Bookstores vs. libraries vs. the internet

I took my daughter to Barnes & Noble today, which got me thinking about the question - where is the best place to pick out books:  bookstores, libraries, or the internet?  And do you select books differently depending on where you are choosing them?

If you read my blog on physical books vs. electronic books, you will know that I do the majority of reading on my kindle.   Therefore, the majority of my books are sourced from the internet - either from Amazon, from the website for the Westchester County library system or from Netgalley (where I request free books in exchange for honest reviews).  But being in a bookstore reminded me of how great it is to pick up and peruse physical books, and how much more serendipitous picking books that way can be.  

Mysteries

I always enjoy reading a good mystery.  These days it seems like thrillers tend to be more popular than straight mysteries among most readers.  I've already written a post on some of my favorite thrillers, and some of the books listed in that post definitely fall into the mystery category as well.  It can be hard to define the exact difference between mysteries and thrillers, but I'd say it's that in many thrillers, especially the psychological kind, the mystery tends to be more just for the reader - figuring out exactly what is happening, what characters' secrets or motivations were, etc., while in a more traditional mystery there is generally a crime, and either a police officer or a private investigator (though occasionally a private person) is investigating what happened.

In my teenage years, mysteries were one of the genres I read the most, working my way through many an author - I think I may have actually read every book Agatha Christie wrote, as well as many of the books by Dick Francis, Mary Higgins Clark, Lillian Jackson Braun, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, etc.  But for the purposes of this post, I'll concentrate more on more recent mysteries that are a little fresher in my mind.

Here are some of my favorites:

From the Top 10 Archives - Jen's 10 Favorite Books of 2005

Once again, I'm looking back at one of my old top 10 book lists - today we'll re-visit my 10 favorite books from 2005.  As a reminder, that means books I read in 2005, not necessarily books published that year.

Here's my list from 2005, in alphabetical order by author's last name:

Books That Made Me Cry

I don't know about other people, but I actually love it when a book makes me cry.  Both for the element of the cathartic release of that I'm emotionally invested.  Often I'm crying at something sad, but sometimes I find the ending of a book I loved to be so poignant that it makes me cry even if it's happy!  In fact, if you look at my reviews of some my favorite books on Goodreads, it's not uncommon for them to include a statement along the lines of "I sobbed my way through the last chapter of this book."  All that being said, I am a famously easy crier.  My kids actually laugh at me because I cry so easily at movies and tv.

So, the following is not at all an exhaustive list of books that made me cry - just a look at a few of the most memorable cries.  Yes, they're all books that I loved (and many of them made my ten favorites lists the years that I read them).  But for the ones I list below, it wasn't just the book that was memorable but also specifically my emotional response to it!