A Month of Faves-- Reading Challenges and Goals/How I Read and Blogged

A Month of Faves is hosted by Girlxoxo, Traveling With T, and Estella's Revenge.

I have a hard time signing up for long-term reading challenges. I forget what I'm doing. I do better with small challenges during seasonal times of the year. I participated in all the Halloween reading challenges and aced those like a champ. I'm also apart of the Classics Club but I didn't not get my ten in this year. :(

I always have a goal to do what I can in Read Harder challenges by Book Riot but once again I just have a hard time sticking to a certain theme each month.

I read a book a day in September with Stacy from Stacy's Book Blog. That was fun and hard and really enjoyable. Most of the books I read were children's books and very short non-fiction. But I read a lot of things that had been on my list!

I always have a goal to read more diverse books and try new genres. 34/128 of my books read this year were by diverse authors. Not as good as I would have liked but 2019 is a new year to do better.

44/128 were male authors so the majority of my reading this last year was definitely female-centric.

21 books were young adult. 28 were children and juvenile fiction. 50 were non-fiction. 23 were memoirs/biographies. I read a lot of mini history bio collections and true crime books. I managed to get one philosophy book in too. Most of my non-fiction this year was memoir. I usually try for more history and science in my non-fiction. I guess I needed something a bit different this year. It seems like I needed to connect with human stories more than anything else. We shall see what 2019 brings!

18 Audiobooks.

25 books were either sci-fi or fantasy! I usually don't read that much in those genres. I also read a lot of horror and mystery/crime fiction. 19 horror and 13 crime/mystery.

I loved listening to Tomi Adeyemi's Children of Blood and Bone. It's a beautiful story made even more magical while listening to it!

My favorite audiobook memoir was Eddie Izzard's Believe Me. He has little live notes that he just shoots from the hip while he made it. It was so funny and entertaining.

I noticed, according to Goodreads, that I read a lot more books that I actually enjoyed. I'm not sure if that means I intentionally picked up books I knew I'd love or if I just happened to find ones I loved more than another year but whichever it was, it was definitely a great reading year for me! 24 books were 5 stars for me and 64 were 4 stars! That's some funtastic books!

I know I can't sign up for any blogging challenge and actually accomplish it. But I know I will keep my eye on The Read Harder challenge from Book Riot. And Girlxoxo has monthly blogging challenges that I may try to participate in as well. Michelle from True Book Addict always has seasonal reading challenges that are short enough to get me going. And I'm perpetually reading my Classics Club books. I also have a list of Amazon's 100 books to read in a lifetime. A list from Well-educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. And President Obama always releases his best reads throughout the year and I try to keep my eye on those for reading ideas.

I've blogged a lot more this year than I did last year and it's been great. To date I've written 117 blog posts this year! Whoa! My favorites are probably the self-reflective ones I've done in December. I've stretched a bit thinking about my year of reading and living and I've seen some patterns.

I've found new bloggers to follow and participated in blogging events and small reading challenges and it's been good for me. I'd like to keep it up and make it more regular. I need the practice I really do enjoy it. So many of my TBR lists comes from fellow book bloggers! Plus I get ideas on how to change things up and to look back at my reading year and see how far I've come and where to go next!

Nonfiction November 2018-- My Year in Nonfiction

Nonfiction November is here (though I'm a week late...) and runs from Oct. 30-Nov. 30. Is being hosted by Doing Dewey, Julz Reads, Sarah's Bookshelves, Sophisticated Dorkiness, and What's Nonfiction?

Week One Prompt: 

1. What was your favorite nonfiction read this year?

My favorites this year have been Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zones by Richard Lloyd Parry. He blended history, anecdotes, and investigation beautifully to make a book about grief and how we deal with it.

I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara. I love reading about true crime because it delves into the dark side of humanity. And somehow illogically my brain thinks if I read about it then it won't happen to me...

The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English by Lynne Murphy. This one goes to back to my roots of Linguistics my major in college. It's like a fun mini introduction to the study of Linguistics and I recommend it for anyone who speaks a language.

2. Do you have a particular topic you've been attracted to more this year?

I definitely notice a trend with memoirs this year. I enjoyed listening to them in the car, etc. And after I'll Be Gone in the Dark, I read two more true crime books.

3. What nonfiction book have you recommended the most?

Ghosts of the Tsunami and I'll Be Gone in the Dark were the two I recommended the most with Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover a close second/third.

4. What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

I loved finding people dedicated to reading nonfiction last year! It was kind of a revelation for me to see the nonfiction love. I hope to add to that this year and meet new people and find new and interesting nonfiction reads.

Dewey: The Small-town Cat Who Touched the World by Vicki Myron

Goodreads Summary:

How much of an impact can an animal have? How many lives can one cat touch? How is it possible for an abandoned kitten to transform a small library, save a classic American town, and eventually become famous around the world? You can't even begin to answer those questions until you hear the charming story of Dewey Readmore Books, the beloved library cat of Spencer, Iowa.

Dewey's story starts in the worst possible way. Only a few weeks old, on the coldest night of the year, he was stuffed into the returned book slot at the Spencer Public Library. He was found the next working by library director Vicki Myron, a single mother who had survived the loss of her family farm, a breast cancer scare, and an alcoholic husband. Dewey won her heart, and the hearts of the staff, by pulling himself up and hobbling on frostbitten feet to nudge each of hem in a gesture of thanks and love. For the next nineteen years, he never stopped charming the people of Spencer with this enthusiasm, warmth, humility (for a cat), and, above all, his sixth sense about who needed him most.

As his fame grew from town to town, then state to state, and finally, amazingly, worldwide, Dewey became more than just a friend; he became a source of pride for an extraordinary Heartland farming town pulling its way slowly back from the greatest crisis in its long history.

My Thoughts:

I loved reading this aloud with G. He loves cats and he especially loved this story of Dewey Readmore Books from Spencer, Iowa. We laughed and finally we cried. I knew they found him in 1987 and that there was no way he survived more than 20 years....It broke our hearts.

Myron also manages to write a short history of Iowa and her small town Spencer. She shares some of her personal history too. Those parts dragged a bit and could have used a bit of editing.

I know they have a kid's version of this story without all the major history lessons and personal hardship stories of Ms. Myron, but this is the book I picked up awhile ago and so this is the one we dug into and read together. It opened up some discussions on drug abuse and suicide and as well as death. It got serious a few times but my boy was able to handle it and I enjoyed the discussions that came out of it even it some of it was a bit much to handle.

Overall, it's a great story. And Dewey, may he rest in peace, was a very special cat.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Goodreads Summary:

...Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life...

My Thoughts:

Wow! I cannot believe the childhood Trevor Noah had. Let's just say I couldn't even dream up half the stuff that happened to him. I loved getting to know more about him and his experiences growing up in Apartheid and how it played out after. He brings a lightness and charm to the stories.

The only thing that bothered me was the distance he had with his experiences. He didn't offer a lot of insight and kind of just let awful horrible stories drop without any sort of inspiration or insight. But maybe that's exactly what he intended to do. A more serious memoir/biography may happen in the future when he's willing to share more of how his experiences have truly affected him.

But overall, the stories are interesting and so heart-breaking. I listened to it on Audible and enjoyed him telling his own stories.

The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying by Nina Riggs

Goodreads Summary:

Nina Riggs was just thirty-seven years old when initially diagnosed with breast cancer—one small spot. Within a year, the mother of two sons, ages seven and nine, and married sixteen years to her best friend, received the devastating news that her cancer was terminal. 

How does one live each day, “unattached to outcome”? How does one approach the moments, big and small, with both love and honesty?

Exploring motherhood, marriage, friendship, and memory, even as she wrestles with the legacy of her great-great-great grandfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nina Riggs’s breathtaking memoir continues the urgent conversation that Paul Kalanithi began in his gorgeous When Breath Becomes Air. She asks, what makes a meaningful life when one has limited time?

"There are so many things that are worse than death: old grudges, a lack of self-awareness, severe constipation, no sense of humor, the grimace on your husband's face as he empties your surgical drain into the measuring cup."

I enjoyed Riggs' musings on life through her love of the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. She quotes heavily from his life and essays. And since she was a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson, she quotes a lot from him too having studying him early on.

The way she tackled life and love and death is inspiring. I can only hope to face death and live life in such a way.

"It's about honoring the unknowing and the awkwardness and the mystery of dying. he said. It's unsettling-- and that's okay."

This is the last paragraph in her book. To me it was profound. You can tell she was ready. It was alarming and tragic and poignant to read.

"Already, the boys are off to the wilds again-- whooping and surviving. It will be getting dark soon--the sky has started with that eerie postapocalyptic light of a warm evening in winter-- but I am not ready to call them back in. There is nothing in this whole world that could make me call them back in."

*Part of my 2018 Nonfiction Reading Challenge.

Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone by Richard Lloyd Parry

Goodreads Summary:

The definitive account of what happened, why, and above all how it felt, when catastrophe hit Japan—by the Japan correspondent of The Times (London) and author of People Who Eat Darkness.

On March 11, 2011, a powerful earthquake sent a 120-foot-high tsunami smashing into the coast of northeast Japan. By the time the sea retreated, more than eighteen thousand people had been crushed, burned to death, or drowned.

It was Japan’s greatest single loss of life since the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It set off a national crisis and the meltdown of a nuclear power plant. And even after the immediate emergency had abated, the trauma of the disaster continued to express itself in bizarre and mysterious ways.

Richard Lloyd Parry, an award-winning foreign correspondent, lived through the earthquake in Tokyo and spent six years reporting from the disaster zone. There he encountered stories of ghosts and hauntings, and met a priest who exorcised the spirits of the dead. And he found himself drawn back again and again to a village that had suffered the greatest loss of all, a community tormented by unbearable mysteries of its own. 

What really happened to the local children as they waited in the schoolyard in the moments before the tsunami? Why did their teachers not evacuate them to safety? And why was the unbearable truth being so stubbornly covered up?

Ghosts of the Tsunami is an intimate account of an epic tragedy, told through the accounts of those who lived through it. It tells the story of how a nation faced a catastrophe and the struggle to find consolation in the ruins.

Parry leads us through one of the most harrowing tragedies a person and community can go through. I read this in a day and I think that's what made this book so powerful for me. He lets us know through the words of those who experienced it the weight of their grief; it's palpable. It sticks with you for days after.

"For many of those who experienced it, the tragedy of the tsunami was formless, black, and ineffable, an immense and overwhelming monster that blocked out the sun. But to Naomi, no less stricken than the others, it was glittering and sharp and appallingly bright. This harshly illuminated clarity was the opposite of consoling. It pierced, rather than smothered, and left nowhere to hide."

Not only do we get a taste of what these people went through after the tsunami hit, we also get insight into the culture of Japan and how they traditionally deal with disasters, grief, and death. We get to experience to good and the bad and the in between. I found myself shocked at how the children died. Why didn't they do anything? This is what I would've done....but Parry helps us make sense of it. How it could have happened and why. And it's just a tragedy.

"It's easy to imagine grief as an ennobling, purifying emotion--uncluttering the mind of what is petty and transient, and illumination the essential. In reality, of course, grief doesn't resolve anything, any more than a blow to the head or a devastating illness. It compounds stress and complication. It multiplies anxiety and tension. It opens fissures into cracks, and cracks into gaping chasms."

"'The children were murdered by an invisible monster,' Sayomi Shito said once. 'We vent our anger on it, but it doesn't react. It's like a black shadow. It has no human warmth.' She went on, 'The tsunami was a visible monster. But the invisible monster will last forever.'

I asked, 'What is the invisible monster?'

'I wonder myself what it is,' said Sayomi. 'Something peculiar in the Japanese, who attach importance only to the surface of things. And in the pride of people who cannot ever say sorry.'"

There are so many more quotes just like these that make you feel what they feel. It's a beautiful and tragic book and I came away with utter sadness at the tragedy, compassion, and hope for those who are left behind.

*part of my 2018 nonfiction reading challenge hosted by Doing Dewey.

Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology by Leah Remini

Goodreads Summary:

The outspoken actress, talk show host, and reality television star offers up a no-holds-barred memoir, including an eye-opening insider account of her tumultuous and heart-wrenching thirty-year-plus association with the Church of Scientology.

Leah Remini has never been the type to hold her tongue. That willingness to speak her mind, stand her ground, and rattle the occasional cage has enabled this tough-talking girl from Brooklyn to forge an enduring and successful career in Hollywood. But being a troublemaker has come at a cost.

That was never more evident than in 2013, when Remini loudly and publicly broke with the Church of Scientology. Now, in this frank, funny, poignant memoir, the former King of Queens star opens up about that experience for the first time, revealing the in-depth details of her painful split with the church and its controversial practices.

Indoctrinated into the church as a child while living with her mother and sister in New York, Remini eventually moved to Los Angeles, where her dreams of becoming an actress and advancing Scientology’s causes grew increasingly intertwined. As an adult, she found the success she’d worked so hard for, and with it a prominent place in the hierarchy of celebrity Scientologists alongside people such as Tom Cruise, Scientology’s most high-profile adherent. Remini spent time directly with Cruise and was included among the guests at his 2006 wedding to Katie Holmes.

But when she began to raise questions about some of the church’s actions, she found herself a target. In the end, she was declared by the church to be a threat to their organization and therefore a “Suppressive Person,” and as a result, all of her fellow parishioners—including members of her own family—were told to disconnect from her. Forever.

Bold, brash, and bravely confessional, Troublemaker chronicles Leah Remini’s remarkable journey toward emotional and spiritual freedom, both for herself and for her family. This is a memoir designed to reveal the hard-won truths of a life lived honestly—from an author unafraid of the consequences.

My Thoughts:

I've watched the documentary on HBO Going Clear based on the book by Lawrence Wright. So I was excited to learn about Leah Remini and her break with Scientology.

Her books main theme is Scientology and how it shaped her youth and early adulthood. She combines this with her desire to be famous and act. She writes about surviving both. Her personality has been to never back down and to stand up for herself and those she cares about. That got her into trouble in both places.

Remini opens herself up. We see she isn't perfect. She's brash and hot-headed but she's humble and loyal and fierce. Even when she was fully indoctrinated into Scientology she still watched out for abuse. She helped out the smaller kids in the Sea Org. She studied and cared about her religion and when the practice from higher ups was not aligning with her beliefs she called them out.

I identify so much in small ways with Remini's journey out of her church. I made a similar journey out of mine nine years ago and the thoughts of guilt and doubt and depression and loss of eternal glory were the same ones I felt as I left. While the church I left wasn't nearly as horrific as hers, the same types of manipulations and abuses were present.

I laughed with Remini and I cried with her through her journey. She's a class act and I wish her the best in her future endeavors. I'm grateful she's brave enough to share her journey with the world and help those who still need it.

She had a story about being a mother that really resonated with me. She said she really admired the parents who actually ran around and played with their children. "But they also left me racked with guilt--until one mother, out of dozens told me I shouldn't feel bad. 'You're not your daughter's playmate,' she said, and I nearly burst out into tears, because I needed to hear that so badly." She says she wasn't a "player," she loved spending time with her, protecting her and setting up her future. Yes, to this. My DH is the player and goofer.

My son did an art project for Thanksgiving where he put thankful feathers around a turkey. One was 'I'm thankful for my mom because she takes care of me.' Another one said 'I'm grateful for my dad because he plays tickle time with me.' Yup, that's OK. It made me feel weird for a bit because I want to be the player but then I remember I'm not and that's OK. I provide other ways to interact and love my son. Thanks, Ms. Remini, for letting me know I'm not alone in that sentiment!

"As long as I was a Scientologist, the church told me what to do and what not to do in almost every aspect of my life. If I had any doubts about leaving my faith, they vanished when I thought of Sofia growing up with that same kind of dependency. I didn't want her to group thinking her connection to the church was the measure of her success in life. I wanted her to be an individual. Belief and faith are great, but very few people have been led astray by thinking for themselves."

*Part of my 2018 non-fiction reading challenge.

Nonfiction Friday-- Obama: An Intimate Portrait: The Historic Presidency in Photographs by Pete Souza

I got this one for Christmas and I finally made the time to just sit and look through and read the whole thing. It's beautiful. It took me back to so many great moments during Obama's presidency. All the class, all the triumphs, and the struggles. The beautiful moments are all laid out so I can go through them time and again.

I love the picture of little 5-year-old Jacob asking the president if his hair felt just like his did and the president leans over and says "Why don't you see for yourself?"

Pete Souza captured the moment Homeland Security Advisor John Brennan told him the awful news of the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre. It's a grief-stricken and haunted look. It guts you.

This book is full of them. Pick it up today. It's an amazing collection that records an historic presidency.

*part of my nonfiction 2018 reading challenge.

Tis the Season for Reading Challenge Signups! 2018 Nonfiction Reading

I go back and forth on reading challenges. I usually like to randomly choose which book I'll end up reading at any given time and so reading challenges haven't worked for me in the past. But I'd like to spice things up this year and reconnect with other readers via the great interwebs. So I'm planning on adding a few to my list this next year. My first official challenge is being hosted by Doing Dewey. She will have mini challenges and giveaways as well as hosting 4 group nonfiction read-alongs.

I usually read a lot of nonfiction throughout the year. But this year I'd like to finish off a few I've started in the past and also diversify my reading.

I'd like to read at least two nonfiction books a month and make sure that they aren't both memoirs--biography fine, but not more that one memoir a month (well, as long as I get another nonfiction in besides a memoir then another memoir would be fine!). Except for September. I'm planning on reading a book a day or close to it with another friend so I'll be reading a lot of memoirs that month!