The Colors of All the Cattle, Alexander McCall Smith

Mansudae Overseas Projects, The Three Dikgosi Monument, 2005

(March 27)

Life After Life, Raymond Moody

Funerary vessel with an underworld scene (detail), South Italian, made in Apulia, 360–340 BCE 

(April 11)

Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

 

Elizabeth O'Neill Verner, Shem Creek, 1954

(January 6)

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) Decorno, such a great lover of Italy, recommended the movie Enchanted April as a way to take a virtual trip there (this plus several others) and I watched it and loved it.... the tears streamed down my face at the end (and even earlier on)... it's touching and sweet, a delight... and bit Abraham-Hicks actually!!... all against this beautiful Italian background of a medieval castle flanked by gardens and the sea.

I liked it so well I wanted to read the novel it was based on, which was super easy to do since it's a Gutenberg Project book... and it was such a lovely read that I finished it in about a day and a half.

It was really lovely, but it was kind of shock as well, since the movie took a number of liberties with the story that make it completely different, and yet the overall effect is exactly right somehow.

Off the bat,  the different colouring of all the main characters was superficially disorienting... in the movie, Rose Arbuthnot is played by Miranda Richardson as a pale strawberry blonde who does look like the Madonna in a painting hanging in San Salvatore, but, in the book, Rose is supposed to be dark-haired and dark-eyed. Movie!Lotty is the dark-haired and -eyed one, but in the book is supposed to be fair and ginger-haired and gets more freckled with every day at San Salvatore.

Meanwhile, the movie's Lady Caroline is a dark-haired Cleopatra of a flapper, perfectly gorgeous and sultry, whereas the original, in the book, is as blond and fair and radiant as a human being can get, all of which Von Arnim meant as important symbolism, for sure.

But none of this takes away from the emotional effect of the story -- the movie still captures that insightfully. 

What is a little more jarring is to find out that the book relationship between Lady Caroline and Mr. Briggs has quite a different dynamic than the movie presents -- the movie really dismantles and rebuilds that subplot, and makes more sense of it, maybe.

What was a great pleasure when reading the book was to see how comic the story was meant to be. There is the greatest scene in the book of the two non-Italian-speaking women being ushered around by the men from San Salvatore and not being quite sure they weren't being robbed and murdered, and having a long conversation with the men as they're led about that consists only of "Si, San Salvatore" said back and forth to each other in varying tones of hope, doubt, fear and bravado for several suspenseful pages, and it's quite hilarious.

The scene of Mellersh meeting Lady Caroline in a towel is also deftly gut-splitting.

The movie for some reason did not play up these comic scenes... but maybe it's because you need to know so much of what is going on in the character's heads to enjoy the humour... and, indeed, the movie used a lot of voice-overs to help us understand the characters' motivations... a sign of a very "interior" novel???... but strangely, a lot of the voice-over thinking was done by Lady Caroline, to completely revamp and rationalize her character, and major changes were made to Mr. Briggs to nicely co-ordinate with that revamping.

The best part of both the movie and the book is the way it dawns on them all that love is the answer to all problems, and how they all blossom and come to true happiness, one by one. It's just all so lovely.

It... the movie-book concept...  was one of those things that is unexpectedly delightful -- I mean, I expected some delight gorging on Italy, but it was unexpectedly super-delightful -- it was not just a pretty trip to a beautiful place but a deep dive into what happiness is. Sigh.

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.

Very Nice, Marcy Dermansky

T.S. Harris, Watery Bliss, 2016

(November 14) I really liked this -- inhaled it in one sitting -- and was struck by how much it was like Conversations With Friends: the characters are all associated with the literary world and the main character has a very flat affect.

It was highly recommended by Goop and there was a long queue for it at the library, two pretty good signs for a work of fiction.

And I think it’s a good novel, charming and absorbing, with the summer-fall romance ending up not so implausible (this trope usually beggars belief so I was wary). The original Goop description made it all extremely seductive too because of their excitement over the ending. After a few pages with these characters you realize the ending could be almost anything -- and because there are a lot of Trump-horror-show allusions, to classism, racism, and violence, you realize any ending could be really nightmarish. The tension builds all right.

An interesting feature of this novel is that there are quite a few first-person narrators handling the story and I love the dimensions this provides.

Did I like it as much as Conversations With Friends??? I think so.

Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney

Eileen OʼSullivan, Multiplicity of Factors, 2015

(October 26)  I just inhaled this novel -- read it in less than 24 hours, almost all at once (a second sitting for the last 40 pages). 

Such an interesting and intriguing voice this first-person narrator has, and I was totally sucked into the love affair that is the focus of the book -- a completely unconventional love affair that is nonetheless conventionally compelling, but is bathed in layers of irony so deeply that it’s almost a comic novel.... except it literally is a romance. Desperate to read more Rooney, but she’s young and has barely started.

I learned of this from Habitually Chic’s Instagram.

Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart, James R. Doty

Sirup, Yin Yang and Maze Symbol in Thinking Heads as Concept of Harmony and Chaos, 2019

(October 8) Pretty much inhaled the first three-quarters of this, then tried to savour the rest more slowly. 

I heard about it through Goop, which made the story very compelling -- a young boy with no advantages and zero prospects in life learns to manifest his desires through stilling his body and practicing meditation, so clearly an instance of systematizing the “law of attraction.”

The full story was fascinating and the book does provide the steps for learning how to still the body, clear the mind and focus on the things you want. In Doty’s case, the things wanted were a medical degree, then a neurosurgery specialty, and then the ability to successfully perform surgeries that had very poor prognoses. It was very interesting.

Becoming, Michelle Obama

Amy Sherald, First Lady Michelle Obama, 2018

(August 28) I really enjoyed this and am sorry I’m finished and won’t have “Michelle” to “talk to” every day. I just loved her voice and her point of view on everything that ever happened to her. 

I didn’t think I would like the book very much, because two friends were reading it back in April when it first came out and both said they found it kind of grocery-listish and without self-insight.

But I did not find it that way at all -- Obama was very astute about her own motivations and decisions in life, I thought.

Moreover, she knew what to share about being a black kid on the south side of Chicago and being First Lady of the United States. 

The book is natural, like you're talking to her, but also profound.

She very politely gets her own back with those who criticized her as a campaign wife and First Lady, and those who were unsupportive when she was growing up. (In the first category: Christopher Hitchens, you asshole.)

I always liked Michelle Obama -- I liked her from the beginning, in 2003, when she began showing up in my blogs as a fashion influence. Like, yes, she had that, too. She was smart, she could speak well, she could dance, she looked amazing, she had the sexiest arms ever seen on a woman, she was a lawyer and a devoted mom, and her style was infectious.

I remember getting a little “diamond” peace-sign necklace because she was wearing one all the time in that first campaign (anti Iraq war). I belted cardigans over dresses. I took pride in bare arms.

I liked everything she did as a First Lady and I think she hit levels of perfection as FLOTUS that future FLOTI will have trouble matching.

And now she writes a great book (smh).

Maeve in America, Maeve Higgins

from Anglonerd.com

(July 22) It was such a pleasure to read this that I finished it before I knew it; it is so funny and touching in all the classic Irish ways (how can that style be so particular and yet so endlessly new?) as well as in all the ways.

It arrived out of the blue as something Kerry brought to the hospital for me to read... the inscription showed that Jane had brought it to her when she was in the hospital... and it is perfect for that, but also for any other time.

And despite having many other books to finish, I kept going back to Maeve’s with eager anticipation, which is how it should be with a book... not how it is with a few I’ve been slogging through for duty reasons (I’m looking at you, History of Gardens).

Anyway, I found Maeve in America so easy and delightful to read that it was restorative.

I want to give it 3.5 stars probably because it contrasted so sharply with the slog books.

The Path Made Clear, Oprah Winfrey

Cavanagh Foyle, Oprah, 2019

(July 8) Like The Wisdom of Sundays, this was not a “book,” really... more a series of quotations from people Oprah has interviewed and gained wisdom from. Oprah writes a few essays about self-discovery which are interspersed.

You can read it in about an hour.

It is beautifully made, as a book: thick, expensive paper covered with full-bleed, full-colour photographs of amazing scenery on every page. The quotes, or conversations with Oprah, are superimposed over these spectacular views. The package is no doubt meant to be used for contemplation, meditation... all the -ations.

It was fine and pleasant, but I had hoped I would learn something new or have an insight about path-finding... but didn’t.

The Light We Lost, Jill Santopolo

Roy Lichtenstein, Kiss V, 1964

(June 4) It killed me when I got to the end of this book and saw the lengthy and detailed acknowledgements thanking people who had read multiple drafts and offered advice on the realism of certain settings and actions, and who had “all made the book so much better”.... could not one of them have caught “I turned on the sink and started washing the dishes” on p. 51? (So like the “empty glass of champagne” in The Night Circus.)

And for all this help and advice, the book is still kind of unrealistic and at the same time banal in its fantasy-spinning. 

Argh, I always have a lot to say about books that are C, C+.

I can’t remember where I got the recommendation, but it must have been from someone’s Instagram account. I do remember commenters discussing a twist and how the whole set-up was so emotional and wrenching. In fact, it was the desire to find out what “the twist” was that kept me reading after I saw how unbelievable it was going to be, how much it was pandering to lovers of romantic baloney.

Jill Santopolo admits in the afterword that she started the book based on the ending of a real-life love affair she never thought would end. That makes sense, because the early part of the book, when Lucy is falling in love with Gabe and then mourning him, seems much more realistic. There are clumsy characters and cliché moments that jar but the loving and mourning seem true to life.

Gabe, though, is a little too perfect... and so reluctant is the author to tarnish his halo that even his decision to go off on a job that Lucy “can’t” follow him on (and this, too, tortures reality -- why “can’t follow”? That one job in New York is the only fulfilling work she can do?) is softened by his eventual invitation to come along. The bad thing, apparently, is “only” that he did not think to ask her along right from the start ...all along he thought he would come back to her, his one true love (despite several serious relationships over the years, including an engagement, which she keeps hearing about secondhand).

I kept hoping the twist would be that they were miscommunicating and misinterpreting each other's actions in the way Romeo and Juliet did, but, no, the twist is something else. 

It all just clanged and clanked. I don’t require 100 Years of Solitude from every novel -- but it needs to be more clever than this.

When I started it I was sort of charmed by the coincidence that it was set to a September 11 timeline -- the day itself, the Gulf War, the establishment of memorials, the killing of Bin Laden, etc., etc. -- and I had just come back from my first visit to New York where I'd seen the play Come From Away, which really took me back to 9/11 very vividly. So resonant.

But then:

The brother who expresses everything through Pinterest-level science jokes is very lame.

The scene when the first-person female narrator describes her physical looks in a way that makes sure we know she is drop-dead gorgeous and yet not an egomaniac at all is lame. Since there is no believable way to do this, such passages are always yucky and grade C. 

So it had these and many more such moments... yet there is great love out there for it! There are more than 17,000 5-star reviews of this book on Goodreads!

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Taylor Jenkins Reid

DigitalDraft, Fashion Art Print

(June 12) I liked it a lot... interesting story about a writer getting the scoop of a lifetime for reasons that really supercharge the book’s ending, quite the unique plot twist, so very enjoyable in that way... but there were some editing issues: the tale is set partially in the ’50s and ’60s, the high-glamour age of Hollywood... a time popular with Millennials recently (and I believe Taylor Jenkins Reid is a Millennial)... but there are tiny anachronisms throughout... e.g., they did not have “dirty martinis” in 1962 or 1965 (p. 222); jeans were not called “high-waisted” in 1967... I can’t remember if hip-huggers were invented by 1967, but they would have been the only departure from regular jeans available in stores (p. 236)... and so on and so on... there was sincere regard for the looks and styles of the times, but how come Taylor Jenkins Reid’s editors didn’t catch these things???

The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine, Alexander McCall Smith

Siepolo Kelebemang, Lively Soul, 2018

(July 11)  It was such a great pleasure to read one of these again. I forgot how soothing they are, and how much they uplift.

Again, there is that effort to make Mma Ramotswe’s life more complicated, but they are still lovely stories. I cried twice over poignant scenes (the final one the most memorable).

All Your Perfects, Colleen Hoover

Elisaveta Sivas, Love and Friendship, 2018

(April 11) A blogger I like raved about this book and this author, so I flagged all the Colleen Hoovers at the library and read this, my first sample, on a trip to NYC. 

The blogger had warned that it was about love and romance and that it had steamy scenes, but I didn’t realize it would be all pretty much that. I mean, it’s a realistic portrayal of how two people in a relationship will turn love into hate through misunderstanding and misinterpretation... but the husband is hopelessly unrealistic in his wonderfulness and there’s a lot of sappiness.

“Cute but sappy” was my first (and only) note on this book... because it was well done in a lot of ways but it’s a subject and a genre (really, really soft porn?) that’s kind of teenagery for me.

I have quickly unflagged all the Colleen Hoovers on my waiting list, and I will now be cautious about other authors recommended by the blogger in question (whose food, fashion, decor and lifestyle advice is always great).

Face Paint: The Story of Makeup, Lisa Eldridge

François Boucher, Woman at Her Toilette, 1738

(August 15) I really liked this -- the topic is a guilty pleasure and there was much new-to-me information and many interesting perspectives on the history of various trends and materials in makeup. Eldridge presents it in a fairly scholarly way, too, with a lot of citations and references, and a kind of reverential tone that you find with newly minted researchers, so appealing.

The book itself is beautiful -- so many stunning colour plates, photos like works of art, paper and binding finishes of the highest quality, all at a luxurious size. It’s really an art book, a coffee table book, in some ways.

This Will Only Hurt a Little, Busy Philipps

(February 19) I really liked this book but was totally shocked by it.

I've been following Busy Philipps on Instagram for a while... Caroline Hirons recommended her as a hilarious follow a few years ago, and I quickly found her very entertaining. 

When her inevitable book came out (all popular Instagrammers get a book offer), I put in for it at the library (noting it was in high demand even here in slow old Hamilton), thinking it would be “good for my blog,” since it would no doubt be short and surface-y, easy to read. 

But when it arrived, I was knocked off my feet. It starts off as I thought it would, with references to stuff that was happening on her Instagram when she started writing -- the raccoons having sex by her pool, “nearly getting killed in an Uber,” and so on. I thought: “Yep, quick read.”

But it never went that way at all after the intro page -- in fact, it quickly got kind of dark... Philipps went through a lot of shit as a young woman partly because of bad luck but also a lot because of a trusting, hopeful nature, and that’s always the saddest.

And Philipps obviously also had a lot of grudges about her career progress she’d been keeping warm for a book like this -- she really relished her opportunity to reveal what pricks some people have been to her. I kind of admire her desire to point out where beloved stars are assholes, but I’m also kind of worried that she enjoys the revenge so much. It was clear that she’s been hoping to publish a bit of a revenge book for a while.

And then there was a potential plot twist at the end, regarding her marriage, her “emotional boyfriend” and difficulties with parenting, that was all so categorically opposite to what we've been getting on her Instagram for the last two years. 

So I liked this book (I like being suprised) and I do enjoy Philipps despite these shocks and her Ahab focus... but how unsettling it all was!

The Quiet Side of Passion, Alexander McCall Smith

Ian McWhinnie, The Blue Vase, 2017(?)

(November 27) Another quick devouring following right upon A Distant View of Everything, and I read this one even quicker, despite it being a good 10 to 15 per cent longer than the average Isabel Dalhousie novel.

This one does have a lot more going on than usual in an ID novel in terms of daily logistics (the hiring of an au pair and an editorial assistant), as well as in terms of the “mysteries” that beckon to Isabel. 

And this is the first time Isabel is faced with real violence while investigating a mystery -- she has received the odd threat here and there in the past, but this is the scariest so far of such encounters. The central “mystery” here is really quite criminal -- not just jealous or unkind people being jealous and unkind, but actual professionals and serious amateurs trying to bilk somebody. 

And McCall Smith cleverly echoes Isabel’s proclivities in another character who’s not as philosophical as Isabel, to interesting effect.

Enjoyed these last two books very much -- I’ve been reading or trying to read too much self-help and not enough fiction lately, I think.

A Distant View of Everything, Alexander McCall Smith

Stephen Conroy, Untitled (Self Portrait), 2005(?)

(November 23) Wow, this is the first time in years I’ve sat down and read a book in two and a half days! And looked forward to getting back to it in between readings, and was eager to read the next in the series (like I was following a Joss Whedon TV show). I had totally forgotten what that was like. (And for me Isabel is particularly addictive.)

There are at least six books recently listed on this blog that I have not yet even read at this point in time; I can’t seem to work up the dedication to finish them (despite they’re all being very short, since I was trying to be realistic about catching up). 

Then along comes wonderful Isabel Dalhousie and wonderful Alexander McCall Smith and I am reading like a fiend, ignoring the internet.

This one had the usual adorable jumping-to-conclusion-iness of Isabel Dalhousie novels, and realistically so in this case (I seem to remember complaining previously about the trope getting a little hack-y). 

Isabel and Jamie had another son!

Sometimes the reason behind an Isabel Dalhousie “mystery” is light and comic; sometimes it’s a bit dark and/or verging on criminal. This one was not terribly dark -- a lonely man tries to spark widespread dislike for someone he’s jealous of -- but it is a bit more sad than usual (and maybe not something to be left to clear up on its own??).

For the art above, I was looking for Scottish paintings of men crying, since Isabel notes at one point that she’d witnessed three separate men crying within the space of 12 hours -- Jamie, Eddie and Rob McLaren -- and five males altogether within the same time frame if her two baby sons were counted.

But then I saw these paintings of men by Stephen Conroy ... and he was born in Helensburgh, which one of the characters in the novel is also from (or has a summer home in or something)... and so it is the perfect choice. This portrait does evoke Rob McLaren’s embarrassment for me.

Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

Henri Matisse, Icarus, 1947

(March 6, 2019)  I canʼt remember where I heard of this book or what made me want to read it... I obviously went for it because it is a very short text and I have been desperate these last two years to read at least one book a month.

And I donʼt know why this took me so long, a full five months, to read... itʼs only 186 tiny pages, and itʼs the gentlest little guidebook ever.

It was a bit surprising actually -- for the plupart, it seems to be about this “ikigai” concept, being aware of your special gifts and predilections. It describes life in philosophical terms not unlike an Oprah book. It seems to be very spiritually oriented. 

But two-thirds or so of the way in, it becomes a real practical advice / guidebook, with references to all kinds of studies of longevity and what has been learned medically and scientifically about long life. Suddenly I felt like I was reading the 5:2 Diet books or Frank Lipman, etc.

The authors infantilized the seniors in Ogimi a little bit. 

Here are the Okinawa superfoods: tofu, miso, tuna, carrots, goya, kombu, cabbage, nori, onion, soy sprouts, hechima, sweet potato, peppers, sanpin-cha (jasmine tea).

I want to start drinking the jasmine green tea, and to find radio taiso exercises, and to do a sun salutation every day. But the ikigai part? ...uh, okkkkkk

10 Reasons You Feel Old and Get Fat, Frank Lipman

Lucian Freud, Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, 1995-6

(July 12, 2020) I wanted to read something by Frank Lipman because he is/was the vitamin guy for Goop and got me thinking carefully about omega-3s… and eventually about collagen. I remember liking his opinion that all you really need as supplements are omega-3s, collagen and Vitamin D.

But as I get into this book, I find itʼs about basically the same things as Sara Gottfriedʼs book Younger, which I read just four or five months ago -- eat right, sleep long, do some yoga, take this one vitamin (lol). I should have topic fatigue here. And why is Goop lining up so many duplicates among their experts? 

Anyway -- although the books recommend almost the same health protocols, and offer you two-week or however-many-week programs guaranteed to revitalize you or reset your biological age -- Sara is very much into how your actual cells will change under the microscope and how you will have different chemical results when tested for various conditions, while Frank is very much into making you feeeeeeel good. It's all about you feeling young again (and slim). He also encourages people to customize his various recommendations to suit their own bodies, believing each individual is their own best doctor, which is appealing.

I guess there is a slightly different focus -- she is a genetic researcher, and he is a naturopath, lol.

But, again, in terms of living according to a protocol, just as I'm never going to try to go to bed early for Sara, I wonʼt be trying to go to bed early for Frank. My circadian rhythms will never be top-notch.

I do admire the careful thinking that went into these protocols, though. And you canʼt help picking up a few good habits each time you read one of these guides. Maybe.

The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror, Mallory Ortberg

John Lawson, Little Miss Muffet, 1860s

(June 9, 2020) I loved The Toast so much that I bought this book to support the author (now Daniel M. Lavery), the Toastʼs co-founder with Nicole Cliffe. The Toast was restoringly feminist but I loved it most of all for Laveryʼs art history pieces, like “Orpheus Rescuing Eurydice From the Underworld, in Order of Rescuing” and “Western Art History: 500 Years of Women Ignoring Men” -- always so clever and cheerfully satirical, always so profoundly insightful about human psychology.

I expected The Merry Spinster would be clever because, yes, it is odd that we like to entertain children with the grisliest stories, like about being eaten by wolves, poisoned by witches, kidnapped by beast/men, etc. I assumed Lavery would do much the same thing with these archetypes that he did with classic paintings, and with literature in Texts From Jane Eyre -- highlight the weirdness of human behaviour by anachronizing everything.

And he did do that a little bit, but this collection was not really about taking the piss out of old standards -- it was more about showing exactly what the horrors of everyday life are, and how the victims just endure them.

Like, there are people turning into swans for extended periods, or being made to eat, sleep and sit with a frog 24/7, or falling in love with nonhumans, but the real horrors are the ways in which people are manipulating one another, failing one another, refusing to face reality, taking advantage of othersʼ kindness, etc., etc.... all just really normal everyday nasty things that go on all the time in real life.

So itʼs like reading a bunch of short stories that have slightly surreal settings but which are more about the mundane betrayals, prejudices and bad faith we have all seen or suffered from, and therefore are a bit depressing.

I found it a bit of a chore to read the first few (longer) stories, actually.

But Lavery really has a talent for mimicking the style / the vibe / the tone of any given genre...really recreates the fairy-tale feeling here... and then that is undercut to humorous effect by the anachronisms, just as in the art-history pieces and Texts from Jane Eyre.

[lovesick son]: “She came back to ask me to return her comb, which I had under my pillow, and which I could not give her. For if she does not marry me, I will die, and I wish to be buried with it. Then she asked, if I would not return the comb, if I would not change my mind and live with her under the sea, and I told her I could not, but begged her to visit my grave when I perished from the wanting of her."
[grim, witchy mother]: “You two are never at a loss for conversation, at least."

lol

Mrs. Simcoe's Diary, Elizabeth Simcoe

Elizabeth Simcoe, Niagara Falls, Ontario, July 30, 1792 

(December 20, 2019) I started reading this because it was short, and it felt like “a good thing to do,ˮ to read up on the early organization of Upper Canada, kind of a duty read, but hopefully quick and dirty.

And then I took forever to get into it .... mostly because I knew I would always be able to renew it at the library... as with The History of Gardens, nobody was going to be putting such a run on Mrs. Simcoeʼs Diary that I would have trouble keeping it (but people did request it once or twice over the past year and a half... no one ever requested The History of Gardens for the two and a half years I had it).

But then I finally did read a long stretch of it... and I realized that Simcoe was journeying down the same path that I have driven every six months for the past almost 40 years... it struck me first that I had a lot in common with her experience when she was in Quebec City in midwinter and was gobsmacked by how warm people kept their houses and ballrooms... she was always commenting on being too warm indoors in the middle of sub-zero weather... and I thought, guess what, 225 years later Quebeckers are still keeping their homes superhot in the winter, way hotter than we ever did in Ontario (and my parents were very fond of being warm).

But then the Simcoes proceeded down the St. Lawrence and it was like a tick-off of all the geographical points I have come to feel like old friends after going by them 160 times... the ile of Montreal... Mrs. Simcoe rode out to “La Chineˮ one day to see the rapids but her only comment was “the roads were very badˮ... then the Simcoes travelled down the St. Lawrence... they passed Gananoque, Cornwall, Kingston, all the usual suspects one by one, stayed in York (Toronto) for a while, then made it down to Niagara, my old stomping grounds, where Mrs. S. refers to many landmarks I recognize... and they lived in Navy Hall, which I remember well... and they would go up to visit Queenston, Fort Erie and Chippewa, just like we do 200 years later... and at the end there is also a lot of description of the area I live in now, which to them was “the head of the lake,ˮ and where Cootes Paradise was already named and didnʼt seem to Mrs. S. to be as swampy as usual marshes.

Anyway, it was so interesting to get Mrs. S.ʼs impressions of all these places so long ago... and to think of how they were travelling and living in the wilderness here... and to think George Washington was alive and causing trouble in the States, and Marie Antoinette was executed while they were here... It was all a bit disorienting... when I learned Canadian history it was presented in total isolation... it felt like Canada was separate and very young, and the rest of the world was very old... and that is partially true but Canada obviously has some history too.

Even more striking than the foreshadowing of my own life and geography was Mrs. S.ʼs fortitude... she came over here in a wooden boat in the fucking 1790s to begin with, then when they got here, the Simcoes lived in tents and huts basically... often sitting around outside under “a bowerˮ in the middle of winter. They had tons of servants and a battalion at their service, but it was still a very primitive way of living and they just bore it. Very few complaints of hardship.

They brought with them only two of their children, the two youngest, and then Mrs. S. had another one while she was here! That daughter survived only a year and a half or so, but the shortness of her life doesnʼt appear to have been related to primitive conditions.

I really have to admire Mrs. S.... what she went through, and the talents she had... amazing.... 225 years ago!

And so many things so completely unfamiliar in the way people lived back then.

A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, Eckhart Tolle

Lawren Harris, Morning Lake Superior, 1921

(November 11) I really liked this book… it inspired me… in ways different from the Abraham-Hicks philosophy, although it seems to mesh with A-H stuff quite nicely. In fact, it made me think that A-H is offering the paint-by-numbers model of attaining joy in the present, in order to attract and convert the greatest numbers. Eckhart Tolle shows you what that fucking ego is doing and so it is a more intellectual but probably more thorough approach, but it is so hard to maintain. My ego is huge and mighty, and it is my ego that is saying this now.

Anyway, I liked this book so much I bought it… I feel I need to reread it many times.

Younger: A Breakthrough Program to Reset Your Genes, Reverse Aging, and Turn Back the Clock 10 Years, Sara Gottfried

W.T. Benda, Cover of Life Magazine September 1923

(September 23, 2019) Iʼm pretty sure I heard of this book or this author through Goop -- I didnʼt make a note of it, but when I look up Sara Gottfried these 15 months later, a lot of the results direct you back to a Goop podcast or article about her -- particularly about her first claim to fame, the hormone-balancing protocol. Sheʼs been interviewed and cited many times over there.

Anyway -- itʼs a great book, in that it delivers an interesting premise and a galvanizing promise. ‟Dr. Sara,” as she likes to style herself, is convinced that most people can stave off the worst aspects of aging by following her health protocol, and the protocol is fairly easy and straightforward to follow... itʼs almost exactly what we were taught in Health in elementary school -- eat good foods, sleep a lot, play outside, brush your teeth, and so on... even the moral equivalents of ‟do your homework” and ‟go to church”: now they are ‟keep your mind engaged,” ‟honour your spiritual life.”

Dr. Sara presents all the supporting science to show that you can shorten or lengthen or ‟whatever” your telomeres, and affect all kinds of chemical processes in your body that accelerate aging or lead to ill health, all in terms that are understandable to the layperson. It is so cheering to learn that so much of what we dread about getting old is avoidable, and even reversible!

Her most encouraging refrain is that we are not at the sum total of our genes -- we inherit some unalterable stuff through our genes, but we are not at the mercy of our genetic heritage: most things are affected by environment / nurture.

So when I was first reading this, 15 months ago, the protocol felt easy to do and so rewarding, so I thought I would try to follow it closely, but now, coming back to it and getting into the detailed daily requirements, I find many inconveniences and realize itʼs unlikely that I will be able to follow it to the T. I do some of the basics of it already -- food, sleep, exercise, mental activity...

But Dr. Sara would like you to be in bed by 10 or 11 every night and up at 7 every day, and this is not going to happen for me; this is not what I retired for. Iʼm also going to be bad at the requirement to three times a day brush your teeth with an electric toothbrush and floss. Nor am I going to make bone broth every week, or avoid gluten, or get a sauna every few days, or take all the supplements she recommends, etc.

So I suppose that if I donʼt follow the protocol to the T, I wonʼt get the optimum results... but I donʼt mind: that is an already healthy thing about me: I never stress about meeting goals, lol.

The Wisdom of Sundays: Life-Changing Insights From Super Soul Conversations, Oprah Winfrey

Vix Harris, Oprah Queen, 2016

(April 20) Thank you, Oprah, for creating a Coles Notes compendium of all the spiritual thinkers you have brought to prominence. 

 This lady really knows what the people want. 

 Smallest of complaints: the design of the book, while tasteful, makes it difficult to read sometimes, with all the coloured papers and with text overlaid on art. Sometimes there was not enough contrast between the typeface and the background, and there was too much italic (which makes good contrast even more vital). 

I was interested to pursue more about Jill Bolte Taylor, who lost her ego through a stroke. 

Sister Joan Chittister’s parakeet story made me cry. 

Overall, the book made me want to listen more.

The Seat of the Soul, Gary Zukav

Georges de La Tour, Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, ca. 1640

(July 21) I tend to measure these psychological / woo-woo books against Abraham-Hicks thinking, because theirs is the most consistent explanation of the meaning of life I've come across. 

So I was worried when Zukav showed signs of being Christian-centric: Jesus is always one of his first examples of an enlightened point of view, and, though he mixes in Buddha, Gandhi and a few other spiritual leaders very conscientiously, you can sense that Christianity is a strong force for him. 

But in the end I would say that Zukav’s point of view is perfectly at one with anything the A-H people try to say; he’s just a little more moralistic about it all…he's like the OCD version of A-H, very specific and regimental, very detail-oriented. But I feel like he comes out to the same thing…. let your inner guide guide you, do the right thing because the karma from it is so rewarding, enjoy life the way you were designed to, be kind.

The Miracle Carb Diet: Make Calories and Fat Disappear -- With Fiber!, Tanya Zuckerbrot

Mondongo, Cotton thread on wood panel, 2006

(March 7) I heard of this “way of eating” through Brooklyn Blonde, started following the Tanya Zuckerbrot and F-Factor accounts on Instagram, and got hooked by the concept… I had had some success with the 5:2 diet but this seemed to be healthier and more sustainable…  This title is the only book by TZ available at the library, so I got it, but The F-Factor Diet, the book she mentions the most on her Instagram, is actually the older of her two publications (the Miracle Carb one is more up to date, apparently).

It was good, worth the read (done in an afternoon… I did not read all the recipes word for word, and that’s a big section of the book)… and even though I have been following the Instagram accounts for a while, I learned a lot of details I would not have picked up otherwise. The book is very repetitive, as are the Instagrams, but to me that’s a good sign… it means they don’t fool around with speculation or correction.

I would buy the book if I could get it for under $10… the recipes looked good and the four “stages” TZ recommends for a would-be dieter are distinct.

For now, I am just going to try to add 30 grams of fibre to my daily diet.

Courage Is Contagious: And Other Reasons to Be Grateful for Michelle Obama, ed. Nicholas Haramis

Michelle Obama illustration by Rob Biddulph based on portrait by Ethan Miller (2009?)

(February 7) I picked this up because I was seeing it bruited about on social media and, more importantly, noticing that it was very short… useful when I am trying to get the blog back on schedule.

And of course I liked this because it is a series of tributes to Michelle Obama, whom I already hero-worship. It was nice to have all her talents laid out formally, though, by celebrities.

I don’t recall whether the book takes any pains to explain why this title in particular was chosen, but it wasn’t because there were a lot of stories about other people's spines being stiffened, as per the Billy Graham quote (which, unfortunately, is about the influence of a brave man), but maybe that quote is just a byword in the States for brave people, and Michelle Obama is certainly one of those.

Each of the contributors praises MO profusely and all of them mention her big endeavors (that damn garden especially -- reading about it repeatedly made me wonder more intensely about the actual impact, which is never documented here) as well as her private style.

What was interesting was how each essay addressed the task… how some writers started out with a story about themselves while others started out with an image of MO, or of some improvement she made.

Overall, it seemed to be on the small side as tributes go… and what was really noticeable was the constant reference to Donald Trump and Trumpian things. He is the background to everything now, after a scant year in power… that is way too much influence to have, especially when he’s so regrettable.

When you feel like the book came out more as another rant against Donald Trump than as a sincere tribute to an amazing First Lady, something’s wrong.

Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone, Brené Brown

George Agnew Reid, Call to Dinner, 1886-87

(Jan. 7) I can’t say Daring Greatly made me want to read any more of Brené Brown, but I guess I saw this one come out and be mentioned by all the usual suspects so I put it in my holds queue… and then I got it, and saw that it was a nice short book,… so I went for it. 

Braving the Wilderness made me realize what it was that was so unsettling about Daring Greatly: Brené Brown’s thirst to be seen as a scientist. Perhaps what she’s doing in this book is a little more desperate… this book feels like it got rushed out to address the hopelessness being caused by the Trump presidency… almost every best-selling self-help author is getting something out right now to shore up the faithful. 

I did notice particularly in this one that the cures to the ills Brené Brown finds are often expressions of her own values -- church-going, Christian family values (although “research” is given the credit).

She does blow you away with the intimacy of her personal stories. And I do think her message is solid gold -- she is basically saying we can have a more humane future if we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to show vulnerability. I think she's absolutely right. 

But no more of this science for me.

Swimming Home, Deborah Levy

David Hockney, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972

(December 1)  I really liked this book (long short story, really? novella?). It was so nice to be reading fiction again… I feel like I haven’t in a long time… and it was also a story I looked forward to going back to and thought about in between reading.

This was a bit of an expedient reading choice since it’s short and I am so far behind. Erica Davies and/or Alex Stedman (bloggers and Instagrammers I follow) recommended this title (or the author). It was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize in 2012.

Early on you sense there could be death or a near-death because of the way the tensions are ramped up… then as the story goes along you wonder if there might be more than one death, or if the character you didn’t think of at first would turn out to be the casualty or the near-casualty, and then you wonder further how anything can possibly be reconciled without a death…

Short but powerful. Vivid in terms of capturing depression and mental illness. Ends with a shock.

Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant

(October 29) ‟I am always thinking about how this book was put together. There is so much careful attributing of each scrap of an idea to the proper name, to one of the two joint authors of this 176-page ‛book.’ It’s funny they want so much copyrighting. And it’s very light stuff anyway. But the binding together is somehow too noticeable, distracts from the message.”

Those were my notes while reading this little book, but for a long time I couldn’t find them... and thought I would have to write something up for this blog based on my memory of the book... and the only memory of the book I had two years later was of how shocking and traumatic Sheryl Sandberg’s husband’s death was, and how awful it was for her to have to tell all the people to whom it mattered -- their kids, his parents, his siblings, her parents, her siblings, all their friends. I could really relate to the agony of the latter activity. But this whole section was very vivid.

I don’t now remember the advice or ‟the message” at all... and now, having found my notes, it’s funny to see that there must have been a message of some kind. It was completely nonabsorbent.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, Mark Manson

"Fuck You" (Hatsukoi-Yokochou manga)

(September 25) This is the fastest I’ve read a book in a long time, not because it was hard to put down or anything, just because it’s very short, and chattily written, blog style, so not that great a reading challenge. ::shrug:: 

I anticipated hating this guy because all the hype about the book emphasizes the “refreshing slap in the face” style self-help -- so I was dubious -- thought it would be just pointless and negatively oriented, probably sensationalistic… but by p. 4 he says trying to act positive just focuses on the lack of positivity, which is reassuringly Abraham-Hicks. His main topic is not trying, like Edward Slingerland’s Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity, only now the point of view is that of a young male blogger who uses a lot of foul language rather than that of an erudite scholar.

Manson is pretty young to be making a lot of the pronouncements he makes about human behaviour and he has the classic arrogance of the inexperienced -- ‟if it happens like this for me it must be the same for all,” and ‟if it never happens that way for me it’s not true.” He’s also very fond of a broad generalization.

In a lot of ways, though, his advice for living supports Abe-Hicks.... it’s just the teen-diary version.

When You Find Out the World Is Against You and Other Funny Memories About Awful Moments, Kelly Oxford

Wayne Thiebaud, Supine Woman, 1963

(September 4) This was recommended by Busy Philipps, whose Instagram I enjoy following; when I looked it up on the library system there was an impressive waiting list for it, which surprised me, since I’d never heard of her till then, and meanwhile this was her second book, her first was a best-seller, apparently she’s been a well-known funny woman for some time. And she’s Canadian! *head-scratch-emoji*

The book is a pleasant read… it’s a collection of short stories, memoir-fashion… it was not laugh-out-loud funny to me, and only occasionally did I heh-heh, but there was a lot of “inner smiling” and wry grins and enjoyment of the point of view. I looked forward to reading it in between bouts, but I didn’t steal time from other activities to read it. A classic 3 stars!

I debated that, though, because of the wonky ending. Following a series of mildly entertaining stories about her early and current life, Oxford suddenly launches into a diatribe against Donald Trump’s sexism… purely understandable in terms of the window of time in which she wrote it (well before he got elected)... but kind of lacking in impact once her book comes out and he’s already been elected. Everyone’s written the same diatribe. It made for an out-of-tune book ending.

This work also may be suffering a bit from second-book syndrome, the collecting of all the left-over bits that never made it into the debut best-seller, thrown quickly together to fulfill a contract. If this was Oxford’s B material, though, her A material, Everything’s Perfect When You’re a Liar, must be pretty good.

The artwork above was suggested by Oxford’s own Instagram -- she has a print of this in her house. It seemed like the right illustration, even though her fashion vibe is totally different.