On My Bookshelf This Summer

If I'm going to be writing a book, I should be reading too - and maybe now more than ever.

I hope to make it through what I have here before Labour Day because I already have several more titles lined up for fall!  

Here's what's on my bookshelf for the summer:

"Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell."

"As the mortars fall and snipers conduct their deadly business, a cellist sits at his window...when a bomb kills twenty-two people waiting in line to buy bread on the street below, he vows to carry his cello into the cratered street at four each afternoon for the next twenty-two days..."  

"...interweaves the stories of a baby girl in India, the American doctor who adopted her, and the Indian mother who gave her up in favor of a son, as two families--one in India, the other in the United States--are changed by the child that connects them."

 "What happens when a southern town's unspoken code of rules and behavior is shattered by three courageous women who strike up an unlikely friendship."   

"What if you could change your life without really changing your life?  On the outside, Gretchen Rubin had it all - a good marriage, healthy children, and a successful career -- but she knew something was missing. Determined to end that nagging feeling, she set out on a year-long quest to learn how to better enjoy the life she already had."

"A vivid, nostalgic and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the middle of the United States
 in the middle of the last century. "

(all via)

"My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closet.  Their selves were on their shelves." - Anne Fadiman

What about you?  Who's on your shelf this summer?  Any reviews on the ones here?