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Taking Care of the Mind Through Exercise

I’ve been wearing my Responsible Adult hat these past two weeks. Doing work-related training, hours of IT maintenance over the weekend (because you never want to do them during business hours…), and filing paperwork for income taxes is enough to leave anyone exhausted.

If it were up to me, I’d spend my prime hours daydreaming, roaming forests, or doing interesting things.

this looks like a good idea

Despite all this, I still squeezed some reading and writing! I entered another writing contest on wattpad (#BattleTheBeast). The last chapter of Clause for Women, Children, and Infirm got written and posted. I managed to borrow Captain America: Civil War from the library (score!), and now I will spend an evening watching (drinking lots of water… I heard this is necessary). I want to keep this up. But how?
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By booksofchange, ago

What I’m Reading Now: The Martian and Good Morning, Midnight

When it comes to popular fiction, I tend to be the most conservative and hesitant. It’s probably due to me knowing if I like something, I’ll go too deep too fast. Just look at my Harry Potter obsession years. That said, I do try to expand my reading horizons.

This year I decided to read more Sci-Fi. Besides classic Jules Verne tales like ‘Around the World in Eighty Days‘ and ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’, and Ender’s Game, most of the stories I’ve encountered in the genre left me wondering: “Why do people like this so much, why is it a classic, I don’t understand!” I wanted to know if I was just bad at picking the good stuff.

So far, two books stand out. Both I’d classify as Sci-Fi, but not the same type. The Martian is the kind that strives for technical accuracy. Good Morning, Midnight uses space travel and apocalyptic circumstances as a backdrop to study characters. (more…)

By booksofchange, ago

What I’m Reading Now: The Book Thief

At the moment, I’m deep into reading The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak. I’ve started it yesterday and cannot put it down. I’ve done myself a great disservice avoiding it just because it’s popular and because it’s about Nazi Germany at the height of the Holocaust. What book could possibly do what Diary of Anne Frank and the Schindler’s List didn’t already? thought I.

Fool, I am. Thank God for ebooks and libraries that loan them.

Overdrive — and all the public libraries that cooperate with the company — thank you.

As of this writing, I’m about one-third’s into the story. I’ve learned why the narrator, Death, calls the main character, Liesel, the book thief. It has to do with her little brother Werner’s death.

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By booksofchange, ago