Every month we have been reflecting on the best things we read. Here are our best reads for July.

Rachel’s Reads

Blogs

• Nomadic Matt is giving away a round trip ticket to anywhere! Contest ends August 6th, so hurry up and enter!
• Amanda of Farsickness wrote an excellent Seoul subway guide.
• The Road Forks wrote about how to make baklava and a vegetarian food in Turkey guide.
• Strux Travel has a tasty guide to Peruvian cuisine.
• Here’s a delicious easy salad recipe to make anywhere, from Beers and Beans.
• Ordinary Traveler gives us some tips for traveling in Italy.

Books - I read 4 books this month. Three of them were the next three books in MaryJanice Davidson’s Undead series.

• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood: This book follows the memoirs of a woman whose sister wrote a book called The Blind Assassin. It’s a little slow, to be honest, and was slightly hard to get into. But once I got into it, I was really quite hooked. It’s the sort of book that I kept having theories about what was going to be revealed, and was really happy that I guessed some of it. Takes effort, but it’s worth it.

Jeff’s Reads

Links

• Why does a carton of orange juice taste so different from the thing that comes out when you squeeze an orange?
• Tyler Cowen gives some advice for finding good food in Beijing.
• Cricket as seen by Americans.
• How do you ensure a fair court hearing in Honduras? Have your appeal heard in Mauritius by judges from the UK.
• Indonesian asylum seekers aim to get put into Australian prisons for the high salary.
• A book written in ink that disappears two months after opening.
• How jokes get drawn.

Books - I read 5 books this month. All of them were quite good.

• Ghostwritten by David Mitchell:  This author also wrote Cloud Atlas which I read last month. It is similar in that it’s basically a book of short stories that are just a little bit interconnected.
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov: The devil comes to Soviet Moscow and messes up everyone’s life. It definitely helped to read it along with a guide that explained all the obscure Russian references and translation issues.
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón: A boys tries to unravel the dangerous mystery of an obscure author’s identity in post civil war Spain.

What were your best reads this month?