More Book Group Reads

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women - Geraldine Brooks

This book was very interesting. I was not excited at the prospect of reading a book about women in the Muslim Religion, but after the first sentence I was hooked. As much as I liked this book, I do think that the author had strong opinions and they did come across in the book. It would be interesting to read a book that just told facts, with no judgment at all.

Under the Banner of Heaven : A Story of Violent Faith - Jon Krakauer

We read this book for book group right after Nine Parts of Desire and called the pair our "foray into books about women oppressed by fundamentalist religions".

I wrote about it in my Bookcrossing journal. Here is what I said there:

Under the Banner of Heaven : A Story of Violent Faith is an engrossing read, as all of Krakauer's books seem to be. His non-fiction reads like a good novel and it is always obvious that he is very interested in the material about which he writes.

Krakauer started out to write the relationship between the Church of Latter Day Saints and its history, but ended up focusing more on the Fundamentalist Mormons with the mainstream Mormons in the near background. The book intertwines the stories of a gruesome murder committed in the name of God, with the history of mainstream Mormonism and the violent history of Fundamentalist Mormonism.

This is a fantastic book to read if you are interested in learning more about extremes in religious faiths. My book group read this on the heals of a book dealing with another fundamentalist theme: Nine Parts of Desire : The Hidden World of Islamic Women by Geraldine Brooks.

Middlesex: A Novel - Jeffrey Eugenides

This book was fun to read. Again the first sentence hooked me.

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

This book has many layers and on the surface is about a hermaphrodite and her struggle with his identity. The book is also about family history and ethnicity in the United States. The book talks about surviving - what some people need to endure to survive. I highly recommend it. The author grabs you from the first sentence and doesn't let you go until the end, teaching you more than you probably ever wanted to know about hermaphrodites, Detroit, and Greeks in Turkey.