"Eligible" by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld has updated "Pride and Prejudice" into an entirely enjoyable and humorous escape novel that I LOVED reading! She brings in timely topics such as health care, transgender and interracial relationships, CrossFit,  artificial insemination,  and reality TV.  The characters are sometimes comic-book like, but weren't Jane Austen's as well?
I really like this author and was so excited when the book came out. I wasted no time in requesting it from the Library and couldn't wait to get it.
I was inclined to re-read Pride and Prejudice right after but now that I finished Sittenfeld's book, I don't want to spoil the experience by diving into the original right away.
If you like Jane Austen, read this book. If you like Curtis Sittenfeld, read this book! And if you haven't read Pride and Prejudice, I am not sure you should read it!

The Girls by Emma Cline

This was an enjoyable, but difficult book. It's a fictional retelling of what it was like to be one of Charles Manson's girls during the Summer of Love. Some of the characters are drawn upon real people and I am assuming, Evie, the main character, is too. Here is a piece of the review in the New Yorker:

Evie Boyd, an only child whose upper-middle-class parents have recently divorced, wants to be older than her fourteen years, and is drawn to the free-spirited, rebellious young women she sees one day in a Petaluma park. They are looking for food to take back to the ranch where they live. The novel charts Evie’s accelerated sentimental education, as she is inducted into the imprisoning liberties of free love, drugs, and eventual violence, all of it under the sway of the cult’s magus, Russell Hadrick. In another way, though, Cline’s novel is itself a complicated mixture of freshness and worldly sophistication. Finely intelligent, often superbly written, with flashingly brilliant sentences, “The Girls” is also a symptomatic product not of the sixties but of our own age: a nicely paced literary-commercial début whose brilliant style, in the end, seems to restrict its reach and depth.

Before the Fall by Noah Hawley

This was a great page-turner that I read in about 3 days.  It would have been faster if it weren't for work!
The NYTimes summarizes it well: 

“Before the Fall” is a complex, compulsively readable thrill ride of a novel. On the other, it is an exploration of the human condition, a meditation on the vagaries of human nature, the dark side of celebrity, the nature of art, the power of hope and the danger of an unchecked media.

I was disappointed in certain aspects of the plot/story, but it didn't stop me from poring through this at a fast pace!

The Nightengale by Kristin Hannah

This is a LONG book....maybe too long but a good and compelling story. I had LOTS of time to read on planes to and from California, so it helped the time go by