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I am really liking the BookSparks reading challenges and will participate in the Fall 2014 challenge.
Below are the ones I plan on reading. (see complete list)
Required reading: Mating for Life by Marissa Stapley
Department: Women’s Fiction
Course Date: Week of September 8
my review
With honesty and heart-warming humor this course will transport you into four women’s lives. While you watch them navigate their chaotic and unconventional lifestyles, they realize the many modern roles woman play and that some love can really last a lifetime.
Required reading: Ghosting by Edith Pattou
Department: Young Adult
Course Date: Week of September 22
my review
Have a love for drama and poetry? Then this course is a must for you! Throughout this class you will learn about a group of teenagers’ perspectives on an end-of-the-summer prank gone wrong, written in verse. Alcohol, guns and a dare— within minutes, events collide and a group of teenager’s lives are altered forever.
Required reading: Destined for Doon by Laurie Langdon and Carey Corp
Department: Young Adult
Course Date: Week of October 6
my review
*Suggested prerequisite for this class (available upon request): Theatre 101 (Doon by Laurie Langdon and Carey Corp)
Anyone with an active imagination should ace this course! This exciting class explores the enchanted land of Doon and what it means to live there. With Broadway, true love and an ancient curse, a group of three friends must battle a world of nightmares in order to save their beloved kingdom.
Required reading: Rock Angel by Jeanne Bogino
Department: New Adult
Course Date: Week of October 20
my review
Calling all 90s rocker chicks (or those who wish they were)! By the end of this course you will have witnessed a young and beautiful guitar goddess rise to stardom and face the challenges inherent with being at the height of 90s rock. With love, drugs, bad boys and rock-n-roll this class will be nothing short of entertaining.
Required reading: Queen of Hearts Volume 2: The Wonder by Colleen Oakes
Department: Young Adult
Course Date: Week of October 27
my review
*Suggested prerequisite for this class (available upon request): Fairy Tale Remix 101 (Queen of Hearts Volume 1 by Colleen Oakes - my review)
Continue on the adventure of a twisted Wonderland fairytale with FTR 102! In this class you will discover that not all fairytales have a happy ending and sometimes the pretty princess becomes the vile villain. This is an important course for anyone looking forward to Fairy Tale Remix 201 (Queen of Hearts Volume 3: The Fury).
Required reading: Hit by Lorie Ann Grover
Department: Young Adult
Course Date: Week of November 3
my review
This course might be a little unconventional but why not learn how to navigate a flirtation with a teacher. In this course you will explore a student-teacher relationship that has become too flirty and too great a risk. This forbidden relationship is exhilarating and intense until a tragic accident changes everything.
Required reading: Stillwater Rising by Steena Holmes
Department: Women’s Fiction
Course Date: Week of November 17
my review
Throughout this course you will uncover the heart-wrenching story of a town trying to put itself back together after an elementary shooting that traumatized a close-knit community.
Required reading: The Unimaginable by Dina Silver
Department: Women’s Fiction
Course Date: Week of December 1
my review
Pack your bags, grab your college sweetheart and get ready for an uber-romantic cruise to Thailand. You’ll learn the fine arts of wining, dining and pirate-invasion-evasion. Wait, what? Yes, this cruise is definitely not everything it seems.
Course: Personality Psychology
Required reading: Both of Me by Jonathan Friesen
Department: Young Adult
Course Date: Week of December 8
my review
Investigate the unexplained condition of dissociative identity disorder in this course through Elias and Cara’s story. Cara meets Elias on a plane and soon discovers that there is not just one Elias but two and Cara quickly finds herself entangled in both of Elias’s lives.
my review
In this moving and funny memoir that spans the six years following the author's purported recovery from anorexia, Dana Lise Shavin offers a candid and ultimately optimistic window into the mindset and machinations of a mental illness whose tentacles reached deep into her life, long after she was considered "cured."
In 1981, Shavin graduated from college with a BA in Psychology. It had been a difficult venture that included an expulsion, a four-month institutionalization, and a multitude of transfers. By the time it was over, she was convinced she was cured, and that it was time to start curing others. "I’m ready," she told her parents, her therapist, and friends—all of whom shook their heads in horror at her 95-pound, 5’9” frame. Undaunted, she landed a job as a counselor in a halfway house for drug and alcohol addicts. If anyone knew what it took to become a happy, functioning adult, Shavin was convinced she was the one.
As anyone would suspect, the burden of self-contempt, faulty logic, and interpersonal turmoil that are the character traits of depressive disorders and addictions do not miraculously disappear once medication and therapy have taken effect. Where, then, do these dangerous obsessions, such as the wish for obliteration (which often co-exists with the wish for immortality), go once a person sets foot on the road to recovery?
For Shavin, they lived beneath the radar of her supposed new-found health, disguising themselves in the falling-down houses she happily moved into and the dangerous neighborhoods she somehow didn't fear. They announced themselves in the deeply flawed men she professed to adore, the food rituals she thought were normal, the ordinary sex she could not have, and, most profoundly, her inability to acknowledge her father’s illness and encroaching death.
While many writers have written candidly and eloquently about their struggles with depression, addictions, and eating disorders, those stories usually conclude once there is progress toward recovery. Beyond recovery—whether from addiction, illness, the death of a loved one, or divorce—there is another story, one that is about how we re-join the world, and, in the living years that follow the darkness, pursue a life that is creative, engaged, and deeply felt in one's body.
It is not too late, you can join too - details here.
