Books Worth Reading

The new question I'm hearing around the book blogs and forums lately is a perfect conversation starter - but one we never would have asked only a few years ago. What's on your Kindle?

I've got plenty of books on mine that I haven't gotten around to reading yet, but I thought I'd list a few that I've been interested in for a while, along with some reviews I've been reading that have peaked my interest.

The first would be David Peace's Nineteen Seventy-Four. Small wonder why I'm interested in this one. The book is the first of a quartet, and Peace's debut novel. Set in the title year, it's a gritty, noirish character driven story that subsequently landed David Peace a Granta nod and a series of film adaptations in the UK. There's an excellent blog review here.

The book industry has been experiencing what we could curiously call a "Swedish Invasion." Cynical readers might refuse to look twice at the broadening library of crime novels coming from the otherwise peaceful northern nation, but there's a reason these Swedish novels are experiencing significant attention. They're just good. Box 21, by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom is no exception. The writing duo has been getting a lot of attention from serious readers since Publishers Weekly, the New York Times, and a host of other reviewers gave the book a standing ovation upon its release.
T. J. English's The Savage City is a historical narrative of New York City in the '60s and '70s, told with the attention and suspense of a dramatic police procedural. Being a man of Los Angeles, the Big Apple holds a whole different kind of narrative novelty to me. I'd put this book in the queue with Erik Larson's The Devil and the White City in terms of taking the history of a city, finding it's pulse, and turning its narrative into a kind of cult object.

My reading list is always long, but ever open to suggestions. Feel free to add to my list in the comments below. In the meantime, what's on your Kindle?