summer 2005 reads
Discover the best summer 2005 reads with our curated list of top books from that year. Find your next favorite novel or nonfiction pick for warm-weather reading!
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Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
Sixteen-year-old Pi Patel is stranded in a lifeboat on the Pacific Ocean with only a 450-pound Bengal tiger for company, and must learn to survive both tiger and ocean.
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Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory. But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England's magical past and regained some of the powers of England's magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French. All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative-the very opposite of Mr Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington's army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different. For Mr Norrell, their power is something to be cautiously controlled, while Jonathan Strange will always be attracted to the wildest, most perilous forms of magic. He becomes fascinated by the ancient, shadowy figure of the Raven King, a child taken by fairies who became king of both England and Faerie, and the most legendary magician of all. Eventually Strange's heedless pursuit of long-forgotten magic threatens to destroy not only his partnership with Norrell, but everything that he holds dear. Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke's magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that eight hundred pages leave readers longing for more.
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The Jane Austen Book Club
by Karen Joy Fowler
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A book club discuss the works of Jane Austen and experience their own affairs of the heart in this charming “tribute to Austen that manages to capture her spirit” (The Boston Globe). In California’s central valley, five women and one man join to discuss Jane Austen’s novels. Over the six months they get together, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable, and love happens. With her eye for the frailties of human behavior and her ear for the absurdities of social intercourse, Karen Joy Fowler has never been wittier nor her characters more appealing. The result is a delicious dissection of modern relationships. Dedicated Austenites will delight in unearthing the echoes of Austen that run through the novel, but most readers will simply enjoy the vision and voice that, despite two centuries of separation, unite two great writers of brilliant social comedy.
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Eragon
by Christopher Paolini
Beautifully written and taut with suspense, "Eragon" is the first installment in an epic fantasy trilogy about a 15-year-old farm boy who discovers his destiny as a Dragon Rider.
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Blue Blood
by Edward Conlon
The life of a New York City police officer, with the NYPD running through his veins: a highly anticipated nonfiction epic-destined to be a classic. The excitement began from the moment of its acquisition in the fall of 1998, when major news organizations, including The New York Times, reported the sale of a book by the NYPD officer who wrote the "Cop's Diary" in The New Yorker, under the pseudonym Marcus Laffey. Now delivered, Blue Bloodis a bona fide literary masterpiece, an important book about what it means to protect, to serve, and to defend among the ranks of New York's finest. Conlon's canvas is great and complicated-he is the product of generations involved in law enforcement, good cops and bad-and the story he tells is impossibly rich: it presents an anecdotal history of New York through its police force, and paints a vivid portrait of the teeming street life of the city in all its horror and splendor. It is a story about fathers and sons, partners who become brothers, old ghosts and undying legacies. Here you will see terms like loyalty, commitment, and honor come alive, in action, on a daily basis. With brio and a thrilling literary style, Conlon depicts his life on the force-from his first days walking a beat in the South Bronx to his ascent to detective. The pace is relentless, the stories hypnotic, the scope nothing less than grand. Edward Conlon is a son of the Bronx, who still lives and works there. His father was a police officer who left the NYPD to join the FBI. His uncle was a lifelong officer of the NYPD. His great grandfather was a crooked cop-a dandy who "carried the bag on Atlantic Avenue"-during the Tammany Hall era. Blue Blood brings together a gifted writer with a subject he owns: Conlon captures the exquisite detail, the hilarious exchange of dialogue, the tragic and the marvelous, experienced firsthand, day after day. He has the Irish gift of storytelling, an old-school delivery, a killer sense of irony, and a sentimental heart. Conlon's father envisioned bigger things for his son, the Harvard graduate; but to Conlon, there is no greater job in the world. He answered the call. In the end, you know why he's a cop, why anyone becomes a cop. Without question, Blue Bloodwill be one of the most talked about and celebrated books of the year.
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Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
by Jack Weatherford
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The startling true history of how one extraordinary man from a remote corner of the world created an empire that led the world into the modern age—by the author featured in Echoes of the Empire: Beyond Genghis Khan. The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in twenty-five years than the Romans did in four hundred. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization. Vastly more progressive than his European or Asian counterparts, Genghis Khan abolished torture, granted universal religious freedom, and smashed feudal systems of aristocratic privilege. From the story of his rise through the tribal culture to the explosion of civilization that the Mongol Empire unleashed, this brilliant work of revisionist history is nothing less than the epic story of how the modern world was made.
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Moneyball
by Michael Lewis
The Oakland Athletics have a secret: a winning baseball team is made, not bought. A story about money, science, entertainment, egos, "Moneyball" traces the remarkable success of the Oakland Athletics, a major league team with a minor league budget.
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Stiff
by Mary Roach
An oddly compelling, often hilarious forensic exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem.
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Trickster's Queen
by Tamora Pierce
Aly fails to foresee the dangers that await as she uses her magic to safeguard Dova and her younger siblings, despite knowing that her thirteen-year-old charge might be queen of the Copper Isles when the colonial rulers are defeated.
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I'm a Stranger Here Myself
by Bill Bryson
A classic from the New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body. After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens—as he later put it, "it was clear my people needed me"). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss hotlines, and the staunch conviction that ice is not a luxury item. Delivering the brilliant comic musings that are a Bryson hallmark, I'm a Stranger Here Myself recounts his sometimes disconcerting reunion with the land of his birth. The result is a book filled with hysterical scenes of one man's attempt to reacquaint himself with his own country, but it is also an extended if at times bemused love letter to the homeland he has returned to after twenty years away.