Tag Archives: Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge

August 27, 2025 · 1:00 am

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

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 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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August 20, 2025 · 1:00 am

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

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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 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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August 13, 2025 · 1:00 am

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

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.

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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August 6, 2025 · 1:00 am

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

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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July 30, 2025 · 1:00 am

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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July 23, 2025 · 1:00 am

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

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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.

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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July 16, 2025 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: My Favourite Summer Quotes From Books

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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 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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July 9, 2025 · 1:00 am

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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July 2, 2025 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Board and Card Games I Like

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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.

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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June 25, 2025 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Do You Follow Celebrity Gossip? Why or Why Not?

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 pineapple sitting in front of a bright yellow wall. It has a pair of sunglasses hanging on the fruit as if the pineapple has eyes. The green leaves of the pineapple are still attached to it and look like a spiky hairdo. Eh, occasionally?

I have to admit to paying more attention to it for a while when the Covid-19 pandemic first began because I needed a distraction from the traumatic ways it was affecting humanity in general as well as the lives of so many people I know (or knew) and love. Those were years I hope to never see repeated in any way.

There was one star who shall remain nameless here who kept having children with different women he wasn’t married or otherwise committed to (so far as I could tell, of course). As in, he was fathering multiple children per year for a while there. It was something I found so unusual that I did let my morbid curiosity get the best of me as yet another birth announcement was released every few months or so.

This was not a hobby I’m proud of, and I have gone back to avoiding celebrity news as much as humanly possible now.

Some of it always seems to leak through, though, even if I do something as simple as look up what new projects my favourite entertainers have coming out.

Those generally positive tidbits of information are something I may save for small talk when nothing else is working and I’m trying to guide the conversation away from topics I don’t want to discuss with a particular person or anyone at all. Most people like babies, weddings, and/or pets, for example, so talking about a celebrity who recently had a kid, got married, or adopted a pet from an animal shelter is something the average person will find neutral if not endearing.

(I generally ignore negative stories unless there’s a rare pressing need to do otherwise. Celebrities are fellow human beings, so I try to give them as much privacy as possible unless they’re, say, harming others with their bad choices or something. Everything else is none of my concern…but I still want to know when their next film, tv series, book, or album is coming out. Ha!)

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