Vacation reading spans the globe and sends us to the Moon

By John Hoover

It’s a beautiful summer day and you’re on vacation. Perhaps you’re at the beach or the lake or camping in the woods. Maybe you’ve taken a “staycation” this year and find yourself at home. Wherever you are, the pace of your busy life has slowed and you find yourself able to relax for a while. When the folks here at Misty Valley Books go on vacation, we reach for a Good Read to spend some quality time with a favorite, or maybe a new, author. Get yourself a tall, cold beverage, find a comfortable spot to spend an hour or two and open one of our summer Good Reads recommendations:

Amanda’s pick for best Beach Read 2013 is Beautiful Ruins ($15.99), by Jess Walter.  A love story whose setting takes us from the western coast of southern Italy to Rome to Hollywood over the course of 50 years, this novel has several ingenious plot twists that make it hard to put down.   Bring extra sunscreen when you pack this book for the beach!

Bill recommends Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed ($28.95), a sprawling epic full of love and despair, with Afghanistan as the setting, plus detours to France and America. This novel is as rich and engaging as The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, his two previous works.

From Lynne come these recommendations: The Book of Lost Fragrances ($16) by M.J. Rose. It’s a fascinating story of perfume from the days of Cleopatra, weaving back and forth from Paris to Egypt. And Lydia Netzer’s Shine, Shine, Shine ($14.99), a poignant, sweet book. In this wonderful and different book you’ll meet Sunny, who was born with alopecia and is pregnant, Maxon, a genius engineer, who is on a NASA space mission to Mars, and their son Bubber. When an accident happens in space, we are thoroughly caught up in their story.

Kim thinks Colony ($7.95) by Anne Rivers Siddons is perfect for anyone headed to Maine this summer. It’s the life story of a former “southern belle” as told through the summers spent with her husband’s family on the coast of Maine. Colony is a great “beach read” paperback.

Jory, our Young Adult specialist, has two books to recommend for our younger readers: Eleanor & Park ($18.99) by Rainbow Rowell. Eleanor and Park share a bus seat to school each day. They don’t talk for weeks, but begin to share comics. Sharing comics turns to friendship, and this turns into first love. It’s easy to fall deeply into this YA romance. And Every Day ($17.99) by David Levithan. Each day A wakes up to inhabit a new body, living in that person’s life for one day. But when A falls in love with Rhiannon, it’s hard to have a new life each day. Why can’t A just have one life?

I could not put down Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry ($15), a bittersweet story of a life gotten through rather than lived. The story takes place in England when Harold, a retired salesman, decides that the only way to save his friend Queenie from dying of cancer is to walk from one end of England to the other. Along the way, he realizes how much of life he and his wife have missed.