Check out Kindle Daily Deal  and  KINDLE BOOKS $3.99 OR LESS DEAL EXPIRES LAST DAY OF THE MONTH!

This site links titles & covers to Amazon.com,  but we wholeheartedly encourage you to buy books from your local brick-n-mortar store and to visit your library frequently. 

OCTOBER – Who says ghost don’t exist?  Certainly within fiction,  ghosts are part of our “reality.”  Sometimes even vampires and zombies and demons and even scarier “other-world” type creatures. With Halloween almost upon us, I started thinking about all the books that MostlyFiction.com has reviewed that include “ghost stories” and other supernatural events.

If you are in the mood for a little “spiritual” reading, here are some recommendations… and expect a spooky week of reviews….

Dead Lines by Greg Bear

The Dwelling by Susie Moloney

All That Lives: A Novel of the Bell Witch by Melissa Sanders-Self

The Spiritualist by Megan Chance

Susannah Morrow by Megan Chance

From a Buick 8 by Stephen King

Diary by Chuck Palahniuk

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

Club Dead by Charlaine Harris

From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris

Blue Moon by Laurell K. Hamilton

Lost Souls by Poppy Brite

The Terror by Dan Simmons

Drood by Dan Simmons

An Unpardonable Crime by Andrew Taylor

The Lamplighter by Anthony O’Neill

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

The Bonesetter’s Daughter by Amy Tan (China)

Peony in Love by Lisa See (14th century China)

Secrets of the Sea by Nicholas Shakespeare (Tasmania)

The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

Darling Jim by Christian Moerk

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

The Pig Comes to Dinnerby Joseph Caldwell

Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Smonk by Tom Franklin

Miss Corpus by Clay McLeod Chapman

Fangland by John Marks

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow

The Devil You Know by Mike Carey

Vicious Circle by Mike Carey

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Perfect Circle by Sean Stewart

The Stranger House by Reginald Hill

Cemetery Dance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Sorcerers of the Nightwing by Geoffrey Huntington

The Ghost Writer by John Harwood

Joplin’s Ghost by Tananarive Due

The Price of Silence by Kate Wilhelm

Second Glance by Jodi Picoult

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

Bannerman’s Ghost by John R. Maxim

Mr. Timothy by Louis Bayard

Versailles by Kathryn Davis

Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb

The White Road by John Connolly

From the Ashes by Meghan Brunner

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende

The Yellow Rain by Julio Llamazares

Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott

The Giuliana Legacy by Alexis Masters

The Prince of Lost Places by Kathy Hepinstall

The Disapparation of James by Anne Ursu

The Madman’s Tale by John Katzenbach

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

The Mercy of Thin Air by Ronlyn Domingue

Yes, My Darling Daughter by Margaret Leroy

The Late, Lamented Molly Marx by Sally Koslow

Child’s Play by Carmen Posada

Isabella Moon by Laura Benedict

What Happened to Henry by Sharon Pywell

The Worthy: A Ghost’s Story by Will Clarke

The Duppy by Arthur C. Winkler

Gentlemen of Space by Ira Sher

The Boy on the Bus by Deborah Schupack

Beyond This Time by Charlotte Banchi

Threads by Nell Gavin

Marguerita Dolce Vita by Stefano Benni

The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts

Lost Souls by Michael Collins (set at Halloween)

Stalin’s Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith

Widows of Eastwick by John Updike

Salem Falls by Jodi Picoult

Guy Savage keeps a site called HIS FUTILE PREOCCUPATIONS… Guy reviews classics… but not just your classroom English lit classics.  Guy likes the gritty.  Noir, especially. But, Guy also likes to read books with a challenge, re-reading some of the true classics of the English language.  And those translated from other languages.  In the last five blogs, Guy has covered: Henry James, Emile Zola, Patrick McGrath, Nina Berberova, and Robert L. Fish Can’t blame you if you have never heard of the last three… that is Guy’s specialty, to seek out the lost books, read them and find out what made them work.  Eclectic, yes… the reviews are so well written that you feel just that much smarter for having read the reivew… even if you can’t find these obscure books in your local bookstore.

Mary Whipple has recently decided to take many of the reviews that she had previously written for Amazon or MostlyFiction.com and to post them in one place: SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS.  Thoroughly impressive when you see this body of work in one place. In this short time, she has also added over thirty new reivews. Any long time visitor to MostlyFiction.com knows that Mary Whipple has been a key reviewer for this site for many years, and yes, it was quite disconcerting to me when I first learned of her plans.  However, once I saw her site come to fruition, I was simply in awe.  Because MostlyFiction is shared among twenty reviewers, it only covers a small percentage of what Mary reads.   So, while there is overlap between our two sites (and we are working on the best way to approach this since Mary is still a contributor to MostlyFiction.com), Mary is able to do things that she was not able to do previously.  Take for example, this review of a poetry book that she recently discovered: LONG DIVISION by Andrea Cohen, Mary Whipple’s unbridled enthusiasm is contagious, almost made me want to reprint it on MF, until I remembered that we don’t cover poetry.  And the entry before that is about a visit with the McDowell artists… where she happened to have discovered this poet.  Still, the majority of her site is devoted to her thorough book reviews. One advantage in Mary having her own site is that she no longer needs to “share” books with the rest of the team. She can review what she wants, when she wants.  So, yes, we are covering a lot of the same books (but at different times). When she reviews a book that MF is not covering and she feels strongly that our readership should know about the book, then her review will be reposted on MF.  At least, that is our current arrangement. All things grow and change, thus we will see where this leads.

Ann Wilkes, has a been maintaining a blog site SCIENCE FICTION AND OTHER ODYSSEYS for quite some time. Ann is a sci-fi author herself and attends many Cons, often sitting on discussion boards with other authors and often sharing tables during book signings.  She meets a lot of authors, both established and newbies. Ann has taken advantage of this great opportunity to interview those that she meets and if she hasn’t met them yet… she introduces herself via e-mail to request an interview.  Ann and I have found it works well for her to submit a review to MostlyFiction and then to post the interview for said author on her site.   In those cases, you have already seen me provide the link to her interview.  Personally, I find author interviews interesting and would love to post her interviews on MF, but how greedy can I be?  When Ann isn’t interviewing, she’s usually providing an update on Cons or other related news.  It may not be all books, books, books but she does give you an idea of what it is like to be author, getting her current book noticed, her successes at getting short stories published (and sometimes rejected), and finding the time to work on her current novel.  I’m embarrassed to say that MostlyFiction.com has yet to review Awesome Lavratt — blame it on Ann being our “beyond reality” reviewer… so I can’t ask her to do it!  I’ve read and it is fun romp.

Next time I do a free-wheeling blog entry… I’ll talk about Facebook.

For now… remember that for this site or any of the other sites, the best way to get daily updates to subscribe to the RSS feed.

And no matter what I site I recommend that you visit, always come back here. Promise!

I thought it might be an interesting exercise to take a look at the “post 9/11” books we’ve reviewed at Mostly Fiction…. that is books that seemed to hit at the cultural changes within our country, post 9/11.

So here’s what I have for my first pass — please add your comments on the ones you can think of:

• A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
• Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
• The Last Good Day by Peter Blauner
• Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff (also see author  interview)
• Harbor by Lorraine Adams
• The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud
• The Echo Maker by Richard Powers
• Shalimar the Clown by Salmon Rushdie
• Flight by Ginger Strand
• Terrorist by John Updike
• America’s Report Card by John McNally
• Cranberry Queen by Kathleen DeMarco
• Bannerman’s Ghost by John Maxim
• A Wedding in December by Anita Shreve

Books that speak directly to the day:

• In the Shadow of No Towers by Art Spiegelman
• The Garden of  Last Days by Andre Dubois III
• What We’ve Lost by Graydon Carter
• 9-11 Commission Report

And just to think about pre-9/11:

• Trudy Hopedale by Jeffrey Frank

(All links below open to our original review)

DAWN PATROL by Don Winslow releases today… and thus the reason that I thought I’d do this list.

THE BOAT by Nam Le (available in paperback in August, but worth the wait)

A GENTLEMAN’S GUIDE TO GRACEFUL LIVING by Michael Dahlie (available soon in paperback)

THE PLAGUE OF DOVES by Louise Erdrich

THE HOUSE ON FORTUNE STREET by Margot Livesey

THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE by Andrew Sean Greer

CHILD 44 by Tom Rob Smith

THE BLUE DOOR by David Fulmer

THE BROKEN WINDOW by Jeffery Deaver

NOTHING TO LOSE by Lee Child

A CHANGE OF HEART by Jodi Picoult

THE GARDEN OF LAST DAYS by Andre Dubus III

BREATH by Tim Winton

THE LAZARUS PROJECT by Alexander Hemon

SPLIT ESTATE by Charlotte Bacon

This list is just a start… one that I will be adding too.  Leave comments on your recommendations for paperback reading.