Book Review: Super Structures
Katie 
Super Structures is all about some of the great structures in the world and their history. Building structures can go all the way back to the pyramids. In addition to talking a bit about the structures, there is also instructions on how to build your own using different pieces. In addition to pyramids you can also learn about and build pillars and posts, arches, domes, and my personal favorite, bridges. It features some of my favorite bridges – Golden Gate in San Francisco and Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia. It then goes into towers and sky scrapers, big wheels, and finally wind turbines. I kind of wish I had the actual model kit so I could try to build some of these structures instead of just the e-book where I can only read about them.
I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review, I was not otherwise compensated. This book was released October 16, 2018 from Quarto Publishing Group.
About the Book
From the Ancient Pyramids to the Eiffel Tower, get ready to take a close-up look at some awesome man-made structures. This unique, interactive book not only traces the history of the world’s most impressive, man-made mega structures from ancient times to the modern age, but also explores the science behind these incredible engineering feats. Discover the science of architecture behind different types of super structures, including bridges, domes and towers, then use this knowledge to have ago at creating your own from the model kit! Using card pieces, plastic connectors and string, you can make the different types of constructions – including an Egyptian pyramid, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Eiffel Tower – and then conduct tests to see how they work!
The Sea Book helps you learn all about, what else? The sea! It shows what the bottom of the sea looks like and tells us why the sea is important and then goes into what lives in the sea. Of course there are plenty of fish in the sea – and it tells about some of the things that fish can do and some of the traits that fish in the sea have. It also talks about other mammals and animals in the sea, and even the life cycle of a sea turtle. The end of the book talks about some man made problems with the sea and how you can help. This book is pretty short, but is jam-packed with a TON of great information about the sea and some beautiful illustrations as well!
Not-So-Brave penguin is about Percy and Posy. Percy is brave and not scared of anything. Posy is scared of just about everything (kind of like me!) When Percy goes out to play and doesn’t come back, Posy gets worried. Everyone assures her that he is fine and that she just worries too much (also kind of like me!) but she decides to be brave and jump into the sea and try and find Percy. She finds Percy who is surprised that she made it to him – and Posy starts to get scared because of the dark. But Percy shows her that the sky was actually not scary, but BEAUTIFUL instead. Percy thanks Posy and tells her that she was brave!! She didn’t know she was brave!
The Little Book of Bad Moods is a workbook that lets you work through your bad moods. Some chapters include – “Blame Others”, “How to make any day a bad day” (I am excelling at this lately) and “Life Sucks Online”. Blame Others includes activities like – “How do you spot an idiot…” in traffic, at work, online, etc. Oh, can I have some fun with this 😉 Unlike the book I read the other day about having a gratitude journal – this book has an ingratitude journal where you list what bothered you each day of the week. (Sadly, I’d have a much easier time filling this out than the other way around.) But maybe once I go through and get all the negativity out of my system I’ll start feeling better? Or maybe I’m just destined to be in a bad mood forever… but at least I’ll have a record of who made me that way in this book.
When I saw the title “Let’s Talk About Sext” I figured it was going to be a book where the main characters predominately communicated via sexts. Except, that could not have been further from the plot of this book. In fact, I think they sent about 4 texts (debatable if they were even sexts, really) to each other in the entirety of the book. Anyway… once I got over that – I had to get over the names of the characters. I feel like everyone has to give their characters these unique names with unique spellings and half the time it makes it a lot harder for me to really connect with the characters because I can’t pick someone else with that name to think about as that character. While the male was Brody, which was normal enough, the female was Phebe. I assumed it was an alternate spelling of Phoebe. I kept reading it as plebe and I wasn’t even sure what that word meant but I knew it wasn’t a name.
Back to the Island 2019 was off to a stressful start. We were supposed to get some rain turning to snow Tuesday into Wednesday, and my flight was at 5:45am Wednesday morning. Southwest issued a waiver so I could change it for free but the forecast couldn’t be pinned down and the airport was supposed to be getting anywhere from a coating to 6 inches. I became obsessed with using FlightAware to track what planes were going to become my flights and ultimately decided to get a cheap hotel room up the street from the airport the night before. (Which ended up being the same one we stayed at when we stayed up at the casino way too late to try andmeet Joey Fatone… the hotel of bad decisions.) Turns out it was a good decision because despite having to clear off my car while in snow up to my ankles, the highway I need to take to get to the airport was a mess and was shut down due to an accident and I probably would have gotten stuck. My flight from Hartford to Baltimore went off without a hitch and Baltimore seemed to have no snow at all, or it had stopped early enough that they were able to clear it all out before I arrived. On our shuttle bus to Jamaica, the sky seemed to be getting darker and as we approached our resort it was raining. We made it to the resort, checked into our room, and got a golf cart ride to the door. As we were settling in, it just started to downpour so we decided rather than try to go get food somewhere we would order room service. We were quoted 45 minutes until it came. 2 hours later… our feast arrived.
You Goal, Girl is a goal setting work book to help you plan out and achieve your goals. The book explains that goals are the steps you take to make your dreams a reality. Your goals should be S.M.A.R.T – that is, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound. This is something that I struggle with – but I am trying to make things that are more measurable – that way it is easier to track your progress and know what you need to do to continue to get there and achieve it.
Over the summer I started a grad school class in Cyber Security so when Dawn of the Code War: America’s Battle Against Russia, China, and the Risking Global Cyber Threat came up on NetGalley for review, I knew I needed to check it out. It was a little bit weird to be reading bout subject matter that had come up in class when I was “skipping” class to travel (I just never registered because I knew I wouldn’t be able to fully commit to keeping up with the course work) and maybe part of the reason why I read it was because I felt a little bit guilty about not being in class.
This book contains 24 different butterflies that have all been turned into a one-size-fits-all flying model. All you need to do is press out the butterfly, fold it as shown in the book, put some tape and a nickel on it and try flying it like a paper airplane! Unfortunately I received only an e-copy of this book so I can’t easily press out the butterflies to try it out and see how they work. The butterflies in this book all are truly beautiful and there is even information on some of the butterflies along with their press-out pages.
When I was little I used to do a lot of cross stitch with the images printed on. I have recently bought a counted cross stitch kit and depending on how well that goes, I may start trying some other designs. So when I saw there was a book of more than 130 whimsical designs I knew I had to check it out to see if it sparked any ideas for me. And within 2 pages there was a dragon, so I was sold! Each design is shown completed as well as the charting for it and recommended colors to use. Each color corresponds to an icon that can be found in the chart. I was also excited to see there was one labeled “pansies” but it was not the same as the flowers I know and love so I’ll skip that one for now – but there are definitely a good number in this book that look amazing and probably way over my head to try, but I will dream about doing them anyway. In addition to designs of animals and flowers and sayings for around the house, there’s also alphabets, borders, etc so you could really customize anything you want and make it look great by combining different items from the book.