Tag Archives: Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge

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Here are the assumptions I’m going to be making for this week’s prompt:

1. The island has a climate that will not kill me with heat stroke, frost bite, or unlucky encounters with the wildlife when I arrive.
2. I will have enough food, water, shelter, medicine, and other basic supplies to keep me alive and well until I’m rescued.

If we’re talking about an island that is freezing cold, filled with venomous snakes, or is otherwise inhospitable to human visitors, all I’d want is to get the heck out of there as soon as possible. I’m going to assume this is not what Long and Short Reviews intended and answer this question under the assumption that I’m safe there as long as I don’t do anything silly like try to jump off a cliff.

In that case, this is what I’d want to have with me.

A notebook to write down memories of and stories about my time there.

A camera to snap a few pictures.

A hammock to sleep in (and a warm blanket in case the night air was damp).

A couple of buckets to use in my sand castle creations.

A swimming suit and towel to make my explorations of the shore a bit easier.

A few people I loved for the companionship.

A few large, friendly dogs to play with and to help me grab the attention of the rescuers whenever they arrived.

And a paperback or two to read if I grew bored.

Give me all of those things, and I’d be pretty happy there for a little while until the rescuers arrived.

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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When I originally saw this topic on the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge List, I thought it would be an easy one. It turns out that most of the books I’ve read recently have not been about tough topics, and the ones I have read are not necessarily titles I’d recommend. So I had to dig deeply into my reading history to answer this prompt.

Title and Author: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Issues It Covers: Racism, Police Corruption, and Injustice

Title and Author: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Issues It Covers: Second Wave Feminism, Sexism, and Mental Health

Title and Author: As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto
Issues It Covers: Gender, Medical Malpractice, and Mental Health

Title and Author: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Issues It Covers: Childhood Sexual Abuse, Mental Health, and Racism

Title and Author: Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life by Henry Cloud
Issues It Covers: Mental Health, Unhealthy Interpersonal Relationships, Toxic People

Title and Author: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Issues It Covers: Grief

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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This list will be a long one. I had some truly wonderful Language Arts teachers over the years. While there were a few books they assigned to us over the years that I didn’t like, I found something enjoyable in the vast majority of our assigned reads.  

I’m assuming that all of the WWBC participants have at least heard of these plays, poems, novels, and other works if they haven’t read them. I chose not to write commentary on them to keep this post from turning into a 1000+ word essay, but I’m happy to expand on anything that you’re all not already familiar with. This is roughly sorted by the age when I read them. Little House in the Big Woods was a fourth grade reading assignment, I believe.

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder 

The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Edgar Allen Poe’s works, especially “The Raven” and “The Masque of the Red Death”

Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Othello by William Shakespeare

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Emily Dickinson’s collected poems

e.e. cummings collected poems

The Iliad by Homer (I think we only read excerpts of this one),

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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There are three different types of things I like to read when I’m not feeling well. I’ll give everyone a few examples of each one.

Comic Strips

All of these comic strips tend to be a mish-mash of whatever it is their creators have been thinking about recently. There are few if any continuous storylines in them. That makes it hard to explain them to new readers but also a great deal of fun to explore. We never know what might pop up in them next!

The Oatmeal.

Will 5:00 Never Come?

War and Peas.

Humorous Blog Posts and Essays

Doctor Grumpy in the House.

If you enjoy medical humour, this doctor’s blog is fantastic.

The Red Brick Blog.

Sadly, this hasn’t been updated in almost two years, but the archives are filled with some wonderful posts.

Mock Ramblings.

Michael and I have been friends for so long that I no longer remember how we met. If you haven’t already scrolled through his site after reading his previous WWBC posts, I highly recommend doing so sometime. He blogs about everything from his strange dreams, to snippets of the stories he’s working on, to recaps of the amazing D&D games he organizes for his kids.

Not everything he writes is necessarily funny, but when he writes humorous stuff he truly excels at it.

SFF Stories

I’ve chosen not link to specific tales from these magazines because of how particular I am about my science fiction and fantasy. In general, I find that all three of these publications do an excellent job of selecting unique, well-developed stories that show off under-appreciated authors in the SFF genre. If you have any interest at all in speculative fiction, I do recommend scrolling through these links to see what might appeal to you.

Fireside Magazine.

Syntax & Salt Magazine.

Lightspeed Magazine.

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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I was the sort of English student that teachers loved. Not only was it my favourite subject, I enjoyed almost every writer that was ever assigned to us in those courses. Often I’d even go out and read as many other poems, essays, or books by that same author as I could find for the sheer fun of it, but I’ll save those stories for August 28 when we all blog about assigned works that we really enjoyed in school.

There were a few exceptions to my love of literature, however.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

I struggled so hard to connect with this book, but the characters were simply too vain and materialistic for me to bond with them at all. Those are simply two personality flaws that I have little patience for in fiction or in real life.

Walt Whitman

While I immediately enjoyed other nineteenth century poets like Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe, Whitman was too verbose for my tastes. He had wonderful ideas, but I kept wanting to edit his poems down to a third of their original size when I read them.

King Lear

There are several Shakespeare plays I really like watching on the stage and will gush about in a few weeks, but King Lear is not one of them. The idea of playing favourites with one’s children deeply irritates me. I’ve seen the longterm effects of that in other families, and it’s destructive for everyone involved.

Due to this, I found it hard to sympathize with King Lear. It seemed to me that he could have easily had a peaceful retirement if he’d only chosen to treat all three of his daughters equally.

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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I’ve written countless books reviews over the years, yet there are still plenty of books out there I love but have not written reviews for. There simply isn’t enough time in the day to do everything! Sometimes I also question if it’s ever a good idea to write reviews for older titles. What do you all think?

• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel
• Every book ever written by Octavia E. Butler (but especially The Parable series)
• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
• Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
• The Little House on the Prairies series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• The Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.