The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact, Chip Heath and Dan Heath

 

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait,1434

(March 8)

The Silva Mind Control Method, José Silva and Philip Miele

                                                    Constantin Brâncuși, The Sleeping Muse, 1910

(March 30, 2024)

Let's Talk About Love, Claire Kann

 

The Caryatid porch of the Erechtheion in Athens, Greece, 421-406 BCE

(September 2, 2023)

Taste: My Life Through Food, Stanley Tucci

 

Rob Kelly, Illustration for "The Hot Seat: Stanley Tucci" on Timeout.com, March 7, 2010

(November 16)

Finding Me, Viola Davis

 

Felipe Targino, Viola Davis, 2015

(September 7)

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, Miguel Ruiz

 

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787

(August 3)

The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene

 

Tony Santiago, Iron Man, 2019

(July  )

Greenlights, Matthew McConaughey

 

Alejandro Mogollo, Matthew McConaughey, 2020

(February 19, 2023) 

Luster, Raven Leilani

 

Debra Cartwright, Illustration for The New York Times, Feb. 14, 2020: "‘In Italy I Kept Meeting Guys’: The Black Women Who Travel for Love"

(October 5)

The Ugly Cry, Danielle Henderson

 

Danielle Henderson graphic from Twitter

(March 30)

Little Secrets, Jennifer Hillier

 

Robin Weiss, Meet Me at the Market, 2012

(March 12)

Yearbook, Seth Rogen

 

Olivia Carino, Seth Rogen, 2019

(January 14)

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays, Samantha Irby

 

Samantha Irby illustration by Jillian Tamaki for “Samantha Irby: By the Book,” The New York Times, May 10, 2018

(December 22) 

You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey, Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar

Ashley Quach, You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey, 2021

(December 13)

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, Greg McKeown

Piet Mondrian, Grey Tree, 1912

(September 29)

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, James Nestor

Pitaloosie Saila, Smoke Rings, 2007

(September 8) 

Design Mom: How to Live With Kids: A Room-by-Room Guide, Gabrielle Stanley Blair

Grandma Moses, Moving Day on the Farm, 1951

(January 11, 2022)

Ageless Beauty the French Way, Clémence von Mueffling

Martial Raysse, L'année dernière à Capri (titre exotique), 1962

(August 6)

You'll Grow Out of It, Jessi Klein

Jesse Benjamin, Comedian Jessi Klein, 2010

(July 21)

The One, John Marrs

 

Banksy, Girl With a Balloon, 2002

(July 13)

How to Raise an Elephant, Alexander McCall Smith

 

Akan artist, Elephant, pre-1700 (Smithsonian)

(June 15) 

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, Katherine May

 

William H. Hays, Winter Light, 2015

(May 23) 

The Geometry of Holding Hands, Alexander McCall Smith

James Cowie, A Portrait Group, 1933

(April 25)

Precious and Grace and The House of Unexpected Sisters, Alexander McCall Smith

 

Wilson Ngoni, Sethunya, 2021

(April 19, April 21)

To the Land of Long Lost Friends, Alexander McCall Smith

 

Mbako Lesetedi, Day at the Park, 2019

(April 10)

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???