Book Recommendations

I love to read and right now I have lots of time to read. Here are some books I've enjoyed over the past few months. Another day I'll do my all-time faves.

The Georgia Nicolson series by Louise Rennison - I've already written about how much I love these totally mindless pieces of fluff. Think Bridget Jones set in high school. I find these books hilarious. I just finished number 7 in a series of 10 and I'm already sad about the eventual end of the series! Seriously, if you're lookin for something light, enjoyable, and wanting to laugh at angsty teenagers being ridiculous, these books are amazing.

The In the Merde series by Stephen Clarke - amazingly enough I'd never read these before, and now I don't know what took me so long! They are hilarious books about an English guy who moves to France and has all sorts of encounters with the French language, French bureaucracy, and French people that anyone who's lived in France will be familiar with. Not so sure how funny they would be to someone who doesn't know the French language or hasn't spent time in France, but they are highly recommended in any case.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows - this book was sent to me, in English, by someone in France. I just think that's funny. This is an epistolary novel about the German occupation of the Guernsey Islands. I love the tone in which it is written. The characters are unique and amusing, the story is touching and funny, and it will stay with you for a long time. Obviously there are some sad and shocking events, but overall I loved the book and tried to read it slowly so that I wouldn't finish it too quickly.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson - I liked this book much more until the ending. The ending almost gave me a heart attack, it was a very startling break from the tone of the rest of the novel. Until the ending though, I liked it a lot. The story itself is very interesting, though the humor is pretty dry. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to everyone. The book begins with the death of Major Pettigrew's brother and the possibility of reuniting two valuable guns that his father divided between the two of them when he died. The gun becomes a symbol of the Major's attempt to maintain the traditional values he was raised with in the face of a changing world that has become all about materialism and money. He also has to confront racism in small town England. Check it out for yourself.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot - this book is absolutely fascinating. Normally cells have a set number of times that they will divide, and then they die. Having immortal cell lines that don't die is very important for scientific research. Henrietta Lacks was a black woman with an extremely agressive cervical cancer who "provided" the cells that became HeLa, the first immortal cell line. HeLa cells have been used to research a huge variety of things including the polio vaccine and cancer treatments. Nearly every lab in the world that uses cells in their research has at least some HeLa cells, including my mom's lab. This book is about Henrietta Lacks, her family, the history of cell culture and many bioethics laws, and the ethical issues raised by her case. I highly recommend this book. Everything is explained clearly and concisely so even if science isn't your thing it's easily understandable.

Anyone else have any book recommendations? I'm almost done with The Immortal Life... so I need some new ideas for books! Preferably happy, not too dramatic books. I have enough drama in my life, I don't need to read about anyone else's drama.