Book Recommendations: June 2020

June is upon us and that means reading new books to pass the time. I will recommend books I have enjoyed throughout this year and over the past couple of years. This list is made up of books that I think others will like as much as I did if not more and I will try to make it diverse.

Circe by Madeline Miller is a book about a nymph goddess that has been banished to an island and forced to stay there by her father, the sun god, Helios. We hear Circe’s story and Miller does a wonderful job showcasing Circe’s pain and suffering and how she rises above the pitfalls of most gods in the book.

Colsen Whitehead has written two amazing novels and is becoming one of my new favorite authors. He latest novel The Nickel Boys is about a reform school for delinquents in the 1960’s in Eleanor, Florida that has a dark secret. Elwood is sent to the school after being falsely arrested while a passenger in a stolen car and is sent there as punishment. The school’s discipline conflicts with Elwood’s philosophy and all that he stands for and what Dr. King has taught him.

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern is a wonderful tale about a guy who avoided his destiny as a kid and tries to make up for it by chasing it years later. Morgenstern creates beautiful mythology and creates another world were books and stories are preserved forever. That world is in danger and it is up to Zachary Ezra Rawlins to save that world that once escaped him.

Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar is a true story about a group of students who went missing after going hiking in the treacherous Russian Ural Mountains. Donnie interviews people decades later and tries to solve their mysterious deaths and that means he has to take the same journey to figure out how the nine students died.

Another author that I have enjoyed reading for the past five years is Don Winslow. His style of writing is art and he can make characters jump out of a book. His novel The Kings of Cool is about three friends who have a weed business in California who run into opinion from a cartel. Ben, Chon and O are thrust into a battle that has been going on for decades and they are suffering the consequences of what their parents did years ago.