Reading List for Summer 2014

If you read my blog regularly you know I enjoy reading books. Here's a link to all of my past book posts. This summer my reading list has a wanderlust theme of stories that talk about travel adventures. One book is on Oprah's reading list, I've always enjoyed her selections! Two books are coming out as movies this year and so I want to hurry up and read them before they hit the theaters because you get so many more details in the book.  Here's the books I've downloaded to my kindle or put on hold at my library.  I've finally learned how to get digital books from my library! Did you know that you can lend e-books to your friends, amazon explains how it works.


Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (Oprah's Book Club 2.0 1) by Cheryl Strayed

Wild is the memoir of 26 year old Cheryl Strayed who details her 1,000 mile solo hike along the Pacific Coast Trail to deal with both the loss of her mother and filing for divorce. Reese Witherspoon is starring in the movie adaptation coming out in December. I started reading it this weekend and haven't been able to put it down. 

Cheryl is a very articulate writer and the book is about soul searching and having the guts to overcome something in her life.  This is a woman who was flat broke, had so many dysfunctions in her life, is so brutally honest about her weaknesses yet funny at the same time. The book is not about backpacking nor a trail guide, it's a story of an ill-prepared woman trekking alone, with no electronics in 1995, hiking at night with no lamp posts, when she had never backpacked before. She didn't practice for this hike, including not trying on her backpack to see if it might be too heavy. lol She hikes with sore feet on a healing journey. I found myself googling pictures of the Mojave Desert so I can picture the terrain.  

Couple neat facts  - upon her divorce she and her ex-husband got matching tattoos and she gave herself the last name Strayed. 


Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord                       Lelord is French psychiatrist who had a number of patients who were unhappy for no apparent reason, he was finding it more of a strain and made him tired. So he wrote a fictional story of  a psychiatrist named Hector who traveled around the world to understand what makes people happy. As he travels from Paris to China to Africa to the United States, he lists his observations about the people he meets and what the secret to happiness is. It's a very small book so I think it will be a quick read. It was a best seller in France then translated to English and the movie adaptation comes out in September starring Toni Collette. 









Margarita Wednesdays by Deborah Rodriguez
In answer to the question of what happened following her New York Times bestseller Kabul Beauty School, Deborah Rodriquez is back with a new memoir. She's an American who decided to move to a seaside town in Mexico despite having no plan, no friends, and no Spanish. This book is about her adventures and misadventures that ensue.





Only in Spain: A Foot-Stomping, Firecracker of a Memoir about Food, Flamenco, and Falling in Love by Nellie Bennett 
This is written by a first time author and just published on July 1, 2014. It's the memoir of an Australian who worked retail but decided to move to Spain to take flamenco lessons. This intrigued me since I visited Spain last year.











What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding: A Memoir by Kristin Newman 
Another new book by a first time author just published in May 2014. It's a memoir of a young woman who traveled the world, often alone, for several weeks each year and shares her hilarious stories from Paris, Amsterdan, Moscow Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, New Zealand, Iceland, Tel Aviv  and just about everywhere in between.

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