The Reader Organisation’s Best Reads of 2012 – Part 3

The countdown to Christmas is getting ever closer, and we're still counting our Reader Recommended book picks of the year, with two more brilliant suggestions from The Reader Organisation staff which will be sure to keep you reading over the festive season.

Middlemarch – George Eliot
(Penguin Classics; 2003)

“Middlemarch took on a reality for me, I didn’t want to leave the town when it was over! A really rich, useful book. I feel like I’ve discovered a new friend in George Eliot.”

(Lynn Elsdon, Get Into Reading Wirral Project Worker)

The Yellow Birds – Kevin Powers
(Sceptre; 2012) 

“When Kevin Powers came back from serving in the United States Army in Iraq, the question he was most asked was, ‘what was it like?’ Powers is a poet and this fine, lyric novel is his best attempt at an answer to that essentially unanswerable question. It is about the terrible impact of combat upon a boy from Virginia and powerfully reinforces what we must already know by now, that war kills those who fight it. If not by bullets and bombs, by breaking the mind, spoiling the past and damaging the future. It is an old story, newly told for the twenty-first century and deserves to be widely read.”

(Angela Macmillan, Co-editor of The Reader and Editor of the A Little, Aloud series)

Find more of Angela's 2012 reading recommendations in Issue 48 of The Reader - a subscription to which would also make a rather wonderful Christmas present...