Best book you've read in the last 30 days?

A Tolerable Anarchy by Jedediah Purdy, which argues that the American founders created expectations on the nature of freedom and rights they themselves couldn't live up to, allowing American rebels and scholars to over time redefine what freedom and liberty mean.

Mars by Ben Bova - a Sci-Fi novel about the first manned expedition to Mars. Full of political intrigue and techy space exploration stuff.

Finally got around to reading Anathem but Neil Stevenson. Really enjoyed it, though it got a bit plodding towards the end. Loved the world he created, and his attempt to teach geometry to my math-o-phobic self.

PS. Came here from the Metafilter Book Club thread--where I'm known as Stray. Hi!

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem. He's one of my favorite authors, and this book absolutely floored me. Read it and try not to adore Perkus Tooth, a hermitous, obsessive genius and his crew of madcap outsiders with similarly unlikely names.
There is some distracting unevenness in the advanced reader's copy I have so I may have to re-read the final edit and see if it's a bit smoother.
Can I nominate this to be the official Metafilter book club book?

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. Awesome book about Abbey's time spent as a ranger in Arches National Monument, a desert near Moab, Utah. The book still seemed extremely relevant and was a perfect hiking book.

Just found the group from the metatalk post. Hope we can get this book club idea off the ground!

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand; I expected something more on the sci/fi end of the spectrum, but it's basically a thriller. I described the main character to a book-loving friend as a sort of Cayce Pollard/Smilla Jaspersen/Lizbeth Salander-fusion nihilist antiheroine. I loved it, and will definitely be looking for more by her.

I read Rose Tremain's A Long Road Home and found it utterly beautiful... It's about a man who immigrates to the UK from an unnamed Eastern Eurpoean country and how he gets along there. Based on that description, I thought it would be much slower/less engaging than it was, but I found myself really caring about the characters. It definitely made me want to read other books by the same author.

I read a bunch of trash detective novels and/or sherlock holmes/agatha christie pastiche so there's nothing I want to really talk about in the last 30 days, but the last thing I read that I would recommend would be this:
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

see also:
http://www.metafilter.com/82619/The-Raw-Shark-Texts

I'm reading Blindness right now, and it's great so far, but I haven't finished it yet. The last really good book I finished was Tender is the Night, and I'd love to talk to someone about it, because it sort of took me for a ride and made me swoon, then made me sad, then made me swoon again. Oh, and I just finished reading the full run of Fables TPB's, which was great fun.

Nightingales of Troy by Alice Fulton. I'm going to have to reread it a couple times before I can discuss it though. Great author, but not my usual genre.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, for at least the third time. It had been years since I last read it - lent it to my mother to try to get her to read it (unsuccessfully) and only recently recovered my copy. I'd almost forgotten just how good it is.

After seeing many, many recommendations for it on AskMe, I finally started Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I absolutely love it--I love the switching genres, the different narrative voices, and the well-maintained sense of suspense. As I approach the end I am finding myself reading more and more slowly because I don't want it to finish. It's been a long time since a book has engrossed me this way.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson - I'm not American, but this is what American Gothic means to me. Fabulous. "I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die" might be a comforting thought from time to time. I may start burying silver dollars and nailing books to trees right away.

Almost done with the short-story collection My Name is Archer by Ross Macdonald, who's pretty much my candidate to complete the phrase "Hammett, Chandler, and...". Have also been on a Richard Stark's Parker reading kick recently after swapping collections with another fan, but I think the last one was just outside the thirty day limit. It's been a hard-boiled fall.

Tender is the Night is pretty astonishing - I read it three years ago and it's still hanging with me.

I adore Shirley Jackson and own most of her novels. Her personal life makes an interesting backdrop for her horrifying stories and novels. She was married to a college professor and was basically a housewife and mother of 4 who wrote in her "spare time." Sadly, she passed away in her sleep at age 48. If you haven't read it yet, The Haunting of Hill House is a masterpiece.

I just finished Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall. It shares some overlap with Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but it falls a little short. In Sarah Hall's dystopian future, the narrator (known to us only as Sister) flees her gray life of drudgery when the totalitarian government that has seized control in the U.K. forces all the women to have IUDs implanted. She escapes to Carhullan, a self-sufficient farm organized and run by women who have not registered with the new regime. But this haven is under threat of annihilation by the government. The only answer is rebellion.

The first third of the book was a little slow going as Sister escapes her job and her husband, but once she reaches the farm, the novel really begins to take off. I loved reading about how the commune operates; how women, without any help from men, survive and strengthen themselves. I've always fantasized about growing my own flax so I can spin it and weave it and make my own linens. I think we all have a little bit of survivalist in us. Of course there are major drawbacks-- no modern medicines for one. At one point a character puts on her glasses and I thought, "No more custom-made glasses or contact lenses." I wouldn't want to do without men, but if the worst happened, if the drying up of oil supplies along with global warming caused my country's government to collapse, I would want to be in a place like Carhullan.

It's a good book to pass along to your teenage daughter.

I tend to alternate fact and fiction.
I have just thoroughly enjoyed the Stieg Larsson trilogy. Before that I read Roger Crowley's excellent Empires for The Sea which was awarded Sunday Times History Book of the Year award. Prior to that Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel which was hugely enjoyable. So far it's been a good autumn.

The Snakehead by Patrick Radden O'Keefe is awesome. It is ostensibly about the Golden Venture disaster, where a boat containing hundreds of passengers ran aground. However, portions of it read as a police procedural, adventure story, biography, and expose. A riveting book.