Book Reading and Beach Bumming

The beach is great!  I am super tan, I have been eating well (junk food and seafood) and I have been sleeping approximately 10 hours per night.  It's awesome.  I have also been doing a lot of reading. 

Water for Elephants, by Susan Gruen is one of the top 3 books I have ever read.  The main reason why, you ask?  Because I could tell from page one that it would be one of the best books I have ever read.  I have never been so "hooked" in my life.  Wow, what an amazing talent an author has to do that to the reader!  It's also written in the first person from the perspective of the main character, a man.  And how she did that I will never know.  I believe they also made it into a movie, right?  I will have to look that up.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter, by Kim Edwards is what I finished today.  It also happens to be in the top 3!  How luck am I that I got to read two out of the three best books of my life in the same week?  WHOA.  There are about 1 million reasons why The Memory Keeper's Daughter is in the top 3.  The main ones are:

• This book is about truth and dishonesty in human life.  No matter whose side you take or who you relate to the most, you can sympathize with everyone because it is so real and raw.
• Kim Edwards describes scenery like no one else I have ever read.  I absolutely felt like I belonged in the book, at the scene.  Like the book's world was in a little capsule and I poked a hole and slid in.  I could see everything.  For example, I was sitting on the beach and I was reading about a particular scene when the female main characters was knocking off a wasp's nest outside and the wasps were swarming around her.  I seriously felt like there were wasps swarming around me.  I even shooed one away!  But when I looked up, the wasp was real!  It really was there and just happened to stop by my beach chair as I was reading that part of the book. What a coincidence!  I would have felt the same either way, though.  That's how well she described the scenery.
• It made me cry.  Any book that can make me cry immediately gets in the top 3.  (Just so you know, it also happens to be the only book that has ever made me cry).

Have any of you ever read either of these books?  What did you think?

I will end with a beach picture, of course.  This is me, my father-in-law, and a friend, Nicole.  We are sitting on the crow's nest of the house with drinks watching the sunset.  Oh... and acting like goofballs.