The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first time I read this I was a little kid and I don't think I picked up on all the Christian allegory stuff. The second time I was a little older and did but I did my best to ignore it. This time, I've read some of C.S. Lewis nonfiction about Christianity so I kept an eye for how some of his philosophy was written right into the story. Beyond the more obvious story of Aslan, the professor's thoughts on whether or not Lucy is telling the truth is the thesis of Mere Christianity. I mostly remember reading this but I wanted to reread it before rereading the others.

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The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I loved the movie and I watched it several times, but I didn't realize it was based on a novel by John Updike for many years. And then it took me a few more years to think that it was probably different than the movie. It is remarkably similar in some places in the beginning- and Jack Nickelson did an amazing job capturing Daryl VanHorn. Susan Sarandon also did an amazing job being Jane, but the Alexandra (Cher) and Suki (Michelle Pfiffer) character are fairly different.

The prose is very embellished, wordy, and poetic. The story itself has a totally different point and thrust. The novel is amoral in a way the movie is not, and it's far more gruesome. In the novel, the wrong-doing of the witches, or people in general, is equated to acts of nature. It's different- but also it's not different. Aren't we over the conversation about whether people are just amoral animals? There's even research that some animals such as primates have some moral understanding of their own. We're not going to shrug off our responsibilities so easily.

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The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A solid adventure story about a small frightened person using his strength of character to save the world as he knows it. I only took off the one star because when I read it as a kid I got very bored and stuck about midway through. I appreciate it a lot more as an adult.

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Origins by Annie Murphy Paul

Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives by Annie Murphy Paul
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An interesting, well-researched book on how the influences on the fetus during pregnancy affect the child throughout its life. The book has a good organization and numerous scientific studies to back up the claims. Unfortunately, it's also gimmicky and tries to provide pregnant mothers with empty assurances that ring hollow relative to the actual studies.

One thing I intensely disliked about this book was the chapter titles: "One Month- Nine Months" actually provides no information about what the chapters are about but is just a cutesy way of imitating basic pregnancy books, and also a shoutout to the fact that the author is herself pregnant as she writes this book. (Though I hope this is indeed a gimmick and she didn't rush through this book in 9 months.)

So here is the breakdown:
One Month- A basic introduction to the book

Two Months- How the food the mother eats affects the offspring throughout his or her life

Three Months- How traumatic stress for the mom during pregnancy affects the offspring for life

Four Months- The dangers of alcohol, cigarette smoking, prescription drugs, pollution, plastics, and other chemicals in everyday products (total horror here) that can cause either immediate birth defects or later-in-life cancers in the offspring.

Five Months- Some rambling about the history of gender predictions (and some subsequent scientific studies confirming some old wives tales), quickening, and sonograms. Finally: only 20 to 40 percent of fertilized eggs result in live birth, the rest are lost to miscarriage often before a woman knows she's pregnant. Numerous factors can prevent male embryos from succeeding relative to the number of female embryos that succeed: pollution, economic depressions, natural disasters, etc... or skipping breakfast. (Skip breakfast to have a girl, eat a lot of cereal for breakfast to have a boy. Or maybe this study is totally wrong- and it's just chance.)

Six Months- The effects of partum and post-partum depression

Seven Months- A more broad exploration of studies in progress concerning the prenatal origins of numerous adult diseases, abilities, or personality traits.

Eight Months- Again as in Chapter 7, specifically looking at the effect of large-scale traumatic events, (as in Chapter 3).

Nine Months- The effects of the process of birth itself: whether natural, assisted birth, or Cesearean, and other birth factors such as time of year the baby is born.

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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The writing is so beautiful. I love magical realism done well, and I think this is the best version of magical realism I've read. I also love sweeping fictional family histories.

My biggest complaint is the characters. The matriarch Ursula is a fully formed character and really the heroine of the book. Her daughter Amaranta is a spectacularly strange villain, and her son Colonel Aureliano is at least multi-faceted. Most of the other characters fall flat for me and not just because of the repeat names. I went through quite a bit of trouble to keep them straight in my mind but most of them just had shadows of personalities. For example, who is Santa Sofia, really? She barely gets involved with her bizarre daughter Remedios the beauty and doesn't react when her daughter ascends into heaven? Who is Jose Arcadio Segundo besides someone who resembles Aureliano Segundo?

But I do also object to the repeat names. It is a common Hispanic naming convention to name a son for his father and even a daughter for her mother, but this often remedied by an aggressive use of middle names and nicknames, such as when Renata Remedios (who actually does have a unique name) goes by Meme instead.

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Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some people are really tough on this book because it's "cheesy," but that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong. It asks an important question and tries to answer it. If the answers are in reality somewhat cheesy, that's not Morrie or Mitch Albom's fault. Also, it's so sad. If you read it without crying you should investigate if you're actually a cyborg.

Morrie is an exceptional former professor dying of ALS and Albom is having a weekly conversation with him about the meaning of life.

There are 14 Tuesdays:
(1) Experiencing and caring about the world and the world's sadness;
(2) Self-pity- limit it to a few minutes a day;
(3) Regrets? This chapter and the ones after it just cover Morrie's sad childhood, ending in the idea that he would never do any work that exploited other;
(4) The main premise of this book: that if you "learn how to die" then you can learn how to live. To Morrie this means being less ambitious and being more "spiritual," something he doesn't fully define but seems to involve appreciating nature and gratitude in general;
(5) Family, particularly immediate family, and especially having children, is more important than money, fame, ambition;
(6) Experiencing then detaching from particular emotions. the description is similar to descriptions of experiencing consciousness in meditation;
(7) Fear of aging- Morrie discusses the joy of being taken care of, and the joy of having already lived through the previous ages and having love and affection;
(8) Money- Wanting excessive amounts of money or material things is an expression of loneliness and lack of love. What's valuable is volunteering to help to help to people;
(9) Be fully present with the person that you're with, pay attention;
(10) A good marriage is extremely valuable;
(11) People are more alike than they realize, and we all need each other. Morrie recommends creating your own culture around you with people focused on the things that matter;
(12) Forgive yourself before you die, then forgive others;
(13) Acceptance of death, appreciating your body, focusing on love, responsibility, spirituality, and awareness;
(14) Saying goodbye. This one is treated lightly, but in reality, if you've experienced the death of a loved one, this one is actually very difficult. You can be a caretaker and be present and still fail to really say goodbye because it's so difficult.

When Albom asks Morrie what he would do with one more healthy day he describes a day of family and friends, delicious food, and walking in nature. Food made the top three!

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Problems and Confessions

Dad had A LOT of books. A total of 26 book boxes to be exact, and I only finished packing them today.  Half of them have already been transported home, and the other half are going home this weekend.  I didn't have the time or energy to go through each book individually to see if I should keep each one, so much to my husband's chagrin I erred on the side of packing them. 

But even I had to admit that a few of them would just never find a reader.  Some were outdated factual tomes, for example, on buying houses or building environmentally conscious buildings. There were also ones that were so above my head that I had to be honest about and throw out. These included all of the computer engineering books (most likely outdated as well) and books on topics such mathematics for physics or advanced chemistry.  All of these books were recycled.

I still feel really overwhelmed by how many I kept and the impossibility of reading some of them and sorting all of them in a sensible amount of time-- say before our next move.

The School by Donald Barthelme

Since I likely won't be reading a book a day or even a week, I thought I would fill in with the instant gratification of short stories. I don't know why short stories aren't more popular. They're quick and potent like poetry.  Kevin is teaching The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: 50 North American Stories Since 1970 (Touchstone Books) in class, so I'm picking out some stories from that one first. "The School" by Donald Barthelme is popular enough that I have come across it before. The first time I read it years ago, I thought it was charming and funny. But I'm older now, and my father recently passed away, and I have a baby on the way, and I often wonder, what have I done? What have I done bringing a child into this?

In fact, ironically, the first thing I noticed was not something about the story at all, but the author's birth and death dates. That's what I do now, I measure other people's tragedy against my own to determine how indignant I should be with the universe. Barthelme lived from 1931-1989, just 58 years. I looked it up; he died of cancer.  He was able to say something about life and death before he experienced the latter. That seems important.

Reading it now, it doesn't make me laugh. It makes me cry. Like the children, I want to know where, where, where. Like the children, I would like an assertion of value.

Books My Father Read

I have recently become addicted to book again the way I was when I was a small kid. I read anything I have reason to believe might be awesome.

I read the books I inherited from my dad after he passed away in 2010. This blog started as a project of mourning to read the books I kept, but has now become a personal passion. I also take recommendations from my husband who's a writing instructor, my friends who prefer different types of books, and Goodreads and Youtube reviewers who catch my attention.

This is my rating system for clarification:

5 Stars = THIS BOOK MADE ME A BETTER, MORE INTERESTING PERSON. FOR THE LOVE OF PUPPIES, READ IT!
4 Stars = This book was really good! Read it!
3 Stars = I enjoyed this book. I'm glad I read it.
2 Stars = This book a little bad. I wouldn't recommend it.
1 Stars = This book is kind of evil and takes a little joy and goodness out of the world.