I love WORDS!  Language!  Story!  The sharing of the momentous and the minuscule and everything in between.  These days we have a superabundance of words available to us via everything from good ol’ books to magazines to YouTube to podcasts and blogs.  Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start reading/listening to all those words!

Voila!  Welcome to a new monthly link up with my friend Sheila over at Making the Most of Every Day and several others!  Each month we will share what we’re reading, watching, listening to, and following!  Word of mouth.  It has a huge impact on what I choose to spend time on, and I think this will be a great tool to use…and a lot of fun as well!

READ:

Sheila recently loaned a book to me, and I couldn’t believe how much I liked it!  Memoir is tricky for me.  It’s not my favorite genre, but this one was fascinating and powerful both in the story told and the advice given in the last section.  The book is The Ways We Choose: Lessons for Life from a POW’s Experience by Dave Carey.  The author brilliantly manages to share the horrors of living as a POW (prisoner of war) for over five years in Hanoi, North Vietnam while still making the reader chuckle out loud!  WHAT?!?  I appreciated his ability to make me feel deeply without pitching me into the pit of despair.  (I don’t like going there.)

Part 1 of the book is called “The Story” and Part 2 is “So What?”  I appreciated Part 2 just as much as I did Part 1.  He explains how he and his fellow POWs “did it.”  How they got through such a challenging circumstance.  Their strategies apply beautifully to situations we face in everyday life; amazingly so.  Here’s one passage that really struck me:

“I found out that stress isn’t entirely bad for us.  Nowadays stress gets blamed for everything, and some if it is a bum rap.  Sailing offers a good analogy.  Stress is what makes a sailboat move through the water.  It is the tension of the wind against the sail that produces movement.  If there’s not enough tension, there’s no movement; too much tension, and the boat tips over.”

Astute, no?  Anyway, I highly recommend this book.  I’ve already bought copies for my husband and our son, and  I suspect I will give more copies as gifts in the months ahead!

WATCH:

I’m finding a major dearth of things to watch on television right now.  (Other than FOOTBALL which is finally rolling again!  Hallelujah!)  Thankfully, Netflix is allowing me to revisit an old friend, The West Wing.  I am happy to report that the show is as smart and fast moving as I remembered!  The relationships and the psychology of this show make it an all-time favorite of mine.

LISTEN:

And what’s really GREAT is that I’ve just discovered a new podcast to listen to!  It’s The West Wing Weekly!  Is that cool or what?!?  Joshua Malina, who played Will Bailey on The West Wing, and Hrishikesh Hirway, a self-professed “political news junkie,” host the podcast, and each week they discuss one episode of the show, beginning with Season 1.  That’s mighty convenient for me, I have to tell you!  It’s SO much fun to watch an episode of the TV show and then listen to the corresponding episode of the podcast!  I find myself nodding in agreement with the hosts and shouting YES, THAT! to a lot of the things they say.

FOLLOW:

A fun story I’m following is the makeover of a vintage trailer!  My friend Karla and her husband recently purchased an old travel trailer and are updating it and making it super cute!  Their story starts here.  Follow her blog and watch the transformation!

What are YOUR favorite forms of media/communication?  Do you have any recommendations of things for me (and others!) to READ, WATCH, LISTEN, or FOLLOW?  Leave a comment below!

And be sure to jump over to Making the Most of Every Day to see what others are sharing!  Link up with us there!

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