Booking It :: October

After skipping the Booking It link up over at Life as MOM last month (because I had read NO books!), I'm happy to say that I'm back. I didn't finish all the books I wanted to read, but I finished one, and one is better than the none of last month, so I'm not complaining. Although I managed to get through quite a few books earlier in the summer, our fall schedule has left little time for reading (outside of my daily quiet times). I'm hoping that as I work on my October umbrella goals, #1 (time management) will help me get more reading in this month. In the meantime, I'm still here and linking up (with my one book).

I continue to press on in my attempt to finish  Who Made God?: And Answers to Over 100 Other Tough Questions of Faithby Ravi Zacharias and Norm Geisler, as well as Bill Bryson's tale of trekking through Australia, In a Sunburned Country. However, the book that I actually managed to read in less than a week was The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag: A Flavia de Luce Novelby Alan Bradley.

This is the follow-up novel to The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, which I wrote a review of earlier this year. Bradley brings Flavia back to help solve another local murder, and in the process she discovers a ring of drug sales, affairs, a pregnancy, and an accidental death from years past. Thanks to her older sisters - who I honestly wanted to reach into the book and throttle - Flavia has some doubts about whether or not her mother wanted her and if she was actually adopted (as her sisters claim). 

Overall, I enjoyed this second venture into Flavia's world, even though I'm still trying to piece together the title of the book with the actual storyline. I'm not sure I would say it is as good as the debut de Luce mystery, but it's an excellent follow-up and a very easy book to read. Even with our crazy schedule the last few weeks, I still managed to make time to read it in just a few days. I would say it's certainly worth checking out at your local library or buying a used copy (as I did), and I'm looking forward to reading the third book in the series, A Red Herring Without Mustard (being released in paperback on 10/18).

As I said before, my bookmarks are slowly making their way through Who Made God? and In a Sunburned Country, and hopefully I will be able to link up my final reviews of both books in November. I'm also in the process of reading Quitterby Jon Acuff. My overall impression so far is that it has lots of good ideas scattered throughout, but they are lost because of the writing style and horrible editing. Acuff (and/or his editors) apparently don't believe in using commas, which brings out the editing-monster in me. Remember, some of my favorite books are satires on punctuation (like Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuationand Woe is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English), so when I'm left trying to figured out what in the world Acuff meant because of lack of punctuation, I go a little nuts.

Well, my fellow readers, that's it for me this month. I'm glad to be back for my favorite monthly link up and I'm looking forward to seeing what other readers have marked off their "To Read" list in the last thirty days. If you want to see what Jessica and others are reading, make sure you head over to the Life as MOM Booking It link up today - thanks for hosting us, Jessica! Until next month, happy reading!