Paradise Found | The Book Report by Rebecca Traver

Welcome to the Book Report! This month I am putting our list of all about journals and journaling as a path to self-discovery and clarity front and center. Some of these are guided journals with prompts and text and some are beautifully blank, patiently awaiting your time and attention.

May I suggest following your instincts and curiosity when it comes to journaling. If you decide to give it a try, know at the outset that at first it can be a challenge to commit to a practice because, like all commitments, it’s practically guaranteed that your resistance issues will come forward to try to talk you out of it...if not right away, then in a week or two.

But - if you can hang in there with yourself, I have full confidence that you will benefit from the experience. As with so many self-care practices, it’s essential to develop trust in ourselves as we engage, especially when we really, really think that that bag of chips, next glass of wine, or upcoming episode is what’s truly best for our well-being. This is where self- compassion and forgiveness come into the picture. Remember, gentle reader, it’s not called a practice for nuthin.

Also included in this report is a selection of New + Newly Discovered titles; a special group of Books for Young and Young at Heart Readers; and a couple of Just Because + Just for Fun offerings.

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I hope you enjoy what you find here and know that, as always,

I am honored by the privilege of taking up space in your inbox.

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“Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury. It is an appropriate companion for difficult change.”

~Julia Cameron

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FEATURED LIST – Sacred Space: Journaling for Self-Discovery + Clarity

Quantum Connections Manifestation Journal: A Guided Manifestation Journal from Leah Shoman is your gateway to unlocking the abundance that awaits within and around you. With every entry, delve deeper into your own psyche, enhancing self-awareness and harmonizing your intentions with the expansive potential of the quantum field.

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Angela Harding: Cornish Path is a beautiful and luxurious journal combining a lovely mix of art and functionality that is a joy to work with as you bring your inner world out into the open and onto the page.

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Handmade Books at Home: A Beginner's Guide to Binding Journals, Sketchbooks, Photo Albums and More by Chanel Ly is a wonderful guide through 12 practical projects that you can personalize to show off your creative side. All you need are a few basic tools and materials to get started.

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JOMO Journal: Embrace the Joy of Missing Out by Kate Pocrass is an illustrated journal packed with inspirational quotes, prompts, and ways to unplug. Here, we learn to plan our time with greater intention, rebalancing our priorities, and reconnecting with ourselves.

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Leaf, Cloud, Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal from Margaret Renkl is a perfect companion to her book The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, offering us a beautifully illustrated journal to guide your observations of nature wherever you find it – in gardens and yards, city parks and vacant lots, or the sky – all enhanced by inspiring prompts and wisdom.

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Overcoming: A Workbook from Michelle Obama is a beautifully designed workbook based on her previous work The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times featuring practical tools for navigating life’s challenges and fortifying oneself in the face of confusion, obstacles, and self-doubt.

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Abundant Floral is a lovely blank journal with a cover designed by British printmaker Kate Heiss, an artist who creates limited edition screen prints and linocuts on paper.

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And for the perfect complement to your journal - beautiful and practical writing tools like these: Modern Script Fountain Pens & Journal and Studio Series Hand Lettering Pens.

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For browsing through our entire list click here.

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“The best time to begin keeping a journal is whenever you decide to.”

~Hannah Hinchman, artist and author

New + Newly Discovered

Something in the Woods Loves You by Jarod K. Anderson is an inspiring blend of nature writing and memoir that explores nature’s crucial role in our emotional and mental health. This is a story about the darkest stretch of the author’s youth, and how deliberate and meditative encounters with plants and animals helped him see the light at every turn.

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The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About by Mel Robbins is for anyone who’s ever felt stuck, overwhelmed, and / or frustrated with where you are – wishing you were someone else, somewhere else. My fellow book lovers, isn’t this all of us at one time or another? Here, we learn that the problem isn’t you! Learning how to take your power back to create a life you love is a process that can begin with two simple words…Let Them.

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In Do Walk: Navigate Earth, Mind and Body. Step by Step author Libby DeLana shares the transformational nature of stepping outside our door for a walk – every day, not just when you need to run an errand or pressure yourself with self-judge-y thoughts that you really need to get more exercise. Sure, a walking practice can include those things, but is best motivated simply by your curiosity and inner longing to roam.

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Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Wisdom for Collective Well-Being from Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen is a first-of-its-kind book about our aspiration for sustainable, collective flourishing through Indigenous wisdom, traditions, and practices that form a bridge between cultures. Through poetic expression and authentic truth telling, Dr. Celidwen invites us to meet the world in all its complexity with reverence and joyous commitment to participate in the flourishing of all living beings.

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Dream Wise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams by Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee with a foreword by James Hollis is a dreamwork-centered guide for exploring and understanding your dreams, presented by three Jungian analysts. “Working with dreams requires flexibility, fluidity, and fluency in the symbolic, but above all, should be enlivening,” say the authors. Dream Wise offers a trustworthy map for exploring the vast reaches of your dreams…an exciting new path to creativity and healing…and a faithful compass to your true becoming.

Soul Growth Astrology: A Workbook for Realizing Your Heart's True Desires by Molly McCord reminds us that, just as caterpillars transform into butterflies, humans are born with an innate need to evolve. Each of us arrives on Earth with a unique astrological imprint – a cosmic map that guides our soul’s journey through this lifetime. With McCord’s help, you can demystify the intricate layers of your astrological blueprint and uncover your deepest desires for this lifetime.

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What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World from Prentis Hemphill asserts that the principles of embodiment – the recognition of our body’s sensations and habits, and the beliefs that inform them – are critical to lasting healing and change. The author demonstrates a future in which healing is done in community, weaving together stories of their own experience as a trauma survivor with clinical accounts and lessons learned from their time as a social movement architect.

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We Will Rest!: The Art of Escape by Tricia Hersey with illustrations by George McCalman is a modern sacred object; medicine for a sick and exhausted world. Weaving together meditations and poetry with storytelling and art, the author provokes liberation through refusal and trickster rebellion energy in the face of a global political and social system that would rather keep us busy and exhausted.

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Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life from Joanna Ebenstein is a transformative guide to embrace your own mortality and live a more fulfilling life. Whether you’re struggling with anxiety, grieving a loved one, dealing with personal illness, or seeking a greater sense of purpose, this is an invaluable support to living a life of greater meaning and joy.

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Okay, Now What?: How to Be Resilient When Life Gets Tough by Kate Gladdin offers a straightforward three-step plan to teach readers how to bravely face life’s unexpected challenges: recognize what’s really causing them to struggle the most, reflect on the impact of that struggle, and finally, how to redirect toward finding the resilience they need to grow through what they go through and create good from even the worst moments in life.

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Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life from Carol Osborn offers insightful guidance, inspiration, and practices pointing the way forward through every conceivable mood, opportunity, and stumbling block on the spiritual journey through the second half of life. Transforming loneliness to solitude, loss of identity to freedom, anger to self-protection, fear to faith, and envy to love, Osborn’s wise and compassionate insights are seasoned by quotes and stories by and about mystics, sages, and old souls from ancient through contemporary times who illuminate the path to living a full life while embracing old age.

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Another book with similar themes is Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing by one of my favorite authors, Abigail Thomas. While reflecting on the past, Abby accepts the shape of her present. No more driving, no more dancing, mostly sitting in a comfortable chair in a sunny corner with three dogs for company – as well as the birds and other critters that she watches out her window. Only this exceptionally gifted writer could generate so much enthusiasm over what might seem like too little.

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And for our younger readers (and their loved ones), may I suggest Guided Self-Love Workbook for Teen Girls: 101 Exercises Proven to Inspire Shameless Self-Esteem and Build Captivating Confidence by Annabelle Pierce which helps teen girls discover exactly what they need to overcome the voice in their heads that says you aren’t good enough.

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Soul Making: The Realization of the Mystical Life by Douglas M. Gillette takes the stance that in the mind of the Divine, every person has Infinite, Eternal, and Absolute Worth. But how do we manifest our transcendent nature in everyday life? How can we construct our lives in the material world so they reflect the Divine nature of our souls? These apparent paradoxes are some of what Gillette explores in this fascinating book.

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I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition by Lucy Sante tells a combined story of two threads of her personal narrative: the arc of her life as the only child of conservative Catholic parents, and her recent step-by-step transition to a place of inner and outer alignment.

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Overcoming Relationship Anxiety: A Personal Approach to Understanding Your Emotions, Building Your Self-confidence, and Creating a Healthy, Secure Partnership from Courtney Paré teaches us about what relationship anxiety is and what causes it, as well as how it can negatively impact the long-term health of your relationship. As you work to let go of and transform the anxiety that’s been holding you and your connections back, you’ll also discover how to prioritize a healthy connection, foster open communication, and build the kind of partnership you’ve always longed for.

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A Confluence of Witches: Celebrating Our Lunar Roots, Decolonizing the Craft, and Reenchanting Our World from Casey Zabala is an invitation to explore the authentic intersections of magic, spirituality, personal development, and social justice. How’s that for an accomplishment?!

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Think You'll Be Happy: Moving Through Grief with Grit, Grace, and Gratitude by Nicole Avant turns the pain of her family’s losses into the fuel that pushes her forward into an even more committed life of love and activism. “We can’t banish evil,” Nicole writes. “We have to learn to swim through trauma and live for all of those who can’t.

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Practical Optimism: The Art, Science, and Practice of Exceptional Well-Being by Sue Varma, MD is a down-to-earth program rooted in optimism to help you live fully and joyfully in an imperfect, turbulent world. This may sound like magical thinking, but it’s not. Practical optimists are resourceful, realistic, and thoughtful problem solvers who possess something of rare value: the inner resources to cope during a crisis and the use challenge as fuel to flourish.

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“Positive thinking is the notion that if you think good thoughts, things will work out well. Optimism is the feeling of thinking things will be well and be hopeful.”

~Martin Seligman

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For the entire list of new discoveries, click here!

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Books for Young Readers + the People Who Love Them

In Praise of Mystery from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón with illustrations by Peter Sis celebrates humankind’s endless curiosity, asks us what it means to explore beyond our known world, and shows how the unknown can reflect us back to ourselves.

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Frostfire from Elly MacKay brings us dragon-expert Miriam and curious Celeste who set out on a magical winter’s day walk through their garden, where a snow dragon just might be hiding!

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Dogs Love Books, Too by Maria Coco shares the story about how every reader – human and canine alike – feels less alone in the company of a good book and each other.

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The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science from Saturday Night Live alum Kate McKinnon is a madcap adventure about three sisters, a ravenous worm, and a mysterious mad scientist.

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We All Play by Julie Flett celebrates playtime and the connection between children and the natural world. At the end of the book, animals and children gently fall asleep after a day of playing outside, making this book a great bedtime story.

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Awake, Asleep by Kyle Lukoff with illustrations by Nadia Alam is another book perfect for bedtime cuddles and storytime – showcasing a diverse range of kids, and families that include same-sex parents, single parents, and multigenerational households.

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10 Cats by Emily Gravett follows the lives of ten kittens as they playfully pounce, bat, and swat while their mother sleeps.

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Bookie & Cookie from Blanca Gómez is a tale of best friends who learn together that trying something new for the sake of their friendship can make for lots of fun.

The First State of Being by Erin Entraada Kelly is a YA novel telling the story of twelve-year-old Michael Rosario who meets a mysterious boy from the future, thus forever changing the directory of his own life, and bringing us the themes of family, friendship, trust, and forgiveness.

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For more books for young readers click here!

Para libros para lectores jóvenes en Español haga clic aqui!

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“A friend is someone who knows everything about you and still loves you.”

~Elbert Hubbard

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Just Because + Just for Fun

Give Me Space But Don't Go Far: My Unlikely Friendship with Anxiety by Haley Weaver is a tender, funny, illustrated memoir about anxiety and self-acceptance, featuring Haley and Anxiety (as themselves), showcasing their complicated but ultimately uplifting relationship.

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Last Call Cats Playing Cards from Ravi Zupa and Arna Miller is a laugh-out-loud deck perfect as a housewarming present, stocking stuffer, white elephant gift exchange, or a game-loving family member, friend, or coworker.

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