Little Thoughts About Books and Stuff

  So I've started a number of books, and have yet to finish them if they haven't been an auido version. But I'm going to hunker down and finish all three of these physical books!  Currently Reading: Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen Date Started:  August 25 Goodreads Summary:  Do you feel like your life is an endless to-do list? Do you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through Instagram because you’re too exhausted to pick up a book? Are you mired in debt, or feel like you work all the time, or feel pressure to take whatever gives you joy and turn it into a monetizable hustle? Welcome to burnout culture.   While burnout may seem like the default setting for the modern era, in Can’t Even, BuzzFeed culture writer and former academic Anne Helen Petersen argues that burnout is a definitional condition for the millennial generation, born out of distrust in the institutions that have failed us, the unrealistic exp...

Currently Reading: Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert Date Started:  April 25 Goodreads Summary:  Eve Brown is a certified hot mess. No matter how hard she strives to do right, her life always goes horribly wrong—so she’s given up trying. But when her personal brand of chaos ruins an expensive wedding (someone had to liberate those poor doves), her parents draw the line. It's time for Eve to grow up and prove herself—even though she's not entirely sure how… Jacob Wayne is in control. Always. The bed and breakfast owner’s on a mission to dominate the hospitality industry—and he expects nothing less than perfection. So when a purple-haired tornado of a woman turns up out of the blue to interview for his open chef position, he tells her the brutal truth: not a chance in hell. Then she hits him with her car—supposedly by accident. Yeah, right. Now his arm is broken, his B&B is understaffed, and the dangerously unpredictable Eve is fluttering around, trying to ...

  Currently Reading: Browse: The World in Bookshops by Henry Hitchings Date Started:  April 13 Goodreads Summary:  Edited and introduced by the writer and critic Henry Hitchings, these fearless, passionate, inquiring essays by award-winning international writers celebrate one of our most essential, but endangered, institutions: the bookshop. From Denmark to Egypt, from the USA to China, Browse brings together some of the world's leading authors to investigate bookshops both in general and in particular - the myriad pleasures, puzzles and possibilities they disclose.   The fifteen essays reflect their authors' own inimitable style - romantic, elegant, bold, argumentative, poetic or whimsical - as they ask probing questions about the significance, the cultural and social (even political) function as well as the physical qualities of the institution, and examine our very personal relationship to it. Little Thoughts : I'm really enjoying these short glimpse in...

Currently Reading: Reel History: The World According to the Movies by Alex von Tunzelmann Date Started:  April 1 Goodreads Summary:  From ancient Egypt to the Tudors to the Nazis, the film industry has often defined how we think of the past. But how much of what you see on the screen is true? And does it really matter if filmmakers just make it all up? Picking her way through Hollywood's version of events, acclaimed historian Alex von Tunzelmann sorts the fact from the fiction. Along the way, we meet all our favourite historical characters, on screen and in real life: from Cleopatra to Elizabeth I, from Spartacus to Abraham Lincoln, and from Attila the Hun to Nelson Mandela. Based on the long-running column in the Guardian, Reel History takes a comic look at the history of the world as told through the movies - the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly. Little Thoughts :  I was enjoying this book until she gave A Knight's Tale a C+ entertainment rating...

Currently Reading: The Awakening by Nora Roberts Date Started:  March 25 Goodreads Summary:  In the realm of Talamh, a teenage warrior named Keegan emerges from a lake holding a sword—representing both power and the terrifying responsibility to protect the Fey. In another realm known as Philadelphia, a young woman has just discovered she possesses a treasure of her own… When Breen Kelly was a girl, her father would tell her stories of magical places. Now she’s an anxious twentysomething mired in student debt and working a job she hates. But one day she stumbles upon a shocking discovery: her mother has been hiding an investment account in her name. It has been funded by her long-lost father—and it’s worth nearly four million dollars. This newfound fortune would be life-changing for anyone. But little does Breen know that when she uses some of the money to journey to Ireland, it will unlock mysteries she couldn’t have imagined. Here, she will begin to understand why ...

  Currently Reading: Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor Date Started:  March 8 Goodreads Summary:  No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you're not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren't found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically tes...

Currently Reading: Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor Date Started:  March 8, 2021 Goodreads Summary:  No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you're not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren't found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of Sao Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifi...

Currently Reading: Sansei and Sensibility  by Karen Tei Yamashita Date Started:  March 5 Goodreads Summary:  In these buoyant and inventive stories, Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance―familial, cultural, emotional, artistic―really means. In a California of the ’60s and ’70s, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives’ freezers, tape-record high-school locker-room chatter, or collect a community’s gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace balls, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with wit and humor. Little Thoughts :  This is this month's book discussion selection for JASNA NJ's book discussion group.  It's divided into 2 parts, part 1 ...

  Currently Reading: Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas Date Started:  Feb. 21 Goodreads Summary:  International phenomenon Angie Thomas revisits Garden Heights seventeen years before the events of The Hate U Give in this searing and poignant exploration of Black boyhood and manhood. If there’s one thing seventeen-year-old Maverick Carter knows, it’s that a real man takes care of his family. As the son of a former gang legend, Mav does that the only way he knows how: dealing for the King Lords. With this money he can help his mom, who works two jobs while his dad’s in prison. Life’s not perfect, but with a fly girlfriend and a cousin who always has his back, Mav’s got everything under control. Until, that is, Maverick finds out he’s a father. Suddenly he has a baby, Seven, who depends on him for everything. But it’s not so easy to sling dope, finish school, and raise a child. So when he’s offered the chance to go straight, he takes it. In a world where he’s expected to am...

  Currently Reading: Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex von Tunzelmann Date Started:  Feb 4 Goodreads Summary:  A re-creation of one of the key moments of twentieth-century history: the partition and independence of India, and the final days of the Raj. Little Thoughts :  I'm really enjoying this book because I keep finding parts that I knew or connections to other historical people or events I already know about.  This is the Feb. pick for the book club I moderate.  Currently Listening: The Trail of the Serpent by Mary Elizabeth Braddon Date Started: Feb 14 Goodreads Summary:  The novel features Jabez North, a manipulative orphan who becomes a ruthless killer; Valerie de Cevennes, a stunning heiress who falls into North’s diabolical trap; and Mr. Peters, a mute detective who communicates his brilliant reasoning through sign language. Little Thoughts :  Listening through Phoebe Reads a Mystery.  Chec...

Currently Listening: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne Date Started:  January 14 Goodreads Summary:  When an unidentified “monster” threatens international shipping, French oceanographer Pierre Aronnax and his unflappable assistant Conseil join an expedition organized by the US Navy to hunt down and destroy the menace. After months of fruitless searching, they finally grapple with their quarry, but Aronnax, Conseil, and the brash Canadian harpooner Ned Land are thrown overboard in the attack, only to find that the “monster” is actually a futuristic submarine, the Nautilus, commanded by a shadowy, mystical, preternaturally imposing man who calls himself Captain Nemo. Thus begins a journey of 20,000 leagues—nearly 50,000 miles—that will take Captain Nemo, his crew, and these three adventurers on a journey of discovery through undersea forests, coral graveyards, miles-deep trenches, and even the sunken ruins of Atlantis. Jules Verne’s novel of underse...

  Currently Reading: Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney Goodreads Summary:  It’s the last day of 1984, and 85-year-old Lillian Boxfish is about to take a walk. As she traverses a grittier Manhattan, a city anxious after an attack by a still-at-large subway vigilante, she encounters bartenders, bodega clerks, chauffeurs, security guards, bohemians, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be—in surprising moments of generosity and grace. While she strolls, Lillian recalls a long and eventful life that included a brief reign as the highest-paid advertising woman in America—a career cut short by marriage, motherhood, divorce, and a breakdown. A love letter to city life—however shiny or sleazy—Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.  Little Thoughts :  This is a...

    No you haven't clicked on the wrong button I'm pretty much still reading the same things I was last week.  The only change is I'm on a new season/story of Phoebe Read's a Mystery and there's a good chance by the time you are reading this post I'm on a completely different store.  Ever since the Pandemic hit, I just haven't been in the mindset to read.  I did burn through a book this week, Bleachers by John Grisham.  It's a short story and I finished it in two sittings, it was a book club book that I forgot about, but I really enjoyed it and will recommend it to anyone who is interested in sports.  Currently Reading: Asher's Garden  by Derek Rey Date Started:  January 1, 2021 Goodreads Summary:  Asher and his best friend, Lucie, are twelve years old and just starting the summer after their sixth grade year. After a horrific accident, Asher’s brother is locked in a coma when a mysterious businessman tries to buy the apartment building ...

  Currently Reading: Asher's Garden by Derek Rey Date Started:  January 1, 2021 Goodreads Summary:  Asher and his best friend, Lucie, are twelve years old and just starting the summer after their sixth grade year. After a horrific accident, Asher’s brother is locked in a coma when a mysterious businessman tries to buy the apartment building where he and Lucie live. While he and Lucie are trying to save their home, Asher discovers a secret about himself that he is afraid to reveal to Lucie; Asher can slip between this world and another world where giant bugs take on human qualities and personalities. Now Asher not only must save his own home, he must help his new friends in the Garden World protect their home from a malevolent, magical being they call the Painting Man. Little Thoughts :  I became friends with Derek on TikTok of all places.  I followed his journey of publishing his book.  I'm only a few chapters in but I'm enjoying the set up and believ...

  Currently Reading: Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman Date Started:  Oct. 24 Goodreads Summary:  In an unforgettable novel that traces a centuries-old curse to its source, beloved author Alice Hoffman unveils the story of Maria Owens, accused of witchcraft in Salem, and matriarch of a line of the amazing Owens women and men featured in Practical Magic and The Rules of Magic. Where does the story of the Owens bloodline begin? With Maria Owens, in the 1600s, when she’s abandoned in a snowy field in rural England as a baby. Under the care of Hannah Owens, Maria learns about the “Unnamed Arts.” Hannah recognizes that Maria has a gift and she teaches the girl all she knows. It is here that she learns her first important lesson: Always love someone who will love you back. When Maria is abandoned by the man who has declared his love for her, she follows him to Salem, Massachusetts. Here she invokes the curse that will haunt her family. And it’s here that she learns the rules of...

  Currently Reading: Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman Date Started:  Oct. 24 Goodreads Summary:  In an unforgettable novel that traces a centuries-old curse to its source, beloved author Alice Hoffman unveils the story of Maria Owens, accused of witchcraft in Salem, and matriarch of a line of the amazing Owens women and men featured in Practical Magic and The Rules of Magic. Where does the story of the Owens bloodline begin? With Maria Owens, in the 1600s, when she’s abandoned in a snowy field in rural England as a baby. Under the care of Hannah Owens, Maria learns about the “Unnamed Arts.” Hannah recognizes that Maria has a gift and she teaches the girl all she knows. It is here that she learns her first important lesson: Always love someone who will love you back. When Maria is abandoned by the man who has declared his love for her, she follows him to Salem, Massachusetts. Here she invokes the curse that will haunt her family. And it’s here that she learns the rules of...