MELT AWAY END-OF-SUMMER BLUES

The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting longer, the leaves are changing, and the temperature soon enough will start to dip. One of my favorite things to do during the summer is curl up with a good book and a cold drink. So I give to you a recommended reading list to cure your end-of-summer blues...

AN END OF SUMMER READING LIST:

We have some classics to offer and some new reads. Enjoy...

1. "A Secret History" by Donna Tartt

It starts with a murder, is obsessed with ancient Greece and creates the delicious illusion of being admitted to the most dangerous of confidences...

2. "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding

Lord of the Flies is a 1954 novel by Nobel Prize-winning British author William Golding. The book focuses on a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves.

3. Enchanted August by Brenda Bowen

A quartet of stressed-out New Yorkers spend a month on an island but find it hard to leave their problems in the city.

4. Sofrito by Phillippe Diederich

A New York restaurant owner hopes to turn his imperiled eatery around by stealing a chicken recipe that also happens to be a Cuban government secret. (I haven't read this one, but it is DEFINITELY going on the list. A chicken recipe that is also a Cuban government secret?!? Sign me up...)

Next up a trio of books that everyone is raving about by Kevin Kwan...

5. "Crazy Rich Asians" by Kevin Kwan

When New Yorker Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, she envisions a humble family home and quality time with the man she hopes to marry. But Nick has failed to give his girlfriend a few key details. One, that his childhood home looks like a palace; two, that he grew up riding in more private planes than cars; and three, that he just happens to be the country’s most eligible bachelor.

6. "China Rich Girlfriend" by Kevin Kwan

It’s the eve of Rachel Chu’s wedding, and she should be over the moon. She has a flawless Asscher-cut diamond, a wedding dress she loves, and a fiancé willing to thwart his meddling relatives and give up one of the biggest fortunes in Asia in order to marry her. Still, Rachel mourns the fact that her birthfather, a man she never knew, won’t be there to walk her down the aisle.

7. "Rich People Problems" by Kevin Kwan

When Nicholas Young hears that his grandmother, Su Yi, is on her deathbed, he rushes to be by her bedside—but he's not alone. The entire Shang-Young clan has convened from all corners of the globe to stake claim on their matriarch’s massive fortune. With each family member vying to inherit Tyersall Park—a trophy estate on 64 prime acres in the heart of Singapore—Nicholas’s childhood home turns into a hotbed of speculation and sabotage.

8. "Even Cowgirls get the Blues" by Tom Robbins

The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them. Yet their rebellion at the Rubber Rose Ranch is almost overshadowed by the arrival of the legendary Sissy Hankshaw, a white-trash goddess literally born to hitchhike, and the freest female of them all.

9. "Jitterbug Perfume" by Tom Robbins

It begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn’t conclude until nine o’clock tonight (Paris time). It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle actually is the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is only a drop or two left.

10. "The Dead Zone" by Stephen King

A #1 national bestseller about a man who wakes up from a five-year coma able to see people's futures and the terrible fate awaiting mankind.

Another one that I haven't read, but it is definitely on my radar...

11. "Marry, Kiss, Kill" by Anne Flett-Giordano

The Emmy-winning "Frasier" writer makes her literary debut with the story of a Santa Barbara detective and her partner probing a series of murders.

Until next time, my lovelies, and happy reading...