5 Good Finds: December 2017

It has been fun to put together my 5 Good Reads and 5 Good Beauty Products roundups so I decided to write a monthly roundup with my favorite things that month. Let’s get started, shall we?

The Crown: I have been binge-watching The Crown and I love learning more about the monarchy. The set, the costumes, the scandal!

Outbound Hat and Mittens: I love this cozy hat and mitten set! And now they are even on sale from Anthropologie.

Educated: A Memoir: This is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It’s a memoir about a girl who grows up in a family of survivalists who believe the world is going to come to an end. They don’t believe in public school education, the medical establishment, and Tara didn’t have a birth certificate or a record of her birthday. Tara and her siblings work on her father’s junkyard where they get injured often and Tara’s brother is physically and emotionally abusive. After Tara’s older brother takes the ACT and goes to college, she decides to study and teaches herself enough to do well on the ACT. She goes to Brigham Young University and learns about things like the Holocaust and the Civil War for the first time ever. Her professors realize how talented she is and she studies abroad at Cambridge, where she dazzles her tutor and ends up getting her Ph.D. there and also studying at Harvard. She becomes estranged from members of her family and the book is about family, education, and becoming independent. I found myself crying multiple times. It’s so well written and such an interesting view of a dysfunctional family.

Lasko 5572 Oscillating Ceramic Tower Heater: I love curling up in the chair in my room to write with the heater nearby or turning the heater on for movie nights.

The Daily Podcast: I am slowly getting into podcasts and really like this podcast by The New York Times. They summarize news stories for twenty minutes. Sometimes the subway is too crowded to pull out my phone or a book to read so I like being able to use my commute to catch up on the news. They did an excellent roundup of the biggest news stories from 2017. (What a year!) People have also recommended How I Built This.