Week in Review: Nervous Conditions, How to Spot a Great Idea, Janet Carding Interview
For the past year, my blogging has been sporadic. To develop the habit of blogging frequently again, I am doing Sarah Arrow’s 30-Day Blogging Challenge a second time. That’s why you are getting a blog post from me today. There was so much good content the first time around, that it’s very difficult to remember everything, so it makes sense to do it again, especially if I expect to graduate to A-List Blogger status.
As someone who is an introvert, who observes people all the time, I like Sarah’s way of doing things. She is very knowledgeable, but has this understated way of doing things. I guess, I am very tired of all the hype, and I have turned off the sound to many so-called influencers and authority figures, in the blogging space.
Monday: Black History Month – A Look at Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Most of my readers know that I am hosting a Read the World Challenge. We started off the reading challenge reading Africa. I opted to read Nervous Conditions written by a Zimbabwean author. The book is a coming of age story that deals with colonialism, class and gender. It’s not easy to read this book because of the subject matter, but books like Nervous Conditions are important because they help us to develop cultural awareness, which is part of what the Read the World Challenge is about. By the way, February is Celebrated as Black History Month in North America and the United Kingdom, so it’s the perfect time for me to publish my thoughts on Nervous Conditions
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Related: Black History Month: Celebrating Black Authors
Tuesday: Bookpacking: Bringing Books to Life, Journeying with the Author. A friend told me about bookpacking after I mentioned my Read the World Challenge. I decided to explore the concept – imagine physically traveling to the places you encounter in your favorite books. I found an interesting website, Bookpackers.com, where Andrew Chater, an award-winning filmmaker, is using some great stories to tour the United States, recreating the journey in the books he selected.
Wednesday: Read the World Challenge Month One Recap. Although the Read the World Challenge officially started in January, do not let it stop you from joining now. The challenge is structured so that you can start at any time. However, you will always start at Month One. In this blog post, I do a recap of what happened in Month One – the most popular books and so on. We hang out in the Read the World Facebook Group, so please feel free to join.
Related: Read the World Challenge
Thursday: How to Spot a Great Idea – What to Look For. Have you ever performed a task, that when you reviewed later, you were totally dissatisfied? That happened to me recently. In preparation for the Read the World Challenge, I wrote a post about where great ideas came from. You see, a big part of the Read the World Challenge is for participants to extract five big ideas from each book they read, then start connecting ideas from various books to cross-pollinate the ideas. I assumed that people would be able to spot great ideas. I wrote How to Spot a Great idea, but I still think it’s a work in progress.
Friday: Janet Carding, Director, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery – An Interview. I conducted this interview nearly a year ago, and am just publishing it. I recognize that I am not Wonder Woman, and I needed the space and time to grieve my brother’s sudden death. As a result, some things were pushed to the back burner. This is a fantastic interview and there are many wisdom bits sprinkled throughout the interview. Get a pen to take notes or you can simply print the interview, then highlight information that’s important to you.
If you’d like to comment on this post, please do so on my Facebook page. You can still join the Read the World Challenge.
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