Booktastic: Devil in the White City

Once upon a time in a great big wonderful city called New York, a fantastic group of girls (and one boy) would get together once a month to drink wine, eat delicious food and discuss a book that we'd all spent the last month reading. We called ourselves "Sparkle Magic" for reasons I don't remember (I'm sure it made sense at the time) and we were, if I use the term loosely, a book club. Ultimately we spent very little time discussing our chosen book and honestly "drinking club" would have described us better, but nevertheless we all made an effort to read our book and spend at least 5 minutes at the beginning of each meeting discussing it. Inevitably a discussion on the book would lead to another discussion that had nothing to do with the book and as the wine flowed we'd have more and more trouble coming back to the book, but that wasn't the point. We had SO. MUCH. FUN.

Why I bring up book club now is that I really love getting other people's opinions on books, both before and after I read them. I am an avid reader, making it through at least a book a week and am thus always looking for a new book to read. A recommendation from a real person is by far my favorite way to choose a new book. This book that I'm about to recommend I in fact already owned but kept picking other books from my stash of unread books until...a completely random guy, the property manager for my apartment, saw it sitting on my floor and told me it was one of his favorite books. Done. That was it, that was my next book I was going to read.

And I loved it!

So, I'm not going to do a proper book review because that feels a bit too much like working, but I am going to tell you you must read:

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

It's historically accurate non-fiction and there is such a plethora of information regarding the Chicago World Fair in 1893, so much of it relevant and pertaining to our lives still today. For instance the Ferris wheel was named after a guy who built the first ferris wheel at the Chicago World Fair, interesting right? There is so much in this book that I can't believe I didn't know and there is also a serial killer! I love serial killers, I'm intrigued by them. Ann Rule's book A Stranger Beside Me about Ted Bundy is one of my favorite books. Weird, I know.

So, everyone go read this book! And Summer, this means you! You said not long ago that you hadn't read a book since book club, that was too long ago, go read this!