Litsy no longer works on my phone properly.

Follow my bookstagram: @dreadbetweenthelines

#tellmetuesday @Ke633

1. Always blue raspberry! 💙
2. A little bit of both. I love swimming, and reading.
3. My town is in under a heat advisory! Its 33 degrees. 🌞
4. Pineapple juice with coconut rum, or beer! 🍹🍻
5. Klondike Days, the annual summer midway and festival in my city.

I'm late, but that's okay! #friyayintro @jesshowbooks

1. The Hunger Games
2. Breaking Bad
3. Nope! The only sport with a place in my heart is hockey.
4. My favourite Saturday lunch: Gangnam Chicken from Rice Bowl Deluxe!
5. I'm not close with my father.

Today, while driving from the town where I work and live to Edmonton, I received an emergency weather alert on my phone. It said to seek shelter immediately. A tornado was spotted forming just 3 kilometers from where I was on the highway. The clouds were suddenly green and swirling. Being in rural Alberta, there wasn't anywhere to stop so I had to keep moving. I dont think I've ever been so scared for my safety or felt so alone.

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A well-written memoir discussing the rise and fall of white supremacy in 1980s New York and Chicago. Picciolini is very self aware, and touches on such influences as family, community and the immigrant experience in relation to his involvement in skinhead groups. I would have liked to read more about the people and experiences that shaped his evolution into an advocate for racial equality.

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This was a fun, thought-provoking, rollercoaster of a read! Considering that this is YA, it dives pretty deeply into philosophical musings about death and immortality. Looking forward to reading the sequel, Thunderhead.

Today I went through all the teaching and professional development books I own but haven't read. I compiled them into one long list, and then narrowed it down to what I think I can manage to read this summer. #tbr #teachersoflitsy #summerreading

#humpdaypost @MinDea

1. My fiancé and I went to #EdmontonCraftBeerFest this weekend!
2. Nope! #EdmontonMeetUp? #Edmonton #YEG? I think I'm the only Litten I know of who lives in northern Alberta.
3. Spaghetti squash with pizza sauce, cheese and pepperoni.
4. Blue-ish.
5. If I remember correctly, somewhere right around the 50% mark!

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Hey all! I'm giving Litsy a second try after taking a few months away. I think being so active here on Litsy burned me out and made me give up on reading. I hope to jump back in soon!

In the meantime, a few updates: I got engaged in April, started working on my MEd in Special Education, accepted a permanent teaching contract, and bought a new car!

Hi Litsy! Remember me? I haven't read a book in over a month (February is SO BUSY in the teaching world), but I'm heading off to Mexico with two coworkers for spring break in 3 weeks! I'm looking for recommendations for vacation-y books to load on my Kobo before I leave! I don't like romance and I'm VERY picky when it comes to YA. I'm hoping to find a series or some really great thrillers! #litsyrecommends

Highly recommend! #sped

"For any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something. If you're sitting there, miserable day after day, that already means that you're probably wrong about something major in your life. Until you're able to question yourself enough to find it, nothing will change."

This short (

"We all have emotional blind spots. Often, they have to do with emotions that we were taught were inappropriate growing up. It takes years of practice and effort to get better at identifying blind spots in ourselves, and then expressing emotions appropriately. But this task is hugely important, and worth the effort. The second layer of self-awareness is to ask why we feel these emotions. These questions often take months to answer."

"The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the most respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Everything worth having in life is won by surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering."

"Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations. Be happier, be healthier, be the best; be faster, richer, sexier, stronger, more productive, more envied and more admired. Be perfectly amazing and crap out two gold nuggets before breakfast while kissing your selfie-ready spouse and two perfect kids goodbye. Then fly your helicopter to your meaningful, fulfilling job that's likely to save the planet one day."

NOTE: The tagged book is not this book. This was an Audible exclusive which is not catalogued on Litsy.

I enjoyed this one! I had some issues with some of the chapters, but Jon Ronson answers the question he sets out to answer: what is the cost of "free" porn? He explores sexuality in the Internet age, which was especially interesting to me as a young Milennial. The chapter about the sex offender registry was fascinating.

I've been in a serious state of book hangover since finishing The Goldfinch! Hopefully this very-anticipated ARC gets me back into the spirit.

What could I possibly say about this book? It is long, slow, and drawn out, but it is also beautifully crafted and emotional. Donna Tartt explores such themes as coming of age, trauma, loss, family and love using the story of Theo, a boy who lost his mother in a terror attack. His evolving relationship with a rare painting becomes his precious last link to his late mother.

"The act, the eternity of it, had thrown me into a different world and for all practical purposes I was already dead. There was a sense of being past everything, of looking back at land from a floe that had drifted out to sea. What was done could never be undone. I was gone, and that was fine."

"People had been raging and weeping and destroying things for centuries; and wailing about their puny individual lives, when, what was the point? All this useless sorrow. Consider the lilies of the field. Why did anyone ever worry about anything? Weren't we, as sentient beings, put upon the Earth to be happy in the brief time allotted to us?"

"To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it. Look very hard at what was close to hand, and make it stand in for the whole. But ever since the painting had vanished from under me, I'd felt drowned and extinguished by vastness. Not just the predictable vastness of time and space, but the space between people even when they were within arms' reach of each other."

#FriYAYintro @jesshowbooks

1. Neither. But puffy sour cream and onion rings are a guilty pleasure!
2. I haven't yet finished it, but The Goldfinch has been an experience.
3. Cleaning, marking, and catching up on some PD!
4. Every language! I love my dog, but the variety of stories I could learn from... 😍
5. I have a Bachelor of Education, with a major in Canadian history and minor in English Language Arts.

#litsylovelist @hermyknee

💕 High school special education and English teacher
💕 Thrift shopping!
💕 Dogs
💕 Green!
💕 Apples and chocolate yogurt dip
💕 Wine
💕 Succulents!
💕 Spring
💕 The Walking Dead

I live for this series.

Working on my annual #preorder binge for my most-anticipated 2018 reads! Tag the books you're looking forward to in 2018. #kobo #ebooks

I accept that I will never be deep or emotional enough to fully appreciate the beauty of Sylvia's work.

Letter #A for #classicsatoz #litsyclassics

I head back to work on Monday, so I'm savouring every last moment of my Christmas vacation. Checking off a few challenge categories with my dear old friend Sylvia Plath. #teachersoflitsy #classicsatoz #litsyclassics

@ClaraEva Have you received your January book yet, by any chance? I had my mom send it out from her place in Edmonton just before Christmas because of all the issues with my local post office. @KassKho #canuckswithbooks

#FriYAYintro @jesshowbooks

1. The tagged book is one of many that I'm looking forward to this year!
2. Tomb Raider. 🤓
3. If I HAD to choose, I'd choose wine. But I love a good craft beer!
4. He does! We actually met while we were both working at Chapters while I was in University. ☺
5. 🖒

Starting on my longest audiobook EVER. I hope that this one is worth it. It works well for a few challenge categories!

My second audiobook of 2018 is already complete!

I skipped through a few chapters of this one, particularly the one about Lena Dunham because I just can't get behind her. This was a great investigation into some of pop culture's most influential women and the people who criticize them. Not surprisingly, the book is written a little like a Buzzfeed article. It didn't bother me at all, but keep it in mind if you're considering this one!

"Shrillness is just a word to describe what happens when a woman, with her higher-toned voice, attempts to speak loudly. A pejorative, in other words, developed specifically to shame half the population when they attempt to command attention in the same manner as men. That's the core of Clinton's unruliness: she has demanded the same stature, power and attention as a man."

"The tendency to label her as 'too sexy' or sexually explicit is a symptom of a much larger anxiety: how to process a woman, and a black woman in particular, who has taken control of her body, her formidable talents, and the way they are marketed, monetized, and received. Minaj is unapologetic about who she is and how she chooses to live, exercising a form of self-determination that has been almost entirely unavailable to black women in America."

"McCarthy's body, like Oprah's or Adele's, has become overdetermined with meaning. A decrease or increase in size warrants a press release about her psychological health, her status in the entertainment industry, and how other women should feel about their bodies. Dozens of celebrities contribute to this understanding, fetishizing their diets, fitness routines and "body tricks" to the point that the fixation cannibalizes their personality."

"It's no coincidence that several of her roles were originally written for men, or mapped on to traditional male genres like the 'buddy cop' film, the spy movie, or the 'ghost busting' narrative. McCarthy's characters have the confidence and shamelessness of a pompous white male. When she discusses her characters, McCarthy's focus is not on their size but on their potential for assholery."

"The notable difference between black excellence and white excellence is that white excellence is achieved without having to battle racism. Imagine. Imagine too, a woman whose dominance on the court leads to a discussion of her skill and not her body."

#2018goals @Wbabdullah

1. 100 books (25 fewer than last year), keep up with my bullet journal, be more financially responsible, get engaged.
2. The tagged book is the first one I'll have started AND finished in 2018.
3. I'm teaching some new (to me) novels next semester!
4. A few challenges. My boyfriend and I created our own list, and I'm participating in #passportlitsy #popsugarreadingchallenge and #classicsatoz
5. Coffee. Always coffee.