GCBC: Red Sparrow, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, and the Assistants

My friend Sarah and I have a book club composed of just the two of us, which we call GCBC, short for Grand Central Book Club.  Since for various reasons we have had to reschedule our last few lunches and therefore were unable to discuss our books at the actual Grand Central in NYC, we bring to you once again our conversation on the books we have been reading, conducted by e-mail and then edited into this post!

Today, we're discussing 3 books we've read over the past few months:  (1) "Red Sparrow," by Jason Matthews, a spy thriller about a young male CIA agent and a young female Russian agent who end up being assigned to spy on/recruit each other; (2) "Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda" by Becky Albertalli, a young adult novel about a gay teenage boy who is not yet out to his friends or family, only to an anonymous fellow high school student on the internet whose identity he does not know; and (3) "The Assistants" by Camille Perri,which is kind of a chick lit/satirical novel about the assistant to the CEO of a media empire, who somewhat accidentally ends up in a Robin Hood-esque expense account embezzlement scheme.

Thrillers

Thrillers are a genre I enjoy and often get asked to recommend.  And I can promise you this - I won't call any of these books the next "Gone Girl"!  "Gone Girl" definitely started a craze for a certain kind of thriller - the psychological thriller hinging in part on the question of whether the narrator(s) are reliable, and that is definitely one kind of thriller I'll discuss here - but there are also a number of other categories of thrillers as well.  (Though I'm not going to include legal thrillers, since it's not a sub-genre I usually read.)  As I usually do in my genre posts, I'll focus on books I've really enjoyed and would recommend.  I've read a lot of mediocre and even somewhat crappy thrillers, and while I sometimes enjoy them even when their quality is not fantastic, I'm not going to include them here.  And apparently I really like this genre because I had trouble narrowing this one down.  So if you enjoy this genre, be prepared to add a lot of books to your to-read list!

Best series

Recently, I asked for suggestions of what genres/topics related to books people wanted to hear about next.  My friend and fellow book-lover Sarah suggested "best overall series of books."  That was definitely not something I had ever thought about before, but it seemed like an interesting - if daunting - topic.

In order to figure out what series to include, I decided I needed to set some parameters.  These are the ones I decided on:

• There have to be at least three books to qualify as a series.  Otherwise, it's just a book with a sequel, not a series.
• I have to have read all of the books in the series to include it on the list; or, if it is a series still in progress, I have to have read all of the books published to date.
• Not every book in the series has to be amazing, but they all need to be of sufficient quality to make it worthy of embarking on the series, and if the series has come to an end, the ending has to be satisfying.
• The series has to be memorable, can't just be books that I remember that I enjoyed but can't really remember anything about.

Once I figured that out, it became abundantly clear to me that though I had many, many series which I had enjoyed, I had a clear top 3 favorite series ever.

Young adult realistic fiction

Today's post was inspired both by the fact that the last book I read was an awesome young adult novel, and by my friend Joanna, who asked for recommendations of books that are good for teenagers.  So I decided I would write about young adult realistic fiction.  I've previously written about young adult dystopian fiction, and in a future post I'll cover young adult fantasy.

This is not to suggest that only young adult fiction makes for good reading for teenagers - my own teenage daughter Allison also reads adult fiction and non-fiction, with some of her favorites including some of the adult dystopian novels in my dystopian fiction post, and also a couple of the books in my post on contemporary fiction with a science fiction edge.  (Interestingly, Allison has not read most of the books below because she generally finds realistic young adult fiction to be too romance-y.)  And when I was a teenager myself, the young adult genre was definitely not as robust as it is now, so I read a lot of mysteries and science fiction - I specifically remember working my way through all the books by both Agatha Christie and Robert Heinlein, among others.  Nor is a book being labeled young adult any guarantee it is more appropriate, especially for younger teens - I've definitely read a few young adult books that have a lot more sex/drugs/alcohol than many adult books!  But to the best of my recollection, that's not true of the books below.

That being said, here are some favorites of mine in the genre of  contemporary realistic young adult fiction:

From the Top 10 Archives - Jen's 10 Favorite Books of 2002

Part of an ongoing trip through time looking back at my top 10 book lists, today we'll re-visit my 10 favorite books from 2002.  As a reminder, that means I made this list in January 2003 covering books I read in 2002, not necessarily books published that year.

Chick Lit

Following up on my recent post on light fiction, there's a whole genre I left out of that post that is generally pretty light and not too depressing, though some books definitely have their darker subplots - chick lit.  Some people take issues with the term "chick lit" but to me it's not an insult, just a descriptor of a genre.  They're usually books about women in their 20s and 30s where the main plot is about love and/or finding yourself, and they're written in a pretty light style that no one would describe as heavy literary fiction.  Then there's the related genre I would call "contemporary women's fiction" which perhaps includes chick lit as well.  But to me, there's a fine line between the two which is a little hard to define. There are definitely some writers that straddle the line too, where the books they wrote when they were younger are more chick lit, but the books they have written later have a more contemporary women's fiction vibe to me.  But for the purposes of this post, I'm going to concentrate on more chick-lit-y authors, other slightly more serious contemporary women's fiction will have to wait for another day!

Anyway, although I read less chick lit now than I did when I was younger, I still love it so much that I can't limit myself to just naming a few favorite books.  So I'm going to go ahead and profile some of my favorite authors instead.