Monday Recommendations

Monday Recommendation List

Random list of 10 books Monday! I have read and enjoyed each of these enough to flag for a potential personal library purchase.

Be bold and just choose randomly, stick to your normal genre...or step outside of your normal reading zone and try something you usually wouldn’t. You can look up the descriptions at Amazon.com, or search my blog for old posts by entering the title in the little search box in the top left-hand corner and clicking the magnifying glass.

This week-- 10 recommendations (in no particular order):

1. Freakanomics by Steven Levitt
2. Are You Ready by Bob Harper
3. Day After Night  by Anita Diamant
4. Seeing Red by Susan Crandall
5. Escape by Carolyn Jessop
6. 365 Things to Do With Your Kids by Bill Adler
7. The Rich and the Rest of Us by Cornell West and Tavis Smiley
8. Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake by Sarah MacLean
9. Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie
10. Rizzoli & Isles Series (starts with The Surgeon) by Tess Gerritsen

Monday Recommendations!

Monday Recommendation List

 

Random list of 10 books Monday! I have read and enjoyed each of these enough to flag for a potential personal library purchase.

Be bold and just choose randomly, stick to your normal genre...or step outside of your normal reading zone and try something you usually wouldn’t. You can look up the descriptions at Amazon.com, or search my blog for old posts by entering the title in the little search box in the top left-hand corner and clicking the magnifying glass.

This week-- 10 recommendations (in no particular order):

 

1. Then Came You by Lisa Kleypas
2. Escape by Carolyn Jessop
3. Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
4. The Giver  by Lois Lowry
5. A Kingdom of Dreams  by Judith McNaught
6. Hiroshima by John Hersey
7. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
8. The Great Influenza by John Barry
9. Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi
10. Of Mice and Men  by John Steinbeck

Monday Recommendation List

Monday Recommendation List

Random list of 10 books Monday! I have read and enjoyed each of these enough to flag for a potential personal library purchase.

Be bold and just choose randomly, stick to your normal genre...or step outside of your normal reading zone and try something you usually wouldn’t. You can look up the descriptions at Amazon.com, or search my blog for old posts by entering the title in the little search box in the top left-hand corner and clicking the magnifying glass.

This weeks 10 recommendations (in no particular order):

1. Modern with a classic feel: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
2. Simply a beautiful story: A Thousand Splendid Suns  by Khaled Hosseini
3. School reading throw-back: Candide by Voltaire
4. Rich Russian History: Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert Massie
5. Food for the brain:  An Incomplete Education by Judy Jones
6. Random information junkie: Freakanomics by Steven Levitt
7. And more…: SuperFreakanomics by Steven Levitt
8. Ponderous: Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
9. Scottish romance: Laird of the Mist by Paula Quinn
10. Courageous memoir: Escape by Carolyn Jessop

Escape

Escape by Carolyn Jessop

My Thoughts:
A brave and beautiful memoir. I wish all the best for Carolyn Jessop. The FLDS belief system is both intriguing and disturbing. I enjoyed following Jessop’s progression to freedom.

Amazon.com Description:

“The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman’s courageous flight to freedom with her eight children. When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral part of Carolyn’s heritage: She was born into and raised in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the radical offshoot of the Mormon Church that had settled in small communities along the Arizona-Utah border. Over the next fifteen years, Carolyn had eight children and withstood her husband’s psychological abuse and the watchful eyes of his other wives who were locked in a constant battle for supremacy. Carolyn’s every move was dictated by her husband’s whims. He decided where she lived and how her children would be treated. He controlled the money she earned as a school teacher. He chose when they had sex; Carolyn could only refuse—at her peril. For in the FLDS, a wife’s compliance with her husband determined how much status both she and her children held in the family. Carolyn was miserable for years and wanted out, but she knew that if she tried to leave and got caught, her children would be taken away from her. No woman in the country had ever escaped from the FLDS and managed to get her children out, too. But in 2003, Carolyn chose freedom over fear and fled her home with her eight children. She had $20 to her name. Escape exposes a world tantamount to a prison camp, created by religious fanatics who, in the name of God, deprive their followers the right to make choices, force women to be totally subservient to men, and brainwash children in church-run schools. Against this background, Carolyn Jessop’s flight takes on an extraordinary, inspiring power. Not only did she manage a daring escape from a brutal environment, she became the first woman ever granted full custody of her children in a contested suit involving the FLDS. And in 2006, her reports to the Utah attorney general on church abuses formed a crucial part of the case that led to the arrest of their notorious leader, Warren Jeffs.”