Miss Penigrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
I’ve been meaning to read this book for about ten years. It was a really entertaining book, and had strong world building without crossing the line into being too magical or too nonsensical. Yes, there was sci-fi/fantasy, but those elements had rules and the book was still rooted in a realistic fiction setting, so it really worked. I appreciated that the book lead with an event that seemed so negative,
I Feel Bad about my Neck
This book was a series of essays on the pressures and personal experiences from Nora Ephron’s life. It was lighthearted at points and more serious at other points, and it was a pretty quick read, but nothing was terribly memorable or life-changing.
We Are Okay
In the forward of this book, Nicola Yoon writes about how this book made her cry on an airplane, and when I read that, I thought “I remember seeing Nicola Yoon on a panel at Mississippi Book Festival last year. She seemed like a person who cries a lot at books. I am not a person who cries very often at books, so this book will not make me cry on this airplane.” I was very wrong. This was a really engaging, heartfelt book. It felt like every sentence was perfect, really – there is not a single part of this book that I think could have been any better.
Mindset
This book is huge in education. People talk about it a lot and discuss all kinds of strategies to cultivate a growth mindset in both teachers and students. The whole premise of the book is that people who have a growth mindset are more likely to be successful in a wide variety of ways, and the ways a person’s mindset impact them. This book pushed me to further examine the areas of my life where I do and don’t have a growth mindset. As a teacher, I think I have a strong growth mindset about my teaching, but I don’t think I’ve consistently done a good job of cultivating that in my students. Going into next year, that’s one area I’m considering when it comes to planning classroom culture.
The Law of Divine Compensation
Going into the first round of democratic presidential debates, I looked at the list of candidates and noted the frontrunners who we’ll actually see in the primaries, the people who have some political experience but will probably drop out before 2020, and a long shot candidate who I’m interested in. And then there was Marianne Williamson, who I had to Google. Turns out, she is an author who writes about spiritual topics. Her performance in the debate made me more interested, so I got one of her books on Kindle. I picked the one that was about money because I am a personal finance nerd at heart. This book was much more abstract and spiritual than books I’m used to reading on personal finance – I’m accustomed to phrases like “expense ratio” and “depreciating asset”, not “Something miraculous happens when we say, “I am angry but I am willing not to be. Dear God, help me see this situation differently. Amen.”