As promised, here are all the books we talked about on Coffee Table on KBBI this morning. Quinton, Terry and I had a blast like we always do, and thanks to everyone who called in!

Click on the photo below to listen to the audio of this morning’s show:

Quinton:

11.23.63 by Stephen King (which Quinton hasn’t actually read, but he gave it as a gift to his father, who loved it. Quinton is now officially the favorite son.)

The three of us got to talking about books everyone has heard of that we feel like we are the last to have read, and in that category Quentin recommends The Giver by Lois Lowry and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. He also liked the Conn Iggulden series on Genghis Khan, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here by Karima Bennoune, and Pink Martini lead singer Storm Large’s memoir, Crazy Enough, which he says is an emotional read while at the same time an easy read, and he could not put it down.

Terry:

Terry, now that he has completed his degree, is delighted to report that he gets to read in a less structured way, as in whatever he wants whenever he wants to. He’s still big with the history, recommending Edmond Morris’ trilogy about Theodore Roosevelt, which he says improves in craft as it goes along, as it well might given it was twenty years between the first and second books. He also recommends Lynn Olsen’s Those Angry Days, when FDR and Charles Lindbergh went head to head over entering into World War II. He was chilled to the bone by Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven. In fiction, he just finished Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, an alternative history which explores the possibility of the Allies losing World War II and a post-war US occupied in the east by Nazi Germany and in the west by Japan. He says there is a twist at the end that he did not see coming. Sounds like Philip K. Dick to me.

And from our callers–

Celia:
The History of Love by Nicole Krause
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Unbroken by Laura Hillebrand

Bumpo:
The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercranz

Rick:
Two Great Courses audible books, The Barbarians of the Steppes (there was a Genghis Khan theme going on this morning) by Professor Kenneth W. Harl, and Brunelleschi’s Dome by Ross King, which he made sound like a how-to book, my favorite kind.

David:
Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne.

Teresa:
Teresa called in from the Homer Public Library, where she coordinated this year’s “15 in ’15” event, and from which list I got some of my favorite reads this year (see below). She reports that the event was so successful that they’re doing it again next year, whoop!

Dana:

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
Ms. Marvel, Volumes 1-3 (and a fourth one is due out the first week of December, yay!)
The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
Operation Mincemeat by Ben MacIntyre

PS–I’ve been reading great fiction, too, like The Beauty of Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb and the Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews, but we didn’t have time to get to them on the air. Check out my reviews on Goodreads for more.

Chatter Coffee Table KBBI