April Monthly Challenge: Earn Your Bookworm Badge!

Sharon Sandberg

@Crystal Bruce The Tao of Pooh- it's a practical approach to Taoism utilizing characters we all know and love. Truly a life-changing book for me.

Allison King

My favorite book of all time is Ronia, The Robber's Daughter by Astrid Lingrid (the author who wrote Pippi Longstocking). Sometimes it is written as Ronja instead. This is how it opens:

On the night that Ronia was born a thunderstorm was raging over the mountains, such a storm that all the goblinfolk in Matt's Forest crept back in terror to their holes and hiding places. Only the fierce harpies preferred stormy weather to any other and flew, shrieking and hooting, around the robbers' stronghold on Matt's mountain. Their noise disturbed Lovis, who was lying within, preparing to give birth, and she said to Matt, "Drive the hell-harpies away and let me have some quiet. Otherwise I can't hear what I'm singing!"

Also, I am the luckiest person ever. Studio Ghibli made a miniseries of the book and it is perfect. In the entire series, I only had one complaint, and that was I didn't think they were showing enough rain in the opening scene. I mean, who gets their favorite book made into a miniseries and that's the only issue they have with it??? They hit every moment in the book and anything that was added made perfect sense to the story.

Allison King

@Michelle Hanning I love Erin Morgenstern! I've read The Night Circus multiple times.

Karen Mercier

@Crystal Bruce The Harry Potter series!

Rachel Kauer

@Crystal Bruce

I have too many favorites…that said my top 2 go-to books for vacation reading are "The Sword of Truth" by Terry Goodkind, and "The Ocean at the End of the Land" by Neil Gaiman. Goodkind and Gaiman are subsequently also among my favorite authors.

Rachel Kauer

@Allison King

I think I just found my next good read! Thanks for sharing!

Amy Hentschke

@Crystal Bruce I wish these answers were being fed into a spreadsheet that could be shared with all of us! I plan to use these recommendations as a reading list for the future. There are so many great suggestions and so many that I have never heard of before!

Donna Mortensen

@Crystal Bruce
Blackberry Wine, by Joanne Harris. I'm a huge fan of dual-timeline books, and Harris's Blackberry Wine deftly alternates flashbacks to one man's childhood/teenage years with his present challenges, where he's called back to those earlier years to rediscover what's really important to him. The story is full of longings--to grow up, to recapture youth, to find communities where we fit in. The first book in many years that had made me cry, and still can! Besides, how can anyone not get pulled in by a novel that begins from the POV of a bottle of homemade wine?

Aashish Thapaliya

@Crystal Bruce This is such a great question! I really love “The Goblin Emperor” by Katherine Addison and "Cold Comfort Farm" by Stella Gibbons. For professional/personal development I also enjoyed “Atomic Habits” by James Clear or “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer (I work at a garden).

Coco Parham

@Crystal Bruce I am definitely re-reading this list when school is out for summer reading ideas! Thanks!

Heather Leonard

@Crystal Bruce so many to choose from. I recently read The Stationary Shop by Marjan Kamali and it was beautiful! The Nightingale by Kirstin Hannah was another good one and the Heiress by Rachel Hawkins was a enjoyable read.

Professional Development book The Leader Assistant by Jeremy Burrows. Getting tips on how to build more confidence in my role as an Admin Assistant is always welcomed knowledge. It is an inspiring read and not heavy a read.

Elizabeth Grover

@Crystal Bruce Personally, my favorite book of all time is Stephen King's “The Stand”. It's long, but one I re-read often. Professionally, it's another Stephen King tome, “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”. A good fundraiser has to be a great storyteller, and his advice is indispensable!

David Hecht

@Crystal Bruce. It's so hard to chose, but I think my all-time favorite is Les Misérables. I also like the fundraising book “It's Not Just About the Money”.

Jana Fross

@Crystal Bruce
This is a fun challenge! I'm making a list for my next read and placed a hold on several books from my online library.

My favorite book is Left to Tell by Immaculee Ilibagiza. It opened my eyes to how atrocities unfold and made me aspire to be emotionally and faithfully stronger in every situation. It's been a bit since I read a professional development book, but The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey left an impression.

Donna Fischer

@Crystal Bruce
So many favorites to choose from, but one of them is The Mists of Avalon. I'm a fan of the Arthurian legend and this book freshened it up and provided more perspective from the female characters. A favorite professional development book is The First 90 Days. When I left my last job to take my current one, my manager gave me that and it was extremely helpful in adjusting to my new position in leadership.

Teri Stoll

@Crystal Bruce
Too many good books to choose from. Favorite book to read to my kids when they were little was If you Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff. For me, one of my favorite books would have to be Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson.

Rebecca Page

@Crystal Bruce Anything by Bryce Courtenay! His books are love letters to his home land, South Africa, and his chosen land, Australia. The Power of One is the first book he ever wrote and it became a best seller. Unfortunately he passed away in 2012 so there will be no new books to enjoy.

The best personal development is The Introvert Advantage. It really helped me to understand myself as an introvert and why I have the feels that I do. It also gave me strategies for navigating the world as an introvert.

Michelle Hanning

@Allison King
I love The Night Circus, too. Morgenstern is writing a new book. Not sure when it will be out, but I will definitely pre-order!!!

Cathy Gibson

@Crystal Bruce The Whole Harry Potter series

Allison Reville

Hunger Games

Tamara Tsang

@Crystal Bruce This one is hard, because I'm a veracious reader! In fact, my first job was as the children's book expert at B. Dalton Bookseller, because I'd read my way through the store. Growing up, it was Anne of Green Gables and Sherlock Holmes, and as an adult any mystery, sci-fi, fantasy.

After university, I gave myself a break and read mostly fiction, but I had a great professional development book during my grad studies called “Mission-based Management”, by Peter C. Brinckerhoff(?). It was so good, that I didn't sell it back at the end of the course! Another good one is "The Shadow Negotiation: How Women Can Master the Hidden Agendas That Determine Bargain Sucess" by Deborah Kolb and Judith Williams. Also, Wealth in Families, a book by Charles W. Collier.

Nicole Soos

@Crystal Bruce

The Holy Bible

Gabrielle Rybinski

@Crystal Bruce
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke is my favorite book!

Chris Fedor

@Crystal Bruce I love to read so I LOVE this challenge Crystal!

I love the Outlander books by Diana Gabaldon, but another favorite that I absolutely love (and the audio version is amazing!) is The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.

As far as personal/professional development, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey is a good one I read several years ago. I'm currently reading two books that came to me highly recommended, but have not gotten too far into them yet, but they definitely captured my interest and have some good information: The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life by Simran Jeet Singh and Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek.

Now I'm reading all the posts and adding to my ever growing reading list

Joy Prevost

@Crystal Bruce Hands down - Jane Austen rocks! Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey.

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.” - Persuasion

Sandra Ross

@Crystal Bruce
any book of the Bible!

Christopher Horn

@Crystal Bruce
Oh man, that's a tough one. I love reading history, classic literature and poetry, philosophy, ancient languages, etc. Some ones I keep going back to over and over include To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the Horatio Hornblower series by C.S. Forester, Witness by Whittaker Chambers, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer, and Herodotus' Histories. But if I have to pick a favorite, Lord of the Rings. It's such a beautiful series, I've loved it since I was a kid. I think I tear up at the Charge of the Rohirrim scene about every time!

A lot of the professional development I've read was while I was working as a teacher at a classical school before I switched fields. Of those, I enjoyed The Great Tradition by Richard Gamble best. As far as non-profit related stuff goes, Bill Connors' book, Fundraising with the Raiser's Edge: A Non-Technical Guide was a really helpful read when I was starting as a DBA. (And, I mean, I've gotten a lot in my professional career out of old moral philosophy books from people like Solomon, Xenophon, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, etc. Cicero in particular has some great thoughts on how good leaders have to synthesize the information they learn from their advisors and managers with their understanding of the people under their leadership, the available resources, and organizational goals to form and execute a comprehensive plan)

Sharelle Buyer

@Crystal Bruce I read way too many books in a year to have a favorite. I have a few favorite authors, but really love the Miss Fortune series by Jana DeLeon.

Donna Mortensen

@Crystal Bruce Don't know how, but I missed the postmodern masterpiece on which I wrote a paper in grad school: The Blue Heron, by Gene Farrington. Opechancanough comes to life in an online chat with the protagonist to kick off the conflict. Poetic narrative and rough dialogue are counterpoints in this dual timeline narrative of modern-day Virginia and 17th century England where social classes are crossed and kept separate, where past is present and present is past, and where the last line of one chapter is sometimes the first line of the next--but 400 years distant. It's truly captivating (hint hint).

Emma Baguley-Lockwood

@Crystal Bruce
My favourite book is ‘The Grace Girls’ by Geraldine O'Neill she wrote a lot of books based in Ireland, Scotland or a character that has moved to the north of England from Ireland around the 1950's it is really interesting to see how they lived back then and how they courted.