I can’t believe Sunday is here again already. Its rapid arrival gives a whole new insight into the old saw, “My, how time flies”! The highlights of this past week were teaching my own class Wednesday where we began our blogging, teaching my grandson’s classes on Thursday, and Easter Sunday. Overall it was a good week and one in which I actually did some reading.

Finished this past week:

Holes, a YA novel by Louis Sacher, which I’m sure starts many conversations among kids who have read it

I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Wasn’t) by Brene Brown, a researcher and social work lecturer at UH Main Campus, part of the UH system for which I teach. The research and the book deal with shame, the definition, the concepts and all its many ins and outs.  She specifically introduces her terms “Shame Web” and “Shame Resilience,” helpful tools for exploring women and shame and how to deal with it. She examines the quest for perfection women take upon themselves and well as the social expectations our culture and society lay upon women, especially. The cover subtitle is, “Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough,” a journey she assists readers with quite well. Seven years of research and hundreds of interviews went into the book, and it shows.

I Thought It Was Just Me has been described as having the potential “to turn lives around (Harriet Lerner, PhD author of The Dance of Anger). The insights and even the strategies offered are not only helpful but workable for most women. She gives women specific things to say to prevent saying, “I wish I had said something” after an incident where they, or another person was shamed by a group of women,  The feeling the reader has at the end of the book is, “We are all in this together, and Brown offers a group solution.

Continuing to read:

Dying for Space by blogging friend and author S.J. Higbee, an excellent, action-packed, fast-paced sequel to her outstanding Running Out of Space. I am not necessarily a fan of Space Opera novels, but this one contains all the elements of any good novel and also has “keeps-you-reading-writing.”

I did not have time to start either of the “I-Can”t-Wait-To-Begin selections” I purchased at Half-Priced Books last week. I still have those to look forward to. Also, the Brene Brown book completed the “I” requirement of my Alphabet Challenge (aka known as “The Alphabet Soup Reading Challenge” from Lori Coswell at the blog, “Escape with Dollycas Into a Good Book.”

I have a wonderful book for “J,” and since it is a book of poems, I have high hopes of finishing it by next Sunday evening’s post. I plan to KEEP READING and trust you’ll do the same.