52 Short Stories

 When I was 7 years old, my great-grandparents decided to renew their wedding vows for their 65th anniversary. And this quickly became a family affair given the rarity of such an occurrence. They decided they wanted the entire family together for the ceremony: grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, anyone remotely connected to the family by blood, marriage or adoption. And the only venue big enough was a cruise ship, which made the whole celebratory event that much more exciting.  I was really looking forward to the trip -- a giant family reunion vacation -- where I could hang out with all of my cousins, eat all the food I wanted (and whatever kinds of food I wanted -- dessert first every single night even!) and try out all the fun activities both on and off the boat. Obviously the percentage of rooms booked by my family and relatives was a small percentage compared to all the rooms available on a giant cruise ship, but by sheer force of numbers, we had quite a bit of...

Here are some Books I wish I had been assigned in Middle School and High School I used to hate rating. So much so in fact that for most of high school, I got by reading SparkNotes alone. When I went to grad school, I lived on campus my first year, but that proved to be financially impossible to maintain so I decided to commute...3 and a half hours round trip, 4 days a week. Music and thinking about life worked for a while, but sitting in traffic day after day left me feeling like I was wasting my life -- or at the very least, doing something wrong. Enter, audio books. Which eventually led me to actually finish reading my first novel in about a decade, and I was so proud of my accomplishment that I decided to start keeping track of every single book I read or listened to. The list has grown long now because I discovered that there are actually in existence quite a lot of books and authors I enjoy reading -- I just had not been introduced to them or at least not introduced properly. So i...