clearing my bookshelf, one page at a time…

i iz a bookworm again.  finally.  after a prolonged stall in my reading (i just couldn’t stay focused), i’m suddenly ~all up in that~: 
 
stephen king, “under the dome”: my only problem, lately, has been the ability to stay awake for more than a page at a time… and let me just say, this is NOT a book that you want to have fall on your nose after you’ve dozed off reading.  at least not in hardback   if you like stephen king, if you loved the stand, you’ll ~love~ this book - small town, going about it’s daily business, when suddenly from out of nowhere, a dome appears over the town, blocking them off from the rest of society.  if you’ve ever read “lord of the flies”, this is the stephen king version.  gruesome, horrifying, and gripping.

richard kadray, “sandman slim”: seriously, you can’t go wrong with a book about an assassin from hell who comes back to earth seeking revenge on those who sent him to hell.  anti-heroes of the world, rejoice!  fun book, reminiscent of “the dresden files” by jim butcher.

“Hell’s a circus run by mental patients. Heaven’s a gated community where we’re the bastard stepkids the real kids hate.”

“While it’s giving me a migraine right now, I think the fact that I’m not an expert on corpse disposal says alot of good things about me and my life choices.”

ursula k leguin, “wizard of earthsea”: into the “dislike” pile.  i like fantasy books.  i love stories about knights and wizards and whatnot.  i just prefer them to not be dry and boring ;o i suspect that people who liked tolkien would like this quite a bit, but it’s not something i enjoyed.  i didn’t care about the characters and, after an entire book of the boy wizard searching for his demon, the ending was just a relief. 

pat conroy, “the great santini”: i read this simply because i’d loved “the water is wide” and no, i’ve never seen the movie and it didn’t disappoint - it was really good!  a semi-autobiographical story about pat conroy’s own childhood and his growing up under the strict hand of his military father.  it’s interesting to note that the depiction of him so upset pat conroy’s father that he struggled to make changes and the two of them repaired their relationship.  also, reminded me of how bizarre my father could be at times.  ;o

paulo coehlo, “the alchemist”: i wanted to like this book.  it’s a simple little tale about a boy and his search for treasure, following a prophetic dream.  i’m told that it’s inspirational, a metaphor for life, and simply enchanting.  mostly, i found it trite and overly simplistic.  “don’t worry, be happy!” people always annoyed me in much the same way.  over here in the *real world*, there are more complexities than that. 

john connolly, “the book of lost things”: zomg, i love, love, loved it!  honestly, it took me 4 tries to read it, because the very beginning of the book is soooooooooooooo sad.  i’d get to a certain spot and just have to put it down.  finally, i was able to get past that spot and i was soooooooooooooooo glad that i did.  beautiful, beautiful book about a little boy dealing with the death of his mother and his travels through the world of his books.  i’m fairly certain that just about every fairy tale was worked into the boy’s fantasy world and the blending of all of these tales is simply magical.

“For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.”

“He would talk to them of stories and books, and explain to them how stories wanted to be told and books wanted to be read, and how everything that they ever needed to know about life and the land of which he wrote, or about any land or realm that they could imagine, was contained in books. And some of the children understood, and some did not.”

“Before she came ill, David’s mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren’t alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. (...) Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by torch light beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. (...) They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David’s mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.”

so a couple of winners, a couple of meh.  and a much lighter bookshelf

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Tagged as: books,quotes,iluffhellsassassin June 30, 2010 @ 08:00 am

in a perfectly reasonable, rational world, we’re all still predictably irrational.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely - always a sucker for “why we think the way we think” books, i absolutely LOVED this.  each chapter looks at specific “mind traps”, the social experiments that back these up, and then gives ideas on what you can do to .  if nothing else, just being aware of the “mind trap” is beneficial.

Why do our headaches persist after we take a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a fifty-cent aspirin?

Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?

When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we’re making smart, rational choices. But are we?

In this newly revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They’re systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational.

two things stood out to me: 1) the author approached Big Bank Corp and showed them that if they gave credit card holders more control over their spending, by being able to set specific limits *on their own* for things like “entertainment”, “electronics”, etc, then credit card holders would be less likely to overspend and get into bad credit situations.  (this option already exists on many corp cards.)  Big Bank Corp thanked him profusely, told him they looked forward to working with him in the future in order, and then he never heard from them again.  why?  because Big Bank Corps liked bad credit situations with their higher interest rates, etc.  hello, banking crisis.

2)  “interest only mortgages” - craziest idea i’ve ever heard.  buyer takes out a loan and, over the life of the loan, he pays only the interest, resulting in a balloon payment equal to the amount of the original loan.  “for example, if you took a 10-year loan of $300,000 at a 6.25% interest rate, a regular mortgage would cost you $3,368.40 a month, whereas an interest-only mortgage for the same amount and at the same interest rate would cost you only $1,562.50 a month.  of course, if you took the regular mortgage, you would owe nothing by the end of the 10 years and would also own your home, but if you took the interest-only mortgage, you would still owe $300,000 (at which point you will take on a new mortgage, and so on).” 

sounds groovy.  MOAR FINANCIAL FLEXIBILITY!!!  and in the perfectly rational, reasonable world, where people behave ONLY rationally and reasonably, they’d be able to pay half the amount they’d normally have to pay per month and use that excess to pay off student loans, get little becky sue the braces she needs, or any number of ~perfectly rational, reasonable~ options.

Continue Reading...

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Tagged as: books,psychology,socialexperiments June 08, 2010 @ 05:42 pm

the love of a child…

this made me cry - such a beautiful story, what a wonderful gift…

Girl’s ‘Notes Left Behind’ Made Into Book:

CINCINNATI—Brooke and Keith Desserich say they never intended to write a book about their daughter.

It started as a parent’s personal journal to their younger daughter Gracie, so she would be able to remember her 6-year-old sister, Elena, who was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer.

“They told us at the very beginning that she had 135 days to live,” Keith Desserich said.

Though her parents didn’t want her to know the severity of her cancer, they feel that she must have known what was happening. The tumor slowly took away her ability to talk.

But Elena was still able to write.

“That was her way to letting us know everything would be OK,” Brooke Desserich said.

After Elena passed away, her parents discovered that their daughter had left a message behind for them—a lot of messages, actually.

“We started to pull out notes and they would be in between CDs or between books on our bookshelf,” Keith Desserich said.

Then the couple started finding them everywhere.

“We started to collect them and they would all say ‘I love you Mom, Dad and Grace.’ We kept finding them, and still to this day, we keep finding them,” Keith Desserich said. “Literally, there are hundreds of notes that we found.”

Elena’s parents each hold onto a sealed note they’ve never opened.

“We always want to know that there’s one more note that we haven’t read yet,” Keith Desserich said.

to purchase “notes left behind”.

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Tagged as: books,stuffthatmademecry November 18, 2009 @ 02:31 pm

today is brought to you by the letter Z

To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt.

Well, true enough, any word worth repeating is greater than the sum of its parts; and the particular word-part Z can, from a certain perspective, appear anally wired.

On those of us neither prosaic nor jaded, however, those whom the Fates have chosen to monitor such things, Z has had an impact above and beyond its signifying function. A presence in its own right, it’s the most distant and elusive of our twenty-six linguistic atoms; a mysterious, dark figure in an otherwise fairly innocuous lineup, and the sleekest little swimmer ever to take laps in a bowl of alphabet soup.

Scarcely a day of my life has gone by when I’ve not stirred the alphabetical ant nest, yet every time I type or pen the letter Z, I still feel a secret tingle, a tiny thrill…

Z is a whip crack of a letter, a striking viper of a letter, an open jackknife ever ready to cut the cords of convention or peel the peach of lust.

A Z is slick, quick, arcane, eccentric, and always faintly sinister - although its very elegance separates it from the brutish X, that character traditionally associated with all forms of extinction. If X wields a tire iron, Z packs a laser gun. Zap! If X is Mike Hammer, Z is James Bond. If X marks the spot, Z avoids the spot, being too fluid, too cosmopolitan, to remain in one place.

In contrast to that prim, trim, self-absorbed supermodel, I, or to O, the voluptuous, orgasmic, bighearted slut, were Z a woman, she would be a femme fatale, the consonant we love to fear and fear to love.

- Tom Robbins

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Tagged as: books,writing May 22, 2009 @ 10:04 am

the unbearable lightness of elephants…

normally during the spring, i get the patio all cleaned off and back in shape after a winter of carting plants in and out, but last spring’s foundation leveling and then the summer’s hurricane delayed me and it never got done.  this year, i’ve finally managed to return it to it’s state of ~patio goodness~.  still a couple of things i want to do: indoor/outdoor carpeting on the half covered by the building overhang (that green stuff is sooo cheap), stencil the remaining amount of concrete, and buy 400,000 new windchimes and suncatchers (i LOVE those things).  all in all, though, it’s lookin’ pretty spiffy :D i’ve decided to quit smoking in the house (yes, i’m a smoker.  no, i don’t want to quit.), so that i am ~forced~ to go outside and enjoy my lil patio (and get some stenciling done, as soon as i decide on what exactly i want to paint out there).  it’s been a fairly easy transition and i’ve taken to leaving my book out there, so now i’m getting a ton of reading done, as well:

  i absolutely LOVED this - a story about an old man in a nursing home who relives his depression-era days with the circus.  you can’t help but commiserate with him in his current circumstances - his treatment as a “non-person” by the nursing home employees, his knowledge of the effects aging is having upon him, etc - but through it all, he maintains his sense of humor and irony, while weaving a fantastic tale of his previous life with the circus.  i enjoy stories of the depression-era to begin with.  add in the circus and the lovable old man telling the story and it’s a winner!  it even has a happy “awww ” ending.

  he had me from the beginning with his discussion of neitzsche (one of my favorite philosophers) and his writing style, itself, was captivating - a leisurely, meandering stroll through the lives of his characters - i thoroughly enjoyed it. his stopping to discuss the characters he was writing about was intriguing to me, as well - not often do you feel you’ve met the author while reading their book! along with the quotes below, i found his “short dictionary of misunderstood words” to be particularly interesting - the words we use often evoke entirely different ideas/concepts from person to person.

”...vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us, which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

“it is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground than to send petitions to a president.”

i had not read anything by kundera before and after reading this, i can’t wait to read more!

speaking of reading… perhaps i’ll go do some of that now!

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Tagged as: books,day2day May 19, 2009 @ 09:27 am