Tag Archives: Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Classic Books I Would Reread

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Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.

A vintage brown leather bag sitting on a white rock carved into the shape of what appears to be a low fence.The original topic for this week was “Books I Would or Wouldn’t Reread and Why.” As I’ve recently done blog hop posts about mostly contemporary books I wouldn’t read and have another one ready to go for next week’s WWBC theme, I decided to tweak this one a little and talk about classic novels I would like to reread someday. 

From what I recall about their storylines, they were all memorable tales filled with characters that I found relatable or interesting in some way.

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

2. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

3. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

4. The Good Earth (House of Earth, #1) by Pearl S. Buck

5. Dracula by Bram Stoker*

6. The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry

7. Beloved (Beloved Trilogy, #1) by Toni Morrison

8. Beowulf by Unknown

9. The Plague by Albert Camus

10. Calvin and Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes, #1) by Bill Watterson**

*Well, other than the fact that the protagonist brushed off the stern warnings he was given from locals about venturing in Dracula’s territory. You’d think he would have taken them seriously when they told him not to go there. Ha!

** If there is such a thing as a classic comic strip, I’d argue that Calvin and Hobbes deserves to be counted as one. They somehow become funnier and more meaningful every time I reread them.

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: How I Handle Bad Days

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Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.

These past several years have included some pretty tough times for my family, including death and multiple other relatives who have had health problems ranging from minor day surgeries to very serious diagnoses that needed emergency or urgent surgery and rehabilitation, radiation therapy, or other treatments afterwards.

Needless to say, my coping mechanism toolbox is well-stocked and has been heavily used since 2020.

This is what I’ve done to take care of myself when I was part of the support system for others:

Ignoring the news

I do what I can to help, but sometimes I simply haven’t had a single speck of leftover energy for paying attention to the terrible things that happen in our world. This isn’t something I’m proud of, it’s just the reality of life sometimes. You have to take care of your own basic needs before taking care of others.

 

A white woman walking her black dog in a forest. They look content and relaxed.

Not me. I just love this stock photo.

Exercising

Specifically, I have found weightlifting, kickboxing, dancing, and long, brisk walks to be distracting and helpful. It’s harder to keep worrying and ruminating when you’re doing a burpee, or trying to get an entire workout done with excellent form,  or just saw the cutest dog ever walk by you on the trail. (Although I say that about multiple dogs per walk because they’re all delightful).

 

Ice Cream Sundaes

Yes, I mean the vegan or dairy-free kind. I’m so lucky to have lots of flavours to choose from these days as that wasn’t the case when I was a kid. Sometimes a sweet treat really hits the spot when you’re anxiously waiting for a text or call to see how the patient is doing. (I do not recommend sneaking a sundae into the hospital waiting room, though. Ha!)

 

Naps

The world can feel like a much more hopeful place if you can close your eyes for twenty minutes and get some rest.

 

Funny Shows 

My spouse loves to watch dramatic, tense shows as a distraction. I need funny, silly things to watch instead where the worst thing that can possibly happen is that the family dog gets a second dinner one night due to a miscommunication.

 

Haircuts 

There’s something refreshing about brief but important moments of self care like this. I like the sensation of having my head gently rubbed and my hair brushed in preparation for the haircut. It’s soothing.

 

Visiting the Library 

It’s nice to be surrounded by people who are (hopefully) having good days when I’m having a bad one because it reminds me that this, too, shall pass. Also, books are a fantastic distraction from the painful stuff in life.

 

Body Scan Meditation

This is the best type of meditation if you ask me! There’s something so satisfying about focusing on relaxing one part of your body at a time.

 

I look forward to reading everyone else’s responses. There’s still room in my toolbox for other self-care options, although I hope I won’t have to use them anytime soon now that things seem to have calmed down for everyone.

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Authors I Wish More People Knew About

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This was a bit of a tricky topic for me because  I have no idea which authors you all are already aware of. People that I read regularly might be well known to some of you and a brand new corner of the literary world to others. (And vice versa, of course!)

Let’s see if I can dig a bit deeper and find some new folks to mention. I’m including one recommendation of a good place to start for every person on this list as I know I sometimes feel a little overwhelmed when checking out a new author and seeing a long list of possibilities.

 

Photo of a maple leaf lying on the blank white page of an opened book. There’s a cup of tea in a white mug with the word tea on it sitting next to the book. Both of these items are lying on top of a white blanket.George MacDonald was a Scottish poet and author who lived in the 1800s and early 1900s and played a major role in creating the modern fantasy genre. C.S. Lewis was one of many writers who was inspired by him. 

Read This First: “The Golden Key,” an allegorical fairy tale he wrote about death and the afterlife. He excelled at creating seemingly inconsequential details in stories that later pay off wonderfully…or at least that’s how I felt when I was a kid reading this!

 

Sonia Hartl is a contemporary fantasy writer who loves playing around with audience’s assumptions about what should happen next.

Read This First: “The Lost Girls,” a more realistic take on what would happen  if vampires were real and actually went around falling in love with teenage girls. That is to say, a one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old man who is romantically interested in a sixteen-year-old girl probably doesn’t have good intentions and should not be trusted any further than you can throw him.

 

Claire Keegan is a contemporary fiction author who writes gentle but honest stories about (mostly) rural settings. 

Read This First: “Foster,” a novella about an eleven-year-old girl who is sent to live with childless relatives in the countryside for the summer as her mother deals with a difficult pregnancy.  This was such a kind and hopeful story that I’d love to see expanded into a tv series that shows more of their lives and what happens next. The relatives welcomed the main character with opened arms and loved her just as if she were their own child. It was so wholesome.

 

Nnedi Okorafor is a contemporary science fiction and fantasy author who writes dark fantasy and science fiction set in Africa. I mention the setting because it plays such a huge role in her characters’ lives in all of the books from her I’ve read. She’s another author whose work I wish would be made into some films. 

Read This First:”Remote Control,” a novella about a preteen girl who has an accident that helps her develop the ability to kill or to heal people just by touching them. This was such a page turner because she didn’t know what was happening at first or what to do with her gift.

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: What Is My Superpower?

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I believe that the last time we had this topic I talked about my uncanny ability to look away from the screen just as something exciting happens in a show. It’s not something I ever do on purpose, I simply get a little bored sometimes depending on which show my spouse picked.

Let’s pick another answer this time.

A white woman wearing a grey sweatshirt is listening to a conch shell at the beach on an overcast and what appears to be somewhat chilly day. Listening is another superpower of mine. I’m good at making people feel heard – so far as I’ve been told – and helping them to figure out what to do without actually ever giving advice.

Here’s the thing: most people don’t need advice in most cases in my experience, especially if they’re not directly asking for you to tell them what to do.

There are often factors outsiders aren’t aware of, or they’ve already tried X, Y, and Z without success and truly do not need yet another well-meaning but ultimately unhelpful person suggesting those options for the tenth time this week.

What they need is a sympathetic ear and someone to validate how difficult and frustrating life can be at times. If they feel heard, seen, and maybe even loved depending on how close I am to them, it can become much easier to try something new, pick themselves up and try again after disappointment, work on one of their flaws, or tackle whatever else it is they’re struggling with that can rarely if ever be fixed by an outsider.

It’s sort of like dancing in that I try to match their energy and glide into the rhythm of the conversation without pushing it into any particular direction.

They’re smart. They’ll figure it out on their own. 🙂

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books I Keep Meaning to Read (but Haven’t)

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A dozen hardbacked books placed with their spines sticking up. The angle of the photo isn’t quite high enough to read their titles, but you can see their white pages and the yellow wall behind them. Since I’m such a huge mood reader, some books hang around on my TBR list for a very long time. Here are some of them:

1. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

2. Dune (Dune, #1) by Frank Herbert

3. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

4. The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

5. Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

6. Children of Time (Children of Time, #1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Now I’m drawing a blank at what else to add!

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books That Deal Well With Tough Topics

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A person with long straight hair is sitting on a pier at sunset and leaning their head on their knees. Their body language looks bent over and sad. Most of my picks are in the nonfiction genre, but I did try to branch out a little to other options.

I am including the topics these books discuss so that my readers will know in advance if a particular title is or isn’t something that piques their interest.

1. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou’s Autobiography, #1) by Maya Angelou

Topics discussed: Childhood sexual abuse, kinship care, separation from parents, racism, and trauma.

 

2. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez

Topics discussed: Sexism and misogyny.

 

3. 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food by Susan Albers

Topics discussed: Emotional eating, binge eating disorders, and mental health.

 

4. CBT for Social Anxiety: Simple Skills for Overcoming Fear and Enjoying People by Stefan G. Hofmann, Robert L. Leahy

Topics discussed: Social anxiety and mental health.

 

5. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Topics discussed: Sexual abuse and mental health.

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books I Had to Read in School and Liked

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A hardback book, a quill, and a bottle of ink artfully arranged outside in the grass. The book and quill are propped up so the viewer can better see them. This is going to be a much longer list than the one I had a few weeks ago. I liked to loved most of the assigned reads in school, including:

1. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

2. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (but I thought these two should have listened to their parents and not been so impulsive or dramatic!)

3. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

4. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

5. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

6. The Color Purple by Alice Walker

7. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

8. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls (even though it made me permanently suspicious of books about beloved pets and what will probably happen to those poor animals by the final scene)

9. The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings by Edgar Allan Poe

10. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

11. Walden or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau (although I wanted a sequel where his poor mother went off into the woods to find herself while Henry stayed home to do all of the washing, mending, gardening, and cooking for once!)

12. Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1) by Chinua Achebe

13. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson (I wish we had lived in the same era. I think she and I could have been great friends).

14. Selected Poems by Langston Hughes (I feel the exact same way about Mr. Hughes and wish I could have been his friend, too).

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: What I Read When I’m Not Feeling Well

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Closeup photo of small pills that look like vitamin e vitamin pills to me. They are soft, small, oblong, and slightly yellow. My answers to this question depend on why I’m not feeling well.

If I’m dealing with something like a migraine, I generally won’t be reading due to how symptoms like trouble concentrating, light sensitivity, nausea, etc. strongly affect what I do on those days even if my pain levels aren’t a hindrance in and of themselves

That’s not a very fun answer, of course, so I’m going to assume we’re all talking about less debilitating sick days when, say, one has the common cold or a sprained ankle instead but can still concentrate and enjoy the written word for at least a little while.

There are three things I especially like to read on these occasions:

Poetry

A hardback, cream-coloured book of Persian poetry that has a single red rose lying on the book.Mary Oliver is – or, rather, was – one of my favourite contemporary poets because of how beautifully she would described something as simple as a sunset or seeing a bird flying around in a field.

She wrote the kinds of poems that nearly anyone can relate to because we’ve all experienced nature in some form in our lives, whether you’re walking past pigeons pecking at bread crumbs on a city street or live in the middle of a forest in a little cottage and go weeks without talking to other human beings.

Black River is a good place to start for Oliver.

For more classic poets, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes are my all-time favourites. They were both incredibly talented and fantastic at capturing those little moments in life that are so easy to overlook.

Hope is the thing with feathers is one of my favourite Dickinson poems.

Theme for English B is a thoughtful Hughes poem that captures a lot of the most common themes in his work. (I can’t possibly pick a favourite poem from him. He wrote so many fantastic ones).

If anyone has recommendations for other modern (or modern-ish)  poets who write or wrote short, snappy pieces, please share! I have not had great luck finding ones I’ve liked. Yes, it’s fine if your definition of “modern” is 1960 or something. I’m not at all picky so long as they’re a great writer whose work still feels fresh and meaningful to you even if it might have been written last century. 🙂

 

Nonfiction

I especially like history, science, and nature-themed books when I’m not feeling well. Medical topics may or may not be interesting, too, depending on how closely related they are to my ailments. For example, I’d rather not read about the misery of the 1918 flu if I have currently have the flu, but a book about how doctors discovered the existence of vitamins or something else would be fine.

A green wooden bench beneath a mature tree. the bench and tree are facing a peaceful little river whose banks are covered in green bushes and healthy grass.These topics are great distractions from something like a fever, a cough, or mild pain because they transport you to other times and places and teach you all sorts of interesting things about the world.

This summer I have enjoyed these nonfiction titles:

“No One Taught Me How to Be a Man” by Shannon T.L. Kearns (A memoir about gender identity and what is expected of men).

“Ghosts, Trolls and the Hidden People” by Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir (Icelandic folktales and the history behind them).  

“Beyond Limits: Stories of Third-Trimester Abortion Care” by Shelley Sella, MD (Stories about people who needed third-trimester abortions for things like terminal diagnoses). 

“The Friendship Bench: How Fourteen Grandmothers Inspired a Mental Health Revolution” by Dixon Chibanda MD (a memoir about senior citizen women offering friendship, advice, and mental health care to young people in Zimbabwe).

I have not read enough nonfiction this year and will try to dig more deeply into it.

 

Rereads

Honestly, this is one of the most common times for me to reread old favourites. There’s something comforting about reading or listening to a story when you already know what’s going to happen in it, especially for a series like the Anne Shirley books or The Chronicles of Narnia where there are many instalments to read if you happen to need multiple days or weeks to recover.

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books I Had to Read in School and Didn’t Like

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Photo of a grumpy tabby cat making an angry face.

I don’t own a cat, but this is basically the face I made while reading these tales!

I was one of those bookish kids who loved English class and could find something enjoyable,  or at least relatable, about almost every piece of literature we were assigned.  I’d even read as many sections of our textbook that weren’t assigned as I could because I loved discovering new authors, poems, and stories.

These are the handful of exceptions to that rule. I still dislike these books and authors to this day…although your mileage may vary!

1. A Separate Peace by John Knowles

This bored me due to the slow pacing as well as a setting (a boarding school for wealthy and often terribly emotionally neglected children) that I couldn’t relate to in any way despite honestly trying my best. My family was warm and loving but generally tight on funds for anything other than the basic necessities in life, so the idea of being sent away to an expensive boarding school and not seeing my parents for 9+ months of the year was just as unthinkable as sending one’s child to the moon. Honestly, reading about a moon colony would have been more relatable to me than this!

 

2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I hated everything about this book: the glorification of wealth, the selfish, vain characters who valued money and social status over anything else, the bizarre indifference Daisy and her husband whose name I can’t remember felt towards their own child, the way the wealthy characters threw lavish parties and wasted money while the poor people in their communities suffered terribly, and more.

As an adult, I realize that at least some of these passages were meant to be criticisms of the pursuit of wealth and power above all else, and it might come across to me differently if I’d read it when I was older than 16. But being exposed to it at that age, and after growing up in a family whose values were the opposite of the ones these characters held, disgusted me and I have never felt the urge to reread it or check out more of Fitzgerald’s work in general.

 

3. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Technically, this was a long poem from the 1700s we were assigned to read in one of my university courses, but I think it’s close enough to count. It was about an old sailor who kills a harmless albatross that helped their ship escape from an ice jam. I was furious with this sailor for not only killing an animal he wasn’t planning to eat but also for killing one that had just helped him. It was a senseless and cruel decision. Honestly, I rooted for the antagonists for the rest of this poem instead of for the sailor. That’s how mad I was at him.

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books I Loved But Never Wrote Reviews For

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A black woman with an Afro who is sitting in bed and reading a hardback book. She has a serene expression on her face and is wearing yellow eye shadow and a pretty white cotton blouse. My answers are going to be for older books this week, and I’m trying to pick titles that I have not discussed in previous WWBC or Top Ten Tuesday posts as well. (Or at least haven’t discussed very much).

These days, I will write a review for just about any 5 star book I read, so it would be pretty rare for a brand new title to appear one of these lists for me.

 

“Miss Peregrin’s Home for Peculiar Children” by Ransom Riggs

What I Liked About It: Strong and exciting world building .

 

“Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” by Lisa See

What I Liked About It: Reading about the lifelong friendship between the protagonist and her best friend.

 

 “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker

What I Liked About It: What a joyful ending it had! The protagonist endured so much pain in her life, so to see her end on such a happy note was both a thrill and a relief.

 

“The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption” by Katherine Joyce

What I Liked About It: This book honestly explored the dark underbelly of the adoption industry where corruption and coercion is used to procure children for adoption who could have otherwise remained with their birth families with a little support. I think adoption can be an excellent option for some children, but it should always be done ethically and only after exhausting all other possibilities for families who are experiencing hard times.

 

“The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women” by Kate Moore

What I Liked About It: Learning about a chapter of history that was never mentioned in school. Worker protection rules were created for a reason and should be respected. So many people died horribly from exposures to all sorts of unsafe substances and environments before we had such laws. This was not an easy read, but it was an important one.

 

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