I’ve never read another by him. I’d like to read “Goodnight June” that you have in your top ten, nice list this week. Have a nice week. kelley—the road goes ever ever on

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  17. Bellezza wrote:

    I started Belzhar, and surprised myself by really liking it, and then it was due back at the library. But, perhaps I’ll check it out again when there’s more time, because I thought Meg did a marvelous job of capturing that age, and my interest at the same time.

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  18. Diane@BibliophilebytheSea wrote:

    I like the intro Sarah, but the reviews have been mixed for sure. Planning on trying it soon.

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  19. I’m not so sure about West of Sunset. Just didn’t grab me. I am, however, reading I’ll Give You the Sun at the urging of my 15 year-old granddaughter. I’m only two chapters in, but so far, I’m not liking it. Sure hope it gets better.

    Posted 1.13.15 Reply
  20. This was an interesting list, not just the same titles as everyone else. I read Belzhar last year and gave it 5 stars. I really enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to and definitely recommend it. I’ll Give You The Sun isn’t out yet here but I really want to read it when it is. I’ve seen so many glowing reviews of it!

    Posted 1.14.15 Reply

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