So many good books to occupy your time

Few pleasures are better than beginning a new book and finding it a great read.

On the other hand, it can be disappointing when you spend precious time reading a book only to find it a bore or filled with stuff you'd rather not read about.

The holidays may be creeping up, but surely between stuffing the turkey and setting the table, or when stuck in a shopping line or at the dentist's office, there can be a bit of time where a good book can save your sanity.

I therefore offer a few of the best I have read recently.

The first one, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, is called "The Shadow of the Wind," a gothic tale starting in 1945 as Spain is trying to rebuild after the World War II.

Zafon's prose is beautiful, and the story caught me right away when Daniel's father takes him to "The Cemetery of Forgotten Books" telling him as they are walking there, "This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens."

In the words of Shakespeare, "And thereby hangs a tale."

Perhaps it was the wind and the fall leaves blowing about, or the fact that I was in Barcelona just a year ago that made this book so appealing. It's intriguing to the very end. If you like a good mystery, this goes well beyond, with danger, revenge, subplots upon subplots and a story that one review said could even challenge Dickens.

I loved it!

The same can be said for Abraham Verghese's "Cutting for Stone," which takes the reader on a realistic journey from India to Ethiopia to America.

Verghese is a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, so this book is about doctors, but also about everyday people.

In the manner of Ann Tyler Verghese's characters are well-defined and interesting.

Another good read is "Sarah's Key," by Tatiana de Rosnay. It is a historical novel about the 1942 roundup of Jewish families in France, some of whom were French citizens.

They were forced to stay in squalid conditions in the Velodrome de Hiver and then were sent to other camps and eventually to Auschwitz.