What Would You Recommend?

The temperature is -6 this morning and my mailbox is in its own little cave.  I don't know about you, but even though the sun has risen as I write this and I hear crazy little birds singing, winter is still here.  So in celebration of girlyness, I'm sticking with the cozy theme today.

Yesterday evening I made a fire and the girls and I stayed in the family room the rest of the evening reading.  That is what I like to do on cold winter nights.  My youngest and I finished reading The Horse and His Boy. (And after she went to bed, I stuck to required reading after the Red Tent relapse of this week).

What is your favorite book that celebrates girlyness? The kind that you stick your head into like an ostrich in the sand. The kind of book that if you start to tell a man about, his eyes will start to glaze over with boredom.  You know the type. You audibly sigh when you're done and you might even have a tear-soaked tissue in your hand.  They're the kind you want to own. Anne of Green Gables. Little Women. Emma. Pride and Prejudice. Those are the classic variety.

The Red Tent, it's this kind of book.  One of my favorites, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was oddly enough, written by a man. I'll never know how we captured so well what being a woman in Taliban-crushed Afghanistan is like.  Well, I don't know what being under Taliban rule is like, but he convinced me.

There's also a collection of short stories by Elizabeth Berg that I really like, but the title story,"Ordinary Life" is a must-read.  You'll be melancholy and cry for days, though.  It's short, so I don't want to give it away.

Anne Tyler's Digging to America is wonderful.  It follows the lives of 2 little girls from China who arrived in America on the same plane, and the families that adopted them, and the intersections of their lives.

Children's books qualify.  My daughter's favorite book in all of the world is Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons.  The character development is second to none.  It is every bit as engrossing and powerful as any grown-up novel you've read.

My other daughter and I are big fans of Cynthia Rylant who writes about our favorite duo, Mr. Putter and Tabby.  She also wrote a book called Missing May that you could finish and fall in love with on a single snowy evening.

Maybe you're the one who made the recommendations to me, maybe you've heard me rave about these books to the point of nausea before.  A reader always takes new recommendations, and one of my favorite things to do is sit down with a book a friend raved about and urged me to read.  It connects me to that person in a unique way.

Now it's your turn - recommend away! Stay warm and comfy. Happy Friday and Happy Reading:)