Letters From Egypt, Lucie Duff Gordon (edited by Gordon Waterfield)

Henry Wyndham Phillips, Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, 1851

(October 23, 2012) This was just delightful -- to experience Egypt through Duff Gordon’s eyes -- to learn to share her love of Arabs... I loved the charming, charming Arabs and now want them to rule the world.

Lucie Duff Gordon herself seems to have been wonderful -- everyone about her clearly loved her (except for her stupid-seeming husband. Very odd.).

Strange disorientation arises because this was written in Victorian times and is exotically located: sometimes LDG will tell a story and make a comment and you don’t get it at all. You can’t tell whether she’s being humorous, insightful, reproving or what. It’s cultural disorientation, I guess, and the very Victorian style.

Took me a long time to read this, possibly because unconsciously I wanted to defer the conclusion... obviously, the further you went in the book, the closer to LDG’s death you were.

This made me want to read more about and by Caroline Norton, and LDG’s Amber Witch.

Sloppy Firsts, Megan McCafferty

DragoArt.com, How to Draw Gerard Way, My Chemical Romance

(November 24) I ended up liking this, but things did not start well. The close parallels to Spoiled were off-putting, (1) because it felt (retroactively) like the Fug Girls were maybe plagiarists as well as lazy and (2) because I had plot fatigue over stories of teen girls who react badly to tragedies, screw themselves up, then get redeemed (via twoo wuv).

But about five-eighths of the way through, Sloppy Firsts suddenly became quite captivating and compelling, mostly because of an interesting boy who sails in and steals our heroine’s heart out of the blue, and who is about as anti-hero as you can get. So that was original and compensatory.

But will I go on to read the rest of the (five-book) series? No, I will not. In the end, Jess, the heroine, the first-person narrator, is just not that compelling to me.

The main thing about this reading experience was that it confirmed an uneasy sense I had that I can't trust the taste of a certain someone who often recommends books. She raves about certain books, such as this series, and gets me all excited. Alas, I have tried four different recommendations from her without sharing any of her rhapsody over them. They were all “OK,” but not rave-worthy for me.

So this is good-bye, L.... on the book-recommendation front, anyway.

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

Gabriele Iuvara, "Las Fura dels Baus in Dreams In Flight"

(November 12) Liked it a lot at first... it’s very rich visually... and pretty original... you don’t know where this concept’s going to go because it plays by its own rules... would make a lovely movie if they could recreate all the visuals... fun and compelling... imagery is amazing.

But

The concept never does go anywhere... the whole thing is conducted as though it’s a lot more profound than it actually is... it was disappointing that Morgenstern didn’t know fundamentals about Victorian or Edwardian life (for example, single ladies didn’t run into gentlemen on the street and then stop to have glasses of wine with them in little establishments) even though she took the trouble to set the whole thing in the late 1890s, early 1900s....

The novel does contain writing such as “holding her empty glass of champagne” …which was painful.... and I didn’t even notice all the passages mocked (gently but hilariously) by Amazon reviewers.

So it was a strange reading experience... "wondrous" morphing into "ridiculous" before your eyes.

Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt, Katherine Frank

Jean André Rixens, The Death of Cleopatra, 1874

(October 19) I want to give this high marks because of my great interest in the subject matter (The Mistress of Nothing was meh as fiction, but I could tell the source was fascinating). This biography was fine but I kept waiting and hoping for "the good stuff" and suddenly Lucie's life was over. And she wasn't re-animated at all -- she was still viewed from a distance by a third party. I wanted her to be more reverse-engineered than she was. I suppose (I hope!) I will meet the living Lucie Duff Gordon in the things she actually wrote.

Katherine Frank's search for Lucie Duff Gordon's story produced all kinds of huge mystical parallels with Lucie's life and with the Egyptian-god myths, which is all very cool and everything but really has nothing to do with a biography of someone else (in my opinion). She intrudes a bit with her own life and you have to wonder if her fascination with the numinousness of her research experience played a hand in how she shaped the biography.

But I can nonetheless tell that Lucie's was an interesting life.

Note on the plot choices in The Mistress of Nothing: it's so obvious to me why "Lucie" was harsh with "Sally" -- why didn't Pullinger see this? Or was it too obvious and boring? Or is there no way to work such a thing into a first-person narrative???

Spoiled, Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Pepstar, Dominique: Tonner Daphne Dimples Repaint, 2009-11

(September 14) I wanted to read this because I enjoy Cocks and Morgan's blog -- the Fug Girls have a talent for hilarious one-liners.

But I felt like this was really a draft for a screenplay -- a screenplay that would have led to a funny, semi-believable movie -- but, in the interests of time or money or whatever, the Girls decided to go with a Young Adult novel because that is I'm guessing the easiest thing to publish... and it just makes all the weird plot constraints all the weirder and more constraining, and more artificial.

Or -- maybe in an effort to do something “different” with the genre they felt they had to have all these weird strained plot points.

Basically, there is no true and deep and genuine love for the Young Adult genre here.

But there were lots of hilarious one-liners, which is what I really wanted, after all.

I agree totally with this reviewer on the technical fail of this novel.

The 4-Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferriss

Rosanne Kaloustian, Illustration for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1990s (?)

(August 28) I liked reading this -- it made the idea of living like a trust-fund baby on four hours’ work a week seem totally doable, which is kind of exciting. It would be absolutely doable for someone like my brother... probably less so for someone in my situation... I really couldn’t reduce my office hours in my current job, but I suppose I could set up a “muse” (low-maintenance business that generates significant income).

Ferriss’s book is devoted equally to two topics, both how to reduce your work week and how to fill the resulting time. This seems strange to me. Why would people bother to free up their leisure time if they don’t have plans to do anything with it? I don’t need that half of the book, for sure. Did Ferriss have to pad in order to have a proper-length book?

Or maybe a "muse" is possible only if you’re the type of person who doesn’t have a busy off-hours life?

But it was fun to read anyhow.

Steve Pavlina recommended this.

The Mistress of Nothing: A Novel, Kate Pullinger

David Roberts, Luxor, Decr 1st, 1840

(August 17) I read this because it won the 2009 Governor General's Award for Fiction and I got several "live" recommendations for it... but I found it banal.

Pullinger uses a familiar device: taking up the point of view of a minor member of a cast (e.g., Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Thomas Cromwell) of a well-known story (Hamlet, the execution of Anne Boleyn) and telling the more famous story from that point of view. I don't find Pullinger so clever with it. The book is not convincing from any standpoint -- class, time period, whatever. Sarah Waters has spoiled me forever for fictitious Victorian narrators, I guess. Sally's voice is too educated and nuanced for a girl brought up in service.

The actual historical details that spawned this "novel," the bare-bones source, are interesting, but I don't think Pullinger did much with them, and, furthermore, I don't get the feeling of having "seen something" of Victorian Egypt despite this being the time and place of the story.

However, I am now mildly enthusiastic about reading Duff Gordon's letters from Egypt, and Katherine Frank's biography of her.

Winter's Bone, Daniel Woodrell

Paul Murray, Cutshin Creek, 2008

(July 19) Really gripping. At first, I thought, “Oh, no, a raw, earthy conflict... somebody’s gonna get raped or brutally killed, or I am gonna be horrified in some unknown way.” Yet such is the talent of the writer that I couldn’t stop reading anyway. And things were a bit brutal. It’s modern hillbillies, running meth and other drugs instead of moonshine, and with all their crazy codes of honour and toughness. But again, it’s love that drives them onward and to do good and evil, and it’s their love that makes me want to keep reading about them. Also, the whole thing was like a trip to an exotic world.

The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling

Henri Rousseau, Surprised, 1891

(July 13) I love him (more for Kim than for this, but this was good, too). I don’t know why I never read any Kipling before; I certainly heard enough about him. I guess I thought he might be a bit clichéd, a bit jingoistic, a bit hokey. He is all these things (plus racist and imperialist), but the guy can tell a story! And every page or two he is so surprising in his style, his insight, or his plot that he takes your breath away. Like, he is a true creative. Not for nothing is he so popular and enduring.

Bossypants, Tina Fey

Jason Mecier, Tina Fey, 2010

(June 29) I heh'd at least once per paragraph and laughed out loud numerous times reading this. Very entertaining observations. I felt that I might be missing out on even more jokes because, though of course I know who she is, I never watched her on SNL or 30 Rock. Still was very entertained.

Not absolutely sure why she called it "Bossypants" since it's kind of an autobiography.

Some funny quotes:

I should have known he and I weren't going to make it when for my seventeenth birthday he gave me a box of microwave popcorn and a used battery tester. You know, to test batteries before I put them in my Walkman. Like you give someone when you're in love.

There are a lot of different opinions as to how long one should breast-feed. The World Health Organization says six months. The American Association of Pediatrics says one year is ideal. Mothering magazine suggests you nurse the child until just before his rehearsal dinner.

I have one top-notch baby with whom I am in love. It's a head-over-heels "first love" kind of thing, because I pay for everything and all we do is hold hands.

[W]henever someone says to me, "Jerry Lewis says women aren’t funny," or "Christopher Hitchens says women aren’t funny," or "Rick Fenderman says women aren’t funny... ", [I say m]y hat goes off to them. It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don't like something, it is empirically not good. I don't like Chinese food, but I don't write articles trying to prove it doesn't exist.

The Tiger’s Wife, Téa Obreht

Milena Dragicevic, Supplicant 31, 2008

(June 17) I really, really liked this novel -- I liked the magic realism of it, a style I always associated with South America but which is nonetheless perfectly suited to this ancient part of Europe. Some very lovely myths are entwined into the narrative. I was inspired to learn a lot about the Bosnian war. Also inspired to read The Jungle Book.

How many books with “wife” in the title have I read lately?

The Notebook, Nicholas Sparks

Will Davies, Harlequin Romance cover

(May 21) OMG.

I wanted to read this because I’d heard so many mildly disparaging comparisons -- “oh, this is sentimental, like The Notebook,” or “this has same kind of blind devotion from fans as The Notebook.” I wanted to know exactly what kind of sentimental this was, or what kind of oxycontin it was. It seemed like a cultural touchstone.

But OMG it was so bad. The opening acknowledgements sounded like they were written by one of my former C students, which was very alarming.

However, the story itself was written more competently than the acknowledgements -- the expression of the ideas is quite competent, in fact. It’s just that the ideas aren’t very powerful or even interesting.

I kept waiting for something “big” to happen, but suddenly the book was over and nothing “big” had happened at all. Everything was just perfect in a Redbook magazine kind of way.

At the end we find out that Sparks based this story on his grandparents’ actual lives, and that makes you wince and think, oh that’s cute, and maybe it explains why Sparks kept everything so generic … he just didn’t want to go there about his grandparents.

But then he did go there -- or somewhere -- with several hot sex scenes. So.

And that’s all the characters do -- eat, have sex, wear nice outfits. There is nothing else going on. The “events” are like snapshots described to us -- which might be an interesting idea in the right hands, but here is just really only about the clothing, the food and the mild porn. Nothing deeper.

Maybe it made for a great movie -- I haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to now. Maybe the movie injected some life into the story... because it is a cute concept and could be really powerful... and I think the movie must be better and that that is what everybody thinks of when they think of The Notebook, because the criticisms are really mild. People have ragged on Twilight so harshly, and I think it’s superior, creatively, to The Notebook.

So either the movie is acceptable and that’s what people identify as The Notebook, or people feel bad that it’s about real-life old people and therefore let it off the hook. Maybe people see it as a blank canvas and inject their own powerful imaginations into it. I cannot otherwise account for its huge, huge popularity.

About a third of the way in, I started to think, “This is just like The Bridges of Madison County,” which is a real insult, ay. But by the end, The Notebook made The Bridges of Madison County look good. O_o

Where Angels Fear to Tread, E.M. Forster

John Singer Sargent Hylda, Almina and Conway, Children of Asher Wertheimer, 1905

(May 20) All these terrible things happen; and yet it is very funny. O_o

Silk, Alessandro Baricco, translated by Ann Goldstein

(May 13) What an amazing and powerful little book. It’s only 132 pages, but it packs the kind of wallop you might expect only from long, pretentious sagas or old masters.

And it’s written so sparingly! It’s like living in a haiku for a little while. Even though it’s a translation, the book is nothing but the plainest and most common words in English, so you suspect that in the original Italian it would also be plain, unadorned vocabulary. So it doesn’t feel like you might be missing nuances. Although with this kind of book you probably are.

The story seems completely original when you are in it, but within a few minutes of finishing it, I realized it was another form of “The Beast in the Jungle,” and a story about limerence.

Andrea (from whom I got this recommendation) thought it was like music -- the pacing, the repetitions, the flourishes -- and with this I agree.

Easy Way to Stop Smoking, Allen Carr

American Cancer Society, "Smoking Is Very Glamorous," 1972

(May 9) Well, it worked for me -- so, to be fair, I've got to give it 5 stars. I didn't particularly expect it to work, and I didn't particularly care if it worked, and it certainly didn't work right away -- but 11 days after I finished this book, I just spontaneously stopped smoking (and have remained non-smoking till now, four months later).

The "switch" flipped for me, the way the book mysteriously hints it will. I'm not sure just exactly which idea it is among all the ideas that Allen Carr drills into you that does the trick, but he does harp on some basic concepts over and over. Some of them are old chestnuts, but a couple of them were interesting new points of view for me ("a cigarette's sole function is to create the desire for the next cigarette" and "you think quitting smoking is hard because everyone tells you it's hard").

Still, none of these saws seemed transformative at the time of reading. Something unknown just kicked in after 11 days.

The Sentimentalists, Johanna Skibsrud

Jeff Greenberg, Silhouette of Man Fishing, Lake Erie, Lorain, OH

(May 2) I read this because it won the 2010 Giller Prize, but I am totally shocked that it did so.

Because it was one of these pointless wandering tales of people dealing with emotions that are never spelled out for the reader, other than to refer us to a boat or a swinging light bulb or a can of ham. How are we supposed to know what these things mean to characters when we never get to know them as other than shell-shocked?

It was like Housekeeping or Tinkers or The Patron Saint of Liars. The genre confounds me.

Lady Susan, Jane Austen

George Goodwin Kilburne (1839-1924), Penning a Letter

(April 20) I heard of this for the first time only a few weeks ago -- so glad to learn there was a Jane Austen I hadn’t read! Love her. This is great. Epistolary novel, which is such an interesting way of doing point of view.

Ah, how dull life would be without the unprincipled schemers among us.

The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Bruce Onobrakpeya, Ibiebe ABC III, 2007

(April 13) I love Adichie’s voice and the way she describes Nigeria.

This is a collection of short stories, mostly about the interface of Nigerians and the U.S. (two or three are set in Nigeria only), but all are sad-sad-sad... bittersweet, really, for there is sweetness. But it’s often wives learning about husbands’ faithlessness, women being oppressed by men, everyone being oppressed by politics.

Nonetheless, I wished with each story that it would turn into a big long novel ::sigh::

The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, The Double Comfort Safari Club, Alexander McCall Smith

Terry Kobus, Nguni - Sideways Glance

(April 4, April 17) Read these out of order -- was halfway through The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party before I realized I didn’t really remember what happened to Phuti’s foot nor that his aunt had a vendetta against Mma Makutsi. What does that say about how these books are going?

The “mysteries” are more and more Isabel Dalhousie-y every day... The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party was particularly like an Isabel story, not really about its title at all.

But I am not yet tired of these people and this scenario.

Kim, Rudyard Kipling

Edwin Lord Weeks, An Open-Air Restaurant, Lahore, 1889

(March 30) Enjoyed this book so, so much, and was totally surprised by this.

I somehow got away with never reading any Kipling till now, but you can’t help knowing who he was and what his most famous books were about. I was put off by an impression that Kipling would be sentimental and imperialist... and maybe too juvenile. But Kim was being discussed on BookCel and sounded interesting... and was easy to get... so.

I picked it up ...and was not able to put it down. There are maybe the slightest bits of sentimentality, imperialism and boys'-adventure-taleism to it, but it is not juvenile at all... and the reading experience is so rich.

First, Kim is utterly adorable and it feels like he would be no matter where or when he grew up. But, second, he is in India, which Kipling paints as this phantasmagoria, this kaleidoscope, this panorama, this feast! of vivid sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings, overflowing with culture and history... and drama and comedy... where people love their loved ones deeply but hide it behind amusing jokes and cheeky teasing... (A Fine Balance and A Suitable Boy do this so well, too)... it’s very endearing.

Basically, a great novel, and now I get why K. is so revered.

All the Living, C.E. Morgan

Matt Schwartz, Girl With Piano, 2008?

(March 22) Thought I got the recommendation for this from Decorno, but now I can’t find any reference to it on her blog. It was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Best Writers Under 35, and a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished book of fiction, and it won third place in Fiction for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award... so these may be reasons she recommended it.

I liked it a lot. It reminded me of Cool Water (backroads small lives) and Gilead (backroads community plus preachers plus American) and maybe a little Edgar Sawtelle (the wonders and beauties of farm life)... and it was so slow to start, and then over too fast. But Aloma’s choice was kind of riveting and it was never a gimme about how it would end... so that was very satisfying.

Symbolism is very, very strong -- in the weather, the scenery, the two houses, and on and on. Really sympathize with Aloma, even though she is a bit dissociated, as is Orren. They have good reasons to be.

The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, Diane Ackerman

Vilhelm Dahlerup, Elephant Gate, 1901

(March 9) Really heart-warming and really scary at the same time... how did people live like that? Even though war stories were part and parcel of my childhood (TV, movies, Life magazine), it’s hard to go chapter-and-verse through the sufferings of a family you get to "know" intimately.

When I heard about this book through BookCel, I imagined it as a story of Jews and underground activists living beneath, or in, the cages of lions and elephants, having to crouch in fake caves or float under the surfaces of ponds and so on to avoid detection. But it’s really about how the Żabińskis were able to shelter people because of the large footprint and variety of buildings of a zoo. The exotic animals are long gone by the time the Żabińskis start harbouring people, and the people rarely stay in the out-buildings.

Actually, there are a lot of interesting stories about the exotic animals at the beginning, but what I found even more interesting and touching -- to my surprise -- were the stories about the very mundane, unexotic animals the Żabińskis managed to keep around them during the occupation of Warsaw... Borsunio the badger, Moryś the pig, Piotr the hamster, Wicek the rabbit, Kuba the chick, Balbina the cat... they had a mini-zoo going on during the war! And all these little animals’ activities are so heartstring-tugging.

Of course, the human activities during the German attack on and occupation of Warsaw are pretty amazing. It’s unbelievable what people can do with passion and numbers.

Ackerman has a strange style, though, one that took me a while to get used to. Strange imagery starts in the very first sentence: "At dawn in an outlying district of Warsaw, sunlight swarmed around the trunks of blooming linden trees..."

Sunlight swarms??

The brutal nature and weather imagery continues apace. According to Ackerman, nature and the weather are scarier than war, it seems, and she doesn’t drop this trope for long. The following tiny sample of strange imagery took me only seconds to gather:

p. 41 "...she realized that for Ryś the Baltic Sea he’d visited three years earlier probably existed only as a hazy memory that included the crashing surf and the glassy heat of noon sand."

Glassy heat? OK... just strange, not scary.

p. 51 "Tall lindens had begun turning bronze and oaks the burnt maroon of stale blood..."

There is so much blood in her nature descriptions -- this is just one of many images in which trees or plants are "blood red"! And not because of the war! Just because it’s autumn!

p. 125 "As the nights crackled with cold and frost feathered the windowpanes, winds knifed through the rinds of wooden buildings and slit life from the piglets."

p. 301 "Flocks of crows circled the sky before landing in the snow-covered fields, on one of those claggy, warm January mornings when dark tree branches glisten through fog and just breathing feels like inhaling cotton."

I, for one, don’t know "those" January mornings, don’t know what "claggy" means and can’t remember not being able to breathe in a fog. Smoke, car exhaust, hairspray, yes, they feel like inhaling cotton.

It all makes Ackerman’s book memorable, anyway (though not in the way I think she meant).

The Charming Quirks of Others, Alexander McCall Smith

Henry Raeburn, Mrs. Alexander Allan With Her Granddaughter, Matilda, 1815ish

(February 15) Love, love, love Isabel. But was a little disturbed in this book by how faithless she was about Jamie, and how she went to others first the moment she heard news that made her doubt him. Also noticing for the first time (or it feels like it) that Isabel is almost always 100 per cent wrong with her first conjectures. She is anti-Holmes, who always knows immediately who’s done the deed and only reveals it later. It’s a different way of keeping the reader in suspense, because you always want to agree with Isabel and her first conjecture.

Stories and misunderstandings were interesting as usual and Isabel is so charming in the way she thinks.

But she is always wrong and I think she always was and I just didn’t absorb it till now -- I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

Jamie cries a lot in this book. Thought that was going to come to something.

Also, garlic gets dwelt upon a couple of times, and I thought that was going to come to something, too.

Neither did.

And, in fact, a lot hinges on a visual impairment that we don’t know about till the very end... so... ::head tilt::.

Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making It Work, A Guide to Taste, Quality and Style, Tim Gunn with Ada Calhoun, Kate Moloney

(February 4, February 16) I really like Tim Gunn -- he’s open, naive, he enjoys a good story, he loves pasta and meatloaf. In Golden Rules, he says he’s revealing his secrets for good manners, which surprised me -- I thought it was going to be a fashion book --, but really he wants to dish the dirt on people, well-known and anonymous, who have been rude. There is some anger there, some love of revenge, so it made me a bit squeamish... until this sentence at the end:

But let’s talk some more about the bad ones, because they’re the most fun to gossip about, and they deserve a little public shaming.

and he’s right, so, OK.

Contains the most unexpected sentence ever:

Sometimes it takes two years for these patients to build up the strength in their stumps so that the prosthetics will work.

O_o

A Guide to Taste, Quality and Style was much more the style guide that I expected with the other, but I still felt less style-guided than I did with the Nina Garcia books. This book is very witty and fun, like the other. His beliefs about posture jive with all my own beliefs about posture, and this was very gratifying.

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

The Forgotten Goddess, Blue Morgana

(February 19) This took months to read -- it’s an enormous book and I had to put it down several times to read other books that were on tighter deadlines at the library, but I kept on coming back to it enthusiastically.

What a saga -- not just because it’s long and has two or three perspectives (two major, one minor), but because Zimmer Bradley has incorporated all the old sagas known to English lit into one big ball of cohesive saga-material. I was really impressed by how she endeavoured to “make sense” of the many contradictions in Arthurian legends.

She tries to do the same with all Western religions while she’s at it.

I was also impressed by Zimmer Bradley’s ability to capture the “feel” of Old English narratives in speech and dialogue -- there was enough OE vocabulary and sentence structure to sound “right” but not so much as to become unintelligible or twee or ridiculous.

I called it “The Mists of Estrogen” in my head because it was dripping with '70s - '80s feminism -- the idea that women are run by (and have power because of) their menstrual cycles and birthing and breastfeeding and being receptacles of the creation of life -- the Gaia-Goddess-Fecundity-Vegetation Mystery Tour. From reading just a little background, I think she may in fact have had a big hand in creating that gestalt.

Anatomy of the Spirit, Caroline Myss

Fernando Vicente, Deslenguado, 2008

(January 19) This book was a roller-coaster ride, if a roller-coaster ride can be thought of as starting off in a mildly exciting way, then becoming totally disappointing, and then turning out OK.

A Greener Tea recommended this, and it sounded vaguely interesting (spiritual, in an Eat, Love, Pray kind of way), but when I got it home, it turned out Myss is an amazing mystic intuitive, able to diagnose illnesses and physical problems simply by meeting a person and even by just hearing about a person through a certain person. And she said that this book would teach you how to become one yourself!

But after a few amazing stories of her diagnoses and cures of various people, the book got severely disappointing. It suddenly appeared that she wanted to do an exercise in comparative religions -- she was going to show us how the seven Christian sacraments, the ten Jewish sefirot and the seven Hindu chakras were all the same thing. (She didn’t add in Islam because she doesn’t know anything about it. :/)

So she goes through all these moral truths and shows how they relate to the sacraments and the sefirot, etc., but she really isn’t teaching us to be medical intuitives! And some of the so-called parallelisms between the three religions were pretty forced. And what about those of us who don’t need to have ideas legitimized by Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism?

It was very strange. It was a sudden shift and a kind of incoherent one.

But then about two-thirds through, the stories about people who were sick or in trouble because of something they screwed up in their chakras seemed to become more interesting. So... OK.