Here are 100 books that My Little Book of Blessings fans have personally recommended if you like
My Little Book of Blessings.
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Maia Haag is the president and co-founder of I See Me! Personalized Books & Gifts. She had the idea to write her own personalized children’s book while on maternity leave. She and her husband, who is a graphic designer, published My Very Own Name, which launched their company. Maia has written over ten engaging, uniquely personalized stories that make each child feel special. She’s even written a personalized book for dog lovers If My Dog Could Talk—based on her own family pet!
This beautifully illustrated, personalized book features your child’s names in the illustrations and throughout the story. I’ve found that both parents and children are captivated by the fanciful illustrations, and it makes a perfect bedtime story. I frequently give this book as a keepsake new baby gift, and I receive rave reviews from parents.
Maia Haag is the president and co-founder of I See Me! Personalized Books & Gifts. She had the idea to write her own personalized children’s book while on maternity leave. She and her husband, who is a graphic designer, published My Very Own Name, which launched their company. Maia has written over ten engaging, uniquely personalized stories that make each child feel special. She’s even written a personalized book for dog lovers If My Dog Could Talk—based on her own family pet!
It’s more important than ever for young children to learn to value and celebrate what makes each of us unique and different. This personalized story teaches your child to value what makes him or her special. The story also teaches your child to love and appreciate the diversity that children across the world bring to make the world a vibrant place: different languages that we speak, hobbies that we have, various skin tones, different hairstyles, and different ways that we love other people.
Maia Haag is the president and co-founder of I See Me! Personalized Books & Gifts. She had the idea to write her own personalized children’s book while on maternity leave. She and her husband, who is a graphic designer, published My Very Own Name, which launched their company. Maia has written over ten engaging, uniquely personalized stories that make each child feel special. She’s even written a personalized book for dog lovers If My Dog Could Talk—based on her own family pet!
I love this personalized book for babies and toddlers because it teaches them classic nursery rhymes, but with a twist. Mother Goose tells a story about how nursery rhyme characters spell out your child’s name. For example, if your child’s name is Olivia, “Old Mother Hubbard” brings the O, “Li’l Jack Horner” brings the L, the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” brings the I, and so on, until your child’s name is spelled out in rhyme. At the end of the story, there’s a glossary that includes classic nursery rhymes for your child to learn.
Maia Haag is the president and co-founder of I See Me! Personalized Books & Gifts. She had the idea to write her own personalized children’s book while on maternity leave. She and her husband, who is a graphic designer, published My Very Own Name, which launched their company. Maia has written over ten engaging, uniquely personalized stories that make each child feel special. She’s even written a personalized book for dog lovers If My Dog Could Talk—based on her own family pet!
This personalized storybook is soothing to young children because it shares the names of everyone who loves the child. When you order the book, you’ll provide the names of family members, relatives, and even the family pet, and the book will feature rhymes about how much those people adore your child.
I’m a gay Midwestern novelist who finds that literary fiction is often humorless, with a narrow emotional range that begins with ennui and ends in despair. If you're weary of trauma porn and want to read books with a broad emotional range, this list of recommendations is for you. My favorite writers ably mix laughter and tears, and are able to find the funny in just about anything life can throw at us.
If you’re older, you probably read O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” for one or more lit classes; if you’re younger, you may have never heard of her as she is now “problematic” according to the unfunny woke-on-steroids crowd. I love O’Connor because I love characters with moral failings, I love mordant humor, and I love the possibility that even the most irredeemable among us can experience moments of grace. The brief details in her stories do such heavy lifting in terms of irony, for example when a Wellesley undergrad hits Mrs. Turpin in the head with a copy of Human Developmentin the short story “Revelation.” The action itself – a privileged white college student from an elite school inflicting violence upon a rural white woman – also speaks to our ongoing culture wars.
In her short lifetime, Flannery O’Connor became one of the most distinctive American writers of the twentieth century. By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O’Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the mysteries of divine grace in the “Christ-haunted” Protestant South. This Library of America collection, the most comprehensive ever published, contains all of her novels and short-story collections, as well as nine other stories, eight of her most important essays, and a selection of 259 witty, spirited, and revealing letters, twenty-one published here for the first time.…
All my life I’ve been pushing against limits. Being the oldest of five children born to a farm couple who became mill workers, I was frequently reminded by family that “people like us” did not need much education, didn’t get the good jobs, and shouldn’t “rise above themselves.” Being a girl, I had additional limits. Naturally, when I learned to read, I was drawn to books in which characters broke through unfair restraints to have adventures and accomplish great deeds. I wanted to be one of those people. By the time I came of age, I knew I had a shot at becoming the heroine of my own story!
In 1962 South Carolina, it is not acceptable for a girl to declare she has been called to preach. Especially at the young age of twelve. But Esta Lea Ridley knows she is called to the Lord and she says so. She seems to have the gift of healing too. Some who support her have their own selfish motives. In the end, we and Esta Lea must figure out what her calling means. This book handles serious matters with a light touch.
The story of an ardent young heroine's first spiritual journey—told with warmth and humor.
During the annual family reunion and pie competition at Beulah Land Healing and Holiness Church, twelve-year-old Esther Lea Ridley is suddenly drenched by a baptism of fire. She knows just what it means: "Esta Lea," she says to herself, "you are called to the Lord." That day marks the beginning of a healing crusade from church to church, and revival tent to revival tent, in the sleepy backwater towns of South Carolina. Travelling with her boy-crazy sister, Sarah Louise, and her uncle Peter Earl—who has been…
I have been a mystery reader my entire life, starting with the Hardy Boys series as a child and then progressing to authors like Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Chester Himes, Ellery Queen, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and many, many others. I love trying to figure out the crime or mystery before the reveal, but usually don’t. And, I have always truly enjoyed mystery books which have humor and quirky characters in them. More recently, I have become an award-winning mystery novelist myself, having published both a historical fiction mystery series and stories set in contemporary times in an ongoing anthology series that combines murder, mystery, and music.
One of the authors was the person in charge of the hospital John Lennon was brought to when he was actually murdered, and the book fictionalizes many of the real-life events of that day and night. But, in addition there’s a second man, a John Doe, and it’s his murder that has to be figured out by the hospital administrator and a policeman. The timing is also in the early days of GRID, which later became better known as AIDS.
It makes for a fascinating read, a great mystery, and a slice of history.
"The Night John Lennon Died...so did John Doe" is the ER Administrator's baptism by fire when John Lennon’s bloodied body is carried into Roosevelt Hospital ER over the shoulder of a policeman. Moments later, in the next room there is the suspicious death of an elderly John Doe. As the old man’s frail body is placed next to Lennon’s in the morgue van, Annie believes her involvement in these two senseless deaths is over. It is just beginning…
As I formed my self-identity I considered myself a spiritual seeker, always straying beyond the boundaries of my more conservative Christian communities. As a minister’s wife, I had a wide experience of Christian-based faith and community. When my husband died instantly of a heart attack, my entire spiritual foundation seemed to crumble. This book is a memoir of my journey to rebuild a new spirituality, founded on the remnants of my original faith and expanding to meet my new and changing experience of who I am. I have a master’s degree in English so the study of literature, mythology, and poetry also strongly influenced my journey, my story, and this memoir.
In all of my reading after my husband died, I was looking for company. Someone who would share and reflect my experience. Not only the loss, but the toll it took on my faith. Jan’s book spoke to me for several reasons. She had lost her husband several years before writing the book. In her experience I saw someone who was a few years down the road from me, negotiating her own spirituality, and writing from a place of healing. Her poetry was honest, yes, but more importantly pure comfort. Grief had ravaged my soul leaving me feeling raw and vulnerable. Jan’s words were gentle and soothing. When I couldn’t concentrate enough to read anything else, I could pick up Jan’s book and find a poem and a connection.
When Jan Richardson unexpectedly lost her husband and creative partner, the singer/songwriter Garrison Doles, she did what she had long known how to do: she wrote blessings.
These were no sugar-coated blessings. They minimized none of the pain and bewilderment that came in the wake of a wrenching death. With these blessings, Jan entered, instead, into the depths of the shock, anger, and sorrow. From those depths, she has brought forth words that, with heartbreaking honesty, offer surprising comfort and stunning grace.
Those who know loss will find kinship among these pages. In these blessings that move through the anguish…
Ever since I was very young I had an interest in Bible prophecy. I thought it was fascinating that someone could predict the future and wondered if the prophecies would come true in my lifetime. It all started with an old audio recording from Alexander Scourby reading the Book of Ezekiel. After that I read the Book of Revelation several times but didn't know what the symbolism meant. Decades later, I picked up the interest again and used my work experience of analytical skills to help interpret its meaning. Most people focus on the Antichrist or Mark of the Beast, yet there are more warnings about the False Prophet than any other character.
Tim Warner is mostly unknown, but his research has led to uncovering facts that many believers do not know about regarding the end times. He provides ample evidence of what the early Church believed and traces a change in belief systems about Bible prophecies over time. It is important to see how these cultural developments infiltrated the Church.
The clearest analysis I found out about was an abrupt change in view beginning with Athenagoras. He was a philosopher who became a Christian but kept Greek beliefs about the afterlife instead of adopting ancient Hebraic teachings. The Church inherited these Greek beliefs without a historical basis.
The date when Christ's Kingdom will come to earth has been the "Holy Grail" of biblical prophecy since Daniel first inquired. Countless Christians have diligently searched for this hidden treasure. It has escaped the meticulous, chronological study of Sir Isaac Newton and the tomfoolery of Harold Camping. The earliest Christians did not believe, as do most modern Christians, that the date of Christ's return is completely out of reach. They held an eschatology called, "Chiliasm," a view that saw all of human history as a "week" of seven millennia, with the seventh millennium being the coming Kingdom of Christ on…
I’m a writer who has traveled the world in real life and traveled through time in my research and imagination. In the past dozen years, I’ve researched historical women of the Bible for my own novels and have come to realize that women of the ancient world were much like women of today. Biblical women had dreams and fell in love. They worried about their children, politics, and the world around them. They wished for security and happiness just as we do. I have a special regard for historical fiction that brings these ancient women to life—honoring their lives and their struggles.
After reading this imaginative story, I never thought of Eve in the same way again. Havah is a stunning depiction of the first woman—one created, not born. Tosca Lee takes us on an original journey into the life, choices, and emotions of the first woman. It is a story of sin, but more than that, it is a story of creative love and the gift of free will. This story allows us to sympathize with Havah, and even ask ourselves what we might have done in her place. Enthralling and inspiring!
