Untamed, Glennon Doyle

Anon., A Bullock Cart Carrying a Cheetah, 1860

(December 16)

The Map of Heaven, Eben Alexander with Ptolemy Tompkins; Living in a Mindful Universe, Eben Alexander and Karen Newell

 

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490-1510

(December 11; August 6, 2021)

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

 

Head of Hermes from the Orpheus Relief, 450-400 BCE 

(September 7)

American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins

Lorena Rodriguez, Vacio (Emptiness), ca. 2000

(September 2)

Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife, Eben Alexander

Gabrielle Huller, Skydiver. Parachute., 2017

(August 1) 

My Year of Living Spiritually: From Woo-woo to Wonderful: One Woman's Secular Quest for a More Soulful Life, Anne Bokma

Sandro Botticelli, Primavera (detail: one of the Three Graces), late 1470s /early 1480s

(July 14)

Nothing to See Here, Kevin Wilson

Remedios Varo, As the Volante, 1962

(June 16)

The Oxygen Advantage, Patrick McKeown

Dick Bruinsma, Window, 2013

(May  )

The Enchanted April, Elizabeth von Arnim

John William Waterhouse, The Soul of the Rose, 1903

(March 27)

Super Attractor: Methods for Manifesting a Life Beyond Your Wildest Dreams, Gabrielle Bernstein

from here

(February 27) Was inspired to read this by a Goop Instagram post. From that and even the introductory pages, I could tell that this was going to totally align with Abraham-Hicks -- Bernstein mentions them by name as teachers right off the bat.

By the end of the book, I would have to say that not only does it align with Abraham-Hicks -- it's basically a workbook for using them. Bernstein breaks everything down into the simplest elements for spoon-feeding and provides totally humdrum examples for illustration, so it's a bit different from Esther Hicks's narrative, which can be a bit lofty and metaphorical. Also different is her recommendation always to be ceding control to the universe, which Abraham-Hicks never does... they never talk about "control" at all.

For a while, I wanted to buy a copy of the book (true sign I am feeling reverential about something I'm reading), but in the end I thought it was a little too dubious with the praying (there are a lot of prayers) and ceding control.

The Light Between Us, Laura Lynne Jackson

AMTK (Andrew Mazorol and Tynan Kerr), Seance, 2012

(February 25) With one day left before it was due, I sampled the first page... and it was so gripping that I dropped everything else then and there and read it cover to cover.

It was not hard to finish in one day: these were amazing stories. First of all, CLEARLY the Other Side and "bonds of light" exist... all the experiences this woman, and her many medium friends and acquaintances, relate cannot be just coincidences and wishful projections. Something's going on.

Some of the stories of reunions with loved ones on the Other Side are absolutely heart-wrenching... I was sobbing over the stories of the father, the son, and the belt, the girl and the kitten... the whale! ...the bee! 

The oddness mixed in with the touchingness in each story makes it all so convincing.

Jackson has a nice narrative style but a strange habit that I noticed: she always gives the height of the men when she describes them, usually precisely. If they are not at least six feet tall, though, she won't bother with precision (or will merely say "he was not tall"). Women are almost always described as "pretty" within the first two words of a description. The funniest quirk!

I should have read this ahead of Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe -- I would have been less underwhelmed.

Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson

Elizabeth Catlett, Portfolio Cover, 1970s

(February 3) Recommended on the Goop Instagram as follows: "In 2001, sixteen-year-old Melody is walking down the stairs at her grandparents’ house in Brooklyn for her coming-of-age ceremony. Sixteen years earlier, her own mother Iris, pregnant, missed her party. Cutting back and forth in time, and from character to character, Jacqueline Woodson explores all the different moments, all the beginnings that lead a family to a particular moment in time. It’s a novel about history, class and status, and the ways we try to escape and cling to our identity. We still can’t believe a story so epic fit into just 200 pages", a perfect summary.

I liked it fine... the cutting back and forth through time and all the slightly different repetitions of key events in the lives of different characters gives the novel the quality of a Cubist painting like Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), like you're actually able to see motion in a static thing, or, here, feel the passage of many generations in 200 pages. Of course it's interesting how the generations differ from each other even though they mirror one another.

I definitely felt I was given authentic tastes of Black culture in Brooklyn from the '60s through to the '90s.

Signs: The Secret Language of the Universe, Laura Lynne Jackson

Roelof Louw, Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges), 1967

(January 17) Heard about this on Goop and read it mostly to see how it lined up with Abraham-Hicks philosophies. At first it didn't look too correlated at all: it was like Jackson believed the thing we need to know the most is that we are not alone, that loved ones who have passed on are not gone for good, that we are being helped from beyond the grave by individuals that we once knew.

Their help, according to her examples, is usually not of a practical nature, but rather is in the form of signs that affirm an event or decision. An example was a stack of oranges Jackson was presented with after a talk went well, which, because of peculiar associations with deceased loved ones, had a lot of significance for her.

A disconcerting element was that most of the examples of people having experiences with signs from the Other Side seem to be Jackson's long-time personal friends, and a great deal of the advice coming from the Other Side seems to be about whether or not to have a child (the Other Side wants people to have the child 100 per cent of the time, interestingly).

So the book follows this trajectory for quite a while, kind of trying to prove anecdotally that there's an afterlife, when, suddenly, it switches to a discussion of energy shifting (vibrational life, in other words) and goes into what is all very much an Abrahams-Hicks vein... how gratitude leads to manifesting and so on and so on. So surprising!

Normal People, Sally Rooney

Tina Berning, Illustration for the New York Times, 2016

(December 14, 2019) I liked Conversations With Friends so much I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this, Sally Rooney’s latest book. As with the other, I mowed it down pretty quickly. There is just something so engaging about her people -- which are the same people as before, really, just in slightly different circumstances, and this is third-person narration. However, we’ve got the bright, quirky, naive girl who is smitten with the adorable but indecisive man who is equally smitten but can’t commit. 

It’s the weirdest love-story situation in the history of love-story situations, but I have enjoyed it twice now because of Rooney’s.... way.

Sometimes while reading it (them) I wonder if I’m charmed mostly by the lack of quotation marks, which sometimes makes it unclear exactly what people are saying aloud and what they are thinking to themselves or simply doing in the third-person narration. You can reread a passage and take a slightly different interpretation sometimes for the lack of quotation marks.

This is a darker version of the first relationship; there are some wrenching motivations behind some of the behaviours (whereas in Conversations With Friends it was all pure quirk and naiveté).

I know that these people and these relationships have existed in real life because Rooney is reconjuring a strong experience like Van Gogh painted sunflowers.

For all the reasons I liked Conversations With Friends, same here.