My Father's Daughter -- The Story of Hannah Pool

This title was on NRO's summer 2010 reading list. It looks really good and both the professional and reader reviews at Amazon are positive. Maybe something for next year's book club?

Hannah Pool was adopted by British parents from Eritrea and "grew up in middle-class comfort in England, missing the hardships, deprivation, and war in Eritrea. But she also grew up with the fantasy of many adopted children of someday being reclaimed by the birth family, as well as the guilt of being curious about her birth family and seeming ungrateful of the adopted family. In Pool’s case, there were the additional layers of differences in race and nationality. Still, when a biological brother contacted her, she wavered for 10 years before returning the contact. At nearly 30 years old, Pool returned to Eritrea to meet her family and reconnect with the culture of her birth.

Writers who recommend titles include Denis Boyles, Orson Scott Card, John Derbyshire, Nancy French, David Gelernter, Jonah Goldberg, Allen Guelzo, C. R. Hardy, Arthur Herman, Hugh Hewitt, Carrie Lukas, William McGurn, Eric Metaxas, Joseph Pearce, John J. Pitney, Father George W. Rutler, Hans von Spakovsky, and John Yoo.

Amazon.com: My Fathers' Daughter: A Story of Family and Belonging (9781416593690): Hannah Pool: Books

TBR list for summer

Not sure I'll get that much read. I like to take a book down to the hotel porch, but I end up people watching and writing in my blog notebook. But here's what I've got so far. There would be more but Barnes and Noble doesn't assign anyone to watch Glenn Beck's Fox program and his book recommendations often go to number one over night. For instance, I asked for George Washington Sacred Fire, and it apparently is temporarily out of stock (or print, don't remember); then I asked for F.A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom, and they didn't have any but had 11 on order (the UAPL has a waiting list of 10). But I was able to find The Overton Window, and Samuel Adams; a life. I like non-fiction, but rarely read a "thriller."

Also on my list to finish is Timothy Keller's The Reason for God, Larry Schweikart's A Patriot's History of the United States, and The Lutherans in North America.  Then I take along some recent JAMAs, which I'm starting to call Ojama due to the editorial slant and butt kissing of the editors, and the Spring and Summer issues of Watercolor and Watercolor Artist.

The unread books list

A strange list indeed. I have no idea why this would matter. These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. LibraryThing is that thing I said I didn't use in my TT. So, people own these books, but many sit unread on their shelves.

Instructions: Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your tbr list. Then copy this to your own blog, and you have a prepared topic! I got this from Cathy Knits.

Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels (Read assigned sections in high school)
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

The only titles on my TBR list are Clarence Thomas' new autobiography, My grandfather's son, and Laura Ingraham's Power to the People. I'll probably review them later. Interesting stuff, some a little hard to believe.