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Memes Recommendations Self-Help

#NonFicNov Week 3: Books on the Good Life

#NonFicNov

It’s #NonFicNov month: we’re encouraged to read non-fiction (or analyze past non-fiction reads). To ease the way, Shelf AwareDoing DeweyJulz Reads, and What’s Nonfiction have some cool weekly prompts to ponder.

This week we bring up books about any particular theme, and one theme I’m very interested in is: how to live a good, happy life.

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Memes

Book-Famous Animals for Top Ten Tuesday

Book-Famous Animals for Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. And this week’s topic is just about any spin-off on books with animals.

So I decided to spotlight book-famous animals who may not be the heroes or their typical sidekicks, but who are pretty integral to the hero’s journey. Here goes the list!

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Recommendations Watchlist

Bringing Up Baby: Movie Review/ Funnies #1

Bringing Up Baby is a story about a missing intercostal clavicle, George the digging dog, and a Brazilian leopard named Baby. And what a madcap rip-roaring ROFL hysterical comedy this was!

Cary Grant plays an absent-minded museum director who just wants to polish off his gigantic dinosaur skeleton. But the harum-scarum Katharine Hepburn has other plans, and willy or nilly, Grant just HAS to help her out.

Oh, I felt so sorry for Cary Grant — who has trouble keeping up with all the stories and names people keep assigning to him. Hepburn gives him a really tough time, sending him running after golf balls, stolen cars, misplaced purses, escaped geese, musical leopards, hidden clothes, missing bones … I am laughing as I write this.

I never expected to like Bringing Up Baby so much. I went in thinking they were both an old married couple (they weren’t) who had decided to raise a leopard (not by choice!) and then squabbled over it (not precisely over the leopard).

I was so happy I took a chance on it. There was never a dull moment. No wonder this movie is considered one of the Top 100 Funniest English Movies of all time. Highly, highly recommended.

Watch the trailer HERE.

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Memes

Books with Songs for Top 10 Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. And this week, we get to share book titles remind us of songs.

My spin on this: books with songs in their titles. I’m taking this rather literally — the easy way out, you know!

Previous Top 10 Tuesday posts can be found HERE!

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Memes Recommendations

#NonFicNov Week 2: If you like… Book Pairings

It’s #NonFicNov month: we’re encouraged to read non-fiction (or analyze past non-fiction reads). To ease the way, Shelf AwareDoing DeweyJulz Reads, and What’s Nonfiction have some cool weekly prompts to ponder.

This week we pair up a fiction book with a related non-fiction one. Here are my suggestions!

#NonFicNov
#NonFicNov

If you like The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood …
… Try out Homer’s The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

Each one gives a different twist, a new perspective to the Odyssey, and uses a musical / poetic lens for that. Penelopiad gives voice to Odysseus’s neglected wife Penelope, and Wilson gives a new spin to existing biases in this Greek epic.

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Memes Recommendations

#NonFicNov: Week 1 / Your Year in NonFiction

Non-Fiction November

It’s #NonFicNov month: we’re encouraged to read non-fiction (or analyze past non-fiction reads). To ease the way, Shelf Aware, Doing Dewey, Julz Reads, and What’s Nonfiction have some cool weekly prompts to ponder.

Four questions for the first week into #NonFicNov:

  1. What was your favorite nonfiction read of the year?
  2. Do you have a particular topic you’ve been attracted to more this year?
  3. What nonfiction book have you recommended the most?
  4. What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?

My answers below in slideshow (because I’m still new to WordPress and wanted to give it a try):

  • Viktor Frankl
  • Happy Things
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Books Memes

Six Degrees: Sleepy Hollow & Other Deadly Secrets

It’s time for #6degrees. Start at the same place as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up. Inspired by the Six Degrees of Separation Meme hosted every month at Books are my Favorite and Best.

Last month, I chose Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) as the last book in my #SixDegrees chain.

Sleepy Hollow

Ichabod Crane, a schoolteacher, came to Tarry Town in the glen of Sleepy Hollow to ply his trade in educating young minds. He was a gullible and excitable fellow, often so terrified by locals’ stories of ghosts that he would hurry through the woods on his way home, singing to keep from hysterics. Until late one night, he finds that maybe they’re not just stories. What is that dark, menacing figure riding behind him on a horse? And what does it have in its hands? And why wasn’t schoolteacher Crane ever seen in Sleepy Hollow again?

Sleepy Hollow reminds me of all things slumberous, hidden, forgotten and deathly. Not surprising, since the Halloween Full Moon just turned the corner, eh?

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Index Memes

Non-Bookish Hobbies for Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. And this week, we get to share our top 10 non-bookish hobbies (this is really difficult!).

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Memes To Be Read Books

Top Ten Books for Non-Fiction November

Full Disclosure: I really don’t read much of non-fiction. But that’s something I want to correct during this Non-Fiction November challenge (hosted HERE and HERE). Below are the top 10 Non-Fiction Books from my TBR pile. Wish me luck!

Non-Fiction November Gladwell

1] Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
I’ve been a huge fan of Gladwell since the Outliers days. So Talking to Strangers is definitely up: “Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world.

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Books Recommendations

The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley: Underrated Gem

Folk Keeper

The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley is set in a world where humans co-exist with the Folk and the Other Folk. It’s not a peaceful co-existence though. The Folk, who are perennially famished, require a tithe from the humans to let their cattle and crops alone. And the indigenous Other Folk, with their magical abilities, create havoc of their own from time to time.

The Folk Keeper’s job is to help keep the status quo by overseeing the tithe. Corinna Stonewall, disguised as a boy at the beginning of our tale, is one such Folk Keeper. She has lived a hard life, and is angry, so angry, at the world. It is no wonder then that she is so prickly, always on edge, and wants so desperately to be special, to have some power over those that have hurt her.