June 6 2019

My Top Tip for Raising Smart Kids

One day when our tv and internet were out, I had an interesting conversation with the cable guy, and no, his name was not Larry.

He noticed all the books and bookshelves in our house and saw the kids’ tassels on the mantle. He says you must have really smart kids. Well, yeah! I wouldn’t have it any other way. My mom-side kicked in and I began telling him about how important it is to read to your kids and let them see you reading for pleasure. Newspapers, magazines, books, cereal boxes, comic books, it really doesn’t matter. As long as you choose to read and they see you enjoy it, they will imitate you.

There was a time when I didn’t think kid #2 was going to be a reader and it kinda freaked me out. She seemed a little distracted when we were reading a book to her and was more into drawing and artsy stuff, even as a preschooler. We just kept reading with her and to her and eventually, she was lured to the bright side with the rest of us. Now the entire family reads voraciously. Or at least we all did while we were living under the same roof. To be fair the kids are grown-up adults and rarely pay attention to us old folks anymore, so I really have no idea what they do in their free time now. Some things are probably better not known.

But seriously, it made all the difference in the kids’ success in school. Readers are succeeders!

Readers are succeeders! Click To Tweet

Reading is the top tip I could share with you to help you raise smarter kids. I’m sure there are a ton of boring statistics to back me up here. Fortunately for you, I will not take the time and effort to dig them up and spit them out for you here. I trust you know how to Google and are fully capable of finding the info on your own.

It is never too late, save yourself and get busy, start reading today! If you think you don’t like reading, you just haven’t found the right books yet. Keep looking! Ask friends who have similar likes and dislikes what THEY like to read. Ask the local librarian for recommendations. I bet Google and Siri could even recommend books for you.

 

No excuses! Find a book or something that interests you and start reading!

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May 2 2019

I Read the First 4 Months Away

I have been listening to so many audiobooks as I make my 20-30 minute commute between work and home each day. I use the library’s website to keep a constant stream of audiobooks and ebooks in my wishlist and on my hold list. When I hear or read about a book I want to read, the first thing I do is look for it on Amazon because I have the little add on that then tells me if my library has it in the various formats and gives me a button to click to request it for hold or check it out on the spot in the case of electronic versions.

You might wonder why I bother to look them up on Amazon instead of going straight to the library website to look them up and be done with it. Well, you see I can find them faster because the Amazon search engines are much more forgiving than the library search. Also if the library doesn’t have it then I add it to my wishlist for future reference. The wishlist is not to be confused with the gift list because I am not hoping to be gifted a copy but rather to be able to remember with name and author of the book should I ever need to look for it at a later time. The thing that makes this wonderous search possible is the Library Extension. I highly recommend it and find it very useful. The best thing is that it is FREE!

Please see below the covers of the 52 books I have read so far this year. If you have any recommendations on books you think I should read, feel free to leave them in the comments below or send them to me via email or social media. All the links are in the top right-hand corner of each page on this site.

Karen’s bookshelf: read in 2019

What Matters Most: The Get Your Shit Together Guide to Wills, Money, Insurance, and Life’s “What-ifs”
Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge
Love, Skip, Jump: Start Living the Adventure of Yes
The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns
Check Me Out
Ridiculous Faith: Experience the Power of an Absurdly, Unbelievably Good God
Maybe It's You: Cut the Crap. Face Your Fears. Love Your Life.
The Ghost and Mrs. McClure
The Big Secret for the Small Investor: The Shortest Route to Long-Term Investment Success
Rising Strong
The Battle Plan for Prayer: Attacking Life's Struggles Through Prayer
Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
The Shoe Box: A Christmas Story
The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo
Killing Thyme
Guilty as Cinnamon
Assault and Pepper
Treble at the Jam Fest
Butter Off Dead
It's Okay Not to Be Okay: Moving Forward One Day at a Time
Karen’s favorite books »

 

2019 Reading Challenge

2019 Reading Challenge
Karen has
read 52 books toward
her goal of
100 books.
hide

 

Category: Reading | Comments Off on I Read the First 4 Months Away
August 30 2018

Reading as Personal Development

As many of you know, I am an avid reader. When I hear about a book I want to read I write it down in my Bullet Journal on the page for recommended books along with who recommended it. I then go to my local library’s website and check to see if it is available as an audiobook. If not audio, then ebook would be my next choice, with paper books coming in as the third choice.

It kind of depends on what sort of book it is, really. If it is one that will have lots of illustrations and charts I will need to flip back and forth to, then obviously, a hard copy of the book would be the logical choice. If it is something that I might enjoy listening to or being able to consume while driving, an audiobook is the best choice. One of the tricks I use for reading more books each year is to listen to them while I do mundane tasks around the house like loading the dishwasher, tidying the kitchen or folding/hanging laundry. I also tend to listen to most audiobooks at 1.4 to 1.8 speed to help keep my mind from wandering as it tends to do at the slower 1.0 normal speed. I choose books where others might choose to watch television or scroll through social media. I choose the library because we simply couldn’t afford to buy all the books I read and we would have long ago run out of room to store them all. I rarely read a book a second time, choosing instead to read something new to me instead. Life is too short and there are so many books waiting for my attention. Continue reading

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February 8 2018

January Reads

Here are the books I read or listened to in January 2018. Check back for more lists of books about once a month.

These are the codes for how I read each book:
(A) = Audio Book
(E) = Ebook
(P) = Paper Book
1 to 5 *s rating system

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1) Stronger by Jeff Bauman (A) ****

2) Reach by Andy Molinsky, Ph.D. (A) ***

3) The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau (A) ***

4) Written in Stone [Books by the Bay Mystery #4] by Ellery Adams (A) ****

5) Poisoned Prose [Books by the Bay Mystery #5] by Ellery Adams (A) ****

6) Lethal Letters [Books by the Bay Mystery #6] by Ellery Adams (A) ****

7) Writing All Wrongs [Books by the Bay Mystery #7] by Ellery Adams (A) ****

8) Killer Characters [Books by the Bay Mystery #8] by Ellery Adams (A) ****

9) The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life by Chris Guillebeau (A) ****

10) Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic (A) ***

11) The Case for Hope by Lee Strobel (A) *****

12) God Speaks Your Love Language: How to Feel and Reflect God’s Love by Gary Chapman (A) *****

13) The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep Is Broken and How to Fix It by W. Chris Winter (A) ****

14) If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit by Brenda Ueland (A) ***

15) The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau (A) ****

16) Love in Every Stitch: Stories of Knitting and Healing by Lee Gant (A) ****

17) Selected Shorts: For Better and For Worse (Selected Shorts) by Symphony Space, Shahrnush Parsipur, Luis Alberto Urrea (Goodreads Author), Ethan Canin, Sherman Alexie, Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen E. Bender, Kamran Talattof (Narrator), Jocelyn Sharlet (Narrator), Robert Sean Leonard (Narrator), Harold Gould (Narrator), Keir Dullea (Narrator), Joanna Gleason (Narrator), Joanne Woodward (Narrator) (A) ***

18) The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks (A) *****

All of these books were checked out from my local library and downloaded as audiobooks to my phone. I can listen to them in my car while driving to and from work or on errands. I listened to them while getting dressed in the morning, eating my breakfast, and packing my lunch. If I am home alone, I am usually listening to a book while doing other things such as folding laundry and crocheting hats for charity. I was shocked by how much more reading I could get done by listening to the books instead of reading them either electronically or in the actual paper form.

As you might imagine, buying all of these books would be quite expensive, especially as quickly as I go through books. This is only one of the many reasons I LOVE my local library. I did read from paper books or eBooks, but those were the ones I carried along to read in restaurants while we waited to be seated or for our food to arrive. They are not on the list because I have yet to finish them. I find that I really enjoy listening to books. Maybe it helps me remember the times when I sat on or near my mother while she read from storybooks to me as a child? Who knows?

Why the library you ask? Well, other than the obvious money saving aspect of it, there is the fact that I have no intention of reading books more than once with a few exceptions, so I don’t feel the need to own them. If I own a book, I must find a place for it in our house and must on occasion dust it and all the others along with it. Life is too short to read the same books twice, so it is certainly too short to spend time dusting books or finding room for them. That is time I could better spend reading more books!

What is your preferred format? Do you read certain books in one format or another? What determines which format you choose?

I like to see what the front cover looks like, so you can see all of them below.

I actually read the first 3 books in this series in December 2017. This is a great series that I found when looking for writing books and I actually read the Writing All Wrongs book first and loved it so much I started the series and read it (listened to it) all the way through. I had apparently read the first book in the series years ago and never got around to getting the rest from the library.
Category: Book Review, Money Saving, Reading | Comments Off on January Reads
March 9 2017

Visit Your Friend’s Bookshelf

On your next stay-cation, consider asking a friend of you can visit their bookshelf. Visiting a bookshelf that is not your own is an adventure to behold. Each book is a window to a new world just waiting to be opened and explored. Where will it take you? Who will you meet? What sort of adventure will you have?

Will you explore the reference books? Maybe an encyclopedia so you can explore new countries and see what sorts of things that country is known for producing. What does the flag look like? Do they dress differently than we do? What sorts of foods do they eat? Continue reading

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