Now, Go. See. Do.

Tag: quarantine reading

Summertime Reading

It’s officially summertime and with it comes summer reading programs. I was the kind of kid that loved getting the libraries summer reading program and checking off how many books I read. Now, I live through my kids and make them do it.

Read All Day: June

1. The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman ????????

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

People were… exhausting. They made her anxious. Leaving her apartment every morning was the turning over of a giant hourglass, the mental energy she’d stored up overnight eroding grain by grain. She refueled during the day by grabbing moments of solitude and sometimes felt her life was a long-distance swim between islands of silence.

2. Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano ????????

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Humans need community, for our emotional health. We need connection, a sense of belonging. We are not built to thrive in isolation

3. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite ??????

Genre: Fictional Thriller

I know better than to take life directions from someone without a moral compass.

4. The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin ????????

Genre: Young Adult

It’s peculiar how no-words can be better than words. Silence can say more than noise, in the same way that a person’s absence can occupy even more space than their presence did.

5. The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson ????

Genre: Historical Nonfiction

The speech set a pattern that he would follow throughout the war, offering a sober appraisal of facts, tempered with reason for optimism. “It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour,” he said. “It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.

6. Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore ????????

Genre: Fiction

Stop micromanaging your life and just live it; joy and meaning will follow. Find the happy medium between being daring and responsible. Cultivate that balance. Do your best. Be good to yourself, even when—especially when—life isn’t being good to you.

7. Finding Chika: A Little Girl, An Earthquake, and the Making of a Family by Mitch Albom ??????????

Genre: Autobiography

The most precious thing you can give someone is your time, Chika, because you can never get it back. When you don’t think about getting it back, you’ve given it in love.

8. The Whisper Man by Alex North ??????

Genre: Thriller

If you leave a door half open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken.

If you play outside alone, soon you won’t be going home.

If your window’s left unlatched, you’ll hear him tapping at the glass.

If you’re lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.

9. The Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler ??????

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

A big surprise that was no surprise at all. If you are a black person in the United States, you live each day with the knowledge that this scene or one very much like it may be in your future. You needn’t have done anything illegal or have broken any rule.

10. Vampires in the Temple by Mette Ivie Harrison ??

Genre: Fiction

There had been vampires her in the salt lake valley when Brigham Young and the pioneers first arrived, but they’d been corralled onto the island after the the Vampire War. They’re not humans who have died and come back to life. They’re homo vampirus, related to us on the same family tree as Neanderthals, a relic of evolution that had died out around other inland salt lakes centuries ago according to the archeologists. The ones here survived for reasons still being studied.

11. The Jetsetters by Amanda Eyre Ward ??????

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Did all siblings revert to their childhood selves when they were together, or was there a way to transition to functional adulthood even while being in one another’s lives?

12. Less by Andrew Sean Greer ??????

Genre: Fiction

Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material.

13. Paris for One and Other Stories by Jojo Moyes ????????

Genre: Fiction, Short Stories

…tell me…the best thing that has ever happened to you.’

‘The best? Oh, I’m kind of hoping it hasn’t happened yet.

14. An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks ??????

Genre: Thriller

People are motivated to break their moral compasses for a variety of primal reasons: survival, hate, love, envy, passion. And money.

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

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