RGB Really Good Books

My daughter Katie is a sixth grade teacher and she keeps a cardboard box in her room labeled: Really Good Books in hasty hand letters. If a student reads a book from the classroom library and feels the title deserves the designation, into the box it goes. It's a simple, populist review system that inspires reading and discussion.

So, I made us a box on the assumption that folks don't just sit around reading poetry ALL the time and might in fact be in the market for a really good book recommended by a friend. People suggest books to me all the time. I write the titles down on old grocery receipts and checkbook deposit slips and jam them into whatever bag I'm carrying never to be seen again. And then the next time I'm at the library or bookstore, I spend way too much time wandering the aisles looking for a really good book, my mind a blank whirl. I then start to cruise the shelves with a hunt and peek process, listing toward authors with whom I already have a passing acquaintance.

What I'm hoping is that folks will respond to this posting with really good books that they read during their summer vacation. (In Cleveland, just having the sun out 3 days in a row is a vacation, so if it's just something you read on the bus and it was really good, put it in the box.)

Here's the first one I want to toss in. The Septembers of Shiraz a debut novel by Iranian American Dalia Sofer, who emigrated to the US at the age of 10 bringing with her vivid images of life, revolution, and her own father's imprisonment and release in Tehran after the fall of the Shah's regime. The reluctant protagonist, Issac, is a Jewish gem dealer in Tehran who chooses to quietly stay in his homeland when many of his friends flee. When the revolutionary guards come for him, the reader follows his harrowing journey into a torturous prison and the subsequent staggerings of his wife, daughter, and son (who is studying abroad in NYC) in alternating chapters. The writing is vivid and sparse, drenched in eyewitness detail that focuses less on the political disputes than on the day to day realities of a family hobbled by change as the revolutionaries quickly overtake the violent, intolerant reputations of their former oppressors. Against this historical backdrop the author shows the reader that whether the topic is families or revolution, there is no such thing as a flawless stone.

Personal note: I get a lot of my information about the world through fiction (that is the fiction written to be fiction, not the distortions brought to us by the MSM). Other books about the Middle East that I would toss in the RGB box are: The Bookseller of Kabul, Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Kabul, The Bastard of Istanbul, Three Cups of Tea (memoir), Under the Persimmon Tree, Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind, and Haveli. Those last four are teen novels, but don't let that hold you back, it just means the protagonist is a teenager. Catcher in the Rye would be a teen book if it were released today.

So, what else is new? What else goes in the RGB box?