theinbetweenismine

just a girl living the expat life

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Archives for October 2019

Monthly recap | October

October 31, 2019 filed under: my so-called life, recap


READ 

October was busy and reading was slow. I finished one book. 

COOKED

I tried a new ravioli dish that we liked okay but isn’t necessarily worth sharing. However, I did bake a nice apple pie for Jon’s birthday that we both loved. It was delicious and I’ll have to share the recipe in a future post.

WATCHED

We watched the season finales of ‘Before the 90-days’ and ‘90-days – The Other Way’ because it’s just the brainless TV I need at the end of a long day.

I also watched a couple of German movies when I was in Germany and a dubbed (*shudder*) version of ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ (the things you’ll do for your niece and nephew! Haha.)

LISTENED TO 

As always, not much new. I listened to a few episodes of  Pod Save America. 

BOUGHT

Of course, we brought back some food items from Germany. I also purchased a couple of birthday gifts for Jon, a TubShroom, more NUUN, and some new Jockey shirts for Jon. I also ordered pair of ankle boots for me online that haven’t arrived yet. I rarely buy shoes online (unless I have previously tried them on somewhere), so I hope these will fit and are somewhat close to what I am expecting IRL.

RAN

I ran 25 miles and cycled 48 miles this month. I had good intentions when I was in Germany to go for a run or two, but we got a lot of rain and to be honest, I had other priorities while I was there. That’s how it goes.

GOING-ONS

+ As you already know, we spent the first half of the month in Germany, surprising my parents for their birthday party! It was the best decision and I still relish every minute that we had with my family.

+ We went to dinner at my favorite pizza place back home and I had the best (I am not exaggerating!) tomato soup and my favorite pizza with tuna. Yum. I also got to eat some Italian yogurt gelato (which is totally different from frozen yogurt) while I was in Germany. 

+ Shortly after our return, we celebrated Jon’s 37 birthday. I baked a birthday (apple) cake and we had a nice and lazy day (as per the birthday boy’s wishes). 

+ I went for my first mammogram ever this month. I guess, I am at that age now. It wasn’t as horrible or painful for me as some women make it out to be. Just one extra preventive care measure that I am happily picking up.

+ I had my performance review at work, my first annual review with my new supervisor. It went very well overall. I am still frustrated with my work situation right now (I don’t have enough work to fill my time), but I am hoping that will change again soon.   

+ I am back to my gym routine. It’s hard to get back into, but it’s always worth it (and necessary, I might add).

+ We’ve been enjoying the first glimpses of fall. Cool nights and mornings, sunny blue skies during the day. We haven’t been impacted by smoke/bad air quality from the fires so far, which – I am crossing my fingers – will hopefully stay this way.

+ My niece turned 11. I still remember when she was a toddler, forming the first hilarious words and sentences, and here she is, sassy and so grown up, and almost on the cusp of puberty. Can someone slow down time, please? 

+ It was my 9-year Instagram-iversary. I can’t believe I’ve been using this platform for almost a decade. When did you post your first Instagram picture? Go look and tell me what it was! (Mine was coffee.)

How was your October?

7

Monthly Favorites | October

October 30, 2019 filed under: monthly favorites

1. I picked up a tube of Weleda Light Skin Food* Moisturizer when I was in Germany. I had long wanted to try their stuff, as Weleda is a European Clean Beauty brand with a long-standing reputation. And I am happy to say, I really like this moisturizer. It’s soft, not too thick (there is a thicker version), absorbs quickly, and I love the citrusy smell.

2. I received an email this month saying that I was going to get a $5 start deposit if I downloaded Peet’s Peetniks Rewards App* and because I am always down for free coffee, I happily obliged. 

3. Do you like Cremini Mushrooms*  as much as I do? I could eat mushrooms with every meal, if I had to. Not surprisingly, we go through a lot of mushrooms at our house.

4. My best friend gave me these cute string lights (similar to those*) when I was in Germany and they’re my favorite thing to brighten up our living room in the evening now. 

5. I bought this Long Cardigan* before our flight to Germany, because I knew it was going to be cooler there. It’s super-cozy and it was comfortable for the plane and I am looking forward to wearing it more often this fall.

6. I picked up a couple of bags of Hustelinchen* when I was in Germany. It’s a licorice-based cough drop (which you can really have anytime, not just when you’re having a cough!). What’s not to like? 

7. I can’t wait for soup weather. This Trader Joe’s Tomato and Red Pepper Soup* is a staple in my pantry during the cooler months of the year. Add a hard-boiled egg and/or some croutons and you have a meal.

What was one of your favorite things this month?


* #notanad, This is not a sponsored post. I have not been compensated by the brand or anyone else for linking the websites.

6

Currently | October

October 28, 2019 filed under: currently

October disappeared on me. Anyone else? I am sure it had to do with the fact that we traveled for the first half of the month, but man, how is it already Halloween-week? 


LOVING | that I was able to spend some precious time with my parents, my sister, and the munchkins. It feels like it’s never enough, but I take what I can get. 

LISTENING TO | the wind outside my window.

THINKING ABOUT | the holiday season that lies ahead and how it’s going to be a busy, but also my favorite time of the year.

EMBRACING | fall with its cooler temperatures, longer evenings, and colorful leaves.

GETTING BACK | to making overnight oats and then warming them up in the morning for an easy, but tasty, warm breakfast.


TRYING TO | get back into my running routine. I feel like I’ve said that a lot lately, but it’s mostly because I took some “unintentional” breaks in the last few months. I mean, I still ran, but I wasn’t following a plan or working toward a goal and that always makes me feel like I am not in my routine, if that makes sense.

EATING | homemade apple pie (including homemade whipped cream – screw that bottled stuff). This was so easy and quick to make. Will have to share this recipe soon!

DRINKING | peppermint tea.

ENJOYING |  all the candles and lights around our apartment in the evenings now. They always make the darker season a little bit brighter.

LOOKING FORWARD TO | going to a play at the local theater. We haven’t done this in forever. 


CELEBRATING | a bunch of October birthdays, including my Mom’s (on the 3rd) , Jon’s  (on the 18th), and Greta’s (on the 21st). 

WEARING | skinny jeans –  all day, every day.

HOPING | for the winds to die down and the fires to be put out here in California. Last year was devastating and it’s been a tough fire season again this year. While we haven’t been impacted by planned power outages and/or threatened by the fires directly, it’s always a scary time living in California when wildfires are raging all over the state. 

FEELING | overwhelmed by the fact that there are only 2 months left in this decade. Let that sink in, friends. 

EXCITED ABOUT | NaBloPoMo. Yes, it’s that time of the year again, where I blog my way through November. Are you joining in?

What’s going on with you currently?

7

October Link Love

October 23, 2019 filed under: link love

Around the Interwebs

It’s not really that hard, or is it? How to eat right.

Should you sleep or exercise? Have you ever had to decide between the two?

10 things incredibly likeable people never, ever do.

 Handy! Instagram Food Hacks.

Here’s What Happened When I Complimented Everyone I Met for an Entire Day. Maybe that’s a bit extreme, but being a little kinder every day goes a long way! 

How Non-English Speakers Are Taught This Crazy English Grammar Rule You Know But Never Heard Of. This is super-fascinating to me. If you learn your native language as a child, many grammar rules are subconscious and you can’t explain them. Jon has asked me many times about German grammar rules that I wasn’t consciously aware of and that we then had to examine together to come up with a rule. Fascinating! 

Around the blogosphere

Recycling. An important post by my friend Tanja.

A good question to contemplate: Would you rather be good at earning or good at saving?

How to make an animated gif for Instagram.

Bravo, Stephanie, for sharing your story! Why I started taking medication for my anxiety.

Lifestyle Creep… Isn’t That Kind of the Point?

Craftiness/DIY

What a cool idea! DIY photo strip costume

Halloween Coloring Page 

Printable Gratitude Stationery

For my runner friends

Mobility vs Flexibility: What’s the difference?

When should you quit a run? Important advice. 

Deliciousness

Creamy Cauliflower Leek Soup. Give me all the soups this fall!

Yum. Chicken with Garlic Mushroom Sauce.

Share a good link with me in the comments!

4

How to pull off a birthday surprise

October 21, 2019 filed under: birthday, family, Germany, travel

 


Remember when I said that I was keeping a secret?

You probably didn’t notice that it was quiet around here for the last couple of weeks. I had prepared a couple of posts to automatically post during my absence (I am not always that prepared, mind you), so you couldn’t know that Jon and I were actually spending time in a different time zone. 

On October 1, J and I got on a plane to Germany to surprise my parents for their 70th birthdays. To be honest, I hadn’t really thought that it was a possibility. I had just been in Germany in May. My parents’ birthdays are 2,5 weeks apart and there was no way I could get time off long enough to be there for both their birthdays. But when my Mom called at the end of August, saying that they had changed their minds about not having a party and were planning one for October 3rd (her actual birthday and a German public holiday), the wheels in my head started turning.

70 is a milestone birthday. My parents are not getting any younger (although I’d like to think of them as perpetually young-ish). I remembered that I was in Germany for their 60th birthdays. How could I miss this big event in my parents’ life and not go? So, I decided that we would go. Just like that.

Well, not really ‘just like that’. I talked with Jon (he was instantly on board!), I talked with my supervisor at work (to request time off), I checked flight prices, and then we just went ahead and booked tickets. 

When I told my sister that we were planning on coming, she was beyond thrilled, as she hadn’t really thought that this would be a possibility either. My parents, of course,  had no clue that we had booked tickets. In fact, nobody knew anything besides my sister. We were so paranoid that someone would slip up and ruin the surprise.
Believe me, it was hard enough to keep the secret for about 4 weeks myself, as I talk to my parents a few times every week. I made sure to complain plenty about the fact how much we hated that we weren’t going to be there for the party, that we would miss out on the amazing food, and how much it sucked sometimes to live so far away. At the same time, I hoped that I wasn’t coming off too strong and making them suspicious.

Finally, the day of our departure was here and as far as we could tell, the secret was still safe. We arrived in Germany on October 2, my sister had arranged for someone to pick us up from the airport and take us to her house, and then we surprised my parents in the evening before the party.

We had first thought about just “showing up” at the party the next day, but a) I didn’t want to give my parents a heart attack on the day of their party and b) we didn’t want to take away the focus from their birthday celebrations, as it was their day, not ours. (I mean, plenty of people still were surprised to see us, but at least my parents weren’t completely emotionally overwhelmed and could focus on their other guests instead of just us.)

My sister drove us and the kids over to my parents’ house in the evening, but dropped us off at the street corner so that she could see them alone first (pretending that she was bringing over some last minute things for the party). We had taken a picture with the kids in her backyard earlier in the afternoon, which she was going to show them. Since J hadn’t been in Germany with me for a while, they’d hopefully notice instantly that the picture was very current.

Meanwhile, we and the kids had walked up to the front door of my parents’ house and were waiting for them to realize what was going on.

Of course, I wish I could have actually seen my parents’ faces when they caught on to what was happening. My sister tried to capture the moment while trying not to seem suspicious when she started filming them. Haha.

Finally, the door opened and they came outside. My Mom was crying and I could tell that even my Dad, even though he doesn’t get emotional quickly, was moved to see us. I’d like to think: the surprise was a definite success and it felt amazing that we had been able to pull this off!


When I asked my parents if they had suspected something… anything… they said no. Of course, they had hoped and wished that we could be there with them for their birthdays, but both of them didn’t think that it was a possibility because of my limited amount of vacation time (comparatively speaking), the fact that I had just visited for three weeks in the spring, and the fact that flying in from California is not a simple train ride into town.

I am just so, so glad we went. I cannot explain how much it means to me to know that we were able to spend this time with them. I’ll tell you all about the actual birthday party (Octoberfest-themed!) and the rest of our stay (we stayed for 11 days) in another post, but just wanted to let you in on my little secret. 

13

Why you should read books (and watch movies) in their native language

October 15, 2019 filed under: books, Things you wouldn't know


Photo by Susan Yin on Unsplash

I recently read my first German book in a long while. The reason why I hadn’t read any books in German is that German books are somewhat hard to come by. I often read on my eReader and most of my books come from the library and – as far as I know – there are no German books in their collection. 

I could probably make more of an effort, there probably are ways to get digital content from German libraries on my eReader (note to self: look into this!), but I haven’t so far.

J had asked me why I hadn’t read any German books at all, so I decided to pick up one of the books I have on my bookshelf.

Out of curiosity, I checked and realized that the book was also translated into English, so I downloaded it from the library to compare the two. To my surprise, I found that, on the first few pages, whole passages were omitted in the English translation. 

Why? Did the translator feel the sentences were superfluous? Did he not know how to translate them properly? I was a bit baffled. I didn’t do a page to page comparison of the whole book, just randomly checked a passage here and there, but I wonder which other parts might have been dropped.

So much can get lost or be distorted in translation. Maybe dropping a few sentences here and there doesn’t really alter the story, but still, the author surely intended them to be there. 

I can’t really speak to the “quality” of the translation and how the feel of the author’s writing style differs between the original and the translated version, but I can totally see how I might love the writing in German, but not so much in English, if you know what I mean. I had a couple of literary translation classes in college and we would sometimes spend weeks discussing the many ways of translating one short passage of a book. It was amazing to see how different people interpreted many different things into the writing of the author, how people ended up choosing one word or phrasing over another. Literary translation is truly an art and still, there’s so much that can go “wrong”.

This, my friends, is why you need to read books in their native language, if at all possible.

I understand that reading a book in another language might not be possible (as you have to speak/understand a foreign language to do so), but I am just pointing out the benefits of doing it when you can.

The same goes for movies. If you can watch a movie in its native language, even with subtitles, by all means, please do.

I wrote a lengthy post about how I feel about dubbing a few years ago, which to my great shame is done extensively in Germany.  All points I raised in this post still apply, from the horrible pick of the German voices (voices often don’t resemble the original voices of the actors/actresses) to the terrible translations. I mean, really bad translations, not just “slightly off”. For Peet’s sake, if you have to dub, do a better job already or don’t do it at all.

The same applies to the reverse process as well, by the way – even though foreign films are usually not dubbed here, only subtitled, the subtitles are sometimes really really bad translations from the original. Even J has noticed that before, when we were watching a German movie and the subtitles didn’t quite measure up to what was actually said/conveyed in the scene. I always wonder if the people who are paid to do the translations are just amateurs or really don’t know any better. It’s possible those people never lived abroad and don’t know/understand colloquialisms and therefore can’t always get it right.

Do you speak another language and have you noticed these discrepancies?

9

Some of my favorite F·R·I·E·N·D·S quotes

October 10, 2019 filed under: friends, lists!

It’s been 25 years (WHAT?) since the first episode of F·R·I·E·N·D·S premiered on television. 

I have to admit, I never watched the show when it first aired. Which is probably a good thing, as it would have been a horribly dubbed German version of it and it would have been awful. I’d say, I was almost a decade late to F·R·I·E·N·D·S and started watching it when the show had officially ended, but since I am a self-proclaimed 90’s girl, I could still relate to the show so much.

I know many people argue that the series hasn’t aged well and I would agree to some extent, but I am also not a fan of picking everything apart that was done 25 years ago. I still find the show laugh-out-loud hilarious (ask J, shaking his head, when he finds me giggling on the couch) and it lifts me up like no other show. 

I even got to sit on the famous Central Perk couch at the Warner Brothers Tour a few years ago. (Hi Caryn!).

In honor of 25 years of F·R·I·E·N·D·S, I thought I’d share ten of my favorite quotes from the series. 

But they don’t know that we know they know we know! – Phoebe (when the secret about Chandler’s and Monica’s relationship gets out, Season 5)

“You’re over me? When were you… under me?” – Ross (when he finds out that Rachel has feelings for him, Season 2)

“Isn’t that just kick-you-in-the-crotch, spit-on-your-neck fantastic?” – Rachel (when she finds out that Ross returned from China with a new girlfriend, Season 2)

“I wish I could, but I don’t want to.” – Phoebe (when she’s asked to help with moving, Season 1)

“I am not great at the advice. Can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?” – Chandler (when Rachel asks him for friendship advice regarding Joey, Season 8)

“Oh I am sorry, did my back hurt your knife?” – Rachel (when she feels betrayed by Monica, who went shopping with Ross’ new girlfriend, Season 2)

“Over the line? You’re so far past the line that you can’t even see the line! The line is a dot to you!” – Joey (when Chandler kisses Joey’s colleague, who he has a crush on, Season 4) 

“PIVOT. PIVOT. PIVOT”  – Ross “SHUT UP. SHUT UP. SHUT UP.” – Chandler (when they’re moving the couch up the stairs, Season 5)

“I think the most romantic song is the one that Elton John wrote for that guy from ‘Who’s the Boss?’… You know, ‘Hold me closer, Tony Danza.’ ” – Phoebe ( when she talks with Rachel about the most romantic love song,  Season 3)

“If you’re afraid to be in a real relationship, don’t be in one.” – Monica (teaching Chandler a lesson about commitment and relationships, Season 5)

Do you love Friends as much as I do? Wanna share some of your favorites?

5

A Fall Bucket List

October 7, 2019 filed under: lists!


Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

Since I completely failed on making a summer bucket list this year, I thought I’d make one for fall (because why not, everyone is doing it!). Even though I am a list person, I am usually not very good at making a bucket list and then trying to check things off during a particular season, but I am always inspired when I read other people’s lists and how much they were able to do and check off. 

Since temperatures have been dropping (ever so slightly) and we had the first thunderstorm coming through, I am getting more excited for a new season. Fall is really the nicest time of year around here in Northern California. 

So, without further ado, a things-I’d-like-to-do-this-fall list:

+ Decorate for fall (I rarely do)

+ Visit a pumpkin patch

+ Go to Apple Hill

+ Watch Halloween movies with J (just the non-to-slightly-scary ones though)

+ Use my crockpot

+ Bake apple or berry crisp

+ Participating in #NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month) again in November, wanna join me?

+ Burn a bunch of yummy-smelling fall candles

+ Getting a head start on Christmas gifts

+ Got to the Causeway Classic football game (that’s an old tradition with J and me)

+ Go for a Halloween walk around the neighborhood to look at the decorations

+ Find more time for knitting

+ Drink seasonal drinks (hot chocolate and all the teas!)

What is on your Fall bucket list? 

4

How to stay sane at the grocery store

October 4, 2019 filed under: daily life

Photo by Anne Preble on Unsplash

Do you enjoy grocery shopping or do you squarely fall into the camp of grocery store haters? I know so many people that hate going to the store, but for me, it’s the opposite. I actually enjoy grocery shopping and I enjoy the prep process.

I still like to be fast and efficient when I do it though. I tend to visit 2-3 stores on my weekly shopping trips, but I can usually get it all done within one to 1.5 hours. I think that’s pretty good.

So, here’s a list of tips to make this mandatory weekly chore a bit more pleasant.

1. Meal plan.

I mentioned this on this blog before (and it still applies), we meal plan which makes the whole process of grocery shopping more stream-lined and efficient. Every Thursday night we write out a list of meals for the next week and add things to the shopping list accordingly.

2. Keep a running shopping list.

I have a list in Evernote (which I can access from my phone) and where I can easily add things when I notice that we’re about to run out of something. On Thursday, I add the rest of our meal planning ingredients to it, and voilà, there’s your complete shopping list.

3. Write your shopping list according to the shop layout.

I know people who write out their shopping lists by store department (e.g. meats, produce, dairy, frozen, etc.), which makes sense, but I actually go a step further and write my list out by aisles the way I’ll walk through the store. If you shop at the same stores, you’ll soon know the layout of the store. I walk the aisles in the same order every time and my grocery lists is written accordingly, which makes for a much quicker trip through the store.

4. Pick a good time to shop.

If you want to make grocery shopping quick and painless, pick a good time to go to the store. I usually try to go on Fridays shortly before or after lunch time. I know I have the luxury of doing my grocery shopping on my day off, but there are other times during the week that are not peak hours (e.g. Wednesday nights).

5. Help bagging.

That’s a pet peeve of mine, but I see so many people standing around with their arms crossed while the clerk rings up the items and bags them afterwards. SMH. I mean, unless there is a second person there to bag the groceries, be proactive and help bagging your own purchases. Not only will this speed up the time you spend at the store, you’ll also have the freedom to pack your stuff the way you like. I often like things grouped a certain way, heavy stuff in my canvas bags, smaller stuff in my basket. (Not to brag, but store clerks have commented on my badass bagging skills and wanted to know if I had worked as a grocery bagger before. Nope, just a skilled, common-sense human being over here. Haha.)

Do you have any more tips to make grocery shopping fast and efficient?

5

What I read in September

October 2, 2019 filed under: books

Phew. Seven books in September. I am liking it and wouldn’t mind for this to continue. I enjoyed all these books, don’t let some of the lower ratings fool you too much. I can be critical sometimes when plots are not coherent or resolve too conveniently, but all of these books were definitely worth my time (and maybe yours!)

Goodnight, June by Sarah Jio (★★★★☆)

Jio explains in the preface what inspired her to write the story and she builds it around the Margaret Wise Brown’s famous children’s book “Goodnight Moon” and how it may have come about.

Successful NYC banker June Andersson inherits her beloved aunt Ruby’s bookstore, Bluebird Books, in Seattle and must return to her hometown to sort out her affairs. In the process, she learns that her aunt shared a deep friendship with Margaret Wise Brown, through a string of letters between the two women.

While the story has its flaws, it was heart-warming and beautiful. I always cringe a little bit when the plot seems almost too convenient and things fall into place just a tad too easily, but Jio’s writing and the way she wove together two separate stories into a book of friendship, sisterhood, and family mystery, with a side of romance was just the kind of book I was hoping to read after some heavier topics in my recently picked books.

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (★★★★★)

I was a little hesitant when I realized that this book was written in free verse, but turns out, it almost read like a regular book with the freedom to condense and abbreviate otherwise elaborate parts, while still telling a beautiful, emotionally full story. It totally worked and I felt myself enamored by Woodson’s childhood memories and take-aways. I read this book in one sitting (granted, it’s a fast read!) and you should, too.

Under rose-tainted skies by Louise Gornell (★★★☆☆)

This YA book reminded me a lot of “Everything, Everything” by Nicole Yoon. Teenage Norah who lives with terrible anxiety and OCD is trapped in her own home, can’t even go to school anymore and has been in therapy for years, but then she falls in love with Luke, the boy who moves in next door. You can pretty much see where this is going. While I appreciated some deeper insights on what it can feel like to live with mental illness (apparently, the author also suffers from anxiety and OCD), I was also really frustrated with this book. First of all, the plot moves really slowly (so slowly that I had to keep myself motivated to keep reading) and really not much happens. And then I have a real problem with the notion that “love can cure mental illness”. It can’t and it won’t. This book did a better job advocating for people who live with mental illness, but knowing people who live with these challenges, I also thought Norah’s level of anxiety/OCD/agoraphobia was taken to the extreme.

Das Herzhören (The Art of Hearing Heartbeats) by Jan-Philip Sendker (German edition) (★★★★☆)

Julia’s father disappears the day after she graduates from college and leaves her family in turmoil. A few years later, her mother gives her a love letter her father had once written to someone named Mi Mi and Julia decides to follow the address all the way to her father’s hometown in Burma (now Myanmar) to solve the mystery of his disappearance. 

I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy the fairytale-style writing, descriptive and evocative language, and the love story behind it all, but as so often, I can get pretty critical with the details of a story, and there were definitely a few things that bothered me about the book. The story was mostly told by U Ba, who Julia meets in a coffeeshop upon her arrival in Burma and who claims that he’d long been waiting for her visit. Through most of the book, we don’t know how U Ba is related to the story and it’s odd that he’s able to tell her the story of her father in an almost omniscient voice. There is also a huge ‘beating the odds’ thing going on in this story, which is almost a little much, and a whole lot of unanswered questions in the end.

My rating hovers between 3 and 4 stars for me, but I gave it 4 stars because of the beautiful writing (Note: I read this book in German, I can’t speak much to the flow of the English translation and – if you follow me on Instagram – you know that I had some issues with it, because I noticed when I did a random page-to-page comparison, that some passages had been dropped in the English translation.)

The Alchemy of Noise: A Novel by Lorraine Devon Wilke (★★★★☆)

This beautifully written novel starts out as a regular love story about two people who happen to cross paths and fall head-over-heels for each other. But this is not a regular love story because Sidonie, the manager of a popular events bar in Chicago, is white and Chris, who she hires as the sound manager, is black. The book explores the hope of “love conquers all” and the reality that two different worlds still exist for white and black people in America. Sidonie and Chris experience this first hand and straddling the two worlds will be a challenge for them that could ultimately break them.

Wilke does a great job developing not just the two main characters of this book, but also the characters of their families and friends. You feel like you’re really getting to know them, almost feel like this story is real, because we all know people like Sidonie and Chris. To perfectly strike that balance of well-developed side characters without taking away from the main characters is the true art of writing.  At first, you might be taken aback by the fact that this book about racial tensions, was written by a white woman. However, Wilke’s note at the end of the book explains why she feels qualified to tell this particular story, and she does so with a lot of bravery and humanity. Definitely recommend!

I Was Hungry: Cultivating Common Ground to End an American Crisis by Jeremy K Everett (★★★☆☆)

I give this book 3.5 stars (as I struggled with the “Christian” approach and the organization of the chapters), even though I wanted to give it 5 for such an important topic: hunger and poverty in America. One in eight Americans struggles with hunger, and more than thirteen million children live in food insecure homes. I think Everett is doing incredibly important work and he calls upon people to  find common ground to work together, not compete against each other in the fight against hunger. He emphasizes the importance of a coordinated response to the crisis. When every organization is focused on doing ‘their own thing’, it results in duplicated efforts and at the same time creates gaps of services, while resources go underutilized. 

The girl who chased the moon by Sarah Addison Allen (★★★☆☆)

This was a fun read, and don’t let the 3 stars fool you into believing that I didn’t enjoy this book, there were just a few things that ‘bothered’ me. First of all, this felt like a YA novel, even though it’s not labeled as one. When her mom passes away, 17-year old Emily has to move in with her grandfather that she has never met to a town where people apparently have bad memories about her mom. It sets Emily on a mission to find out what happened in her mom’s past.

Allen actually pursues two storylines in this book, Emily’s and Julia’s. Julia is an old classmate of Emily’s mother and has returned to the town temporarily to take care of some family business, when hers and Emily’s paths cross. Each character has a lot of baggage and I feel like Allen could have developed each one into their own story, but neither story was developed enough to stand on its own and the characters remained emotionally flat in many ways.

I enjoyed some of the magical elements in this story (Emily’s grandfather being a ‘real life giant’, changing wallpaper, the Mullaby lights, etc.), but also grew kind of critical about the predictability of the plot line.

What did you read in September? Anything you’d like to recommend? Leave a comment, and then add me on Goodreads to keep in touch.

4

Hi, I am San – German native, dual-citizen living in beautiful Northern California. Runner. Knitter. Crafter. Reader. Writer. Proud aunt, sister, and friend.

I’ve been blogging since 2004 and don’t intend to stop any time soon. If you are looking for personal content and making a  genuine connection, you’ve come to the right place.

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