Cat Pollock Writes

Six weeks, friends. We're at a little over 10% of the way through the challenge (woohoo!) Today's book up for review: Wrecked: When a Broken World Slams Into Your Comfortable Life Jeff Goins, 2012, Moody Publishers Find it where I found it: Kobo Books Summary: Wrecked is about learning how to "live life with purpose", to repeat an oft-turned phrased. More specifically, it's about finding the middle ground between dreams of a better world and daily responsibility. Why I Read It: I got a crack at the ebook for free. Opinion: There was a lot in this book I found myself nodding along in agreement with (based on my life experience). One of the key points that seems to bleed off the pages of Wrecked is how necessary of an ingredient commitment is to the recipe of a life filled with purpose. I saw commitment as the most common thread between personal stories Goins shares - instances where commitments were kept and where they weren...

A few months ago, I made a massive, terrifying, trajectory-changing decision about my life. Bolstered by the confidence of family and friends and buoyed by the promise from God that He would provide... I quit my job, just before leaving for Kenya. I quit it, and after I returned I made the dive into full-on freelance worker-ness. If worker-ness is even a word. I'm starting nearly from scratch, and duh-ude, is it hard to start there. Slow. Completely uncertain. Faith building, yeah, but that doesn't change the fact that I don't want to look at my bank account balance right now. Or that every proposal rejection doesn't sting. That it's depressing to check my email to see that nothing has come in yet, but I do it anyway. It's slow. I want to be busier. I'm used to having little free time in my schedule and many more things to do than I can fit in. My feet want to go, go, go. My hands want to do, do, do. My brain wants to keep planning, plotting, ...

No preamble today - straight to the review! Hitler, Vol. 1: 1889-1936 Hubris Ian Kershaw, 1998, W.W. Norton & Company Find it where I found it: Amazon.com Link Hitler, Vol. 1: 1889-1936 Hubris - Click to tweet Summary: Hitler, Vol.1: 1889-1936 Hubris is the first of two volumes about the life of German Chancellor and eventual dictator Adolf Hitler, written by British historian Ian Kershaw. This first volume explores his life from the time he was born until the remilitarization of the Rhineland (an area Germany had been forced to demilitarize as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919) in early 1936. Why I Read It: I've got a thing for history. I've had a thing for German history since I was a kid, and a thing for the time period between World War I and World War II since college. If you need any indication for how much of a thing it is - I did an independent study on it. This was one of the books I picked up to read as part of that ...

This morning is the first morning all week I've had enough energy to get up and get moving before 9AM. First morning I set the alarm with the intention of getting out of bed before noon. First morning I haven't looked at my goals list for the day and immediately drawn a line through a third of the items on it because I just didn't have the energy to complete them. First time I haven't seen that list as the enemy and tried to pretend like I never wrote the thing out in the first place. Depression can really do that to a girl when it kicks in. To be fair, a lot of the triggers have been pulled recently. I haven't been practicing self-care the way I should for a good while now. I've gotten sick a few times. Finances are stressing me out. I'm grieving multiple losses (people and things). It's the time of year where I need to be vigilant because depression like to creep up on me. In the words of the infamous Marty Deeks, "I'm stingin' al...

I don't even know how to tell you how applicable the book I review this week is, but here's my review of it: You're Going to Be Okay: Encouraging Truth Your Heart Needs to Hear, Especially On the Hard Days Holley Gerth ( website ), 2014, Revell. Find it where I found it: Google Play Book Link You're Going to Be Okay Book Review - Click to Tweet Summary: You're Going to Be Okay, by Holley Gerth, is about walking through hard circumstances, and learning to walk through them with the knowledge and assurance that you are going to be okay. It's specifically aimed at women, and offers wisdom and advise - including strategies to overcome the mental and emotional issues that come up during those times. Why I Read It: I was in the middle of going through some things that were really beating me up a couple of years ago, when a post about it from one of my former World Race squad coaches showed up in my Facebook feed. My attention shifted pr...

July 4th, 2010. Not my first Fourth of July spent away from home, but definitely my first in another country. My team was in Mwanza, Tanzania, and there were no fireworks, parades, or other celebrations of the anniversary of America becoming a nation. We lived in a house with two other teams that month. Two other teams were on the other side of town, one team was in Eastern Tanzania, and one more team was headed back to Kenya because their ministry in Tanzania didn't work out, but something in Kenya was being arranged. So the six teams that were in Mwanza for the Fourth had a party that night. Lots of music, games, and catching up on what everyone else had been doing in Kenya. The neighborhood couldn't have missed the spectacle of 40+ Mzungu in one place. Just like the robbers didn't miss the opportunity when they discovered we hadn't securely locked up the front door after our guests left and before we went to sleep. Like thieves in the night took on a whole ...

This week's review: The Best American Short Stories 2001 Katrina Kenison (Series Editor) ( website ) Barbara Kingsolver (Guest Editor) ( website ) 2001. Houghton Mifflin Company Find it where I found it: Amazon.com Link Summary: The Best American Short Stories 2001  is an anthology of short stories published between January of 2000 and January of 2001 in American and Canadian literary journals by authors that reside in the two countries. It is part of a series called The Best American Short Stories, which has been in publication in 1915, and continues to this day. Why I Read It: I love a good story, whether it is as short as a flash fiction story or an entire series of novels. Anthologies like this give me a lot of stories in a smaller space, and they give me the chance to discover authors I've never read before that I never would have found on my own. I stumbled onto this series because the previous year's anthology was assigned reading for an...