Book Review #1 - The Lord of the Rings + Challenger Deep

Hello!

Welcome to the first book review of the 2016 Reading Challenge!

Throughout the year I will be posting book reviews over the books in my 2016 Reading Challenge. It sounds simple because it is simple. I will try to update as often as possible because I want the content of the book(s) to be fresh on my mind so I can give my most accurate opinion.

Three weeks into the new year and I have finished two of my books! The first one I read was The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien. This was for my A Book & its Prequel category. The second book was Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman. This was for my National Book Award Winner category. So let's just jump right into the reviews!

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
Category: A Book & its Prequel
Rating: 9/10
Summary: Detailed, long read, imaginative, vast

This is one of my favorite trilogies and favorite worlds in Book Land. I absolutely love the idea of Middle Earth and its history and stories. I have read the trilogy before, along with The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and a few other books from that land.

The Fellowship of the Ring is the beginning of Frodo Baggins' adventure, but it also ties in deeply with the history and conclusion of Middle Earth. There are many things in this book that, when reading it the first time around, felt lost on me, like I was missing pages with valuable information. However, after reading The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, this story line is a lot more clear to me.

There are a few things I like about Tolkien's writing. First, he is detailed. I love detail because it allows me to imagine the character more accurately while I'm reading the story. I'm very visual and very right-brained, which means that as I'm reading I have to create the images I'm reading. If I don't get enough detail, I feel like I can't connect to the storyline. Second, his book has more story than meets the eye. Much of a character's history can be found in other books, which means that I can go find said books and learn more about the inhabitants of Middle Earth. Third, he is just a great writer. I learned long ago that some books have what I call "the hook." The hook is what gets me going. If the author writes something good enough or intriguing enough, I have to keep reading to find out what happens next. That is how Tolkien writes, in my opinion. He has the hook and reels me in every time!

One thing I like about this book in particular is that he gives each character the opportunity to have a personality. We all know it's about The Ring and how it needs to be destroyed, so the focus is mostly on Frodo. However, throughout the book, each of the characters of the fellowship are focused on which allows you to learn more about their character and get more insight on how they will help or hinder the company.

One thing that might confuse some and even confused me the first time reading this book is the plethora of "extra" characters that come up once and are never seen again. I have mixed feelings about this for which I will discuss my positive view and my negative view. My positive view is that, yes, there are all of these extra characters that pop up and disappear, but that is how life works. We have these random roles filled about us with people we never see again. I feel like Tolkien did a great job making this very realistic. However, as a book from a trilogy with a huge amount of characters, it is overwhelming... along with the 3-5 names each person is given (Elfish, Dwarf Tongue, Common Tongue, Old Tongue, etc) that you feel like you need to remember. It can just become overwhelming!

So to wrap this review up: I would recommend this, highly, to anyone who is willing to hyper-focus on the trilogy, and even perhaps delve into the Silmarillion and side-stories. However, if you're looking for a quick read, I would pass it up.

Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman
Category: A National Book Award Winner
Rating: 10/10
Summary: Creative, eye-opening, overwhelming, stigma-breaking

The original book I was supposed to read for National Book Award Winner was Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson. Apparently my Higher Power had better things in mind.

When I went to the bookstore this weekend, I was looking for Fortune Smiles and couldn't seem to find it. It looked like my bookstore had a huge sale and a lot of shelves were wiped clean. I didn't find too many of the books I was looking for and was wandering towards the front when I saw another book I needed for my list. Then, I glanced down and saw Challenger Deep. I remembered it being on the National Book Award list and thought, "I'd rather buy this book now than order the one I'm supposed to read online." What a lazy thought, but it proved to be exactly what I was supposed to do.

Without spoiling the book, the basis of the story is about a 15 year old boy named Caden Bosch who is struggling with a mental illness. You don't quite get it at first, pages 1-30 are a little random, but I think that's the point. It goes on to narrate the story inside of Caden's head, his thoughts on everything surrounding him.

I will admit, I did not quite understand what was going on. Then, there was this point about 50 pages or maybe 100 pages in where it clicked.

You see, I know several people who struggle with mental illness. I know someone who is bipolar and manic depressive. I never quite understood them, and still don't quite understand them, but this book helped show me what is going on inside their head. Sometimes they leave reality and become manic and paranoid over things we don't see or understand. My friend would tell me they think someone is following them home from work, or that someone was watching their house, that they couldn't leave their child with someone else because something could happen to the child. Most of the time I would ignore it, or think they were being weird, and I occasionally would get irritated if it happened more than once a week. Now I know it's not weird, but it's a mental illness. They can't help it. Even if they KNOW they are being irrational, they can't control the thinking in their head.

I don't know... this book struck a cord with me. It was very eye-opening. It's helped me to understand that mental illness can't be willed away. Some days the illness is bad, really bad, and some days it's just there waiting to take over.

If you have ever read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, I would like to think that Challenger Deep is a similar style, both stigma-breaking and eye-opening books. If you haven't read The Curious Incident, you should, it's a great book, another one I highly recommend.

I just have to finish with this: the stigma of mental illness is not good. I think many people don't understand what mental illnesses are and it makes them cast out those who have it. I don't quite understand bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, manic depression, and those other scary diagnoses. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully understand them, but this book gave me the inside scoop on how people with a mental illness deal with life. It's scary, terrifying even. I can't imagine going through that kind of ordeal. What I can do, however, is have compassion, and try my best to just accept them for who they are, even when I can't help.

So to wrap this review up: I would HIGHLY recommend this book. I don't care who you are, what genre you read, how much time you have, just read it. It took me one day to read, and I would stop to do laundry, make meals, play with the dog, etc. Just read it!

2015 Year in Review // 2016 Commitments

Happy New Year!

I can NOT believe it's 2016!

2015 was an interesting year. In many ways it challenged me to step out of my comfort zone and to face a lot of fears I had. I believe 2015 was a year of growth. I learned a lot about myself and I'm grateful for all of my experiences (the good, the bad, and the ugly).

I would love to do a recap of 2015. I won't make it as long as the ones I've done before. I want to focus more on 2016 because I'm excited for what's to come!

I started helping teens with that thing I do regularly. It has been interesting doing something for others that takes away selfish thinking. It has its ups and down (can someone say teenage hormones, because good grief) but overall it has been a fun experience. I struggled with this at first because I wanted so badly to save these kids from their homes (and themselves), but I've learned that I can't do that. I can only show them how to make changes within themselves if they want it. (Above photo was our anniversary celebration at Hey Day. What a great memory!)

Another thing that happened in 2015 was getting Bronson, and then finding him a new home. This was one of the hardest experiences I have ever had the pleasure(?) of dealing with. I wanted a second dog so badly and found Bronson via Craigslist. It seemed like a wonderful idea, and truthfully was nothing but good intentions, but... Bronson was the second most stressful living being I had ever dealt with all of my life. I'm going to be brutally honest here because I feel like it's important to tell the truth about what I was dealing with. I tried so hard changing my personality to fit Bronson's needs that I got incredibly depressed. The depression stemmed from feeling like a failure. I couldn't help Bronson become less timid and submissive, I couldn't prevent him from peeing in the house or submissively peeing, and when I failed I would get angry, then I would yell and holler and punish, then I would feel guilty and try it all over again. It caused a lot of problems in our house. I was miserable. I cried all the time. I only dealt with the dogs when I had to. I stopped talking to people. I felt terribly alone and isolated. I wanted to leave and never look back. When I finally spoke up about rehoming Bronson I was so stressed out. Thinking about it today still stresses me out. It caused a lot of tension and unwanted stress. But I had a choice to make: I was going to lose my mind or find this dog a new home. Eventually enough "incidents" happened to where I finally had a breaking point and found Bronson a new owner. The last I heard from the owner, Bronson is a very happy farm dog chasing all the deer and wildlife he wants.

Another experience in 2015 was job hunting. I talked about this in my last post but it was a major point in the last year, something that shaped my path and taught me a lot. I have learned (through that thing that I do regularly) that I am a huge people pleaser and full of fear. Maybe that's normal, maybe it's not, but my fear of disappointing people and fear of failure can ruin me. This is so serious that it's almost hard to talk about. I started struggling with my last job when some of the executive decision-making was making me uncomfortable, but I was so worried about upsetting my boss that I didn't do anything. Let's not forget that I was actually working two jobs for half of last year so I could pay my bills. I really questioned why I was allowing myself to suffer so much just to bake. Why would I put myself through something so tedious and not get anywhere when I have a degree in a very stable career field? So, after battling with my fears, I finally made the step to look for a new job in the fall. It took a few months but I finally got offered the job I'm currently at through OU. What's been fun to see in the last month is that my desire for baking and cooking at home has come back. I look forward to it instead of dreading it when I get home. I'm also less tired which in turn makes me less irritable. Last, but definitely not least, is that I am now financially stable, and can really look at doing things I've been holding off just so I could bake while barely making ends meet.

I also competed in the Oklahoma State Fair again. I didn't do as well as I wanted to, but I did place 1st in several categories and overall I did a great job raking in the ribbons. It was fun to recipe develop and try new things. It allowed me to take risks that I haven't done in baking before. Some of it worked, some of it didn't, but I feel like it made me more brave. One thing that has held me back over the past year or so is not having the money to try new recipes. I didn't want to waste $15 if the recipe was going to turn out okay. I've been wanting to work on new cheesecake recipes as well, and while it's hard for you to mess those up, cream cheese is expensive! I'm excited that I'll have the time and money to focus on more recipe developing and hopefully jump back into food blogging again!

Overall, I think 2015 has taught me one VERY important thing: I've gotta do me. I have to make the effort, the decisions, take the risks, the leaps of faith, I have to take care of me. If you noticed, I only talked about myself in this post. It's been a long time coming before I could manage to do that (and I had to rewrite a few paragraphs). Usually it was other people, places, and things that made me happy, but 2015 has taught me that only I can make myself happy. I can't rely on outside forces to do these things for me, I have to rely on what is on the inside. This year was hard. VERY hard. I made a lot of decisions that put me in EXTREMELY uncomfortable situations. I had to confront people. I had to quit a job I loved but could no longer financially support me. I had to get rid of a dog. I had to accept when I was wrong and amend those situations. I had to accept some situations that weren't going to go my way.

But here is the cool thing. Are you ready? You want to hear what happened?

Everything turned out okay.

2016 Commitments

I am like many other people in this world. I hate the word resolutions. When the New Year comes around, I groan just thinking about seeing all of these resolutions being made just so they can be broken in a month. Womp womp.

So this year I made the decision to change the word from resolutions to commitments. Why? Because I can make a commitment. I can hold a commitment. I feel like when I commit, it holds me accountable of something. It gives me more responsibility. I have also found that I can't seem to force myself to change. I can't just consciously think to myself, "Hey Kelli, let's stop doing this and from now on only do this." I mean... what. I can't do that. First off, I have to be willing to change. I feel like the new year forces people to pick things to change rather than become willing to change it. Sometimes I become willing in April. Or October. It's not always January. Second off, a lot of change for me occurs on the inside. Not the outside. Changing things on the outside don't make me feel better in the long run. I have to change the way I'm thinking and acting in order to change my life around me.

So this year I have just a couple of commitments.

1) Become more "house wife-y"
I know this doesn't make sense. I'm not married, this is true. This means, to me, that I want to do more at home. I want to cook more meals, I want to keep up with chores around the house, I want to spend more time at home. I spent a lot of last year just running around instead of embracing what was around me. I have a lovely home, an adorable pug, and hard working boyfriend, and I want to become more a part of that setting.

2) Embrace my delightfully weird self
In the past, I spent a lot of time hiding the things I enjoyed from people because I hated being judged. This last year I realized that if I spend all my time shaping myself to other peoples particular needs that I will never be able to embrace my weird. I love my weird. I am a nerd, a fan girl, I love to read, I love to do crafty things, I love to look up weird theories about books and movies and learn an unnecessary amount of information about them. So this year, I'm going to embrace that. If I see an awesome Harry Potter dress at Hot Topic and I can't live without it, then I'm going to buy it. If I see an opportunity to quote a line from Lord of the Rings in a conversation, then I'm going to quote it. If I have 4 hours on a random weekend to watch Game of Thrones obsessively and pine over the fact that Winds of Winter won't be out for a really long time, then I'm going to do that.

3) Read more books
I have an entire post about the 2016 Reading Challenge right here. Last year I read the first 5 (and the only published) A Song of Fire and Ice books by George R.R. Martin. (For those of you who don't know, that is where the TV show Game of Thrones comes from. Game of Thrones is the first book of the series. The rest of the books are all titled differently.) I really enjoyed reading something new for the first time in a while, so I decided that I would join a reading challenge to get myself reading new genres. Ironically enough, my first book is The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien, one that I have read before, but wanted to reread and it fit nicely into my challenge list.

4) Take care of myself
This is kind of generic, but something I want to focus on for 2016. Taking care of myself means a lot of things to me. Sometimes it means taking care of my body, such as skincare or exercise. Sometimes it means taking care of my emotions, such as journalling or meditating. Sometimes it means indulging in something, such as buying a new purse or getting my hair did. It even means taking care of my health, such as going to the dentist or the doctor when I need to. I spent a lot of time ignoring myself in 2015 (especially the first half) and just focusing on everything around me. I stopped wearing makeup, I stopped dressing nice, I stopped journaling, I stopped caring. It had a lot to do with being depressed, but I realize that I can't just ignore my body, my feelings, or my thoughts. I need to embrace them and work with them. If I'm having a bad day, I need to reset. If I'm tired, I need to take a nap. If I'm feeling ugly, I need to get dressed and put on some make up and fix my hair. I want to try to get back into yoga again, but I will be taking it very slowly since my body is recovering from working on my feet for the last 2ish years.

So! That's my 2016 commitments list! I'm looking forward to working on this a little bit at a time! Now, it's your turn to type! What are your 2016 commitments? Do you have any? Do you wish you could've made some? It's not too late! You can begin to grow and change any time you want to!