The Elliott Bay Book Company

Cornelius Suttree lives in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River. He comes from a prestigious and wealthy family, whom he has chosen to forsake. Suttree runs with a rough hobo crowd—most of whom he meets in the slammer. Gene Harrogate, nicknamed the City Rat, is one of many such goons—he's shot with buckshot when he's caught humping melons in the neighbor's field. In many ways, Harrogate is a continuation of mark Twain's Huck Finn—mischievous, poor, and completely unsupervised. He is always waist deep in some heinous scheme.
Though this novel is dark—it is by far Mr. McCarthy's funniest. It's full of white trash shenanigans that involve moonshine, turtle fishing, electrocution, dynamite, visits to witches, vicious bar fights, and the gold old misery and poverty that neglect fosters.

If you want a fast-paced read about a little known theory that has fundamentally changed modern life then you can't go wrong with this book!

Spenser offers to protect a forensic art consultant retrieve a stolen painting. But both the painting and the consultant are blown to hell when the swap goes awry and Spenser is determined to take this one on all by himself.
Full of everything a good P.I. novel needs—guns, dogs, fistfights, drinks, brooding, and all this set in Boston. You just can't go wrong with a Spenser novel.

A co-worker was stunned at my confession that I had never read any Raymond Carver. She immediately stopped whatever it was that she was doing and went on a hunt for this short story I absolutely had to read. That weekend I got all cozy in my chair and opened up this book to the story she bookmarked for me. 3/4ths of the way through the story I was so terrified I almost closed the book—a page after that I was weeping tears of joy. After I finished the story I sat there in a daze. I was clearly shaken—shaken the way Dostoevsky shakes you—to the bone.
p.s. The story was "A Small, Good Thing"

At 18 Jaimal Yogis gets the sense that something's just not right. So he bails on it all—his high school, his parents, and his friends. He buys a one-way ticket to Maui and gets into surfing ... and that is just the first four pages of this brave, bad-ass, soul surfers journey!