The Great Work Begins

Have you ever read something you've read before and liked and appreciated and understood, but suddenly, you're seeing it in new colors and shades and depths and light explodes and it's a little bit like when the Angel first visits Prior in a big budget production of Angels in America?

Yeah, I'm going through that now. It's great.

For Those of Us Not Living Solitary Existences on Mountaintops

I'm currently in the last weekend of my yoga teacher training. About two months ago, when my reading list arrived in my email inbox, I could feel my heart pitter patter with excitement. School! Reading lists! Maybe I should get a new lunchbox! And the books have all been fascinating and honestly, are helping me make some positive changes in my life, but they're tricky. The predominant text, the bible of yoga, if you will, is The Yoga Sutras of Patanajali. This is a brilliant text, but it's written for monks living alone on mountaintops. There is a portion that discusses how to use mind control to shrink yourself and levitate. I know, right? Clearly, your teacher at Yogaworks is a total hack. But in all seriousness, I've had difficulties applying some of the things I've been learning to the reality of life in the big bad city and one of my teachers recommended I read Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic. When I stopped laughing at the title and actually started to read it, I could not have been more grateful for the recommendation. It could be a quick read, but it shouldn't be, because the things Darren Main talks about are worth letting sit and stew. You don't have to have read the Sutras to appreciate it either. If you've ever left a yoga class feeling completely peaceful and at rest with the world and want tools outside of your asana practice o continue that feeling, this book will be helpful. If you want tools for leading a mindful and conscious life amidst all the everyday bluster, this book will be helpful. If you want to read about a point of view different from your own, this book will be helpful.

In case you haven't noticed, I found this book quite helpful.

The One Night Stands Of Reading

In high school my friend Vanessa used to make fun of me for reading Airport Novels, books like Life of Pi or She's Come Undone or anything at all by David Sedaris. Basically any book lots of people were reading because lots of other people had already read it. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is decidedly Airport in nature, wildly popular because of the story behind the author's death and also because the cover is just abrasive enough to be impossible to ignore. The story itself is really dark. Yeah, you might think the Swedes are all lingonberry jam and efficient furniture design but apparently that's just cover for the multi-generational incest/torture scandals and immense corporate corruption. It's a compulsively readable thriller but the writing veers into carelessness pretty often, the author sketching out scenes and telling the reader what to feel instead of bothering with character development or realistic dialogue. Still, all is forgiven because hidden among the murder scenes and rape sequences that would do Sade proud is a passage in which the narrator listens to the Eurythmics completely unironically. One more point for the Swedes.

Richard Poirier is SO Invited to My Dream Dinner Party

Here's why.

What's Farsi for "Cajones"?

Hi, Sarah! This is pretty much verbatim what I told you at dinner tonight but on the off chance my mom is reading this like I asked her to, I will repeat myself.

Shirin Ebadi is a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for her humanitarian work in the Iranian judicial system and this is her story. Truth is always stranger than fiction and while I knew on some scholarly level the upheaval Iran has gone through in the past 40 or so years, I really had no idea the magnitude of the human cost. In about two hundred short little pages, Ebadi managed to bring that home to me. The whole time I was reading this, I kept thinking of a good friend of mine from junior high and high school whose mother was Iranian. I never bothered to ask her about her upbringing or what brought her from Tehran to Cincinnati, Ohio because I was self involved in the way that only a teenager can be. She's of the same generation as Ebadi and I wish now I could call her up and hear her story. After all, it's not just winners of the Nobel Peace Prize who are brave and make sacrifices to do what they think is right. Stories like this make it harder to complain about the piddly mundane issues of everyday life and make it easier to be strong when encountering them. And for that, I am grateful.

Summer Wasting

I'm halfway through The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and a manuscript about time travel. In lieu of an actual post, here is a picture I took on my phone. You're welcome.

Not Finishing, Not The End of the World. Or, Not Finishing Not The End of the World.

A friend and I recently had a conversation about the fact that not finishing a book is a learned skill. We slog through unenjoyable novels as though they were homework and we are expected to turn in a book report upon completion. This was absolutely something I had to learn, the idea that nobody would be mad if I put down a half-finished book never to return to it. And then I had to learn not to be mad at myself, ha. And is it just me or do books of short stories lend themselves particularly well to this lesson? After all, if one story doesn't grab you, skip ahead to the next. There were a few moments of Not The End of the World worth commending, but for the most part, Atkinson's desire to weave apocalyptic visions into the mundane just makes for a lot of vaguely interesting stories that end suddenly and oddly. So I put them down and am on to the next.