Week 3
Conversation #1
While, Eat, Pray, Love is not exactly my own cup of tea, I can certainly suggest something to this customer.  The first book that came to mind, especially since she mentioned Oprah books, was Wild by Cheryl Strayed.  While grittier than Eat, Pray, Love, Wild shares similar themes of self-reflection and travel.  It tells the story of a younger Cheryl Strayed coming to terms with herself and her life as she hikes the Pacific Crest Trail, a long distance hiking trail that spans the west coast of the U.S. from Mexico to Canada.  Strayed reflects upon her troubled past through relationships, drugs, to the loss of her mother, as she hikes the trail with no previous hiking or backpacking experience.  Along the way she not only becomes a much more experienced and knowledgeable hiker, but she also comes to terms with herself while meeting interesting characters along the way.  Made into a movie just as of last year, it does have lots of material that could be discussed in a Book Club.


Conversation #2
Yes, I admit it.  I did read all the Twilight books.  I found them humorous if nothing else!  I enjoy supernatural books too, so I could definitely recommend a number of books to this customer.  If they want to stick to the Young Adult theme, this customer could look into Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy series.  Yes, its contains teen romance and drama, but I found them a little more complex and involved than Twilight.  If you wanted to steer even more away from the teen romance, you could try Julie Kagawa's The Immortal Rules.  While still in the YA genre, it shows a tougher side of vampires who rule the humans within a dystopian world.


If this customer wanted something absolutely, totally different from Twilight and wanted to venture into adult fiction, I would point them in the direction of several books, depending on what kind of vampires and story they were looking for.  Some take vampirism as more of disease, while others take a more traditional approach.  Does the customer want any romance, or none at all?  Do they want a post apocalyptic setting or more current and realistic?  Great vampire books in adult fiction include: The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, The Passage by Justin Cronin, A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.


Conversation #3
Off the bat, I think of an adventurous, high-stakes, true book such as Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.  This is the true account of an Everest expedition that ended disastrously.  I found it to be a thrilling and nonstop account of all the events that happened of that one fateful attempt to summit Mount Everest.  If the customer wanted something that is a lot more similar to The River of Doubt, one of the top recommendation according to Novelist is The Lost City of Z by David Grann.  While I have not read this myself, it has caught my eye on the shelf before and recounts the search for a mythical city within the Amazon.