Tiny Navajo Reads: Top Ten Reasons Why I Read

Hi guys! It’s time for another Top Ten Tuesday! TTT was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

Today’s topic for this particular Top Ten Tuesday are the reasons why I read the books I read. Now, ONTO THE LIST!!!

1.  Dragons! – how can you say no to dragons. I love dragons and I want to read all the books with dragons that I can.
2. Food! – I love it when books are centered around foods, especially foods from different countries. My area of food interest is East Asia, Japan and China. Nothing from Korea yet, but I hope to find some soon!
3. Epic fantasy! – I love fantasy and when it’s a huge series, that’s even better.
4. Specific covers! – I love it when a cover catches my attention, because for me, that’s supposed to indicate a unique storyline. Sometimes it’s not, but sometimes it is!
5. Broken faery tales! – I like it when faery tales are retold in a new light, or new point of view. Those are some of my favorite books.
6. Booklr! – the book community on Tumblr is one of my favorites, because of how much people are talking about the newest books and it makes me want to read a certain book. Good job booklr!
7. Book recommendations! – similar to booklr, just book recommendations in general will lead me to some of my favorite books.
8. Friends/co-workers! – working in a library, I have a lot of friends/co-workers who also love to read. When they find a book, they then recommend said book to me and we all suffer in misery together because how can you not?!
9. Book rivers! – if this sounds weird, I will explain. Book rivers are something my library does on their catalogue to put specific books that fit a similar theme on display. I have read quite a few amazing books because of the book rivers!
10. Letter communication! – I love it when books are told through letters. It feels a very obscure genre(?) but it’s one of my favorites!

Why do you read books? What catches your attention to read a book? Comment below and let me know!

Tiny Navajo Reads: The Novel Cure

The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin

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*Published September 26, 2013*

This has been one of my favorite nonfiction books of this year, and I don’t say that often. I’m not a big fan of nonfiction in general, but this is one that I will actually buy and keep! Such a good book and quite a long book as well.

A novel is a story transmitted from the novelist to the reader. It offers distraction, entertainment, and an opportunity to unwind or focus. But it can also be something more powerful—a way to learn about how to live. Read at the right moment in your life, a novel can—quite literally—change it.

The Novel Cure is a reminder of that power. To create this apothecary, the authors have trawled two thousand years of literature for novels that effectively promote happiness, health, and sanity, written by brilliant minds who knew what it meant to be human and wrote their life lessons into their fiction. Structured like a reference book, readers simply look up their ailment, be it agoraphobia, boredom, or a midlife crisis, and are given a novel to read as the antidote. Bibliotherapy does not discriminate between pains of the body and pains of the head (or heart). Aware that you’ve been cowardly? Pick up To Kill a Mockingbird for an injection of courage. Experiencing a sudden, acute fear of death? Read One Hundred Years of Solitude for some perspective on the larger cycle of life. Nervous about throwing a dinner party? Ali Smith’s There but for The will convince you that yours could never go that wrong. Whatever your condition, the prescription is simple: a novel (or two), to be read at regular intervals and in nice long chunks until you finish. Some treatments will lead to a complete cure. Others will offer solace, showing that you’re not the first to experience these emotions. The Novel Cure is also peppered with useful lists and sidebars recommending the best novels to read when you’re stuck in traffic or can’t fall asleep, the most important novels to read during every decade of life, and many more.

Brilliant in concept and deeply satisfying in execution, The Novel Cure belongs on everyone’s bookshelf and in every medicine cabinet. It will make even the most well-read fiction aficionado pick up a novel he’s never heard of, and see familiar ones with new eyes. Mostly, it will reaffirm literature’s ability to distract and transport, to resonate and reassure, to change the way we see the world and our place in it.

Okay, that is a long synopsis, but I promise you that this book is worth it and that’s coming from someone who enjoy sci-fi and fantasy best. This was a HUGE book, but it was a book that recommended other books for you to read whether you were feeling like you were stuck in a rut or not having enough adventure in your life. It took me several days to actually get through this book, but I enjoyed reading every little bit of it. I didn’t skip any entries, I read each and everyone and I even took note of some of them for my own personal readings.

What are your favorite types of nonfiction books? Why are they your favorite? Comment below and let me know!

Tiny Navajo Reads: Teaser Tuesday

Hi again to another Teaser Tuesday guys! It’s a wonderful weekly meme that is hosted by The Purple Booker, go check out her site! To play Teaser Tuesday is easy, here’s what you do:

1. Grab your current read
2. Open to a random page
3. Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
4. BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
5. Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! Everyone loves Teaser Tuesday.

So, here are my two sentences for Teaser Tuesday! And as an addendum, I choose two sentences from throughout the whole book, so there’s a variety. Enjoy!

“He wouldn’t have thought it would make a difference, but to watch a person move around and cast no shadow anywhere became terrifying after a while. There was a strange weightlessness to it. As if they weren’t actually there.” Peng Shepherd, The Book of M

and

“He should have clung to it, but he began to despise the name that was stated on his driver’s license. It was not him. It was someone else, whom he was never allowed to know but also not allowed to forget.” Peng Shepherd, The Book of M

This book wrecked me and I can safely blame my friend Megan, from work. I truly love it when my friends recommend me books, but this one truly and thoroughly wrecked me! In a good way! And excellent book all the way through. What books have been recommended to you that you love, even though it gives you so many feelings and pain?!  Would you then recommend them to others to include them in your pain as well? Comment below and let me know!

Tiny Navajo Reads: Thursday Three Recommended to Me

Thursday Threes: Books Recommended to Me

Hello again guys! I know that I missed last Thursday, but I’m learning to have posts ready the day before if I’m working a morning shift! Anyway, today we’re going to be talking about three books that have been recently recommended to me thanks to my fellow librarians! Which means they are extremely good books for me to read!

The Book of M by Peng Shepherd – recently recommended to me by my friend/coworker Megan who has an excellent taste in books and this one just sounds like it would be amazing anyway!

One afternoon at an outdoor market in India, a man’s shadow disappears—an occurrence science cannot explain. He is only the first. The phenomenon spreads like a plague, and while those afflicted gain a strange new power, it comes at a horrible price: the loss of all their memories.

Ory and his wife Max have escaped the Forgetting so far by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods. Their new life feels almost normal, until one day Max’s shadow disappears too.

Knowing that the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to Ory, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up the time they have left together. Desperate to find Max before her memory disappears completely, he follows her trail across a perilous, unrecognizable world, braving the threat of roaming bandits, the call to a new war being waged on the ruins of the capital, and the rise of a sinister cult that worships the shadowless.

As they journey, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a new force growing in the south that may hold the cure.

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson – while I have already read this book, but it was recommended to me by Clovis. I have talked about the books Clovis has recommended to me before, most the Fables series.

Defeated, crushed, and driven almost to extinction, the remnants of the human race are trapped on a planet that is constantly attacked by mysterious alien starfighters. Spensa, a teenage girl living among them, longs to be a pilot. When she discovers the wreckage of an ancient ship, she realizes this dream might be possible—assuming she can repair the ship, navigate flight school, and (perhaps most importantly) persuade the strange machine to help her. Because this ship, uniquely, appears to have a soul.

Ship of Theseus by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst – this was recommended to me by a manager at the library who found out that I like books that have been written in and that this was a book that dealt with this aspect of reading specifically. This is one that I’m excited to read!

One book. Two readers. A world of mystery, menace, and desire.

A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown.

The book: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V.M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey.

The writer: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world’s greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumors that swirl around him.

The readers: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they’re willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears.

Have you had any recommendations lately? Who were they from and did you take them? Comment below and let me know!

Tiny Navajo Reads: Skyward

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson

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*Published November 6, 2018*

Thank you again to Clovis, my awesome Sanderson-loving coworker, who brought this fully to my attention. The main reason I read this one is that he wanted me to kind of vet it for him. I was planning on reading it anyway, just not as soon as I did, which was as soon as our library’s copy came in. He even held it behind the desk for me so that I could be the first person to check it out. And while not a part of the Cosmere, as far as I can tell, this is still a spectacular young adult book about space and learning about yourself.

Spensa’s world has been under attack for hundreds of years. An alien race called the Krell leads onslaught after onslaught from the sky in a never-ending campaign to destroy humankind. Humanity’s only defense is to take to their ships and combat the Krell. Pilots are the heroes of what’s left of the human race.

Becoming a pilot has always been Spensa’s dream. Since she was a little girl, she has imagined soaring above the earth and proving her bravery. But her fate is intertwined with that of her father–a pilot himself who was killed years ago when he abruptly deserted his team, leaving Spensa’s chances of attending Flight School at slim to none.

No one will let Spensa forget what her father did, but she is determined to fly. And the Krell just made that a possibility. They’ve doubled their fleet, which will make Spensa’s world twice as deadly . . . but just might take her skyward.

I loved this new world that Brandon Sanderson has brought! A colony of humans trapped on a planet, beneath the surface where they must struggle to grow larger than a few hundred in one settlement. But for Spensa, this is a world that suffocates her. She wants to fly, be a pilot, like her father before her. We also see her father’s death has intertwined into her own fate and it causes Spensa to not only feel tension at the mention of her father but doubts about herself as well.

I love that we can see Spensa and her flight grow together and become more than what anyone thought they could be. With this being a war though, and a war fought in space, Spensa and her flight experience loss. A loss that they have never had to deal with before and one that teaches them they cannot take their lives for granted. We also see Spensa confront the death of her father in a way that she was not able to before, especially when she finds out more about his death. We see her rage not only at the world, but at herself, the Flight Academy, and her father. We also see her learn to control that rage and do what she does best, which is fly!

What are some of your favorite reasons to read? Do you read every book of a particular author? Comment below and let me know!

Tiny Navajo Reads: The Diary of a Bookseller

The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

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*To be published September 4, 2018*

I had been waiting for this book to come out since forever! Well, not forever, but since a friend of mine on Tumblr, Immzie’s Adventures Through Books, mentioned reading it and it sounded so funny! So, when I saw that there was an ARC for it at ALA New Orleans I grabbed that sucker and got my copy! YAY!!!

This book is a biographical year in the life of a secondhand bookseller, and if you were ever curious about what it takes to own a bookstore this book will tell you. In great detail. It’s fricken’ marvelous! Shaun Bythell starts a daily diary of the orders he needs to fill, the books found for said orders, and the money in the till at the end of the day. He then writes about what happened during the day in the town of Wigtown. He writes about the books he buys from others, the books he sells in town, the events that are going on with tourist attractions, and the small vacations he takes.

Shaun’s dry humor is hilarious to me, and I love how he talks about his daily life as a bookseller. I love this and I kind of hope that he’ll write another and I can learn more about the bookseller life.

What nonfiction books have you enjoyed the most? Why did you enjoy them? Comment below and let me know!