Category Archives: Blog Hops

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

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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 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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Top Ten Tuesday: Beach Reads


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

A glass bottle that has a piece of paper sealed inside of it. The bottle is sitting in the sand at the beach and you can see the water coming in behind it. No idea what message is scrawled on the paper, though!I’ve been participating in Top Ten Tuesday for years now, but I’m still a little confused by the concept of a beach read. Being at the beach is no different than being in a library, coffee shop, waiting room, train car, or at home when it comes to what I read.

My state of mind matters far more. If I’m nervously waiting for an update about someone who in the hospital, for example, I’m probably going to need something lighthearted to read that doesn’t require too much analysis. If I’m bored and craving a challenge, I might pick up one of the classics or something from the literary fiction genre that is nuanced and subtle.

I am trying to remain in the spirit of this week’s theme, though, and so I’ll share some fun seafood and marine-themed cozy mysteries as my answers as they’re the sorts of books I could read in almost any situation.

1. Sunny Side Up (Li Johnson Murder Mysteries #1) by Daniel Stallings

2. Dressed to Keel (A Darcy Cavanaugh Mystery #1) by Candy Calvert

3. Murder at the Lighthouse (Exham on Sea Mysteries #1) by Frances Evesham

4. Town in a Lobster Stew (A Candy Holliday Mystery, #2) by B.B. Haywood

5. Beach Blanket Barbie (Zoe Donovan Mystery #6)by Kathi Daley

6. A Shell of a Problem (Sanibel Island Mysteries, #1) by Jennifer L. Schiff

7. The Cruise Ship Lost My Daughter by Morgan Mayer

8. Lowcountry Boil (A Liz Talbot Mystery, #1) by Susan M. Boyer

9. Live and Let Chai (Seaside Café Mystery, #1) by Bree Baker

10. Clammed Up (A Maine Clambake Mystery, #1) by Barbara Ross

(Don’t they have great titles?)

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: TV Shows I’ve Binge-Watched

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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.

Drawing of a large screen tv and a remote floating in the air beside it. I generally do not binge-watch shows due to my spouse’s preference for programs that involve war, pandemics, alternate history (and not the cheerful sort that imagines a better world), various sorts of apocalypses, fascist governments, etc.

Many of these shows have great storytelling…but they are also heavy. Characters die or get hurt regularly, so after one episode I’m ready to turn off the TV and go do something peaceful.

Here are a few shows that I have been able to binge-watch in the past in large part because they are either sitcoms or have enough humour in them to balance out any scary or sad scenes in them. I’m trying very hard not to repeat any answers here that I shared in a recent WWBC post about shows we’re currently watching:

Black-ish

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

How I Met Your Mother

Kim’s Convenience 

Ted Lasso 

The links above will take you to their respective Wikipedia articles. While I don’t have very niche tastes, I didn’t want to make assumptions about which shows my readers might or might not already be familiar with.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books Set in Orphanages


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

Black and white photo of a vintage classroom where each wooden desk sits two pupils. The room is empty and feels a little desolate. I have a couple of relatives who were adopted as a sibling group after living in an orphanage in the 1940s or 1950s, but it would be quite rare for that to happen these days as most children in the foster system are now either being looked after through kinship care or traditional foster care.

The interesting thing about orphanages to me is how long they’ve stuck around in pop culture after being phased out in North America decades ago with rare exceptions. (Yes, I know they still exist in other parts of the world…but even there I believe the trend is often moving towards placing kids with relatives or foster families).

Here are some books I’ve read and enjoyed that were set in orphanages.

1. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

2. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #1) by Ransom Riggs

3. The Cider House Rules by John Irving

4. The BFG by Roald Dahl

5. Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate

6. The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman

7. Orphan Number Eight by Kim van Alkemade

8. Baby Alicia Is Dying by Lurlene McDaniel

9. Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2) by Ransom Riggs

Have you noticed this literary trend as well?

 

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: My Favourite Summer Quotes From Books

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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 straw hat with a black ribbon wrapped around it is sitting on top of some wheat in a field. The wheat is golden brown and looks ready to harvest. I have no idea why the hat was left there. I’ve done a lot of quote posts for various blog hops over the years, so I’m going to make it a little more challenging for myself this week by narrowing it down to quotes about summer.

1. “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
Henry James

 

2. “Ô, Sunlight! The most precious gold to be found on Earth.”
Roman Payne

 

3. “The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.”
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

 

4. “All in all, it was a never-to-be-forgotten summer — one of those summers which come seldom into any life, but leave a rich heritage of beautiful memories in their going — one of those summers which, in a fortunate combination of delightful weather, delightful friends and delightful doing, come as near to perfection as anything can come in this world.”
L.M. Montgomery, Anne’s House of Dreams

 

5. “The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.”
E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

 

6. “some winters
will never melt

some summers
will never freeze

and some things will only
… live in poems.”
Sanober Khan, Turquoise Silence

 

7. “I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.”
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

 

8. “The sidewalks were haunted by dust
ghosts all night as the furnace wind summoned them up,
swung them about, and gentled them down in a warm spice on
the lawns. Trees, shaken by the footsteps of late-night strol-
lers, sifted avalanches of dust. From midnight on, it seemed a
volcano beyond the town was showering red-hot ashes every-
where, crusting slumberless night watchmen and irritable
dogs. Each house was a yellow attic smoldering with spon-
taneous combustion at three in the morning.

Dawn, then, was a time where things changed element for
element. Air ran like hot spring waters nowhere, with no
sound. The lake was a quantity of steam very still and deep
over valleys of fish and sand held baking under its serene
vapors. Tar was poured licorice in the streets, red bricks were
brass and gold, roof tops were paved with bronze. The high-
tension wires were lightning held forever, blazing, a threat
above the unslept houses.
The cicadas sang louder and yet louder.
The sun did not rise, it overflowed.”
Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Honourifics in the Title


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

A blue envelope lying with its flap up. It’s ready to receive the card or letter that will go on there. Thank you to Joanne @ Portobello Book Blog for submitting this theme! Here are ten books with honourifics in the title. I chose as many ones that I’ve read as possible, but I had to branch out a little to other options as well.

1. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #1) by Ransom Riggs

2. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

3. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

4. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, #1) by Robin Sloan

5. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other stories by Robert Louis Stevenson

6. The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers: Spiritual Insights from the World’s Most Beloved Neighbor by Amy Hollingsworth

7. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

8. Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan Henry

9. Mrs. Poe by Lynn Cullen

10. Miss Rhythm by Ruth Brown

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Fictional Worlds I’d Love to Visit

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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 shooting star falling in front of the Milky Way just after dusk. The land below is treeless and rather flat, so the sky is the star of this show. The sky moves from being dark blue to light blue to showing just a sliver of light from the sun that’s just set over the horizon as you move your eyes from the top of the scene to the bottom of it. I believe we had this topic for a previous WWBC post, and my answers are probably going to be pretty similar this time around.

The Star Trek universe is somewhere I’d love to live because of how many current social problems are rarely if ever an issue there due to the existence of replicators,  advanced medical treatments, and other cool technological and social advancements.

I’ve love to visit the woods between worlds from The Magician’s Nephew, the sixth book in the  Chronicles of Narnia series. Little Lydia was annoyed that we only got to see a couple of the worlds that could be visited through that in-between place. There were so many other ponds to explore.

Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot duology has another peaceful setting I’d love to explore.  I could be quite happy living in harmony with nature if I picked the right community to visit there.  Their methods of ensuring that work got done appealed to me, too, because of how customizable it was and how forgiving it was for people who are disabled or more talented at some skills than at others. You do just about anything useful for a community:  growing food crops, washing dishes, providing medical care,  fixing bicycles or other machines, caring for children or adults who needed it, teaching kids how to read, etc. There weren’t any judgements about who did what. It was all appreciated which is quite refreshing when compared to how certain types of work are over or undervalued in modern society in my experience.

How about all of you?

 

 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Like to Re-Read


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

Thank you to Becky @ Becky’s Book Blog for submitting this theme.

A deciduous tree - possibly a maple tree - that’s growing next to a pond. This photo was taken at twilight or just after sunrise when part of the sky is dark but there is light at the horizon. The pond water is perfectly still and so you can see a perfect reflection of the tree in the water. Here are some books I hope to reread someday:

1. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

2. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

3. The Giver (The Giver, #1) by Lois Lowry

4. Becoming by Michelle Obama

5. The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1) by Ken Follett

6. Watership Down (Watership Down, #1) by Richard Adams

7. The Shining (The Shining, #1) by Stephen King

8. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

9. A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, #1) by Becky Chambers

10. The Magician’s Nephew (Chronicles of Narnia, #6) by C.S. Lewis

It’s a fun assortment of genres and themes. How about all of you?

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Board and Card Games I Like

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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.

As an adjacent hobby, I also love jigsaw puzzles and similar sorts of things that don’t quite fit into today’s theme.

I don’t get to play board and card games very often, but I  love them! My preference is for games that don’t require you to memorize a long list of rules because this is a hobby I pursue for relaxation and socialization purposes. (Sorry, chess!) Whether I win or lose is pretty far down on the list of things I worry about, so games of chance are perfectly fine by me.

Here are some of my favourites:

  • Dutch Blitz (which is the only time my otherwise stoic German-Mennonite extended family is noisy on game nights!)
  • The Game of Life
  • Clue
  • Risk
  • Sorry!
  • Scrabble
  • Battleship
  • Boggle
  • Concentration

Closeup of scrabble tiles. Some are turned upside down, but you can see an a, q, t, and r tiles lying face up. As well as any sort of cooperative board games where all of the players band together to, say, defeat a bad guy or find the materials they need to fix their spaceship and leave a dry desert planet before everyone runs out of water.

Yes, I know that most of these games have been around for a very long time. It’s largely due to the fact that my grandparents taught us to play most of them from old card and game sets they’ve had since, I don’t know, maybe the 1960s or 1970s?

I look forward to seeing what you all suggest and hope to discover some fun games that are a bit more modern.

 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Quotes About Canada


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

Happy Canada Day to everyone observing it today!

A Canada goose sitting in front of a pond looking every bit as grumpy as this species often are. For this week’s freebie/throwback theme, I’m going to share ten quotes about Canada in honour of Canada’s birthday. Many of them are humorous.

I included a photo of a Canada goose in this post because of the old joke that Canadians are so friendly because we channel all of our anger into these beautiful but often grumpy animals.

1. “I get to go to overseas places, like Canada.”
Britney Spears

 

2. “What part of Canada are you from, honey?”
“THE LEFT PART,” said Jay.”
Adam Rex, Fat Vampire: A Never Coming of Age Story

 

3. “Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from.”
Margaret Atwood

 

4. “We would drive to Canada, where it would probably be legal for us to get married- it was Canada where they let people do whatever they wanted because it was too cold to bother stopping them.”
W. Bruce Cameron, Emory’s Gift

 

5. “The maple leaf in 1965 was chosen to symbolize our land
Its points are five; like the fingers of a hand”
Mohamad Jebara, The Illustrious Garden

 

6. “A major principle of Canadian foreign aid has been that where the USA wields its big stick, Canada carries its police baton and offers a carrot.”
Yves Engler, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy

 

7. “This was Canada after all, where no one was overly impressed by anything.”
Harper Lin, Killer Christmas

 

8. “Cemeteries are deceptive places. You go there for quiet remembering and find yourself assailed by noisy questions. If Mr. Wong didn’t turn his back on his homeland, if he didn’t forget it or forsake it, what then did he feel about becoming a Canadian citizen? Was it a statement of belonging?”
Susan Crean, Finding Mr. Wong

 

9. “There is room on this land for all of us and there must also be, after centuries of struggle, room for justice for Indigenous peoples. That is all we ask. And we will settle for nothing less.”
Arthur Manuel, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call

 

10. “I was obligated to be nice. I couldn’t be the one Canadian who ruined the country’s reputation. How could I live with myself if I caused a Yankee to say, “I used to think Canadians were so nice, then I met that asshole, Steve”?”
Steven Barker, Now for the Disappointing Part: A Pseudo-Adult?s Decade of Short-Term Jobs, Long-Term Relationships, and Holding Out for Something Better

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