Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness
Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness, by Alex Charns, is a warm, candid blend of memoir, humor, and practical guidance. Narrated by Annie, a German shepherd and husky mix, the book follows Charns’s recovery after hospitalization for major depression with psychotic features. Annie’s lively perspective makes difficult subjects approachable while establishing the bond between dog and owner as the book’s emotional center. Her declaration, “I rescued Alex and the whole family,” neatly captures the reversal on which the narrative is built.
Across twenty-six compact chapters, Charns presents wellness as a collection of mutually reinforcing habits. Walking, medication, talk therapy, meditation, sleep, faith, friendship, reading, volunteer work, political participation, and gratitude all contribute to a balanced life. The book’s structure reflects this philosophy, moving briskly among personal memories, observations, photographs, and Annie’s comic complaints. Her demands for walks, games of fetch, and generous portions of dog treats give the narrative an appealing rhythm and keep its advice grounded in daily experience.
The book gains depth from Charns’s account of intergenerational trauma. His mother’s childhood in Nazi-occupied Poland, her later struggles with post-traumatic stress, and his own early encounters with Holocaust history illuminate the fears that shaped his family. Charns writes with particular honesty about psychosis, suicidal thoughts, sleep deprivation, and the stigma surrounding psychiatric hospitalization. The chapters on treatment and family support are direct and humane, presenting recovery as sustained work supported by professional care, meaningful routines, and personal relationships.
Annie’s humor gives the book its distinctive personality, but its strongest quality is the sincerity beneath the jokes. Charns’s affection for his dog becomes a way of expressing gratitude for the people, practices, and communities that helped restore his health. When Annie defines canine devotion by saying, “That is the power of the dog. Love. Love. And more love,” the line also summarizes the book’s central conviction. Concise, intimate, and encouraging, Pizza Dog Annie’s Guide to Wellness offers an accessible portrait of recovery rooted in companionship, purposeful activity, and care.
Pages: 78 | ASIN : B0H699ML1N
They Were Living A Lie
The False Paradigms of Today and the Timeless Truth of Tomorrow examines how perception, social conditioning, group identity, history, psychology, and inherited ideas shape what people accept as truth. Was there a particular assumption about modern life that first made you question the larger worldview behind it?
As a child I saw that the basic assumptions people make about life were wrong. As I looked around at the adults, they were living a lie, and probably didn’t know it. They bought into the whole story that you have to go to college, get a job, get married, work hard, get a mortgage, have children–that if you do all of that, you will be living the best life. But as I looked around, I saw people who were not happy, who did not have fun, and did not seem to be doing anything great. There was no way, I thought, that I would fall for these lies. There was a truth out there that could set us free to be happy and fulfilled in life, and the people around me had totally missed it.
Why do you think people become so emotionally attached to beliefs that challenge can feel like a personal attack?
I think Eckhart Tolle explained it well. People believe that they are their minds. They think their minds are clever. They have worked a lifetime creating their admirable minds, much like a sculptor creates a perfect statue out of block of granite. (I once believed that too, and being supremely arrogant, I thought my mind was a work to be admired by all young attractive women. Of course, they rarely admired my creation, and shied away from me.)
When an outsider questions basic tenants of our belief systems, people see it as a personal attack. You are attacking their persons–well, their minds. And to them, this is the same thing. But they are completely wrong. If you sit and try to meditate, you can watch all the garbage, half-baked thoughts the mind comes up with. Nobody would be proud of those thoughts.
But there is more to that question. If you can destabilize someone’s thinking, make them realize that their entire outlook was wrong, now what are they going to do? That is a very uncomfortable place to be. Who wants to reassess their lives, and reconstruct their world outlook? It can mean that they have spent decades doing the wrong things. Nobody wants to face that. It is easier to just tell me, and other troublemakers, that we are wrong, and get back to the football game.
What do you believe people misunderstand about the relationship between scientific models and reality itself?
In the book, I think the chapter that rattles people the most is when I question science, and I believe it is because to differing degrees we have all unconsciously absorbed science as the bedrock of truth. Most of us lost God in the 18th and 19th centuries, and so we gravitated towards science. We need some ultimate authority. It used to be God. Everything that was so, was so because of God. Now, science has become the bedrock of our life views. And it has become the ultimate authority. Even for religious people.
Almost everyone believes in evolution, big bang, and cave men. Are they all true? I don’t know. They are theories. If you question some aspects of science successfully, where does that leave the reader who blindly accepts it all? If parts of science are just conjecture, then how are people to decide what is real and what is not? We are not scientists. It was easier to just accept all of science without thinking too hard about it. But questioning the fundamentals of our belief systems is not a comfortable place to be. All of a sudden our outlook on the world is imperiled. Again, it is easier to just tell me I am wrong..
Ah, but you asked about scientific models and reality itself. . .Probably all scientists realize that theories are theories. They are not necessarily the truth. Theories cannot be proven. They are generally accepted explanations of reality. But they usually are disproven in time, although it may take centuries. When we find data that contradicts our theories, our scientists will typically amend the theory, but rarely will they cast it out. It is only when a generation of scientists dies, that their theories can die with them. (That is one of the great things about death. It brings change, as the newer generations replace old ways of thinking with newer ones.)
But normal people, we tend to confound theories with all the rest of science. We are black and white thinkers. To us, science is true or it is not. We can put rocket ships on the moon, therefore, science is true, including all of its theories. But in reality, some science is true, and some is just conjecture–theories.
So, if scientific theories are not necessarily true and likely to be discarded at some point, why do we base our beliefs on them? Why have we made scientific theories the central tenant of our worldview and why do we use them to define who we are? It has become just this for a great many of us. We do not realize to what extent science has replaced the Catholic Church in providing much of the foundation of our collective understanding of the world. In the past, people would be aghast if you stated that Christ was not God but was instead a divinely inspired man. You would be shunned, tortured or perhaps executed as a heretic if you spread those blasphemous thoughts. It is similar today with regards to science. In much of Western society, if someone professed that evolution is a fanciful theory and is not true or, even better, that the Earth does not rotate around the sun, you would be considered an idiot and would likely be shunned as ignorant or crazy. It’s the same.
To sum it all up. . .the likely reason people misunderstand the relationship between scientific models and reality itself, is probably due to lazy black and white thinking. People have a tendency to take the whole package, or none of it. Just like in the Middle Ages, you accept everything the Church says, and now, you accept everything science says. No picking and choosing. It is so much easier to just chunk it all together, and accept it all as one package. Science is good, therefore all science is true.
Do you see the transformation you describe as something that could happen gradually through culture and education, or does it require a more fundamental shift in human consciousness?
The change I call for, is that people realize that individuals are not important, and that humanity, itself, the aggregation of all people, living and dead, is what really matters. To focus on only ourselves is to be short-sighted. To reach our potential, to help others reach theirs, that is the proper outlook. It took a book to explain this concept, so I won’t try in a few sentences, or I risk sounding trite.
But, yes, humanity will transform into this realization. It will become fundamental, and we will create different social systems and personal outlooks completely different based on this fundamental realization. But likely not in our lifetimes, possibly not even in our grandchildren’s lifetimes. Fundamental change on this scale takes centuries, not years. Humanity is the creature that matters, not us individuals. We come and go and are forgotten, but humanity persists, doing whatever it is it does, but it is heading somewhere. We just cannot know where. I personally believe, but do not know, that the type of change I see coming, will happen soul by soul, individual by individual, and slowly, over the generations, people will think and act differently. Christianity took almost 350 years before it really started growing, that is, when it became the state religion of Rome. Until then, it was a very small movement, slowly proceeding, slowly growing. Nobody in the first generation thought it would ever be the religion of Rome, or that it would take over Latin America or Africa. This is the same. We cannot know what the future holds. (Yes, including me.) But as I see it, this is where we are headed.
Author Links: Goodreads | Website
What do we believe? Whatever they told us to believe.
What do we do? Whatever other people are doing.
How many lies have we welcomed into our lives without having seriously analyzed them?
It’s the reason many of us feel empty inside—there’s nothing there but convenient mistruths, and at some level, we all know it. We then orient our lives based on these false beliefs, wasting our precious limited time among the living striving for goals that leave us ultimately unsatisfied.
The False Paradigms of Today and The Timeless Truth of Tomorrow by John Bliss takes a steak knife to these common delusions with 13 irreverent essays that rip and tear at the foundations of our collective worldview. Little is held sacred to Bliss.
The essays in Part 1: Your Understanding of Reality is More Fabricated Than You Think dispel our delusions one at a time, including:
our mistaken belief in progress,
our misplaced confidence in our own rational prowess,
our loss of personal identity from group identification,
our misplaced faith in science as a true representation of the world, and
our morality: what it is and where exactly it comes from.
After carving away these restrictive untruths, Part 2: An Exploration of Truth Across Historical, Mystical, and Philosophical Dimensions introduces a deeper understanding of humanity based on history, mysticism, psychology and philosophy. Some of the topics in Part 2 include:
how our religions became second-rate pathways to God,
our reliance on logic and how it warps our decision-making,
how idealism can lead to mass murder and tyranny,
the overriding importance of history, where we’ve been, where we are going and why,
our immaterial connection to all people living and dead—Jung’s collective unconscious, Emerson’s Over-Soul, and Varro’s Soul of the World, and finally
the bedrock assumption that we all got wrong. Switch this out, and everything changes.
The essays are filled with stories from history, including meetings of the apostles Paul and Peter with the Emperor Nero and Simon Magus the magician, the mystical transformation of Emmanuel Swedenborg, the nineteenth century German intellectual revolution, the establishment of three French religions worshipping not God but Reason and Humanity, the abdication of the World Teacher, and the genocide of the Tibetan culture.
The book is ideal for seekers of deeper meaning, arm-chair philosophers and historians, and those disillusioned with the emptiness of contemporary thought. Discover why your view of reality may be distorted—and how by changing the one assumption on which your entire world-view is based, everything shifts.
Assassin’s Love
Assassin’s Love, by Chris Neo, is a compact romantic thriller built around desire, deception, and a murder contract that becomes unexpectedly personal. Wealthy Valentino and his dissatisfied wife, Heleanne, encounter a family of Romani merchants who trade in suggestively named products and far deadlier services. After Heleanne begins an affair with Alexi and hires his clan to kill her husband, assassin Rafaella enters Valentino’s home disguised as a maid. The setup has the heightened energy of a stage melodrama, with a small cast, dangerous attractions, and motives that become clearer through confrontational dialogue. Neo moves through the story briskly, giving each chapter a specific dramatic purpose.
The book’s most interesting relationship is the one between Valentino and Rafaella. She arrives prepared to seduce and poison him, but their attraction unsettles her professional discipline and forces her to decide what she values more than the assassins’ code. Valentino is equally intriguing because his genial manners and domestic habits conceal a mysterious past. Their romance is sensual, earnest, and deliberately tied to the novel’s central idea that genuine love reveals itself through sacrifice. Heleanne and Alexi provide a darker reflection of that idea. Their passion grows out of greed and fantasy, while Valentino and Rafaella gradually demonstrate loyalty through action. That contrast gives the story a clear moral shape without slowing down its plotting.
Neo’s dialogue-led approach makes the book feel immediate and theatrical. Characters flirt, bargain, threaten, and confess with very little narrative distance, so readers are rarely left waiting for the next confrontation. The recurring pancakes, pink juice, dogs, poison, and yellow swallow tattoo work as playful clues that later become important to the resolution. The erotic scenes occupy a substantial portion of the book and establish the emotional turning point in Rafaella’s mission, though their length and repetition may be more detail than some thriller readers expect. The broad characterizations and extravagant coincidences suit the story’s playful, fable-like atmosphere, especially during the final fight and the revelation of Valentino’s connection to Baba.
Readers familiar with James Patterson will recognize the short chapters, direct prose, and steady supply of hooks, but Neo gives the formula a more intimate and romantic focus. Patterson often expands suspense through multiple locations and intersecting investigations, while Assassin’s Love concentrates its tension inside one troubled marriage and one secretive clan. The result is closer to a dark romantic folktale told with the momentum of a commercial thriller. Its pleasures come from watching seduction turn into devotion and from seeing every early joke about assassins acquire a literal meaning. For readers who enjoy heightened romance, explicit sensuality, and twists delivered with a wink, this is a lively and memorable short read.
Pages: 82 | ASIN : B0BKQNKXP5
“why do my teeth fall out?”
Lily and the Tooth Fairy follows a little girl who loses her first tooth at the beach, and a beloved family story sends her dreaming into fairyland and wondering what surprises the tooth fairy might leave behind. Why did you choose to begin Lily’s adventure with a family beach day?
Children most often ask, “why do my teeth fall out?” I can’t answer in one or two ways:
“To make room for the adult teeth to accommodate the expansion of the jaw bone.”
or use kid-friendly terminology
“You’ll get bigger teeth as you get bigger, in order to eat bigger meals.”
Papa shares a tooth fairy story that was told to him when he was young. What role do you think family traditions and storytelling can play in helping children understand new experiences?
Yes. More dental milestones are in the works. But because all children experience milestones, I will be introducing a new character by the name of Maya, in my next book, “Teeth like me.”
Author Links: Amazon | GoodReads
When Lily and Papa return home from their outing, Papa shares a tooth fairy tale with Lily that was once told to him when he was a boy. That night, she dreams of being a fairy who lives in fairyland, making gold coins. The dream is so real in makes her wonder: Do fairies truly have magical powers? Will she find something special in place of her tooth when she wakes from her slumber?
The Rug Dealer
Martha L. Thompson’s The Rug Dealer is a candid, fast-moving memoir about desire, reinvention, and the stories we tell ourselves when reality threatens a cherished fantasy. It begins with Thompson at the Turkish Consulate in Los Angeles, trying to finalize a divorce from a man who disappeared decades earlier, then circles back to 1980, when she arrived in Konya as an adventurous but sheltered teenage exchange student. There she becomes infatuated with Mehmet, a charismatic rug dealer whose pull on her shapes years of romantic decisions, dangerous travels, and startling misjudgments.
Thompson writes in a direct, conversational voice that preserves the immediacy of her younger self. Her descriptions of Turkish tea, crowded trains, family apartments, ancient landmarks, Manhattan streets, and backstage life give the memoir a vivid sense of place. The most revealing moments come when the older author allows us to recognize dangers that the young Martha can’t yet understand. Attraction repeatedly overrides warning signs, and acting becomes both a genuine vocation and a way to escape feelings she hasn’t learned to face. That tension gives the book its emotional momentum.
The memoir’s many short chapters create an episodic rhythm, carrying Martha through Turkey, Paris, Portugal, New York, regional theaters, Juilliard, and Los Angeles. Some emotional patterns recur often, particularly her search for men who resemble Mehmet and her habit of treating risky situations as romantic adventures. Yet that repetition also conveys the stubborn nature of obsession. Thompson doesn’t polish her younger self into an easy heroine. She records her dishonesty, self-absorption, cultural assumptions, and reckless choices with unusual openness. The warmth brought by her acting career, her dog Gus, and her eventual relationship with Don gradually deepens the story beyond romantic fixation.
The Rug Dealer will appeal most to readers who enjoy memoirs about complicated relationships, youthful risk-taking, international travel, and the slow work of gaining self-knowledge. Theater lovers will appreciate the substantial account of Thompson’s training and professional acting life, while readers interested in Turkey will find plenty of sensory and cultural detail viewed through an American visitor’s evolving perspective. It’s an especially good choice for anyone who’s ever looked back on an old obsession and wondered how much of its power came from the person involved, and how much came from the life they imagined around them.
Pages: 242 | ASIN : B0GKQXRLF9
Telling Dixie Goodbye
Telling Dixie Goodbye is a memoir about the long and complicated business of becoming your own person without pretending you came from nowhere. Scott Oglesby begins as a frightened, self-conscious boy in 1950s Arkansas, absorbing the racial codes, masculine expectations, family silences, and social pecking orders around him. From there, the book keeps moving: college hazing, the Vietnam-era draft, civil rights work, California counterculture, theater, marijuana, New York, marriages, writing, aging, and a seemingly endless parade of people who become part of his education. What holds all that movement together is Oglesby’s effort to understand the South that formed him. He can be angry at it, embarrassed by it, nostalgic for it, and unexpectedly grateful for it, sometimes within the same afternoon. That tension is baked into the book from its opening memories of Pine Bluff, where childhood fear, family love, racism, and humor are already tangled together.
Oglesby’s greatest asset is his voice. He’s funny without constantly reaching for a punch line, candid without turning confession into performance, and unusually willing to let his younger selves look foolish. That matters because this is a book full of mistakes, false starts, questionable schemes, failed careers, romantic disasters, bad judgment, and second chances. His years in California and New York give the memoir the loose, unpredictable energy of a life being invented as it goes, but the book gradually reveals that its emotional center is family, particularly his sister Rhonda. Their relationship stretches from childhood rivalry to adult partnership, resentment, shared property, caregiving, blowups, forgiveness, and a hard-earned closeness. One of the book’s most satisfying turns comes when Oglesby realizes that winning an argument over their shared house matters far less than preserving the person who has repeatedly stood beside him through illness, death, and grief.
The memoir deepens considerably as loss begins replacing adventure as the force moving Oglesby forward. His life with Helene, her illness and death, his parents’ decline, his mother’s Alzheimer’s, and his later marriage to Ann give the book an emotional weight that the younger narrator couldn’t have carried. The chapters surrounding his mother’s final days are especially affecting because Oglesby doesn’t tidy them into easy lessons. Love appears there as caregiving, irritation, guilt, black humor, exhaustion, money worries, mercy, and the terrible responsibility of making decisions for someone who can no longer make them herself. His eventual realization that he needed to stop worrying about whether his mother recognized him and concentrate instead on remembering who she was is quietly devastating. That same instinct runs throughout the memoir: memory can’t repair the past, but paying attention to it can change what the past means.
By the end, Telling Dixie Goodbye becomes something larger than a story about escaping the South. Oglesby is an older man circling back through the places, people, objects, music, prejudices, affections, and unfinished business of his life. A free sofa from strangers in Florida becomes a lesson in the limits of political and class assumptions. An abandoned piano becomes a meditation on neglect, mortality, and all the things he meant to learn. Then the book closes with a wonderfully concrete act of reclamation: Oglesby drives north carrying his mother’s piano and a church pew handmade by his grandfather, intending to place both in his Yankee home and finally take the piano lessons he kept postponing. It’s exactly the right ending for a memoir this restless and affectionate, because Oglesby doesn’t finally conquer his past or discard it. He makes room for it. Telling Dixie Goodbye is a funny, searching, deeply human memoir about discovering that leaving home can take a lifetime, and loving it clearly may be the truest way to say goodbye.
Pages: 266 | ASIN: B0HCHDT342
Remember, It’s Just in Your Head
Remember, It’s Just in Your Head, by Ben Dylan, is a contemporary LGBTQ+ coming-of-age novel about grief, identity, and the difficult work of choosing to live. University student Reuben Fletcher is already struggling with anxiety, suicidal thoughts, family pressure, and his hidden sexuality when his close friend Ava dies by suicide. Her death leaves him replaying every missed warning sign and unanswered call. From there, the story follows Reuben as he carries his guilt through lectures, orchestra rehearsals, friendships, and a campus culture that can be both cruel and unexpectedly supportive.
As mental health fiction, the novel is intensely direct about depression, disordered eating, panic, and bereavement. Reuben’s first-person narration keeps the reader close to his spiraling thoughts, especially when ordinary moments become loaded with fear or regret. The recurring images of rooftops, photographs, and chemical reactions give shape to emotions he can’t easily explain. Ava’s Polaroid camera becomes the book’s strongest symbol, connecting memory with her final request that Reuben keep looking for “the good stuff.”
The queer coming-of-age story develops alongside Reuben’s grief, particularly through his relationship with Nathan and his frightening experience of being publicly outed by Xan. Dylan captures the exhausting calculations that come with hiding, as well as the relief Reuben gradually finds in being known. The supporting cast gives the campus novel a generous emotional range. Ryan, Sophia, Taylor, and even Reuben’s abrasive classmate Nadia are carrying private pain of their own. Their stories reinforce the book’s central idea that kindness often begins when someone takes the time to look beneath another person’s performance.
The prose favors emotional clarity and repeated motifs, occasionally restating Reuben’s guilt and fear more often than the moment requires. That repetition also reflects a mind caught in rumination, making his eventual return to music feel genuinely earned. This is a grief and healing novel with a tender gay romance, a strong awareness of student mental health, and a sincere belief in human connection. Remember, It’s Just in Your Head offers an openhearted portrait of survival as something built slowly through friendship, creativity, accountability, and the decision to keep showing up.
Pages: 243 | ASIN : B0HCTPJ9YV
Plans: A Haterius Family Adventure
Plans by Pamela Percival is a Christian family adventure novel that blends domestic suspense, international travel fiction, and coming-of-age family drama. At its center is Aggie Haterius, a widowed cybersecurity professor raising three strong-willed daughters: twins Kae and Domi, and their younger sister, Claudia. A long-awaited summer trip begins just as Aggie’s professional success attracts dangerous attention. Percival tells the story through multiple viewpoints, giving readers access to Aggie’s protective instincts, the twins’ changing relationship, and Claudia’s struggle to find her own place within the family.
The suspense grows from two connected threats. Aggie’s work on the highly classified Mojave Project has made her valuable to governments and criminals, while a delusional colleague, Dr. Robert Sterling, has become increasingly violent. Once the family reaches Israel, the book develops into a cybersecurity thriller and international conspiracy story. Sterling’s attacks are immediate and personal, while the stolen software creates a broader danger. The combination gives the novel an unusual identity, mixing a stalker thriller with technological intrigue and a mother’s determination to protect her children.
Family life provides the book’s emotional center. Kae, Domi, and Claudia argue, tease, compete, and defend one another with convincing intensity. Their sightseeing, hotel stays, meals, and mishaps give the novel the texture of a detailed family travel adventure. Claudia’s desert excursion is especially important because it lets her become the informed, confident sister for once. Faith also plays a role, making this clean Christian suspense novel as interested in courage, loyalty, and providence as it is in danger. The measured, scene-by-scene storytelling allows readers to spend plenty of time with the Haterius family before the plot takes its largest turn.
That turn transforms Plans into speculative time travel fiction while setting up the larger Haterius Family Adventure series. A desert sandstorm, an assassin, an extraordinary lightning event, and a seemingly impossible disappearance bring the novel to a striking cliffhanger. The included preview of No Plans, Book Two, reveals that Aggie and the children have entered a world where ancient Aramaic is spoken and camels have replaced modern transportation. Readers who enjoy Christian family fiction, multi-POV adventure novels, cybersecurity suspense, and time travel series will find plenty to explore here. Plans is a story about a capable family whose careful preparations lead them into an adventure far beyond anything they imagined.
Pages: 291 | ASIN: B0GY4N5142
