What I've been reading in the month of August

I really enjoyed writing about what I read last month!  This month I did less reading for the simple fact that I discovered a free Crossword Puzzle app that completely sucked me in and owned my entire life.  I did read a lot though, and this is what I've read:

I love every single piece of writing by Diana Gabaldon.  I fell in love with her first book, Outlander, and I read all of the books she's published since.  I find her to be so expressive, and the characters and settings to be so realistic (despite the fact that the main conflict in her Outlander novels is time travel.  Trust me.)  I bought The Custom of the Army for the simple fact that I have been dying ever since I finished reading An Echo in the Bone almost two years ago and all of the Lord John books last winter.  And the next Outlander installment (Written in My Own Heart's Blood) one isn't due out until 2013!  The Custom of the Army was an interesting short piece about the custom of the British Army at the time as to how an officer was to be court martialed.  It concerns Lord John's trip to Canada to serve as a character witness in a trial and is alluded to in Lord John and The Private Matter.   It was nice to fill in that bit of information, but it was mostly just necessary to get my fix of Diana Gabaldon's fiction.

The Know-It All by A.J. Jacobs is a comedic, non-fiction book about A.J.'s desire to become the smartest man in the world by reading the Encyclopedia Brittannca from a-ak to Zywiec.  It is amusing to watch him try to fit the encyclopedia into his life and how it gives him perspective on life and how much there really is to know.  I found parts of it to be absolutely hilarious, although parts of it were a bit slow.  I particularly like the insights the reader gets into his relationships with others (particularly his wife, his father, and his insufferable brother-in-law) through the lens of becoming "supremely intelligent."







I have also read two of Jacobs' other books (although technically not this August):   My Life as and Experiment and The Year of Living Biblically.  The first book, My Life as an Experiment is a fun description of Jacobs' attempts at living different, outlandish philosophies of life, such as Radical Honesty.  It was funny and enjoyable but Living Biblically was so profound (if also amusing) that his other works pale by comparison.  The process by which Jacobs attempts to understand the Bible and the things people do to respect what they believe it means is actually fascinating, and I think it turns out to be much more meaningful experience than Jacobs expected it to be.







Inconceivable: A Medical Mistake, the Baby We Couldn't Keep, and Our Choice to Deliver the Ultimate Gift by Sean and Carolyn Savage is probably the saddest book ever.  I cried throughout, reading about this family's pain as they so desperately tried to have one more child through in vitro fertilization, only to have another couple's zygote implanted accidentally.  The Savages chose to have the other couple's baby, but at great personal and emotional cost.  I don't know if it was so well-written, but it was a moving (and depressing) story.













I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced is the true story of a Yemeni girl who was married off to a much older man  at the age of nine in order to pay off her father's gambling debts.  It was a really sad story (obviously), and very compelling.  It is written in very simple language as befits the youth of the narrator as she tells how she was sold by her family, abused by her husband and his family, and how she found justice.







Game of Thrones:  A Song of Ice and Fire (and the rest that follow) by George R.R. Martin is pretty famous right now because of the HBO series which is supposed to be fantastic.  I could not put down the first three.  Again, this is one of those stay-up-til-three-AM reads.  The narrative switches from character to character so that there is a different narrator for each chapter.  It's kind of fun, because you find that you are rooting for the villain, even though you loathed her in the last chapter.  The fourth book was also pretty good, but I haven't yet finished the fifth.  It is loosely set in the medieval times, and does a good job of capturing the unease of the time period.  A very enjoyable read!