This book by Ali Redford and illustrated by Kara Simpson is more or less explained by its title. It's about overcoming childhood trauma and becoming vulnerable enough to develop real and meaningful relationships, grounded in trust and kindness, with other people, and its straightforward metaphorical slant on this works pretty well. Probably a good one to read with emotionally-repressed kids of five to nine or so.
Sorry - I keep reading really short books as a brief escape from the heaviness that is my dissertation and then find myself compelled to write a blog post about them. This book was also pretty heavy to be fair but I've been reading about Daesh all morning, so in comparison...
Okay fine no more super-short books. I feel vaguely guilty for artificially-inflating the little numbers in the right-hand column of my blog. Unfortunately, while I am working my way through an average of two or three books a day for Project Öcalan, none of these books are actually finished or read in full - just relevant chapters and sections. Some of them probably will be. Irregardless there are several in my (over summer considerably smaller than usual) Currently Recreationally Reading Pile that I'm towards the end of, so if the next post on here is also about some random kids' book that took me about as much time to digest as it takes me to have a normal-size/consistency poo, then I no longer deserve my loyal readership. Oh wait - there isn't one. I will read what I like. But frankly the stuff in my CRRP* is way more fun for me to read, and however wholesome this book itself may be to the stable development of emotionally-damaged children, it's not the kind of book I can mull over and say interesting stuff about either,** so to the purpose of generating quality content, I'm sticking with the CRRP and will stop perusing items on my parents' bookshelves willy-nilly.
* Now there's an initialism I can get behind. So many posts when I'm referring to stuff I'm currently reading of my own accord I have to tap out some fat selection of words - now condensed into a mere four letters! This truly is the future.
** I mean, if I really wanted to give it a go, I'd probably be able to extrapolate some points about fragile masculinity and how it takes root even in childhood, also the utter fundamentality of childhood care and loving nurturing environments for proper self-realisation - but that would be to stretch the purpose of the book which is to deconstruct the walls of the children being read this book, and I said that in the first paragraph and I reiterate this book probably would work quite well as heavy-handed metaphor in building those bridges, assuming it's being read in a context of stability and kindness so the child can let down their walls in complete trust - whatever. There are other books in the CRRP that deal with this in greater depth*** so I will discuss it in the posts about those.
*** Actually come to think of it, there aren't - but there is another pile of books with the specific designation of purpose being that it is comprised of items that will be added into the CRRP once I have finished items in it. This procedure is fairly non-standardised, and the limits of the CRRP are generally determined simply by how many bookmarks**** I have readily to hand; finishing a book means rotating its bookmark into a new item from the pre-CRRP pile (let's call that one the Pre-selected Upcoming Reading Pile, or PURP) and, obviously, adding it to the CRRP - though sometimes I will follow spontaneous personal whims or recommendations of friends or the necessity of impending due-back-at-library dates, and bypass the PURP to add such items directly into the CRRP... how did this get so complicated!? Anyway, there are items in the PURP that deal with, in proper depth, the potential non-fiction discussion topics thrown up by this book.
**** I ostensibly have eight of these, but the CRRP's average size tends to hover between eight and twelve items at any given time. There are several things that I've been using as bookmarks for a long time which are definitively Not Proper Bookmarks, once hopefully once I whittle down the CRRP to seven***** items (this will happen over summer, as the PURP and the contents of my entire bookshelf are in storage - all I have (except for a bag-for-life full of library books which I am not going to read all of because they are for Project Öcalan) are the CRRP as it stood at the end of June, and a half-dozen university library books which I plan on speed-reading), these can be relieved of their duty, and rotation can ensue with consistency. Writing it out like this makes it sound like I've given this a lot of thought, though I literally don't think about it at all (giving them initialisms makes it sound like a deliberative process); the CRRP and PURP are entirely organic circumstantial sets, and quite often books will sit in them for Long Times without my attention while I breeze through shorter or for-whatever-reason-more-appealing items that have passed through neither pile.
***** One of the bookmarks I'm not fond of. It's metal, which means it slides out of books (especially paperbacks) really easily, and it has engraved on it a list of fifty of the 'greatest books of all time', and while it does list some quality titles, it also lists Moby Dick - and moreover I have always been vaguely suspicious of efforts to rank and quantify things that are essentially qualitative, subjective, and aesthetic.
*** Actually come to think of it, there aren't - but there is another pile of books with the specific designation of purpose being that it is comprised of items that will be added into the CRRP once I have finished items in it. This procedure is fairly non-standardised, and the limits of the CRRP are generally determined simply by how many bookmarks**** I have readily to hand; finishing a book means rotating its bookmark into a new item from the pre-CRRP pile (let's call that one the Pre-selected Upcoming Reading Pile, or PURP) and, obviously, adding it to the CRRP - though sometimes I will follow spontaneous personal whims or recommendations of friends or the necessity of impending due-back-at-library dates, and bypass the PURP to add such items directly into the CRRP... how did this get so complicated!? Anyway, there are items in the PURP that deal with, in proper depth, the potential non-fiction discussion topics thrown up by this book.
**** I ostensibly have eight of these, but the CRRP's average size tends to hover between eight and twelve items at any given time. There are several things that I've been using as bookmarks for a long time which are definitively Not Proper Bookmarks, once hopefully once I whittle down the CRRP to seven***** items (this will happen over summer, as the PURP and the contents of my entire bookshelf are in storage - all I have (except for a bag-for-life full of library books which I am not going to read all of because they are for Project Öcalan) are the CRRP as it stood at the end of June, and a half-dozen university library books which I plan on speed-reading), these can be relieved of their duty, and rotation can ensue with consistency. Writing it out like this makes it sound like I've given this a lot of thought, though I literally don't think about it at all (giving them initialisms makes it sound like a deliberative process); the CRRP and PURP are entirely organic circumstantial sets, and quite often books will sit in them for Long Times without my attention while I breeze through shorter or for-whatever-reason-more-appealing items that have passed through neither pile.
***** One of the bookmarks I'm not fond of. It's metal, which means it slides out of books (especially paperbacks) really easily, and it has engraved on it a list of fifty of the 'greatest books of all time', and while it does list some quality titles, it also lists Moby Dick - and moreover I have always been vaguely suspicious of efforts to rank and quantify things that are essentially qualitative, subjective, and aesthetic.
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