17 posts tagged “books”
I like Barbara Ehrenreich. A lot. I have always enjoyed reading her ever since I picked up Bait and Switch a few years ago. And I have to admit - as someone who has a violent allergic reaction to The Secret - I am quite tickled by her new book: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America.
She started her talk at the Seattle Public Library last night with a disclaimer: she is not pro-misery. In fact, one of her previous books focuses on the value of joy in society. She's not on a crusade against happiness, she is on a crusade against delusion. Because when delusion replaces realism on a large scale, bad things happen. Very bad things. Like complete economic meltdowns.
She starts with a personal story. 8 years ago, she was treated for breast cancer, and she was angry. She was angry because this disease is so prevalent and yet we don't know what causes it. (As a first-world disease it has environmental causes, but who is funding research to discover and eliminate those toxins?) She was angry because she had to fight with her insurance company to get coverage. (Health care reform, anyone?) She was angry because chemotherapy is the only option for treatment that sort of works, and it's fucking poison. (Did you know that anyone who survives chemo is at much higher risk for developing other cancers, because chemo is full of carcinogenic toxins?) And she was a bit irked by all the pink ribbons. Not all women like pink stuff.
Her anger was met by the sisterhood of survivors with a cry of: "change your attitude, or else." The popular myth in that community is that only people who think positive get better. If you're angry or depressed because you have a potentially terminal disease, you are apparently at fault if you die from it. Because of your attitude.
After doing a good deal of research (she happens to have a PhD in cellular biology) and surviving herself (despite never once thinking of the disease as a "gift"), she can assure us that this is not the case. And she has heard from a lot of other women with breast cancer who are relieved to finally hear this perspective. Not to mention oncology nurses who are beginning to take a stand against this kind of pink-fuzzy victim blaming.
The only way we are going to cure humanity's ills is by recognizing them as ills and NOT gifts. And then coming together to figure out how to fix them.
The economic collapse way brought to us by positive thinking. Real Estate Value Will Never Fall. Oh, really? Was that ever a realistic thing to think? I Got This Great Mortgage Because I Deserve It And I Will Never Get Laid Off? Ha. I'm glad I rent. The Stock Market Is Real, And Cannot Fail. The stock market, my dear ones... is IMAGINARY. What is real can usually be perceived by the senses. The stock market assigns value to the concept of potential future value. Concepts are very fickle and don't have a family to feed, so I would not trust them.
I am over my head in credit card debt not because I am irresponsible, but because I really believed I would continue to make enough money to pay them off. Optimism. I was wrong, because I did not have all the information. I did not foresee two layoffs in two years (or 3 in 10 for that matter). Now I know better. The mists are beginning to clear for me, and I won't do it again, or at least not in the same way.
I haven't read the book yet, but I am especially looking forward to her analysis of The Secret. That particular kind of magical thinking is somewhat confusing because it sometimes appears to be working. It is in fact true that you are more likely to "manifest" something if you have a clear grasp of what it is. But that isn't any kind of secret, that's just plain old fashioned planning.
Instructions:
Copy this and paste into a new entry. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tag other "Book Nerds."
I went with the standards of the person who posted this before me: I am a purist, so if I hadn't read the whole book it didn't count.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (You must have read them ALL!) (only 2)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x
Total: 7
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger x
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
Total: 5
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
Total: 3
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Total: 2
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez x
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins x
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood x
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan x
Total: 6
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquezx
Total: 3
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov x
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt x
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold x
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy x
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x
Total: 7
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante x
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Total: 4
80 Possession - AS Byatt x
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell x
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Total: 5
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole x
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Total: 6
=48... almost half!
Inspired by Jodi. Not ranked.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Martin Amis: The Information
- Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride
- Haruki Murakami: The Windup Bird Chronicles
- Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow
- Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping
- Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
- Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible
- Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margherita
- John Kennedy O'Toole: A Confederacy of Dunces
I am predictably falling behind on my apartment cure plan. I'm still only about 75% done with the kitchen and haven't done the oven yet. It's not that it was sooo dirty (though the inside of the fridge needed a lot of scrubbing), but I store a metric shit-ton of stuff in my kitchen drawers and cupboards and I had to sort through all of it and make decisions about it, item by item. That part is now complete, and today I was going to do the stove and surfaces and floor, but then I wasn't feeling very well, so I read this instead:
I should be able to catch up this week I think. The next week is not as grueling... I have also gone so far as to mark a green pouch for my daily receipts so I can monitor my spending. This will not be easy for me as my tendency is to totally block out any thoughts about how I spend my money.
I talked to my mom today and got an update on my increasingly-senile Grandpa. He is now forgetting how phones work and calling her to reach someone else. When she answers he tells her to let it ring next time so he can get through to the person he is trying to reach. He also pulls out his own teeth with plyers rather than go to a dentist and refuses to get a new hearing aid despite the fact that he's almost completely deaf now.
In happier news, I went to the Pike Place Market Ghost Tour with Lily and Corey on Friday. This one had some good stories, but no ghosts appeared for us. I was most intrigued to learn that Seattle once made most of its tax revenue from the World's Largest Brothel. 500 rooms.
I get up around 9:00 feeling a bit groggy still from the Advil PM I took last night to help me sleep the bad week away. I desire a maple bar but instead walk to the nearest cafe (a Starbucks - I am that lazy) for an apple fritter and a quad americano. I do some journaling while I fritter but only seem to have two pages worth, scribbly thoughts. I take out the recycling and the garbage, including the leftovers from months ago that have been taunting me from the tupperware in the fridge. I scrounge up 14 quarters and take two heaps of laundry room in the basement only to find both machines occupied.
I call my mom for our weekly chat but she is still so groggy that I can't understand what she's saying, so I promise to call back later. I look at random things on the interwebs for a while. I have an IM conversation about a transitional relationship and an electronic music performance. I strip my bed and flip my mattress - which turns out to be a bit of a wrestling match when I decide to flip AND reverse (a la Missy Elliott). I wash my dishes completely for the first time in two weeks and find some things in the sink I'd rather not talk about.
I finally gain access to washing machines and have a chat in the laundry room with a woman who lives in the building. This is literally the first conversation I've had with a neighbor here in the nearly four years I have lived here, barring the time someone from down the hall knocked on my door to borrow tweezers to use to open their apartment door because the doorknob had fallen off. People in Seattle are not known for being gregarious.
I dry and put away my dishes and clean the counters and stove, then I sweep and wash my kitchen floor. I consider taking a bus to the University District to buy a keyboard and mouse but instead I call my mom and talk about my Meyers-Briggs personality type (INTP). She tells me that she now calls my increasingly senile grandpa Frank at 11 pm every day to remind him to take his sleeping pill. "Pill Time!" she exclaims. He enjoys this little ritual. She doesn't call if there's a thunderstorm, for fear of being electrocuted.
I put my laundry in the dryer and have another chat with the same neighbor. I decide to go to Broadway and browse at Bailey Coy books, where I end up buying The Moronic Inferno by Martin Amis and The Sea by John Banville. I only pay $2.96 because I am able to redeem my book buyer punch card. I think Martin Amis no longer gets as much respect as he used to from young people. But I digress. I consider grabbing a slice of pizza but decide instead to have sushi for the 3rd time this week. I begin reading the first essay in the Amis book while I eat.
Back home, I let the bird out to fly around and download a couple of episodes of Mad Men to watch while I have cookies (Newmans-O's) and water. And now, at 9:30, I climb into bed with Amy Tan's memoir and a cup of tea. And there you have it. Night night.
...is getting large. This isn't everything:
I've been "tagged" by Barry so here goes
Instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag 5 different people.
"A few days after my chance discovery in the library, I surfed the Internet and came across an interview with U.G. Brahma, president of the All Bodo Students Union, who complained that under the pressure of aggressive Sanskritization, several Bodo subgroups have forsaken the Bodo language and culture. This poses a serious threat to the survival of our Bodo culture as a separate entity.
As I knew from living in Quebec - and as I had witnessed on a tiny scale on the Isle of Man - nationalist movements often draw their most potent energy from fears of language loss and cultural erasure."
That's from:
I'm not going to tag, because everyone has pretty much done this already, but if you haven't, don't let me hold you back! Grab thee your nearest book!
Today I booked:
- A flight from Seattle to Copenhagen, and another one back again.
- Two days at the Willamette writer's conference in Portland
- A weekend at the Sol Duc hot springs.
I'm up to 10,000 words on my childhood memoir. I'm getting into the difficult bits now....
...with limited success.
Books: Show us your summer reading list.
Submitted by marvel is my pen name.
I read all year. Here's what is in the stack right now...
