The Books List, Part Two

20 Books I Would Recommend Reading, 5 Books I Wouldn't, and 50 from my Reading List

Still in quarantine, so time for another Books List post! I hope that you found the first post helpful in bringing some enjoyable books to your attention. If you didn't read it, go here:https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-books-list-part-one.html

You'll probably note that there is a continuing pattern in the proportion of books that I liked (20), books I didn't like (5), and books I might like (50). It's true that I do enjoy the majority of the books that I read, but that's not because I have low literary standards. Although I tend to be an optimistic chick, I don't appreciate bad writing, nor will I recommend a book that left me flat, even if it's by a favorite author (out of fairness, I almost always finish a book, even if it's not great, to give it every chance).

So how do I get so lucky? Well, it's because I tend to read books that have either come well-recommended or that are by an author I like. Sometimes I am betrayed, but most of the time I am delighted. Sometimes I just idly pick something out or read what's handy, and that's where taking my chances is less likely to pay off (sometimes it does). Basically what I'm saying here is that you, too, stand a better chance of liking something that was recommended – hence my list!

My likes/loves: These are books that entertained me, moved me, taught me things, made me think, inspired me, and that I would heartily recommend. They are not ranked – they are merely in the order in which I read them.

1. 3001: The Final Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
2. Moses, Man of the Mountain – Zora Neale Hurston
3. Seraph on the Suwanee – Zora Neale Hurston
4. Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott
5. Odd Thomas – Dean Koontz
6. The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
7. The Taking – Dean Koontz
8. The Dark: New Ghost Stories – Ed. By Ellen Datlow
9. A Cold Heart – Jonathan Kellerman
10. The Conspiracy Club – Jonathan Kellerman
11. The Last Juror – John Grisham
12. Writing the Breakout Novel – Donald Maass
13. A Primer on Mental Disorders – Allen, Liebman, Park, Wimmer
14. Wake Up, I'm Fat! - Camryn Manheim
15. Wasted – Marya Hornbacher
16. Helping Someone with Mental Illness – Rosalyn Carter
17. When the Wind Blows – James Patterson
18. Cradle and All – James Patterson
19. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
20. Along Came a Spider – James Patterson

My meh/yuck list: Did not find these appealing for any number of reasons – some were boring; some had an interesting subject but did not do it justice; some were flat-out terrible. All simply left me cold in some way. Although I am likely to read multiple books by authors I like (you will see a lot of Dean Koontz, Jonathan Kellerman, Margaret Atwood, Charles deLint and Zora Neale Hurston), I do not excuse those authors when they write a book I didn't like, so they might just show up here, as well.

1. Unexplained! - Jerome Clark
2. The Chronicle of Crime – Martin Fido
3. 563 Stupid Things People Do to Mess Up their Lives – Dr. Larry
4. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
5. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

My Reading List: these are books I haven't read yet, so I don't have a reaction for you. However, I could semi-recommend them, based on the reasons they made it onto my list:

1. They were on one of those “100 Greatest Books” lists;
2. They are other books written by authors I really enjoy; or
3. I read a review, and it sounded like something I'd like.

#1 can be a bit hit-or-miss; #2 is almost (but not always) foolproof for me (but maybe not for you), and #3 usually works out pretty well, as it's a combination of the first two. As always, your results may vary, but consider them suggestions. These may tend to come in chunks of stuff by author (apologies). There are literally over 1400 books currently on my reading list (I'm stupidly ambitious), so this is a very small chunk. Don't worry; there will be more of these posts.

1. The Princess of Cleves – Madame de LaFayette
2. The Stranger – Albert Camus
3. The Counterfeiters – Andre Gide
4. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
5. Germinal – Emile Zola
6. U.S.A. Trilogy – John dos Pasos
7. Hunger – Knut Hamsun
8. Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Doblin
9. Cities of Salt – Abd al Rahman Munif
10. The Death of Artemio Cruz - Carlos Fuentes
11. The Last Chronicles of Barset – Anthony Trollope
12. The Pickwick Papers – Charles Dickens
13. The Sorrows of Young Werther – Goethe
14. Oblomov – Ivan Goncharov
15. Waverly – Sir Walter Scott
16. Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata
17. The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
18. Cold Sassy Tree – Olive Ann Burns
19. Dawn – Octavia Butler
20. Boys and Girls Together – William Goldman
21. Bimbos of the Death Sun – Sharyn McCrumb
22. Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
23. Mythago Wood – Robert Holdstock
24. Illusions – Richard Bach
25. The Cunning Man – Robertson Davies
26. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
27. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
28. The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
29. Emma – Jane Austen
30. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
31. The Ambassadors – Henry James
32. 100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
33. Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
34. The Man without Qualities – Robert Musil
35. Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
36. Yarrow – Charles de Lint
37. Memory and Dream - Charles de Lint
38. Trader - Charles de Lint
39. Greenmantle - Charles de Lint
40. The Little Country - Charles de Lint
41. Mulengro - Charles de Lint
42. Spirits in the Wires - Charles de Lint
43. Medicine Road - Charles de Lint
44. The Blue Girl - Charles de Lint
45. Angel of Darkness - Charles de Lint
46. Dreams Underfoot - Charles de Lint
47. The Fair in Emain Mancha - Charles de Lint
48. From a Whisper to a Scream - Charles de Lint
49. I'll Be Watching You - Charles de Lint
50. Into the Green - Charles de Lint

That's all for now; hope you find these lists useful as you think about things you might like to read.

Here's the next, uh, chapter: https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-books-list-part-three.html

Image from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/illustrations/book-old-clouds-tree-birds-bank-863418/

Review of Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale by Chuck Kinder

I want to be nice to Chuck Kinder. I want to give him a great review, because he is from West Virginia. Although I was not born in West Virginia, I grew up there, and I have had to deal with the most astonishingly ignorant comments from people who either have no idea that West Virginia is actually separate from Virginia (What part of Virginia did you say you were from? The part that became a state in 1863), or who think it is a land peopled solely by unlettered inbreds of the Deliverance ilk (by the way, Deliverance was set in Georgia , and the people in the movie were actors).

Okay, so clearly I'm a little defensive about the West Virginia thing, and I wanted to praise my homeboy Chuck Kinder as a fantastic writer who has penned an amazing book. And yet, although I don't think Kinder is a bad writer--as a matter of fact, he is a good writer--I do not, in fact, think that he has penned an amazing book, or even a very good one. It is not so much a bad book, either, as an aggressively pointless one.

Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale is the story of friends Ralph Crawford and Jim Stark, two intelligent yet self-defeating writers who are unlikely to achieve their big dreams of being star novelists, as they have made a second career of doing inadvisable quantities of recreational drugs, screwing around on their spouses, wandering off aimlessly, running out on restaurant checks, and blathering, blathering, blathering about all the great stuff they are going to do as soon as the world stops holding them back. Arghhh. I don't feel I need to tell you more; I am sure you know people just like this and probably have restraining orders against them.

What initially drew me to this book was the deadpan hilarity of the cover (in retrospect, the best part of the book), backed up by approving cover blurbs by such renowned literary figures as Michael Chabon, Richard Ford, Scott Turow and Larry McMurtry. But I should have taken warning from those same blurbs: Ford, for example, invokes the likes of Kerouac, Ken Kesey and even R. Crumb. The term 'iconoclast' is used, with reverence. Sigh. I have read Kerouac, Kesey and Crumb (now there's a nice, alliterative law firm for you), and they seem to enjoy writing about the pointless pursuits of drug-addled hedonists (by turns, nihilists), so, hey, if that's what you're into, this book fits right in. It also occurred to me that the blurbists are all known for writing "manly man" fiction, so maybe that's the problem--maybe I just don't have the right plumbing to enjoy this stuff. And here I was thinking a pointless, plotless, train wreck of a book with unlikable characters doing nothing worthwhile or even remotely interesting wouldn't appeal to anyone , regardless of gender.

Sorry, Chuck. At least I don't think it's because you're from West Virginia, if that's any consolation.

Hey, here's a book I liked: 

https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2022/02/review-of-james-pattersons-quickie.html

The Books List, Part One

20 Books I Would Recommend Reading, 5 Books I Wouldn't, and 50 from my Reading List

It is March 2020, and we are currently staying at home because of the threat of COVID-19 (historical context!). People are looking for things to do while under this semi-quarantine, and a lot of us are finding more time to catch up on reading. It's always good to have friends who can recommend books that they enjoyed, to give us an idea of something we might try next. I personally read a lot of different kinds of things – fiction, non-fiction, Young Adult (YA), graphic novels, and several years ago, I started writing down everything I read, with a little smiley, meh face, or frown to remind me whether I liked it, didn't care, or disliked it, because I am certainly not going to remember every single book I read, but at least I know whether I would read it again or steer clear.

I am not going to write reviews or summaries of these books, because all that stuff is readily available online. This is just my very simple overall opinion based on how I felt after having read the book. Did I love it, or at least like it? Or did I feel like I wasted my time? The point of sharing this list with you is to give you some inspiration about what you might like to read.

My likes/loves: These are books that entertained me, moved me, taught me things, made me think, inspired me, and that I would heartily recommend. They are not ranked – they are merely in the order in which I read them.

1. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
2. By the Light of the Moon – Dean Koontz
3. The Art Book – Phaidon Press
4. Cat's Eye – Margaret Atwood
5. The Murder Book – Jonathan Kellerman
6. The Face – Dean Koontz
7. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
8. The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
9. Enough Rope – Lawrence Block
10. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
11. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – Al Franken
12. Light in August – William Faulkner
13. The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla – Stephen King
14. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
15. Stupid White Men – Michael Moore
16. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
17. Ender's Game – Orson Scott Card
18. The Songs of Distant Earth – Arthur C. Clarke
19. Jonah's Gourd Vine – Zora Neale Hurston
20. The Hammer of God – Arthur C. Clarke

My meh/yuck list: Did not find these appealing for any number of reasons – some were boring; some had an interesting subject but did not do it justice; some were flat-out terrible. All simply left me cold in some way. Although I am likely to read multiple books by authors I like (you will see a lot of Dean Koontz, Jonathan Kellerman, Margaret Atwood, Charles deLint and Zora Neale Hurston), I do not excuse those authors when they write a book I didn't like, so they might just show up here, as well.

1. For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
2. The Official eBay Guide – Laura Fisher Kaiser and Michael Kaiser
3. Emotionally Weird: A Novel – Kate Atkinson
4. Don't Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, You Know them Taters Got Eyes – Lewis Grizzard
5. The South Beach Diet – Dr. Arthur Agatston

My Reading List: these are books I haven't read yet, so I don't have a reaction for you. However, I could semi-recommend them, based on the reasons they made it onto my list:

1. They were on one of those “100 Greatest Books” lists;
2. They are other books written by authors I really enjoy; or
3. I read a review, and it sounded like something I'd like.

#1 can be a bit hit-or-miss; #2 is almost (but not always) foolproof for me (but maybe not for you), and #3 usually works out pretty well, as it's a combination of the first two. As always, your results may vary, but consider them suggestions. These may tend to come in chunks of stuff by author (apologies). There are literally over 1400 books currently on my reading list (I'm stupidly ambitious), so this is a very small chunk. Don't worry; I'm planning on coughing up more of these posts.

1. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature – Steven Pinker
2. American Normal: The Hidden World of Asperger Syndrome – Lawrence Osborne
3. Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats – Craig Marberry
4. Partly Cloudy Patriot – Sarah Vowell
5. Lady Oracle – Margaret Atwood
6. Man's Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
7. Running with Scissors – Augusten Burroughs
8. Random Family – Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
9. Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
10. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
11. The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
12. Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
13. My Antonia – Willa Cather
14. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
15. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
16. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
17. The Call of the Wild – Jack London
18. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
19. Dune – Frank Herbert
20. Fifth Business – Robertson Davies
21. The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
22. The French Lieutenant's Woman – John Fowles
23. Gravity's Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
24. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
25. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
26. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
27. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
28. Rabbit Run – John Updike
29. Slaughterhouse – Five – Kurt Vonnegut
30. Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey
31. Sophie's Choice – William Styron
32. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
33. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
34. Ulysses – James Joyce
35. The World According to Garp – John Irving
36. The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell
37. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
38. Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner
39. Plainsong – Kent Haruf
40. Survival of the Prettiest – Nancy Etcoff
41. Learning Their Language – Marta Williams
42. Science and the Search for God – Gary Kowalski
43. Darkness Visible – William Styron
44. I Know What You're Thinking – Lillian Glass
45. The Fat Girl's Guide to Life – Wendy Shanter
46. Good Grief – Lolly Winston
47. Symptomatic – Danzy Senna
48. From Beirut to Jerusalem – Thomas Friedman
49. The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
50. Petersburg – Andrey Bely

That's all for now; hope you find these lists useful as you think about things you might like to read. Let's make quarantine fun and productive!

Here's the next list! : https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-books-list-part-two.html

Image from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/book-read-tee-literature-2020460/

My Review of the Beyond Thickburger from Hardee's / Carl's Jr.

Allrighty, some of you have perhaps read my review of the Impossible Whopper from Burger King (and if you haven't, here's a link https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2019/11/my-review-of-impossible-whopper-from.html), wherein you learned that, as a, um, "concerned carnivore", I am making an effort to eat farther down the food chain, for purposes of not being sad about animals dying and also because of environmental and dietary concerns. Regardless of your feelings about eating critters, vegetables are just better for you, and they are grown much more sustainably than animal products. I'm pleased that another fast-food chain, Hardee's (or Carl's Jr, if you are from western parts), has introduced a plant-based burger, the Beyond Thickburger.

Impossible and Beyond are two different and competing brands of meat substitute. Whereas Impossible is soy-based, Beyond uses pea protein as a base. As a matter of fact, here is the complete ingredient list: water, pea protein isolate, expeller-pressed canola oil, refined coconut oil, rice protein, natural flavors, cocoa butter, mung bean protein, methylcellulose, potato starch, apple extract, salt, potassium chloride, vinegar, lemon juice concentrate, sunflower lecithin, pomegranate fruit powder, and beet juice extract. So yeah, that 18-ingredient list has, oh, 17 more ingredients than beef, and with a similar amount of calories and fat, it's not necessarily a whole lot healthier than beef, just less murdery. It does have zero cholesterol, though. 

So what about the most important bit--the taste?? How does it compare to the Impossible Whopper?Well, with regard to that, let me just say, damn, it's so much better! It has the juiciness I was missing, and is also much more flame- broil-y, as well, and considering that's BK's thing, it's a bit embarrassing. As for how it compares to actual beef, I think you could give this burger to someone without telling them it wasn't meat and they would never know. We have a winner!

However, even though Beyond completely kicked Impossible's butt in this head-to-head taste-test, Impossible is still fine and dandy with me. If there were a Hardee's across from a Burger King, the choice is obvious, but if there were just a Burger King, I absolutely would still choose the Impossible Whopper over a beef burger. A category in which Impossible does completely win is calorie count, which is pretty important. The Beyond Thickburger has 840 calories. The Impossible Whopper with cheese has only 630 (a regular Whopper with cheese has about 800). 840 calories is one-third the typical caloric intake required for an average adult man and almost half that of an average woman. And this is one sandwich, so caveat emptor. 

Ah, yes...one other thing...the Beyond Thickburger made me burp, rather a lot. Like from about an hour after I ate it, up until about five or six hours later. And those burps did not taste real fabulous (and just FYI, I ordered the burger without onions--the mind reels at the thought of what would have transpired if I hadn't). So, uh, maybe not the thing to eat if you need to be in close proximity to anyone for the next while? I did have a soda with it, but carbonation usually gets burped forthwith, so I doubt that was a factor. Also, I don't remember this happening with the Impossible Whopper. Your digestive system, and therefore your results, may vary. 

All in all, I am very happy to see meat substitutes coming to the fast-food market. It's a step in the right direction, burps aside. KFC is currently testing Beyond Fried Chicken in some markets (Atlanta is one, I have heard), and I will be very interested to try that, as well. So just remember: If you want to save the planet, Mom was right--eat your veggies!

My Review of the Impossible Whopper from Burger King

First off, I'll state that I'm not a vegetarian. I do eat meat, but I'm not altogether comfortable with that, and I think there are a lot of positives involved in eating lower on the food chain. Better for your health, better for the environment, and certainly better for the livestock. If there are things out there that do a good job of behaving like meat, give me my protein, and are affordable and convenient, what's not to like? So it was with great anticipation that I sat down to try an Impossible Whopper, Burger King's new offering, a soy-based meat substitute.

The Impossible Whopper is available with all the typical fixings you can get on a regular Whopper (and yes, you can get bacon on it, if you feel a bit more callous toward pigs than cows). I ordered mine with cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayo, and ketchup. People have been mentioning the price as being higher than that of a typical Whopper, but the sandwich and a side of mozzarella sticks cost $8.20 all together, and I didn't find that particularly exorbitant (this is in North Carolina; your results elsewhere may vary). By the way, I'm happy that Burger King offers mozzarella sticks, but sad because they never seem to be freshly made. If you want good drive-thru mozzarella sticks, go to Arby's. Their sticks game is on point.

As for the Impossible Whopper, I liked it. It was tasty and satisfying. It did not, I repeat, not, taste like beef. However, it still tasted good, and it tasted like "a burger", if that makes sense. Part of that was the toppings and the bun, I'm sure, but it also had the right texture, or "mouth feel", as they say. One thing that I will note is that it was not juicy, although frankly, a lot of juiciness can make a burger excessively sloppy, and I do not have much interest in wearing a plastic bib everywhere I go to eat. It didn't taste dry, either--it wasn't crumbly or mealy. It was firm and meaty, and of course the mayo and ketchup added a decent amount of sloppiness to the burger experience.

The verdict: I'm in. It's a win-win: I get my burger, and nobody has to die. From now on, I'm getting my mozzarella sticks from Arby's, but when I'm at Burger King, I will happily order the Impossible Whopper from now on!

September is National Pediculosis Prevention Month

September has almost begun, and I noticed while researching things that occur during the ninth month that September is National Pediculosis Prevention Month. My initial reaction to this was, "What the heck is pediculosis?"

Just in case you were wondering that same thing, I looked it up to save you the trouble. Pediculosis, it seems, is a nicer way of saying "an infestation of lice". Nicer, and shorter, as well--I'm not sure how well National Month for the Prevention of Lice Infestation would fit on a banner at the bake sale fundraiser. Also not sure if you would want to buy any baked goods after seeing that.

So now that we know what pediculosis means and why the word is used, let's learn a little more about the problem itself. The most common type of pediculosis is an infestation of head lice, spread through head-to-head contact, such as when people are cuddling or sleeping side-by-side. It's most commonly found in children ages 3-10 and their families. Every now and then, you will hear of a lice infestation sweeping through an elementary school, complete with kids lining up to be inspected. Treatment for head lice includes medicated shampoos and ointments as well as physical treatments like delousing combs, hot air and even shaving, when all else fails (lice are not super easy to get rid of). People of African descent have an advantage when it comes to lice--they are less susceptible to these infestations because of their hair texture.

There are other types of lice infestations (and other types of lice) besides that which involve the head. The hair on one's body can be the subject of pediculosis, as well. The infestation that we know as "crabs", which strikes the genital area, is a type of lice infestation--pubic lice. If one is nervous about applying chemical treatments to these more sensitive areas, at least it is much easier to simply shave hair off the body than off the head. Lice are similar to fleas and ticks in that they like to stay on the body, biting the skin to drink blood. This can cause a lot of itching discomfort, as well as other, more serious, complications--some very deadly diseases such as Typhus can be spread by lice. Fortunately, only body lice, which are different from head and pubic lice, are known to spread disease.

To prevent pediculosis, avoid contact with other sufferers, keep bedding and clothing well-laundered and keep hair and body clean. Pediculosis is actually on the rise, probably owing to an increase in population and more crowded living conditions, so be aware and keep yourself as clean as is practically possible.

To find out what else is going on in September, click here: https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2019/08/your-september-birthday-september.html

Free-use image from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/person-man-body-back-hand-finger-3382130/

Your September Birthday: September Holidays, Traditions and More

Ah, September! Beginning of the school year, first month of fall, and here comes football! For some of us, September is more like the start of a new year than January, which after all comes right in the relative doldrums of winter (sorry, January babies). Those of you born in September might think you don't have enough cool holidays-the exuberance of the Labor Day weekend can be bittersweet, as it also marks the last summer blowout-but read on; there's plenty of interesting stuff in September to celebrate.

Monthly Observances
September is National Chicken Month, as well as the national month for alcohol and drug addiction recovery, childhood injury prevention, coupons, honey, Hispanic heritage, mushrooms, organic harvest, osteopathic medicine, ovarian cancer awareness, sickle cell, pediculosis prevention, pianos, potatoes, preparedness, rice, and skin care awareness, as well as the international month for people skills, self-awareness, and strategic thinking.

Furthermore, September is the official month for ADHD awareness, baby safety, backpack safety, college savings, gynecology cancer awareness, world leukemia and lymphoma awareness, metaphysical awareness, menopause awareness, mold awareness, pediatric cancer awareness, reunion planning, sea cadets, self improvement, healthy aging, shameless promotion, sports and home eye health and safety, subliminal communications, and world animal remembrance.

September has also been deemed One-on-One Month, which may or not be related to the fact that it's also Pleasure Your Mate Month (or it may just be about basketball), and, last but not least, literary types might appreciate the fact that September is not just Library Card Sign-Up Month, but also Be Kind to Editors and Writers Month. Yes, please!

Weirdest Holiday
The 25th is National One-Hit Wonder Day , so listen to some Haircut One Hundred, Joe Budden or Soup Dragons today!

September Traditions
Flower: aster - faith, wisdom, valor
Birthstone: sapphire - chastity, hope; Virgo's gemstone: topaz - fidelity

Zodiac sign: Virgo (1-22) and Libra (23-30; see October for details). Virgos are earth signs, so called because they are solid and stable, like the ground you stand on. Virgos are extremely reliable and dependable in the workplace. They like following routines, so they have to try to keep from being awfully boring! Best friends: Taurus and Capricorn. Best love matches: Scorpio, Pisces and Cancer.

Famous Birthdays: Lily Tomlin (1st), Jimmy Connors (2nd), Charlie Sheen (3rd), Beyonce Knowles (4th), Bob Newhart (5th), Idris Elba (6th), Buddy Holly (7th), Don Rickles (8th), Otis Redding (9th), Colin Firth (10th), Ludacris (11th), Jennifer Hudson (12th), Jesse Owens (13th), Jacqueline Bisset (14th), Prince Harry Wales (15th), Peter Falk (16th), Narendra Modi (17th), Greta Grabo (18th), Jimmy Fallon (19th), Sophia Loren (20th), Larry Hagman (21st), Joan Jett (22nd), Ray Charles (23rd), Jim Henson (24th), Christopher Reeve (25th), Olivia Newton-John (26th), Avril Lavigne (27th), Brigitte Bardot (28th), Madeline Kahn (29th), Truman Capote (30th).

Catholic Feast Days
1- St Fiacre, St Giles
2 -St Agricolus of Avignon
3- St Gregory the Great, Ste Phoebe, St Simeon Stylites the Younger
4 -St Marinus, Ste Rosalia, Ste Rose of Viterbo
5 -St Laurence Justiani
6 -Ste Bee, St Magnus of Fussen
7 -St Anastasius the Fuller, St Cloud, Ste Regina, St Gratus of Aosta
8 -Nativity of Mary, St Adrian
9- St Peter Claver, St Bettelin
10- St Nicholas of Tolentino, Ste Pulcheria, St Theodard
11- St Veran, the Blessed Louis of Thuringia
12- St Ailbhe, St Guy
13- St John Chrysostom, St Venerius
14- Ste Notburga, St Maternus
15- Ste Catherine of Genoa
16- St Cornelius, St Cyprian, Ste Ludmilla, Ste Edith of Wilton
17- Ste Hildegard of Bingen, St Lambert, St Robert Bellarmine
18- St Ferreolus, St Joseph of Cupertino
19- St Januarius, Ste Emily de Rodat, Ste Lucy of Scotland
20- St Eustace
21- St Matthew
22- St Maurice, St Phocas
23-The Blessed Padre Pio, Ste Thecla
24- St Gerard
25- St Cadoc, St Finbar
26- Sts Cosmas & Damian, St Elzear
27- St Vincent de Paul
28- St Bernardino of Feltre, St Thiemo, St Wenceslas
29- St Michael the Archangel (Michaelmas), St Raphael the Archangel
30- St Jerome, Ste Sophia

See? No matter what day you were born on, something is happening!
Not born in September? Here are all the other months!

January - https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2017/01/your-january-birthday-january-holidays.html
February - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/02/your-february-birthday-february.html

March - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/03/your-march-birthday-march-holidays.html

April - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/03/your-april-birthday-april-holidays.html

May - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/05/your-may-birthday-may-holidays.html
June - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2017/05/your-june-birthday-holidays-traditions.html
July - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2017/07/your-july-birthday-july-holidays.html
August - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/07/your-august-birthday-august-holidays.html
October - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/09/your-october-birthday-october-holidays.html
November - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2017/10/your-november-birthday-november.html

December - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/12/your-december-birthday-december.html

Aster image from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/photos/aster-white-aster-bloom-blossom-3762937/