Interesting Reads

These are a few interesting books we enjoyed reading Design Your Next Chapter, Happy: The Journal, Rick Mercer Final Report, Saints and Misfits, Written in the Stars, and Thousand Splendid Suns. We also read a few inspiring Biographies in DK Life Stories.

The stories and advice on the Design Your Next Chapter by Debbie Travis will give ideas to those who feel they have lost track of who they are and what they want to be. Those going through jobs that no longer satisfy them or feel they have reached the end of a learning curve will find the stories in this book inspiring. There were a lot of reminders and important points shared in this book - here is a summary. 

When we are living lives full of obligations, sometimes we lack happiness and forget there is more to life than daily routine. This is the time to remember that dreams belong purely to us, and are not locked by demands of careers, marriage, and parenting. Accumulating money and power should not be the definition of a successful life and the book reminds us how important balance is to our overall happiness.

Passion has peaks and lows, which changes with age and simplest ideas bring the most happiness. So make time to have fun and play to rekindle what you like doing. 

• Writing down gives clarity. 
• Pin up things that inspire you and see it everyday so you can see how it overlaps each other. 
• If social media bothers you and makes you depressed stop using it, and spend time seeking out and getting inspiration in real stories. 
• Uncomfortable emotions help create energy, so we need  to calculate the risks by weighing in what is at stake, time, effort, and money. 
• Imbalance in mind, emotions, and body should not dominate life, we have to do new adventures outside our comfort zone to reignite joy. 

Happy: The Journal is a retreat from the stresses of everyday life, a place to work through our problems and confide worries, fears, and secrets. It offers a chance to focus on life's positive aspects and find things that make us happy. Each page of this daily journal is filled with new ideas, creative prompts, and words of wisdom that will help write a little joy into every day of the year. The ideal place to express what's happening in our life to unlock inner happiness. 

DK Life Stories is a series of books that we enjoyed reading and learning from. These biographical books share stories behind inspiring personalities. Children and adults will enjoy reading facts about the lives of incredible people from history. The colour photographs and hand-drawn illustrations are inviting and engaging. We found these books easy to read, and like how it summarizes incidents and important moments in history. It is a good way to gain knowledge of historical moments and how these significant people have contributed towards it. We checked out biographies of four people - Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, and Katherine Johnson.

Rick Mercer Final Report written by Rick Mercer is interesting to read, as it includes never-before-published rants from the last five seasons of the show, plus a selection of the best rants from earlier years. It is a good book with political humour that makes you think. 

Saints and Misfits by S. K. Ali is a novel that keeps the reader wondering what will happen to the characters, making us curious to find out what happens. We enjoyed how well the author describes the situations, characters, their thinking, and setting. This book will be enjoyed by youth and adults.

Written in the Stars by Aisha Saeed brought me to tears. The main character Naila falls in love with a boy, and when her parents find out, her whole life changes. Her parent's solution was to take her "back home" and get her married without her consent. She was born and raised for seventeen years in Florida, and never been to Pakistan. They end up getting her forcefully married, and the man she marries was not aware of this. Many lives get affected and get hurt. Read to see what happens, and how they come out of this conflict. 

Although this novel was a fiction, I was happy the author included an epilogue with a happy, satisfying ending for the reader. Marriage is a leap of faith - it should not be forced by parents that silence many girls that suffer emotionally and get abused. This novel makes the reader aware of these situations, and how we can help these women. 

Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is about Mariam, a girl born out of marriage and the hardship she goes through from being forced to marry an elderly man, the abuse she goes through for not having children, dealing with war, and how her life changes when her husband marries Laila, a young girl. This well written book will bring out emotions in the reader, and feel empathy towards women in these countries and how war changes lives. 

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