The last five books I’ve read were all pretty good. Except for “Wonder” by R.J. Palacio – it was brilliant! I looked back at all the other books I’ve read this year, all the ones I rated 5-stars (five in total, I don’t allocate the fifth easily), and the only other book that stood out for me in a way that I would run up to complete strangers and tell them to READ THIS BOOK! is John Boyne’s Noah Barleywater runs away. Both these books are appropriate for all ages (unlike the three Stephen King books that got that elusive fifth star, I guess).

All of these were audiobooks. I kind of forgot about my undertaking to read one real, paper book a month until just now, typing this (whoopsies!) and two of them had me putting down what I was doing – for very different reasons.

Mr Mercedes (Stephen King) caused me to pause my meal twice while listening to it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the worst gore ever to (dis)grace literature, but it was well written, of course. It didn’t quite make the 5-star club. I gave it 4.5 and will post a review as soon as I know if and when More Than Food is going to publish it on their site.

Wonder (R.J. Palacio) had me setting my knitting aside a few times while a bawled, to avoid dropping stitches through my blurry vision. In case you didn’t get this from the first paragraph, stranger, you need to READ THIS BOOK!

The two Undead books (MaryJanice Davidson) were good. Enough. I’m still annoyed by Betsy’s constant internal discussions, but Fred the mermaid is still awesome. Mostly. She’s also got that internal chatter, but what can you do. That’s apparently what these characters do *sigh*.

Angelmaker (Nick Harkaway) was unexpectedly intriguing. I’ve now moved on to The Gone-Away World, although I’m battling to get into it. I’ll give it another hour, because I’ve seen great reviews, and I’m hoping it’s just a clever way of distinguishing the deserving readers from the rest.

What are you currently reading? And what is the book you want to run up to strangers to and tell them to READ THIS BOOK?