the fifth five

21. La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith
I didn't think it was possible, but it turns out that Alexander McCall Smith can churn out a really crappy book. This one was terrible. The characters are weak, the plot is filled with holes, and his signature dry humor is completely missing. A part of me wonders if he wrote this as some sort of a joke to see how willing the public is to read whatever he writes, no questions asked. If you're craving an Alexander McCall Smith novel, save yourself from this one and pick something else.

22. Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
I mentioned in a previous post how much I loved this book. Because I am feeling lazy, I am just going to share again what I wrote before: This book was absolutely riveting. Because it's the story of a WWII POW, a good chunk of the book was also pretty horrifying, and as such, there were times I just wanted to put it down. But I couldn't. Which was good because even though things always got worse just when you thought they couldn't, eventually everything turned out all right for old Louie Zamperini.

23. Heartbeat by Sharon Creech
I've read two other books by Creech: Love That Dog and Walk Two Moons. Though Heartbeat was enjoyable enough, I liked the other two better. It was written in poetry form (as was Love That Dog), and had some poignant moments, but overall I felt that Creech was trying too hard to make this coming-of-age story moving, so that the results came across as rather sappy.

24. The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Wladyslaw Szpilman
Another riveting WWII story of survival, only this time it features a Polish Jew living in the Warsaw ghetto. I didn't think any Jews survived the Warsaw ghetto, but apparently this one did, though it took more than a few miracles and a whole lot of luck for that to happen. His was a pretty incredible (though, like Unbroken, also pretty horrifying) story, and a good one to read alongside others about the Holocaust.

25. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
The thing about Malcolm Gladwell is that not only is he a really great writer, but he's also a really great teacher. As with his other two books, The Tipping Point and Blink, I came away from this one feeling a little more educated and able to see the world around me with new eyes, so to speak. It's a fascinating subject, and I especially loved his conclusions that that there really is no such thing as the "self-made man," that all of us rely on each other, our backgrounds, and strokes of good timing and luck in order to find material success in this life.