Take a Chance Challenge #5--Phone an Author

5.  Phoning an Author.  Pick a random last name out of the phone book.  Find an author with the same last name and read a book by them.  Write about it.

The last name I chose out of the phone book was Eldredge.  I was thrilled when I did a search of authors with the last name Eldredge to find John Eldredge.  He is the author of the book "Wild at Heart," a book all about men.  If you have a man in your life or you are a man I highly recommend reading this book.  "Wild at Heart" is not the book I read for this challenge though.  For this challenge I read, "Walking With God"  (BTW--it bugs me to put book titles in quotation marks instead of underlining them but I don't have the option of underlining in my blog--sorry to all you grammar people).  The beginning of the summary on the back cover says, "This is a series of stories of what it looks like to walk with God, over the course of about a year."  Eldredge basically published his journal from a year when he was consciously walking with God.  Consulting God on every decision and where it took him.  How things went when he listened and obeyed and how things went when he didn't.  I enjoyed the book for the most part but my walk with God looks very different and at times I thought I should be more like Eldredge in my relationship with God but at other times I disagreed with some things he did and said.  Overall though it was a good book and it certainly made me think and evaluate.  I could relate to much of Eldredge's struggles.  He struggles with trying to do too much and not being able to sit still and just listen to God.  He is always trying to do the next thing.  I am the queen of that.  I have a very hard time just sitting and doing nothing of consequence.  Unless you consider reading but I even make that something to cross off my list.  I'm always in a hurry to get to the next book because I might die and not get to read every book I want to read.   I am overproductive all the time and it is exhausting!  I fall into bed every night spent and worn out.  Sure, I accomplish a lot but at what cost.  Being still with God and listening is close to impossible with me but I'm working on it and God is working on me and I'm so thankful for His grace and mercy.  Here are some highlights that I marked...(I kept tearing little pieces off my bookmark to mark pages)

• "God wants us to be happy.  But he knows that we cannot be truly happy until we are completely His and until He is our all.  And the weaning process is hard.  The sorrows of our lives are in great part his weaning process.  We give our hearts over to so many things other than God.  We look to so many other things for life.  I know I do.  Especially the very gifts that he himself gives to us--they become more important to us than he is.  That's not the way it is supposed to be.  As long as our happiness is tied to the things we can lose, we are vulnerable."  
• "In learning to hear the voice of God, one thing is certain--if you cannot hear a 'no,' you will have a hard time hearing God at all or believing that what you think you've heard is in fact from God.  This is crucial--hearing God requires surrender, giving all things over into His hands. Not abandoning your desires, but yielding them to God.
• Each day ask God, "How am I doing, God? How do I think I'm doing, and how do You think I'm doing?"  and then LISTEN.
• "To come to Chist and realign yourself with Him at the end of your day when you are utterly spent and don't want to pray has a deeply sanctifying effect."

Take a Chance Challenge #10--Movie/Book Comparison

10. Movie/Book Comparison. Find a book that you haven't read that has a movie based on it that you haven't seen. Read the book and watch the movie within a few days of each other. Write about your reactions to both the book and the movie and compare the two.

I recently read "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" for book club and found out that there was a movie based on the book that was produced in the 1940s. So, I checked it out from the library and watched it. As usual, I like the book considerably more than the movie but I usually still like the movie. I have to say that I don't like this movie at all. The book really should have never been made into a movie. So much of the book is just Francie's thoughts and feelings and memories of her life. That is impossible to portray in a movie. Also, in the book Francie feels a distance from her mother but is never rude or disrespectful but they show her being downright insolent towards her mother in the movie. They took what is a very minor theme in the book and turn it into a major theme in the movie. They didn't include so many of the colorful characters that are described in the book and changed the story quite a bit. I disliked this movie so much that I consider to have been a waste of my time to watch it. Read the book, don't see the movie!!

Take a Chance Challenge #2--Random Word

I've finished another book for the Take a Chance Challenge This one was --

2. Random Word. Go to this random word generator and generate a random word. Find a book with this word in the title. Read the book and write about it.

My random word was "seat" and I found a great book called, "Answering 911 Life in the Hot Seat" by Caroline Burau. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Burau writes about life as a 911 operator the good, the bad, and the ugly. Her writing style reminded me so much of Ann Marie--her sense of humor and her take on things. I love Ann Marie's writing so of course I loved this book. One of the things I enjoyed was how she so frankly talked about her feelings when it came to certain calls. How she would be on the edge of her seat as the drama played out and then the police would arrive and she'd be cut off never knowing how it ended. It made me think about the woman that I talked to the day Joe choked when he was about 7 months old. I was completely hysterical, trying to save my baby and listen to her at the same time. I was screaming and at one point yelling at her. She was telling me to lay him down and take his clothes off. He was blue, passed out, totally limp and I could feel the pluot (a fruit that is a mix between a plum and apricot) pit at the opening of his throat. I was slowly and carefully trying to get my fingernail around it and get it out. I was NOT going to take the time to lay him down and take his clothes off and I screamed at her, "NO!!" and then I think I just dropped the phone. It's all a big blur to me. I did get the pit out after probably 3 or 4 minutes and then he didn't start breathing. I had to lay him down and give him mouth to mouth resuscitation and then he started breathing and crying. That's about the time the EMTs walked in and the first thing they said was, "a crying baby--that's good." They sounded as relieved as I was. I can't remember what I did with the phone but I probably picked it up, said, "they're here" and hung it up. That poor woman--to have to listen to my screams of desperation--it must have been awful. Soon after it happened I thought about seeing if I could get a copy of my 911 call--I was most curious to see how long it lasted. But, I never did. I didn't want to relive those few minutes. I thought about that a lot as I read this book.
I highly recommend this book, it was a fun and fast read, something I never would have come across if it hadn't been for this challenge. This makes up for the one book that I didn't like at all.

Take a Chance Challenge #9--Poetic Review

I am so completely not a poet so I am really going out on a limb here but my "I must do it all" personality has spurred me on to try and be poetic. Here are the guidelines for this challenge:

9. Poetic Review. Write a book review in three different forms of verse: haiku, limerick and free verse. (You can pick any book you want to write about.)

I chose the book "Julie and Julia" to write my poetic review. I have to say that I didn't love the book. It was okay but got a little long and was a bit depressing. I want to see the movie but am waiting until it comes out on DVD. I enjoyed hearing about her challenge and how it went but the book was a little boring. Here is my poetic review--

Haiku

Julie and Julia
On a quest to cook French food
Mastered the jelly

Limerick

French cooking she wanted to master
The kitchen stayed quite a disaster
Good food she created
And felt quite sated
Her butt got vaster and vaster

Free Verse

julie
a challenge
one year to
master the art of french cooking
and write about it
small kitchen
dirty dishes
flies
friends
lobster
jellies
victorious
the master unimpressed
the end

Take a Chance Challenge #1--Random Book Selection

This challenge required me to go the bookstore or library and make up my own rules before I went in.  So, I went to the library of course--too cheap for the bookstore.  I walked to the fiction section and went in 3 rows, walked to the middle, went down 3 rows from the top and then 10 books over.  That lead me to "A Catskill Eagle" by Robert B. Parker.  This book (as I've mentioned a few times now) is not what I would normally enjoy reading but if I liked shoot-em-up and kill-em mysteries it would've been great.  The story line was good and mostly kept my interest.  I did enjoy reading something a little different but was glad to be done!

Take a Chance Challenge 4--Judge a Book by its Cover

I'm not doing these challenges in order...hope that's okay. Challenge 4 was to pick a book based solely on its cover and then blog about it. I was in the library the other day picking out a book for Challenge 1 and sitting on a random counter was a book that caught my eye. I love books that are paperback and have a flashy cover. This one had a woman and a computer and was titled, "SAHM I Am." I recognized SAHM as an acronym for "Stay at Home Mom," and that interested me as well as the flashy cover. I assumed it had something to do with being a mom and the computer or texting or some other techno thing. All of which caught my attention.
So, I read the book in less than 24 hours. I loved it! It turned out to be pretty much what I expected but I didn't expect it to be written as all e-mails. This book is about an e-mail loop of SAHM's who share their lives with each other. Since I am in a similar e-mail loop I found it to be quite funny in some parts. The book is written satirically and really makes fun of some over achieving SAHM's as well as some crazy situations moms can get themselves into. It was a very enjoyable read just like I thought it would be based on the cover.