Now, Go. See. Do.

Tag: good books

Spring is For Reading

We are heading in to my favorite seasons, spring and summer. I love the sun as much as I love books. Give me both and I’m in heaven. My perfect reading spot is on the beach, but give me a book, a hammock and sunshine anywhere and I’m one happy lizard.

Read All Day: May

1. American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins ????????

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Someone once told me that the only good advice for grief is to stay hydrated. Because everything else is just chingaderas.

2. The Two Lives of Lydia Bird by Josie Silver ????????

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

I found the old me, still in here, and the new me sitting right alongside her. We made friends.

3. The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren ????????

Genre: Contemporary Romance

That’s the whole point of luck, isn’t it? You have to trust that it’s not fleeting.

4. The Mother-In-Law by Sally Hepworth ????????

Genre: Mystery

I worked hard for everything I ever cared about, and nothing I ever cared about cost a single cent.

5. The Man from the Train: The Solving of a Century-Old Serial Killer Mystery by Bill James, Rachel McCarthy James ????

Genre: True Crime

This book is almost entirely about people who lived in small towns a hundred years ago. As much about how they died as about how they lived. But the flash of death illuminated the lifes the victims have lived.

6. The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare ????????

Genre: Historical Fiction

It is the hate that is the enemy. Not men. Hate does not die with killing. It only springs up a hundredfold. The only thing stronger than hate is love.

7. The Breakdown by B.A. Paris ??????

Genre: Thriller

I never really remember doing any of it, which should worry me more than it does…

8. Things You Save in a Fire by Katherine Center ??????

Genre: Romance

It’s amazing how brave you can be when you feel safe.

9. The Library Book by Susan Orlean ??????????

Genre: Nonfiction

All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.

10. Restart by Gordon Korman ????????

Genre: Fiction, Middle Grade

What was so wrong about the old me that now I have to be somebody else?

11. Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston ????

Genre: Romance

He’s not afraid of anything he feels. He’s not afraid of saying it. He’s only afraid of what will happen when he does.

12. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett ????????

Genre: Historical Fiction

Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.

13. Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid ??????

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

I don’t need you to be mad that it happened. I need you to be mad that it just like… happens.

Now, Go. See. Do.

~meemish

Still Quarantine Reading

Month two of quarantine and I’m still reading. In between reading, I’m doing puzzles and listening to podcasts (oh, and homeschooling my kids). The outside world may be scary and unsure, but in my house is a library of adventure. I choose adventure.

Read All Day: April

1. The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo ??????

Genre: Historical Fiction

We were a chocolate-box family, I thought. Brightly wrapped on the outside and oozing sticky darkness within.

2. Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs: Big Questions by Tiny Mortals About Death by Caitlin Doughty ????????

Genre: Nonfiction

We can’t make death fun, but we can make learning about it fun. Death is science and history, art and literature. It bridges every culture and unites the whole of humanity!

3. Normal People by Sally Rooney ????????

Genre: Fiction

I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I cared what people thought of me.

4. Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys ????????

Genre: Historical Fiction

Your shoes are carrying your most valuable possession—your life. Do not delay. Everything else can be replaced.

5. The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger ????????

Genre: Fiction

Insatiable, impatient, impossible.

6. Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia ????????

Genre: Young Adult

There is a small monster in my brain that controls my doubt.

7. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky ??????????

Genre: Young Adult

Try to be a filter, not a sponge.

8. A Woman is No Man by Etaf Rum ????????

Genre: Fiction

Where I come from, voicelessness is the condition of my gender, as normal as the bosoms on a woman’s chest, as necessary as the next generation growing inside her belly.

9. The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed by Jessica Lahey ??????

Genre: Parenting

In order to help children make the most of their education, parents must begin to relinquish control and focus on three goals: embracing opportunities to fail, finding ways to learn from that failure, and creating positive home-school relationships.

10. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides ??????

Genre: Mystery

Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist. We need to ask ourselves, is this someone who will be honest with me, listen to criticism, admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible?

11. The Watsons Go to Birmingham-1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis ????????

Genre: Historial Fiction

I learned about getting saved. I learned how someone could come to you when you were feeling real, real bad and could take all of your problems away and make you feel better. I learned that the person who saved you, your personal saver, was sent by God to protect you and to help you out.

12. I’ve Got Your Number by Sophie Kinsella ??????

Genre: Fiction

My phone’s my life. I can’t exist without it. It’s a vital organ.

13. Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes ????????

Genre: Fiction

Your head is the house you live in, so you have to do the maintenance.

14. Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, & Advice for Living Your Best Life by Ali Wong ????????

Genre: Autobiography

The answers to making it, to me, are a lot more universal than anyone’s race or gender, and center on having a tolerance for delayed gratification, a passion for the craft, and a willingness to fail.

15. Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them by Jennifer Wright ??????

Genre: Nonfiction Science

Diseases don’t ruin lives just because they rot off noses. They destroy people if the rest of society isolates them and treats them as undeserving of help and respect.

16. The Second Sister by Claire Kendal ??????

Genre: Mystery

Why are so many fairytales about sisters saving their brothers? All the ones you told me last week were.

He is right. Hansel and Gretel. The Seven Ravens. The Twelve Brothers. Our mother seemed to know hundreds of them.

We should write a different story. I want one with a sister who saves her sister.

17. When Life Gives You Lululemons by Lauren Weisberger ??????

Genre: Fiction

I feel like we just stepped into an episode of Housewives.

Now, Go. See. Do.

~meemish

Pandemic Reading List

I have always loved reading about diseases and their effects on communities. Even though I knew the reality of living through one, I never really imagined I would. Well, here we are. So, here’s a short list of the books I’ve read in the past, never imagining I could possibly be a character in a similar story in the future.

Oh, and my favorite podcast:)

1. Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic-and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

From Steven Johnson, the dynamic thinker routinely compared to James Gleick, Dava Sobel, and Malcolm Gladwell, The Ghost Map is a riveting page-turner about a real-life historical hero, Dr. John Snow. It’s the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure—garbage removal, clean water, sewers—necessary to support its rapidly expanding population, the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. As the cholera outbreak takes hold, a physician and a local curate are spurred to action—and ultimately solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time. In a triumph of multidisciplinary thinking, Johnson illuminates the intertwined histories and inter-connectedness of the spread of disease, contagion theory, the rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry, offering both a riveting history and a powerful explanation of how it has shaped the world we live in.

2. In the Sanctuary of Outcasts by Neil W. White III

The emotional, incredible true story of Neil White, a man who discovers the secret to happiness, leading a fulfilling life, and the importance of fatherhood in the most unlikely of places—the last leper colony in the continental United States.

3. The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus by Richard Preston

A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic “hot” virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their “crashes” into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.

4. Pandemic 1918: The Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History by Catharine Arnold

In January 1918, as World War I raged on, a new and terrifying virus began to spread across the globe. In three successive waves, from 1918 to 1919, influenza killed more than 50 million people. German soldiers termed it Blitzkatarrh, British soldiers referred to it as Flanders Grippe, but world-wide, the pandemic gained the notorious title of “Spanish Flu.” Nowhere on earth escaped: the United States recorded 550,000 deaths (five times its total military fatalities in the war), while European deaths totaled more than two million.

Amid the war, some governments suppressed news of the outbreak. Even as entire battalions were decimated, with both the Allies and the Germans suffering massive casualties, the details of many servicemen’s deaths were hidden to protect public morale. Meanwhile, civilian families were being struck down in their homes. Philadelphia ran out of gravediggers and coffins, and mass burial trenches had to be excavated with steam shovels. Spanish flu conjured up the specter of the Black Death of 1348 and the great plague of 1665, while the medical profession, shattered after five terrible years of conflict, lacked the resources to contain and defeat this new enemy. Through primary and archival sources, historian Catharine Arnold gives readers the first truly global account of this terrible epidemic.

5. Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson

It’s late summer 1793, and the streets of Philadelphia are abuzz with mosquitoes and rumors of fever. Down near the docks, many have taken ill, and the fatalities are mounting. Now they include Polly, the serving girl at the Cook Coffeehouse. But fourteen-year-old Mattie Cook doesn’t get a moment to mourn the passing of her childhood playmate. New customers have overrun her family’s coffee shop, located far from the mosquito-infested river, and Mattie’s concerns of fever are all but overshadowed by dreams of growing her family’s small business into a thriving enterprise. But when the fever begins to strike closer to home, Mattie’s struggle to build a new life must give way to a new fight—the fight to stay alive.

6. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Set in the days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

This Podcast Will Kill You

Grad students studying disease ecology, Erin and Erin found themselves disenchanted with the insular world of academia. They wanted a way to share their love of epidemics and weird medical mysteries with the world, not just colleagues. Plus, who doesn’t love an excuse to have a cocktail while chatting about pus and poop?

Now, Go. See. Do.

~meemish

Reading All Day

Welcome to quarantine reading. What else is there to do? Honestly, I could be cleaning out a closet (or two) but that’s not going to take my mind off the reality of what’s going on in the world. I’ve never been more grateful for my “Want to Read” list on Goodreads.

Read All Day: March

1. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan ????

Genre: Fiction

You know, I’m really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.

2. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson ????

Genre: YA Mystery

The people you love weren’t algebra: to be calculated, subtracted, or held at arm’s length across a decimal point.

3. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward ????????

Genre: Fiction

There’s too much blank sky where a tree once stood.

4. The Dry by Jane Harper ??????

Genre: Mystery

Hidden somewhere in the dark, the cicadas screeched.

5. Alone: Orphaned on the Ocean by Richard Logan, Tere Duperrault ??????

Genre: True Crime

She really was a female Moses in the bulrushes, a waif cast adrift on the waters who would begin her life all over again, almost from scratch.

6. The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates ??????????

Genre: Nonfiction

That is why we women have to lift each other up—not to replace men at the top of the hierarchy, but to become partners with men in ending hierarchy.

7. The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer ??????

Genre: Nonfiction

I wear my mistakes like badges of honor, and I celebrate them.

8. Summer of ’69 by Elin Hilderbrand ????????

Genre: Historical Fiction

Telling the truth when you’ve done something wrong is the most terrifying thing in the world.

9. Half Broke Horses by Jeanette Walls ????????

Genre: Autobiography

Sometimes something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person’s life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting off just as big a change in a body’s life.

10. Son (The Giver Quartet, #4) by Lois Lowry ??????????

Genre: YA Fiction

Evil can do anything, for a price.

11. Lost and Found by Orson Scott Card ??????

Genre: YA Fiction

If everybody says something, it’s almost always wrong.

12. The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh ??????????

Genre: Fiction

Hate can be passionate or disengaged; it can come from dislike but also from fear.

13. No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us By Rachel Louise Snyder ??????????

Genre: True Crime

…for every woman killed in the United States from domestic violence homicide, nearly nine are almost killed.

14. Funny, You Don’t Look Autistic: A Comedians Guide to Life on the Spectrum by Michael McCreary ??????

Genre: Autobiography

I was diagnosed with autism at the age of five. I wasn’t diagnosed as a comedian until much later, though I always loved to perform and make people laugh. When I started doing stand-up in my teens, I realized that I could use comedy to help demystify autism and break down stereotypes. 

15. The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova ????????

Genre: Nonfiction

It was the beginning of that long bifurcation that became my life: Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish. I thought later how simply and quickly they had introduced that concept to me, as easily as breaking a little finger.

16. Recursion by Blake Crouch ????????

Genre: Science Fiction

Is déjà vu actually the specter of false timelines that never happened but did, casting their shadows upon reality?

Now, Go. See. Do.

~meemish

I Love Books!

What would I do without books? I often feel like I don’t have enough time to read all the books on my list and I start to panic. Then, I remind myself, it’s not an assignment I have to finish. It’s purely for my enjoyment and to open my mind to other worlds and perspectives. And then I continue on reading.

Read All Day: January

1. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold ??????

Genre: Fiction

Murderers are not monsters, they’re men. And that’s the most frightening thing about them.

2. Coraline by Neil Gaiman ????????

Genre: Paranormal Fiction

Now you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.

3. Do You Mind If I Cancel? (Things That Still Annoy Me) by Gary Janetti ??????

Genre: Nonfiction

Don’t worry about being normal. It’s an awful thing to aspire to.

4. Gathering Blue (The Giver, #2) by Lois Lowry ????????

Genre: Young Adult

Take pride in your pain; you are stronger than those who have none.

5. So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y’all Don’t Even Know by Retta ??????

Genre: Autobiography

Bitch, stop wasting time fearing the worst! Living through the worst is never as hard as fearing it. Fight the fear and go do what you gotta do. That’s what you came here for.

6. Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson ??????

Genre: Fiction

I started to care less about the future. I cared more about making the present tolerable. And time passed.

7. Whisper Network by Chandler Baker ??????

Genre: Fiction

We followed the recipe and set the timer for eighteen months and figured by then, the glass ceiling would have shattered under the weight of all the world’s leaning women.

8. Messenger (The Giver, #3) by Lois Lowry ????????

Genre: Young Adult

Things seem more when you’re little. They seem bigger, and distances seem farther.

9. The Rosie Result by Graeme Simsion ??????

Genre: Fiction

It is a sign of intelligence to recognize our limitations and of maturity to seek help when required.

10. The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin ????????

Genre: Mystery

Sunset Towers faced east and had no towers.

Now, Go. See. Do.

~meemish

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