Category Archives: Blog Hops

May 14, 2024 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Quotes About Science


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

A male Asian scientist wearing a face mask and peering through a microscope at something on a slide. Perhaps he is looking at a highly infectious disease?While all of my book reviews on this blog are about the speculative fiction genre, I read many other genres as well.

Nonfiction is a particular favourite of mine. It’s exciting to learn about everything from prehistory to astronomy to the latest medical breakthroughs in books.

Here are ten bookish quotes about science.

“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
― Stephen Hawking

 

“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

 

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.”
― Claude Levi-Strauss

 

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
― Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers

 

“Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

 

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”
― Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence

 

“I penetrated the outer cell membrane with a nanosyringe.”
“You poked it with a stick?”
“No!” I said. “Well. Yes. But it was a scientific poke with a very scientific stick.”
― Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary

 

“In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.”
― Jane Goodall

 

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.

{Speech accepting the John Burroughs Medal}”
― Rachel Carson

 

“It takes a fearless, unflinching love and deep humility to accept the universe as it is. The most effective way he knew to accomplish that, the most powerful tool at his disposal, was the scientific method, which over time winnows out deception. It can’t give you absolute truth because science is a permanent revolution, always subject to revision, but it can give you successive approximations of reality.”
― Ann Druyan

 

If you’ve read any great books about any branch of science lately, I’d love to hear about them!

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May 8, 2024 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Stories I Wouldn’t Revisit and Why

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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

A closeup photo of about a dozen DVD cases, including cases for Friends, Pulp Fiction, Django, and several other films that don’t have English titles. The original topic for this week asked about books, films, and TV shows that I wouldn’t revisit. I’ve decided to pick one answer from each category.

Book

The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien

Why? 

As much as I enjoyed seeing how everything ended, the pacing of this trilogy was too slow for me to ever revisit it. The long, flowery descriptions of the landscapes, settings, and characters painted a vivid picture in my mind, but they were also so numerous that I did find them a little tedious after a while given how much writing styles have evolved since this series was published.

(The films are still cool, though).

Film

Any action film ever.

Why? 

I do not enjoy this genre. On the rare occasion I watch one, it is usually to make my spouse happy instead of out of any innate desire to see a character break the laws of physics and defy the limits of human anatomy as often as tends to happen in these sorts of stories.

 

TV Show

Old sitcoms.

Why? 

The sexist and homophobic jokes in them. What may have been acceptable 30+ years ago doesn’t always age well in modern times. I do not judge others who can look past those things, by the way. I simply don’t find that sort of humour amusing and would rather watch something else instead.

 

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May 7, 2024 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Books About Dandelions


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

When I was a child, it used to irritate me when people tried to prevent dandelions from growing or said negative things about this flower. Dandelions were the perfect flower in my mind for three reasons:

Photo of dozens of pretty little dandelions growing in a grassy meadow. 1) They are hardy and strong. In many parts of North America you can find them growing everywhere without any intervention or pampering needed by humans: ditches, rock gardens, by the side of the highway, in neglected yards, and anywhere else that had the bare minimum amount of soil, sunshine, and water.

2) They are nutritious. You can eat them, turn them into beverages like dandelion wine, or use them as medicine.

3) They are beautiful. I loved every stage of their development, from  unobtrusive little green shoots in the spring soil to friendly specks of yellow in a sea of grass to irresistible white puffs of seeds that would be blown off by the wind if people didn’t do it first.

There is something wonderful about plants that thrive under a wide variety of conditions and that have so many uses.

Here are ten books about dandelions.

1. Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

2. Dandelion and Quince: Exploring the Wide World of Unusual Vegetables, Fruits, and Herbs by Michelle McKenzie

3. The Dandelion’s Tale by Kevin Sheehan

4.An Island in a Green Sea by Mabel Esther Allan

5. Andersen’s Fairy Tales / Johnny Crow’s Garden by Hans Christian Andersen

6. Dandelion, The Extraordinary Life of a Misfit by Sheelagh Mawe

7. Wicket and the Dandelion Warriors: An Ewok Adventure by Larry Weinberg

8. Ta by John Robert Russell

9. Little Dandelion Seeds the World by Julia Richardson

10. Barney Bipple’s Magic Dandelions by Carol Chapman

 

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May 1, 2024 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Villains I’d Root for Instead of the Protagonists

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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

 

A topiary that’s been trimmed to look like a person. It has a big, round head and broad shoulders. Sometimes antagonists are more interesting than protagonists. I suspect it’s because, at least for some writers, villains have more freedom to say and do whatever they wish than characters who are supposed to set a good example for everyone.

Here are some villains that I liked better than the protagonists I was supposed to be rooting for in these stories and why I enjoyed them so much.

Spike from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

He was a creative, emotionally intelligent, and hilarious bad guy. I also enjoyed seeing his character development over the seasons as he slowly learned how to be a slightly better vampire than he’d been before thanks to the time he spent with humans he liked among other reasons.

 

Gollum/Smeagol from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings novels

As critical as it was for his gold ring to eventually end up in other hands for plot reasons, I felt terrible for Gollum when he was separated from his Precious. He’d lost everything else important to him in life, and the magical effects of the ring had warped his mind and body beyond repair over the many years he spent with it. The poor guy.

 

Wile E. Coyote from the 1950s children’s cartoon Looney Tunes 

I never wanted the roadrunner to be eaten, but I did wish that Wile E. could catch him just once!

 

The Blair Witch from the film The Blair Witch Project 

Think about it. The Blair Witch went off deep into the woods to live alone and would have been perfectly content to not have any contact with the outside world at all until the protagonists of this film decided to invade her territory and steal her possessions. This happened after the main characters had been warned by local townspeople to stay out of the woods, so it’s not like they were unaware they were wandering into danger.

While I certainly didn’t want anyone to get hurt, everyone would have been better off if this camping trip never happened. There was never any need for the Blair Witch’s privacy to be invaded, and I would have been annoyed, too, if I were in her shoes!

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April 30, 2024 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Petty Reasons You’ve DNF’d a Book Or Reduced Its Rating


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

The phrase Game Over is written in bright neon lights.

I will not be sharing the names of any authors or titles in this post as I don’t want to make anyone feel bad.

1. They didn’t know the difference between hay and straw. 

Straw is used for animal bedding while hay is used for animal feed. If an author tries to feed nothing but straw to their cows, the poor creatures will not receive the nutrients they need to survive and I will not continue reading that tale!

 

2. They introduced way too many characters in the first chapter. 

I get overwhelmed by these things. By all means have dozens of characters if needed, but give me some time to take note of who they are before bringing more folks into the fold.

 

3. There is a terribly judgemental protagonist.

Realistically flawed main characters are so much more interesting to read about than perfect ones, but I quickly lose interest in protagonists in most cases if their main flaw is harshly judging other people. This is true even if I happen to agree that X is generally a good thing to do or that Y is generally not a good thing to do.

I’d rather have more love and acceptance in the world and in fiction.

 

4. The plot includes a love triangle.

I’m completely burnt out on this trope.

 

5. Character names are difficult to pronounce due to inconsistent spelling or pronunciation rules

If their names have been spelled or pronounced in ways that do not make sense or vary a lot from one name to the next, that is not the book for me unless the author is doing it on purpose and clearly explains why there are no consistent rules about such things in that universe. This is something that happens most often in the fantasy genre in my experience. I wish it didn’t happen so often.

 

6. Driving or walking distances are wildly unrealistic

If your character plans to drive from one side of Toronto to the other in a couple of hours, especially during rush hour or a blizzard when traffic is painfully slow and driving time can be much, much longer than that, I will shake my head and decline to read any further. There is no world in which this happens unless you’re writing a Star Trek novel and there’s a transporter involved.

Toronto is huge and full of congestion and construction projects for most of the year. The rest of time, it is almost always snowing, sleeting, or raining heavily. Characters who wish to speedily reach their destination through my city should either travel at two in the morning in January when there is zero precipitation or avoid this part of the world altogether.

 

7.  Anyone other than an antagonist is rude to someone to the service industry.

There are plenty of other ways to show a character is having a bad day and not being themselves when necessary. Rudeness, especially to folks who are often treated unkindly in real life and who make far too little money for all of their hard work, is not something I want to read about.

 

8. The pet dies.

Fictional pets should be immortal if you ask me!

 

9. Too many sex scenes.

It’s totally fine to include them if they’re an integral part of the storyline.

I’d prefer to replace the rest of them with scenes that are funny, dramatic, or propel the plot forward. Alternatively, the book could also be just a little shorter and that would be perfectly okay.

 

10. Text talk.

Unless there’s an excellent reason for a character to write or speak this way, I’d prefer them to communicate in full sentences or something close to that. They can use as much slang as the author wishes (although that can make a book feel dated pretty fast if you’re not careful), I just want them to speak or write in a way that doesn’t substitute numbers for letters or shorten words for no logical reason.

 

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April 24, 2024 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Songs That Confused Me When I Was a Kid

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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

If anyone is interested in reading a great essay about how common sayings, phrases,  and even certain logos can be misunderstood, go check out Knowledge Is Power. France Is Bacon.

I normally avoid discussing sensitive topics like religion online, but I must bring it up today due to the sort of childhood I had.

A closeup photo of a mic in a mic stand on a stage. The lights from the upper portion of the stage make it impossible to see anything in the distance. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I was a preacher’s kid and was homeschooled for the first several years of elementary school.  The combination of these two things meant that I knew very little about secular pop culture until I was about eleven or twelve and my parents began gradually relaxing their rules about music, tv shows, and films.

(They were less strict about books for some reason, but even there I mostly read the classics, Bible stories, the Inspirational genre, and fairy tales until I was old enough to go to the library with less adult supervision and, ahem, bend the rules just a little bit by borrowing children’s ghost stories and Choose Your Own Adventure books. 😉 )

Therefore, I suspect that my first two answers might not be familiar to some of you. I mixed it up as much as possible and included secular music, too, to increase the odds of someone knowing at least one of my answers!

Apple Red Happiness

Apple Red Happiness is a kids’ worship song about the Fruits of the Spirit, which are a list of virtues from the New Testament. They include love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. 

What confused me about this song were all of the food references that had nothing at all to do with the topic at hand. What on Earth did food have to do with being kind or peaceful? I couldn’t figure it out, so I was always left feeling puzzled and a little hungry during this song.

 

I’m in the Lord’s Army 

I’m in the Lord’s Army is a kids’ worship song about committing to being in service of God that uses a lot of militaristic imagery to get its point across.

There were motions we were supposed to act out at specific portions of the song. For example, we’d pretend to pull the string back on a bow and shoot an arrow every time we heard the world artillery or pretend to hold a bridle and gallop like a horse every time we heard cavalry.

Given the large number of pacifist German Mennonite relatives I had, this song also utterly confused me. When I learned what metaphors were, I concluded that this was a metaphor….well, at least until I learned about the Crusades and other holy wars when I grew older. Then it was back to permanent confusion.

As protective as my parents were, though, some secular music did seep through.

 

Kissed By a Rose

I believe I heard Seal’s Kissed By a Rose on a radio that was playing in a store somewhere when I was a kid.

It sounded a little medieval to me and was nothing like I’d heard before. I loved it!. For several years I assumed that this song was hundreds of years old and had only recently been rediscovered and recorded for a new generation.

 

Stop! In the Name of Love 

One of my elementary school classmates would randomly sing Stop! In the Name of Love by The Supremes when we were at recess. (Or maybe some other artist did a cover of that song that I wasn’t aware of?)

I had never heard of this group before and had zero cultural context to understand what I was supposed to stop doing, what love had to do with it, or what other rules love might compel someone to follow in order to avoid breaking anyone’s heart. None of it made sense, and for many years I assumed that kid simply enjoyed making up silly things to sing that weren’t supposed to make any sense.

It also didn’t help that he only sang those five words over and over again and only occasionally included the next five (“before you break my heart”).  Maybe he didn’t know the rest of the lyrics and was secretly just as confused as I was?

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April 23, 2024 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Unread Books on My Shelves I Want to Read Soon


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

Four shelves of library books that are stacked neatly but with their spines facing away from the viewer. The shelves are labelled from 3B at the top left all the way down to 7C to the bottom right, although I do not know what those numbers and letters signify. This is going to be one of those weeks when I give more than ten answers. It will help to make up for the weeks when I fall far short of that goal.

As I’ve mentioned here before, most of the books I read come from my local library for practical, environmental, and frugal reasons.

Depending on how many ebooks my library has ordered, this could mean that I might immediately be able to download a book from them, be one of the first people on the waitlist for the next available copy, or, in some cases, have a few weeks or months to go until one is available for me.

I don’t mind waiting for books. It increases my anticipation for my next great read and helps the librarians show just how popular certain titles are. They are often able to order more copies if the waitlists stretch out so long that the people at the bottom of them can expect to wait for several months to years at the current pace.

Usually, the most popular titles either already have plenty of copies of them circulating or will soon see a huge increase in how many of them are available to borrow that will reduce my wait time from several years to a few months or several months to a couple of weeks.

Here are the books on my hold shelf that have long waitlists.

Book cover for Antarctica by Claire Keegan. Image on cover shows a photograph a white woman with long, wavy hair wearing a light summer dress with spaghetti straps on it. She’s crouching down and touching the water below her gently. There is a blue filter on this photo that makes everything look cold and possibly even icy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Antarctica by Claire Keegan

Waiting Since: February 20

Why I’m Interested: She’s on my must-read list. I love her descriptive writing style and realistic storylines.

 

Book cover for The Spoon Stealer by Lesley Crewe. Image on cover shows a red sleeveless dress and two white sheets hanging to dry on an outdoor clothesline. There is a wicker clothes basket partially hidden by the dress and sheets, but with the wind blowing everything around we get a glimpse of it. The grass below is growing tall, and there is a thick forest behind this scene.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. The Spoon Stealer by Lesley Crewe

Waiting Since: March 5

Why I’m Interested: Canadian fiction often isn’t as well-advertised as all of the books published down south in the U.S., so I make a concerted effort to seek out non-American authors and stories as much as possible. This seems like a nice slice-of-life read.

 

Book cover for Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport. Image on cover shows a painting of a pine forest with a river running through it. The land has been tinted pink by the setting sun filtering through the puffy white clouds in the sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport

Waiting Since: March 20

Why I’m Interested: This is something I struggle with and hope to improve within myself.

 

Book cover for The Lost Sounds by Chris Watson. Image on cover shows a drawing of a brown bird that has a white chest. Its head is lifted up as if it has begun or soon will begin to sing. You can see a full moon in the background against the night sky. Why aren’t you sleeping, little bird?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4. The Lost Sounds by Chris Watson

Waiting Since: March 26

Why I’m Interested: Birds are such fascinating creatures. I’m waiting for the audiobook version of this book so I can hear all sorts of beautiful bird songs from the U.K. that (I’m assuming?) we probably don’t get to enjoy very often here in Canada.

 

Book cover for To Slip the Bonds of Earth by Amanda Flower. Image on cover shows a painting of a white woman wearing a 1900s-style white blouse and floor length green skirt. She is pushing a bicycle on a dusty country road as her brown satchel hangs from the handle bars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. To Slip the Bonds of Earth by Amanda Flower

Waiting Since: April 3

Why I’m Interested: Did you know that Orville and Wilbur Wright had a sister named Katherine? I did not, but now I’m curious to read this cozy mystery about her. Is it at all historically accurate? Will there be airplanes in it? I have no idea, but trying new things is worth it in my opinion.

 

Book cover for Lewis Carroll’s Guide for Insomniacs by Lewis Carroll. Image on cover shows a drawing of a rabbit wearing striped pyjamas and standing up with a puzzled expression on his face as he holds a pocket watch as far away from his legs as he possibly can. He appears to be the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. Lewis Carroll’s Guide for Insomniacs by Lewis Carroll

Waiting Since: April 9

Why I’m Interested: I sometimes have trouble falling back asleep at night and I love Caroll’s work.

 

Book cover for The Wisdom of Nurses: Stories of Grit From the Front Lines by Amie Archibald-Varley, Sara Fung. Image on cover is a photo of a blue stethoscope lying on a white surface.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7. The Wisdom of Nurses: Stories of Grit From the Front Lines by Amie Archibald-Varley, Sara Fung

Waiting Since: April 9

Why I’m Interested: Some of my relatives work in the healthcare field. I have a great deal of respect for anyone in that profession and love dipping into memoirs and similar sorts of books about their experiences.

 

Book cover for The Laundryman’s Boy: A Novel by Edward Y.C. Lee. Image on cover shows a drawing of a black shirt hanging on a clotheslines in front of a red sky filled with yellow stars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8.The Laundryman’s Boy: A Novel by Edward Y.C. Lee

Waiting Since: April 17

Why I’m Interested: Mr. Lee is another Canadian author I’ve added to my TBR. The writing in the short preview I read was gorgeous, and I’m quite curious to learn more about the protagonist, a young Chinese immigrant who dreams of leaving his exploitative job and continuing his education.

 

Book cover for The Minotaur at Calle Lanza by Zito Madu. Image on the cover is a drawing of a Minotaur on the left hand of the figure and a human head on the right. The human’s face is shown in silhoutte, but the Minotaur’s face looked like a maze instead of having any discernible features.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9. The Minotaur at Calle Lanza by Zito Madu

Waiting Since: April 17

Why I’m Interested: This travel memoir set in Italy in 2020 sounds like such a poignant read.

 

Book cover for A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland. Image on cover shows a closeup of a person’s chest. The person has long, straight brown hair that is covering much of their chest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10. A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland

Waiting Since: April 17

Why I’m Interested: This is a title I mentioned in the Spring 2024 TBR List post back in March. The Selkie Wife is a wonderful folk tale, so I’m thrilled that I’m a little closer to (finally!) being able to read this retelling of it now.

 

Book cover for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal. Image on cover is a drwaing of two Native people. One is holding a fan made from bird feathers and the other one has a bird feather in their hair and is pointing at the sun above them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11. Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal

Waiting Since: April 17

Why I’m Interested: When I was in school, I learned very little about Native American history before the arrival of people from Europe and other continents. I’m hoping this book will help to change that and fill in some gaps in my historical knowledge.

 

Book cover for Health for All: A Doctor's Prescription for a Healthier Canada by Jane Philpott. Image on cover shows a drawing of hundreds of people who have been arranged into an image that looks like two hands that are about to shake each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12. Health for All: A Doctor’s Prescription for a Healthier Canada by Jane Philpott

Waiting Since: April 17

Why I’m Interested: Canada has Universal Health Care, but our system isn’t funded as much as it should be given our growing and aging population. I am so curious to read this doctor’s perspective on the best ways to ensure that everyone gets the healthcare they need and that healthcare workers are treated fairly and given the tools to succeed as well.

 

Book cover for Microskills: Small Actions, Big Imact by Adaira Landry, Resa E. Lewiss. There is no image on the cover. Microskills is in a large white font and the rest of the title is in a smaller yellow font. There is a blue background, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

13. MicroSkills: Small Actions, Big Impact by Adaira Landry, Resa E. Lewiss

Waiting Since: April 19

Why I’m Interested: I have seen some evidence of this working in my life with topics like setting fitness goals, but I want to learn more about it.

 

Wish me luck as I wait my turn for these titles! I’d love to hear your thoughts on them if you’ve already read them, too.

If you have a local library that you use, how long are the waitlists there for new and popular books?

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April 17, 2024 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Introvert vs. Extrovert – Which One Are You?

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 drawing of four different batteries standing next to each other. The one on the left is nearly fully drained, and has a red bar on it showing it desperately needs to be charged. The next two have two orange and three yellow bars on them respectively, showing that they are draining but still have some juice left. The battery at the left has four green bars on it and is fully charged. I am an introvert because my emotional battery is charged up by being alone.

When I was a kid, introversion wasn’t understood as well as it is today. (Or at least not in the rural areas I grew up in where extroversion was a strong social norm and you were considered a little odd if you didn’t fit into that box. Cities might have been different in that regard as one could pick from a much wider range of social circles in such places!)

There are still misconceptions about it, of course, but now I find that most people are totally understanding when I say that I’ve had a wonderful time at massive social event X but will be taking some time for myself the next day or two to recharge my energy levels.

With that being said, I can behave a little like an extrovert under the right circumstances. There are certain people in my life I adore spending time with and who drain my introvert battery much more slowly than other folks do.

These people tend to be quiet, gentle, and kind souls who are also fellow introverts. (I love noisy, boisterous people, too, but it’s easier for me to spend long periods of time with folks who enjoy some friendly silence for part of our hangouts).

Some of us are naturally pretty far on one side of the spectrum or the other, but from what I’ve observed the majority of people seem to have aspects of both extroversion and introversion in their personalities depending on how much socialization they have or have not been getting recently and what else is going on in their lives.

For example, are they currently dealing with an injury or illness that drains their energy? Have they recently had a big change in their life like moving? Are they celebrating something exciting like a promotion, new addition to their family (whether pet or human), or graduating from college?

All of these things and more can nudge you firmly in one direction or the other at least temporarily in my experience.

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April 16, 2024 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I’d Like to go on Vacation With


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

A pair of sunglasses sitting on a sand dune. The sun is setting in the background.As I’ve mentioned here before, visiting Prince Edward Island is my dream vacation.

My ideal vacation companions are people – or, in this case, characters – who are friendly, flexible, independent, enjoy the simple things in life, and are introverted or introvert-friendly. I’d like to have some time each day for group hangouts, of course, but I’d also want everyone to feel free to take a few hours to do something alone or with just one or two other people whenever needed.

Other than books, of course, I love nature,  food, history, and visiting old cemeteries, so most of the activities I’d suggest would revolve around these topics. Depending on the weather, we might visit the beach, look for interesting epigraphs at the local cemetery, go for a nature walk or hike,  take a tour of a historical site, or ask the locals about their favourite local spots to hang out that tourists might not be aware of and then see if those suggestions were as fantastic as I hope they would be.

If the weather outside were frightful, I’d suggest visiting nearby museums, bookstores, coffee houses, ice cream shops, restaurants, and/or libraries to whomever wished to join me.

Here are some characters I think would enjoy this minimalistic and laid-back vacation style.

1. Frodo Baggins from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy

2. Eleanor Oliphant from Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

3. Celie from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple 

4. Katniss from Suzanne Collin’s The Hunger Games 

5. Don from Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project 

6. Alice from Claire Kann’s Let’s Talk About Love

7. Murderbot from Martha Wells’ All Systems Red 

8. Richard from Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere 

9. Matilda (as an adult) from Roald Dahl’s Matilda 

10. Binti from Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti

 

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April 10, 2024 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: A Moment I Wish I Could Relive

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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A photo of a soft pretzel. If I could relive one memory, it would be hanging out with my best friend Jill Scheiman.

Jill and I were inseparable in junior high and the beginning of high school. Both of us came from upper working class to lower middle class families, so we were used to having plenty of fun on a budget.

She loved music, sappy movies, and developing crushes on someone new every few months. I used to marvel at how easy it was for her to suddenly start liking someone because of how rare it was for me to do the same thing.  Her bedroom was filled with teen fashion magazines and home gym equipment whereas mine was filled with books and whatever secular music CDs I could afford to buy. I was quieter, more serious, and much less interested in romance as a genre or as a hobby than she was, but we both enjoyed finding the humorous moments in life whenever we could and talking about various nerdy things.

I wish we could spend another afternoon driving around aimlessly, going on the rambling walks we would sometimes take while we talked about everything, or enjoying some soft pretzels or slushies at the mall. We were both genuinely good kids who liked hanging out together. Giggling was about the most disruptive thing we could think to do.

(Well, other than the time that we toilet papered the car of one of our youth group leaders. With that being said, we also cleaned it all up afterwards, and the adults were amused, not annoyed, by our antics as this was many years before the famous toilet paper shortages of 2020 and they knew we didn’t mean any harm.)

They were never grand plans, but they were our plans. Even simple things in life are better if you have someone to do them with!

We mostly lost touch after she graduated from high school as she was a few years older than I was, but the last I heard about her was that she was married, had a couple of kids, and was studying to become a nurse. (She did not go straight on to college after her high school graduation, so this was later on in life).  I wish her and her family well.

But what I wouldn’t give to be a carefree kid with her again on a Sunday afternoon! Every few years I look her up online to see if I can find anything about what she’s up to these days. I haven’t had luck with that in a long time,  but I do keep trying. Maybe when we are old women we’ll have a chance to be silly again together. I included her last name in this post on purpose just in case she ever googles herself and stumbles across this message.

As an interesting aside, I recently read that today’s teenagers are much less likely to hang out at the mall than previous generations did. Some malls don’t allow unaccompanied minors to walk through them at all anymore, and other malls have gone out of business due to the Internet and cultural shifts. Almost anything can be ordered online these days, so plenty of shoppers of all ages have switched to that if they need a new book, t-shirt, or pair of shoes.

I wonder what Jill and I would have done if we were teenagers in 2024? Probably a lot of texting, social media stuff, and swapping memes, I’d guess.

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