Two of My Favorite Books So Far This Year

Life is moving pretty quickly at the moment.  The Boyfriend and I have finally found ourselves an apartment and will be moving in to it soon!  Next week we will be in Montreal and the Adirondacks for a little vacation!  The puppy is adorable and full of energy! 

And here are two of my favorite books that I've read so far this year.  I loved them both so much that I know whatever I say in a review really will not do them justice, so instead of reviewing them, I'm telling you how much I really really really really really adored them.  Like, devoured them.  And thought of them weeks after I finished them.  They touched my heart so much and left me all "OMG what the hell?!!?".  I've included the book descriptions from Amazon too, because honestly I'm feeling too lazy right now to write my own. 

Without further ado, two books you absolutely need to read if you have similar reading tastes to me:

"In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.
Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.
Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.”
A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal."

(book description taken from Amazon.com)

Title: Let the Great World Spin

Author: Colum McCann

Date of Publication: 2009

Number of Pages: 349

Genre: Fiction

Source: Personal Copy

"In an alternative future Japan, junior high students are forced to fight to the death! L to R (Western Style). Koushun Takami's notorious high-octane thriller is based on an irresistible premise: a class of junior high school students is taken to a deserted island where, as part of a ruthless authoritarian program, they are provided arms and forced to kill one another until only one survivor is left standing. Criticized as violent exploitation when first published in Japan--where it then proceeded to become a runaway bestseller--Battle Royale is a Lord of the Fliesfor the 21st century, a potent allegory of what it means to be young and (barely) alive in a dog-eat-dog world. Made into a controversial hit movie of the same name, Battle Royale is already a contemporary Japanese pulp classic, now available for the first time in the English language. A group of high school students are taken to small isolated island and forced to fight each other until only one remains alive! If they break the rules a special collar blows their heads off. Koushun Takami's brutal, high-octane thriller is told in breathless. blow-by-blow fashion."

(book description from Amazon.com)

Title: Battle Royale
Author: Koushun Takami
Date of Publication: 1999
Number of Pages: 624
Genre: Fiction
Source: Lended to me by a wonderful coworker!


So basically, read them both and let me know what you think ;)  Or if you have read them, did you love them as much as me?  If not, why?

Merci!  Hope you all had a great weekend!