Sunday Bookends: Her last Name Is Really Raisin? And Let’s See How Reading Non-Fiction Goes

Welcome to my weekly post where I recap my week by writing about what I’ve been reading, watching, writing, doing, and sometimes what I’ve been listening to.

What I’m Reading

Non-fiction has been the theme this week, to a point. I can only take small doses of non-fiction anymore and if I get too much by my two to three minutes of news viewing a day, then I don’t open the non-fiction books I have on my Kindle or in my hands. Speaking of Kindle, I’ll be buying a lot more of my non-fiction books as hardcopies in case Amazon decides they want to delete my books from my Kindle or cloud. A monopoly book company isn’t going to tell me what I can and can not read, thank you very much.

So, anyhow, in non-fiction, I started Jordan Peterson’s new book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life this week. It was released Tuesday.

I wouldn’t call myself a Peterson follower, but his intellect and ideas intrigue me. He’s not a Christian writer, though he references the Bible often, so I wouldn’t base my life strictly on all that he says. Still, he has some good points.

This book presents some challenges for the intellectual giant who faced some serious health issues with his wife and himself in 2019 and almost all of 2020. During a time when his daughter needed surgery outside of his country of Canada and his wife faced cancer, Peterson was already starting to suffer from the effects of an autoimmune issue he developed in 2017 from food and benzodiazepine his doctor prescribed to help with anxiety from the autoimmune condition. He’d also continued the benzodiazepine to help with the stress he was under from becoming a public figure when he stood up against a Canadian law aiming to force people to call people by the pronoun they said they wanted to be called by. Peterson felt personal freedoms were being stripped from people by laws being passed to say they had to refer to people by whatever pronoun they wanted. Students and others tried to get him fired and bam — his notoriety was off and running.

The side effects of the drugs, coupled with the rest of the stress Peterson was under caused his body, essentially, to fall apart and also threatened a mind that even his critics have called brilliant. Only in the last few months has Peterson been able to get back to writing, speaking, and presenting his ideas (which are not all political and not as extreme as some of his critics would like you to believe), mainly through finishing this book (the sequel to 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos) and starting a podcast. He has been unable to return to teaching or to treating patients. He was a clinical psychologist before all his health issues hit and while being a professor at the University of Toronto.

The second non-fiction book I am reading is by Ben Shapiro, a conservative commentator who I sometimes enjoy and who sometimes grates on me, depending on what topic he is rambling about.

Ben’s book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, was written last year and focuses on the idea that the ability to hold civil disagreements, especially when it comes to politics, is disintegrating and that many want that disintegration to happen so that we never have actual discussions about what we disagree with, we simply pick sides, stand on our sides, and scream at each other. While we are screaming at each other we also try to “cancel” each other and tell anyone who doesn’t follow politics what they can and can not read, see, listen to, watch, or talk about. In other words, the world is out of control and Ben doesn’t like that and believes the rest of us shouldn’t either.

The book’s main point is that many of us have preconceived notions about each other based on politics and that’s not a good thing.

I’ll be reading more of the book this week to see what all Ben has to say.

I also hope to start a book by Steven Furtick that I’ve had in my Kindle for a while and didn’t realize it: Seven Mile Miracle.

I will, however, need to break up my non-fiction reading with some fiction so I am continuing Death Without Company by Craig Johnson and also started a light romance by Tari Farris called You Belong With Me.

Little Miss and I finished Stormy: Misty’s Foal this past week and started Sea Star by the same author (Marguerite Henry).

I also finished Lord of the Flies, which I was reading with The Boy for his English. He will probably finish it next week. His progress is broken up by me asking him to do various questions and chapter quizzes in the middle of his reading assignments.

I rambled about my feelings about the book and how different it was for me to read it as an adult than a 10th grader, last week on the blog.

 What I’m Watching

I was unnecessarily excited when I saw The Mallorca Files Season 2 pop up on Britbox last week. The excitement I felt either shows how sad my life is or how necessary it is for me to have something to drown out my depression. Actually, it demonstrates both. Either way, it turns out my husband must also have a sad life and the need to drown out depression because he was also excited and we watched two episodes of the six-episode series in one night. They usually offer more episodes, but filming was cut short because of You Know What.

I also continued to watch Agatha Raisin, a series about a woman in public relations who becomes an amateur detective in the small town she lives in. There was a movie before the series, which I discovered this week and now helps me understand why the first episode of the series simply seemed to start in the middle and not explain what other cases Agatha had helped the town and their bumbling police department with.

The show is okay but mainly features an annoying, pushy woman with no filter, wearing an annoying hair cut that resembles what some historians say Cleopatra wore, nosing around town, pushing her way into people’s business, and accusing everyone in the town of murder until she accidentally stumbles on the actual criminal.

My son and I joked that when new people move into town and Agatha accuses them of murder the rest of the people in town laugh. Then they assure the newcomer, “Oh, that’s Agatha. Don’t worry. You’re not a part of the town until she accuses you of murder.”

Despite our making fun of the show, I will most likely continue to watch it to give my brain a break from actually having to think too much. I finally paid attention to the beginning credits of the show and saw right before I published this that the show is based on a series of books with the same character, and in some instances by the same name of the episodes, by M.C. Beaton. I glanced at the beginning of one on Amazon and plan to buy one in the future.

On Sunday of last week, I took a DVD of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, a movie from 1948 with Cary Grant and Myrna Lloyd. Even The Boy laughed at it. It is a very funny movie for anyone who is looking for a laugh these days. It ages well because what Mr. and Mrs. Blandings go through to build a new house is spot on with what still happens today. The social commentary from the oldest daughter about the world is also hilarious because, again, it sounds so much like conversations many of us are having today.

I was surprised by the daughters talking back to their parents and jokingly asked my parents, who would have been 4 when this movie came out if they ever talked to their parents that way. I knew, the answer already, of course, but my mom’s wide eyes and head tilt, as if to say, “Are you serious right now?” was totally hilarious. Less hilarious was the fact my grandfather was abusive, which I was reminded of when my mom said, “Am I alive right now?” That obviously meant that if she had ever spoken to her father the way those children did, he would have whipped her into Sunday.

My dad never answered, but I am pretty sure his father would have smacked him pretty good if he had spoken back to him, based on the stories I heard about him. He was not, however, abusive like my other grandfather. A quick clarification: my maternal grandfather was abusive, but he later knew admitted he was wrong and did offer an apology to my grandmother, mother, and aunts before he passed from cancer in the late 1980s.

What I’m Listening To

This week I have been listening to a lot of Christian worship or Christian contemporary, including Cory Asbury and Danny Gokey. I also listened to some Brandon Lake, Needtobreathe and threw in some The Dead South just be eclectic and weird.

What’s Been Occurring

I love the weekly post idea that Erin at Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs, stole from Bella at Over the Tea Cups.

 Erin writes about her week as if we are all sitting around having a cup of tea (I’ll take herbal, please, Erin. I have a caffeine allergy, sadly. Don’t be afraid to slide a cookie over to me too.). 

I may adopt this idea as well and post it on Saturdays, but for now, I’ll keep my ramblings about my week to one post. I mean, how many posts about my boring life do you need to read a week? Well, a couple I suppose since I only write about my boring life on my blog. Ha!

Anyhow, on the subject of boring, our week was boring. We did school work, I went to the store once, we picked up some Subway, and I messed around with figuring out book promotion and reading up on improving my writing skills for fiction (and everything else). I publish my books for fun but if it brought in a little money on the side to support our family, that would be helpful. My husband says I will get better with each book I write. I hope he is correct on that front.

What I’ve Been Writing

Writing about book promotion is a good way to move into what I have been writing lately. I’ve already mentioned a couple of times on the blog that I published The Farmer’s Daughter last week. I don’t like to keep mentioning it because this blog isn’t about advertising or marketing. I do know some of you followed it, however, so I will mention that the final version of it is on sale on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, Apple iBooks, Scribd, and Kobo.

If you have read the book and liked it, please feel free to leave a review on whatever source you read it from. Reviews help indie authors immensely.

I have been posting excerpts of The Farmers’ Sons on Fridays and this week I posted on Friday and another excerpt on Saturday.

Earlier in the week I:

 reviewed Sweeter by Jere Steele;

wrote about how God can fill in the gaps between our creativity and how it can benefit others;

wrote a parallel between how our world has gone mad and Lord of the Flies. 

So that is my week in review. How about you? Reading any good books? Watching anything good? Do anything exciting? Let me know in the comments.