Tag: School

Books, Professional Development

Book 969: The Art of Communicating – Thích Nhất Hạnh

Geoff W

Book cover of "The Art of Communicating" with Amazon Affiliate linkI had to read this for a course I’m talking about the art of brave communication. We only had to read the first couple of chapters, but I found it to be an approachable and relatively easy read so kept going.

Where Hanh excelled was in his simple writing. For the most part, there were no overwrought metaphors or awkward analogies. There was one at the end that I’ll get to, but I think it’s a religious thing and it just fell flat for me.

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Updates

March Recap 2022

Geoff W

March is gone and April is moving even faster. I’m not sure how it’s already the sixth but here we are. I’m sitting in an airport to fly to Texas for a wedding and just now catching my breath to be able to blog my recap.

March was really jam-packed from my celebrating my getting into the Harvard Graduate School of Education (see fun photo at the end) and a friend’s new job to hiking part of the Blue Hills. I also taught myself how to do color work knitting and we brought back date night. And this doesn’t even start to cover how busy I’ve been at work recently.

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Books

Book 911: The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison

Geoff W

Book cover of "The Bluest Eye" with Amazon Affiliate linkToni Morrison is one of those authors who have always been on my list, mostly due to the controversy around their books (stupid book banners), but I’ve never gotten around to reading them. Both The Bluest Eye and Beloved were on my The Classics Club list I created back in 2012 and I picked up physical copies sometime after that.

When Morrison passed in 2019, I told myself I would read her works and it took me this long to get to them thanks to always being distracted and just not making an effort. Both are relatively short so ended up on my Rando Book Selector spreadsheet using randomly generated titles from roughly 60 books to slowly chip away at my TBR pile and The Bluest Eye came up as I was planning for a recent vacation and here we are.

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Books

Book 739: Solitaire – Alice Oseman

Geoff W

Book cover of "Solitaire" with Amazon Affiliate linkI honestly have no clue how to respond to this one. I enjoyed it for the few glimpses I got of Charlie and Nick and am now both looking forward to and dreading the next two volumes of Heartstopper because of knowing some of their future. But, it was a weird book in that it is very much a tribute to angsty teenage-ness.

I like to think that I was an angsty teenager, but really, I was a toe-the-line don’t draw attention to yourself closeted teenager who was boring as hell. I’m sure I had a touch of anxiety, I always have, but I never let it take over my life so I couldn’t really relate to Tori losing all control over everything to her depression or Charlie to whatever he faces (it wasn’t explicit).

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Books

Book 648: Honestly Ben – Bill Konigsberg

Geoff W

Honestly Ben book coverThis one was pretty forgettable for me, which is sad because it’s actually a good book. I think the problem is that I read Openly Straight, basically the first half of this book/story a little over five years ago. If I would’ve read these back to back I would’ve probably had much stronger feelings about this one.

Let’s start with what didn’t work: the swimming analogy. The book opens with Ben, the protagonist, going to swimming lessons for the first time and sinking to the bottom of the pool. Konigsberg uses this as a very clunky metaphor for Ben’s life and thoughts at the start of the book. I was honestly hoping it wouldn’t resurface at the end of the book—which isn’t totally fair because I would’ve been more pissed if he didn’t complete the metaphor—but it did and it just made me sigh and shake my head.

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