read a new book every month

and Selected Stories by Kate Chopin. Really depressing actually…

Working on several books at the same time – not efficient, but seems to be working.

I did finish Beautiful Mind – awesome story… VERY different from the movie.

by Sylvia Nassar. I love this book so far, but don’t think I’ll be able to finish it, only about 1/2 way through.

I reread Harry Potter books 6 and 7 last weekend… doesn’t that count? I guess not since I’ve read these before.

John Adams by David McCullough

Amazing biography – Truly inspiring – especially Abigail Adams who comes alive through her letters.

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.

^{Source: http://www.goodreads.com}

I love reading, and I want to get some new books to read.

I think reading a new book every month is a really good goal!February 2008- Jayne Eyre by: Charlotte Bronte

Better than Beauty – A Guide to Charm by by H Valentine; A Thompson
-Entertaining, funny, and amazingly spot on!

The Newman’s Own Organics Guide to a Good Life: Simple Measures That Benefit You and the Place You Live by Nell Newman
-some good ideas

A book about a guy who goes to Namibia to teach as a volunteer… can’t remember the name right now.

Sadly i’m starting another year without having completed this goal. :-( I actually got three quarters of the way through “The Secret River” before i freaked out and put it down again. Great book though, what i have read has stayed with me. This month i am planning to finish that and also get through “Shantaram” by David Gregory Roberts, another half read book. I figure that will count as my one for the month!