Jon Ronson

"Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry" (Riverhead: 2011) By Jon Ronson.

The other day I went to a meeting of the Classic Book Group at a bookstore here in Portland. It was on two of Lewis Carroll's books. The meeting seemed to be just like the tea party that Alice encountered in "Alice In Wonderland". Even the Mad Hatter was there along with the Red Queen and the Dormouse. I wrote this meeting up in another blog, ZebraReader's Getting Healthier.

The reason I brought it up is that Jon Ronson's book is like falling down a rabbit hole but in this case the mental health industry and entered a world of the psychopath. Make no mistake, Ronson is Alice as he tries to make sense of what a psychopath is and the reaction of the mental health land to this very odd classification of the human being. The more he tried to understand the psychopath the more he did not understand it although he met so many people who thought they did understand. They didn't and although a few had a strong inkling. So many made some serious mistakes with very tragic results.

I first heard about this book in an interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I was fascinated with the author and the exchange between him and Jon Stewart who read the book. I wanted to read the book and I found it in the small library across the street from my apartment. I checked it out on a Thursday and did not put it down until yesterday, three days later. It is a fascinating, twisting and illogical journey about the most oddest and dangerous of the people in human population. They are not all in our prisons either. Some of them are world leaders and on Wall Street.

I heard the fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, on the new BBC series respond to a police officer when she called him a psychopath that he was not a psychopathy but a highly functioning sociopath. He told her: "Know your terms." This book really does not make much of a distinction between sociopath and psychopath except to say that a psychopath is born that way while a sociopath is created by his or her environment. There are no other difference. There has been suspicions on my part that some people that I have known were psychopaths. I have not changed my mind but now I have more facts in these beliefs. There is a test that many professionals use that is explained in the book. It is very interesting list or characteristics.

The book is absorbing because you follow the author's discoveries and thought processes as he tries to understand what is involved in trying to pinpoint who is a psychopath and who is not. The author becomes more compassionate when he sees that many people are not capable of the feelings many of us are and that the psychopath copy our reactions so they can fit in the society. When they see a picture of a person with severe facial injuries they are repulsed and upset as the normal person is. They are unmoved and even excited. As I said, there are many signs one can tell who is a psychopath and who is not.

Ronson felt like a detective as he sought to understand this situation. They are often the force for our mysteries and drive many of us to seek answers to the problems they pose. They are more of a part in our lives and culture than we realize. Of course, most of us know them as the worst of the criminals, the serial killers and rapists.

Ronson is most known for writing the book that the movie, "The Men who Stare at Goats" is based on. He is full of anxiety and even worried that he was a psychopath at an early point of his investigation. He was told in no uncertain terms that if you have to ask that question, you are no psychopath. I really learned a lot about many things about the mental health field and not just psychopaths. We as human beings don't know all that much about mental illness and the different aspects of human behavior especially the psychopath.

Audrey Niffenegger

"The Night Bookmobile, a Graphic Novel" by Audrey Niffenegger( Abrams: 2010)

At first, I thought this book was a children's book, but it is definitely not. It is a dark story about a woman who finds a bookmobile that is full of the books she has read and the journals she has written. The artwork is wonderful but the story is not. I hated it. I would say this author has a love/hate relationship with books. Since I don't, I did not appreciate the tragic story of the character's relationship with the bookmobile.

It takes the premise of a magical story and I was expecting to read one but instead read a nightmare or something out of Rod Sterling's Twilight Zone. The artwork lulled me into the story and I fell for it and found myself in this nightmare of a book. Beware of this beautifully illustrated trap. It has everything one expects a nightmare to have: suicide, broken hearts, disappointment and loneliness. It is not the thing that books are made of or not what I have found over the years. Maybe, the story is a metaphor for something else and I am not getting it. It is true that if someone read only books and ignored people one might miss out on life, but books are written by people. There is no way you can miss the people who wrote them.

If reading is your thing, give this book a skip.

Alan Bennett

"The Uncommon Reader" By Alan Bennett Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2007


Most people would say both here and across the pond that the Queen of England is a rather dull sort of monarch; but this book portrays her in a far different light and although it is fiction one would only wish it was a true one. Alan Bennett has written a witty and delightful book about reading and used the Queen to be the explorer of great books and how one chance meeting at a bookmobile sitting at the back of the palace changes her life.

If the author can transform an unintellectual queen into interesting and intelligent woman with the use of books, there is hope for all of us. Not everyone in the palace understands the queen's growing hunger for books and many see it as a threat to the empire. The more she reads the more she is able to build a sense of self-determination and to direct her own life. Ah, the power of books. She has help in this in the person of Norman Seakins who helps her on her journey.

This is a short book, a novella really of 120 pages and the evolution of a reader and beyond. It is believable and a lot of fun. There are many good mentions of great books and if someone wanted to expand the lessons that the queen learned from her reading to those of us who read as well it would not be hard. There is lots of humor here as when the queen asks why she cannot read the books from her own library and finds out they are too valuable to read. I liked this book so much I read it twice, and it is staying in my library.

Pat Conroy

"My Reading Life" by Pat Conroy Doubleday: 2010

This book is a library book and I have no idea when it is due. It is so well written that I wanted to savor the language and the commentary on books as well as the love that Conroy has for reading. I could not. Still, it was a wonderful journey into Conroy's mind for there is no mistaking this author's love of books. It is a love that unites him with his mother who also loved reading too but not his father who thought of books as furniture. His mother gave all of her children a love of books that lives with them still although she is gone now.

As with most writers, writing and reading is so intertwined that it is hard to separate the two activities. The reader gets a strong dose of Conroy as the writer as well as Conroy as the reader in this book. We roll around in his ocean peaks of admiration, elation and enjoy his love of language as well as the books that he read throughout his life. There is humor as the he describes his mother's love of the book, "Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell and all of the times his mother read it and made her kids watch the movie. For her, it was not so much a novel as a book of manners and they way things were supposed to be in the South.

Conroy is considered a Southern writer and it is evident in this book that he agrees with this assessment for his mother, Peg Conroy, is Southern raised as well. His father Donald Conroy, is a U.S. Marine fighter pilot. He will move his family 23 times before Conroy is 18 years of age. At one point in the book, the author states his father raised him to be a fighter pilot too but his mother got him with her reading and love of books. He became a writer instead and one of his sister is a published poet. He also said that he has spent his whole life trying to understand who his mother was. He also wrote the novel, "The Great Santini" so he could understand his relationship with his father who was a abusive husband and father so he could have a relationship with him. His mother divorced his father after he retired from the service.

There were many special people in Conroy's life and one of them was a special English teacher. He introduced him to different writers especially Thomas Wolfe ("Look Homeward, Angel" (1929)). His mother would follow behind him reading the same books Conroy read for she did not have a college education and always felt inferior to others because of that. Whatever classes he took in high school and even at The Citadel, a military college, she followed behind him absorbing the same lessons and books that he took. He states: "Your mother plays witih snakes and poison and raises you to tell the stories that will make all our lives clear. It all congeals and moves and hurts in the remembering." The author writes he could not ask for anything more.

I found this book a wild and fascinating ride through books, reading, writing and one man's life. I am not a big fan of Conroy although I have read several of his novels, but if anyone loves to read, this is a book to glide through for it is one long trip of of enjoyment and literary knowledge. He states many times how much he enjoys language and this book certainly is an example of his love affair with language, books and writing.

Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ, Who Drew Women to Sci-Fi, Dies at 74

(from the New York Times dated today)

Joanna Russ, a writer who four decades ago helped deliver science fiction into the hands of the most alien creatures the genre had yet seen — women — died on April 29 in Tucson. She was 74.

Her death, from complications of a stroke, was announced on the Web site of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

Ms. Russ was best known for her novel “The Female Man,” published in 1975 and considered a landmark. With that book, which told the intertwined stories of four women at different moments in history, she helped inaugurate the now flourishing tradition of feminist science fiction. She also published essays, criticism and short fiction.

Ms. Russ was herself the subject of many critical studies, including those collected in “On Joanna Russ,” edited by Farah Mendlesohn and published in 2009 by Wesleyan University Press .

The science fiction writer has the privilege of remaking the world. Because of this, the genre, especially in the hands of disenfranchised writers, has become a powerful vehicle for political commentary. In the America in which she came of age, Ms. Russ was triply disenfranchised: as a woman, a lesbian and an author of genre fiction who earned her living amid the pomp of university English departments.

Some critics found her too polemical, but many praised her liquid prose style, intellectual ferocity and cheerfully unorthodox approach to constructing her fiction, which could include discursions into history and philosophy and sections of quasitheatrical dialogue. (She was originally trained as a dramatist.)

There was palpable anger in Ms. Russ’s work, but it was leavened by wit and humor. In a scene from “The Female Man,” Janet Evason, who inhabits an idyllic future on Whileaway, a planet without men, visits Earth, where she is promptly hustled onto a television talk show. A dialogue unfolds between Janet and the master of ceremonies:

MC: I — Miss Evason — we — well, we know you form what you call marriages, Miss Evason, that you reckon the descent of your children through both partners. ... I confess you’re way beyond us in the biological sciences. ... But there is more, much, much more — I am talking about sexual love.

JE (enlightened): Oh! You mean copulation.

MC: Yes.

JE: And you say we don’t have that?

MC: Yes.

JE: How foolish of you. Of course we do.

MC: Ah? (He wants to say, “Don’t tell me.”)

JE: With each other. Allow me to explain.

She was cut off instantly by a commercial poetically describing the joys of unsliced bread.

Writing in The New York Times in 1983, Gerald Jonas ranked Ms. Russ “among the small band of accomplished stylists in science fiction.”

She won a Hugo Award in 1983 for “Souls,” a historical fantasy novella about a 12th-century abbess who must defend against invading, sexually brutalizing Norsemen, and a Nebula Award in 1972 for the story “When It Changed,” a precursor of “The Female Man.” The Hugo, presented by members of the World Science Fiction Convention, and the Nebula, presented by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, are considered the Pulitzer Prizes of the genre.

Joanna Russ was born in the Bronx on Feb. 22, 1937. In 1957 she earned a bachelor’s in English from Cornell, where she studied with Vladimir Nabokov. In 1960 she received a master’s degree in playwriting and dramatic literature from the Yale Drama School.

But by then she had set her sights on science fiction, having published her first story, “Nor Custom Stale,” the year before in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

The field was such a male stronghold that through the mid-20th century its handful of female writers often used masculine pseudonyms. (Ursula K. Le Guin, today the best-known woman in science fiction, did not begin publishing until the 1960s.)

In midcentury science fiction by men and women, female characters resembled their earthly counterparts: comely, compliant and domestic. “Galactic suburbia,” Ms. Russ derisively called this fictional universe, and she began to push against its confines.

In a series of stories published in the late 1960s, she introduced the heroine Alyx, a quick-witted, not greatly beautiful mercenary, thief and assassin who roams energetically across the centuries from antiquity onward.

Alyx also stars in Ms. Russ’s first novel, “Picnic on Paradise,” published in 1968; the novel was later reissued with the stories in a compilation volume, “The Adventures of Alyx.”

Ms. Russ’s feminism is perhaps nowhere more visible than in “The Female Man.” It features a contemporary woman, Joanna, and three alter egos: Jeannine, who dwells in a dismal past; Jael, a warrior who inhabits a world in which the war between men and women is literal (“The best way to silence an enemy is to bite out his larynx,” she says); and Janet, the utopian.

Ms. Russ, who lived in Tucson, had a brief early marriage that ended in divorce. No known family members survive.

As a scholar, she was known for a study of Willa Cather that invoked Cather’s lesbianism, long a taboo subject. She taught at the State University of New York, Binghamton (now Binghamton University, State University of New York); the University of Colorado; the University of Washington; and elsewhere.

Her other books include the novels “We Who Are About to ...” and “The Two of Them,” and the nonfiction books “How to Suppress Women’s Writing” and “Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts,” in which she denounces as censorship the antipornography stance of some feminists.

In her critical work, too, Ms. Russ’s wit came barreling through. Writing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1969, she had this to say about John Boyd’s novel “The Last Starship From Earth,” published the year before by Berkley Books:

“I forgive Mr. Boyd the anguish his novel caused me and hope he will eventually forgive me the anguish this review may cause him, but for Berkley there is no forgiveness. Only reform. Don’t do it again.”

David Sedaris

"Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk" By David Sedaris Illustrations by Ian Falconer Little, Brown: 2010

I remember when this book came out last year. I was in Korea and listened to interviews of the author and read reviews of it. I really wanted to read it, but I knew I did not have the chance to do it since I could not get books in English in Korea that new or particular books that I wanted in English there. Books in English in Korea are like gold there.

I have read other books by David Sedaris and found them to be very funny. He writes memoirs like my friend Ted does. Ted is a huge fan of his and they have met several times and even had lunch once. These stories are not like a memoir but are stories of animals but are not really stories of animals. I have talked about my friend Ted and he recommended this book and thought I had it already. I got this from the library. What Ted did not tell me is that some of the stories were actually quite sad. I complained to Ted over the phone about it and he said that Sedaris explained that life is funny and sad so that is why the stories are that way too or something like that. It was hard to make sense what Ted was say because he was in Seattle, Washington and drinking coffee and espresso out of every coffee shop, it seems, he could find. Ted is a 12 step man and he has switched over to coffee in a big way.

Anyhow, I do recommend the book. It is a wonderful series of very easy to read stories that are not for children. Trust me on this. We, adults, need stories like this, even the sad ones, that are for us only. Harry Potter can be read by adults and children. These stories can be read only by adults. The story that came from the title of the book is a sad one but funny. A squirrel meets a chipmunk and they have this thing immediately. He is happy he can talk with her, the chipmunk, about anything. He is so in love as she is. Then he brings up something and says he really thought she might like as much as he did and she asked what it was. He said it was jazz. She was afraid to admit that she did not know what it was and envisioned it was all sorts of odd sexual practices. Because she became so cold to him, he drifted away and she later married a chipmunk and it was one of her grandsons who told her what it was. She had never saw the squirrel again.

A word about the illustrations. They are wonderful too. Ian Falconer is the author and illustrator of the Olivia series of children's books. They captured the whimsical quality of these stories very well.

If you haven't read any of Sedaris' other books, I recommend them to you. They are really funny. They are about his life in the form of memoirs. If life gives you lemons, one can survive it all by developing a sense of humor like this author.

White, Edmund (Penguin Lives)

"Marcel Proust" by Edmund White (Penguin Lives) Lipper/Viking: 1999

I enjoyed reading this slim 165 page book. It is part of the Penguin Lives series and each author of the series is chosen for his or her expertise on the author in question. Edmund White is a Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Literature from the National Academy of Arts and Letters. His book, "Genet: A Biography" won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award.

Proust is most known for the seven volume novel, "Remembrance of Things Past" and White chooses to intersperse the creation of this epic novel along with details of his life in this book. Memory plays an important part of the novel as well as Proust's life and how he lived his life. He was active in French social life and the novel includes his experiences and his conflicts associated with the double life he led as a homosexual in a time where it was not socially acceptable although not as condemned as it was in England.

White writes with authority and yet the story of Proust is readable and interesting as he moves through his relatively short life. Many people thought of him as a shallow socialite but he was anything but that. He was a gifted observer of the life of those who lived from party to party and of the art world at the time. Many were astonished that after his death when the final two volumes were finally published that they were reading the work of a genus and that he was one of the most important writer of the 20th century.

Russ, Joanna

"How to Suppress Women's Writing" By Joanna Russ University of Texas Press: 1983

This is a library book that I have read before. I am reading it again because it scared me the first time I read it. It scared me because it was true. It should scare most women when they read it because they will notice this very well researched and readable book is absolutely true.

I have a graduate degree in Education with an emphasis in journalism and English from the University of Kansas(KU). I did a lot of my undergraduate work at San Diego State University. I graduated from KU in 1989. I grew up in the public schools in San Diego, California from 1950 to 1964 and then went to KU off and on until my graduation in 1989. Everything Russ said about the education system in her book was very accurate from my experience in California and Kansas.

I have always been an avid reader and held a public library card. Everything she said about books and women's writing are right on point. The author states that she did not see the attempts to suppress women's writing in her early years. It continues to this day. The book was published in 1983 but there is enough in the book and in current publications to show the trend continues.

Why should this information be scary? Because for most women, many of the people in our lives are men. Most of the pillars of our education that we let into our lives unedited are full of the prejudice that passed for unbiased information. The people we let into our lives, into our beds, read their books, take their classes, not only don't value us but try very hard to make sure we don't value ourselves. Then you have to ask the obvious questions: why? Why do men do this? Why do women participate in this devaluation of ourselves? These questions are frightening because everything we have valued as true isn't true at all. The people we looked to in admiration don't admire women at all.

Last year I read a series of books on Virginia Woolf's life. I had started with the assumption that her husband was her best friend and supporter. I ended up with a different idea. He was not such a supporter. He was always in the background weakening the supports under her. She could not see that the closet person in her life was not necessarily her best friend. She was in conflict all of her life. He helped turn the screws on occasions.

The truth of the matter is that women need to stand on our own two feet. No one is going to take care of us no matter how many fairy tales society tells us. The proof is all around us. I don't have to present the facts here. The book does an excellent job in that it quotes long passages from books I myself read when young and absorbed without question of opinions that were very sexist. I did not question as I do now.

When I was married to the father of my children, I did not want to question the motives of my husband as I was very ill and he was my life support. He did save my life so I did not lose out, but there were so many things I should have questioned but didn't. I even went to see a therapist at the Veterans Administration who said I should ignore my feelings and trust my husband more. The therapist was an idiot. I learned to always consider one's feelings as valid.

We, as women are not taught to trust ourselves. There are other examples in which other people are taught to trust the government, religious leaders, certain religious books and on and on and not themselves. The older I get the more I learn that I need to unlearn what I was taught as a child. This is because I live in a democracy and there is a free exchange of ideas. There are countries that if Russ had written and published her book there, she would have been imprisoned or worse. The lesson is learned: Trust yourself. Heck with what some people want on government buildings such as "Trust in God" . The self is the first one to trust.

Marcel Proust and Memory

"Marcel Proust" by Edmund White Lipper/Viking: 1999

I am reading the above book about Marcel Proust that is part of the series, Penguin Lives, and enjoying it very much. Recently, while I was in Korea I lost my entire book collection that was here in my house when someone took it and gave it away without my permission. I have written about this before. I was heartbroken as this is my house and I had no way of getting the books back. The person in question was angry at me for divorcing him twenty years ago. Part of the books that was given away was some of the volumes of "Remembrance of Things Past", a monumental achievement by Marcel Proust. I have read only three of the volumes and I was astonished that the librarian at the public library did not recognize it. I always thought that Remembrance of Things Past or "In Search of Lost Time", a novel of seven volumes by Marcel Proust should be on the must read list of all readers. Our library only has one volume which means they gave away the ones in my collection. That is such a shame.

I started to read the book about Proust because I have been thinking of late of the subject of memories. Proust's novel is an exploration of the themes of times, space and of course, memory. It is also a condensation of innumerable literary, structural, stylistic and thematic possibilities. I am interested in memory here although I recommend highly that everyone should read Proust at one point in their lives.

In the book that I am reading, White states that Proust develops the idea that memory is not like a vase in which all of our memories are from the past are available to us simultaneously. According to White, Proust felt that the heart has its intermittencies and memories come flooding back to us in their full, sensuous force only when triggered involuntarily by tastes or smells or other sensations over which we have no control. This is one of the touchstones of the seven volume novel he writes.

Proust was well aware of the feelings of loss of loved ones, friendships, and so on throughout his life. He felt that everyone was capable of art to recreate that. We can take these experiences and recreate what it is we lost so we can then experience them again. In some ways, some people would want to hold onto those memories while others detach. Proust still felt jealousies and possessiveness long after affairs ended.

I have always felt that memories should comfort and provide joy and not torture. I agree that memories do come to the surface unbidden as Proust felt, but once they are in the conscious mind they should be savored and the lessons once learned should not provide points in which to again provide pain and suffering. The inner world of each of us are full of memories and they are to be explored so they can become fruitful and pleasant and not daylight nightmares.

Certainly, most of us will not be writing our own seven volume novels based on experiences and people we meet during our lifetime. We won't have the talent of a Marcel Proust but we do have the ability to take what we do experience and turn it into different forms of art as Proust did. A good way of doing that is reading what Proust did with memory in his novel. I am a big believer in adapting art to fit who the person is. I am a reader so books play a large part in my life as well as art and music. I agree that each of us are capable of doing it in our own way.

Bill Klatte and Kate Thompson

"It's So Hard to Love You: Staying Sane When Your Loved One is Manipulative, Needy, Dishonest, or Addicted" by Klatte, Bill and Thompson, Kate New Harbinger: 2007

I checked this book out of the library because I am having difficulty with boundary issues with someone in my life and wanted to read a book before purchasing it. I had gone into the catalog of the public library and chose it from the description and it is easily what I need. It is full of advice but in small manageable sections. There are lots of examples of people so that the reader can easily identify.

For me, I am having pain just reading about the information so appreciate the fact that I don't have to read cover to cover but can skip to the appropriate sections that I need addressed. For example, the authors described different terms such as enmeshed which I believe I fall into and then examples of people who are and possible antidotes for such behavior. They also go into definitions of those who do too little and too much in this area.

The authors have the opinion that those who read this book still want to help their loved ones, but they don't want to enable them or make them worse. They are not advocating a complete break but ways of helping our loved ones with problems in such a way that they have a better way of getting help than simply everyone falling out of the boat and drowning. The sub-tittle is staying sane and this is the book to help the reader do just that.

Both authors are very knowledgeable and provide expert information on dealing with the people who have addictive and similar problems because when you are caught in their situations you have it too to some degree. The bottom line is tough love though but in a way that gives the loved one a chance on escaping his or her problem and not sink you in the process.

Hoarding

"The wise man does not hoard. The more he helps others, the more he benefits himself." Lao Tzu

If I had the desire to hoard, and I do, it is to hoard books. I love to see their spines lined up on a bookshelf, all different widths, colors, titles and will often steal a look at my book case above the computer desk just to feel the comfort and warmth, books have always given me. Before I left to go to Korea in March 2010, I had a huge library in my house. Every room had its own bookcase and often it was one bookcase lined up on the walls. Ah, it was wonderful. Then, in my absence, my ex-husband feeling anger towards me gave away the entire collection to the library. When I found out in Korea, it plunged me into a deep grief that has yet to heal. My name was not in those books and I can't get them back. He chopped the bookcases into wood and left them in a pile in my yard that I am still trying to get rid of.

I think I learned about hoarding then. Now, I live in the master bedroom of my house and all of my books including library books reside here. I still love books, but hoarding is something that needs to be looked at and examined. I had hoarded clothes, but I did not mind losing them for I had lost weight and did not fit into them anymore. I am planning on moving again but will not have the huge number of things anymore. I will just make use of public libraries, electronic readers although I am not fond of them as I am for the real thing and reading a book and giving them away.

There is limitless worlds in books and I love exploring all the different ideas and truths that are included in them. That has not changed. It is the medium that has changed for me. I still think living in a huge library would be fun but not practical. I read books on collecting ever so often; but people often collect for value and not for the pure joy of reading. I am of the reader sort and don't care so much for the value of the books itself. Getting books out of print is a joy and love Google Books for having them online for this reason. If I was a very wealthy person, I would get a great deal of happiness just donating valuable books to collections available to the public. I will never forget the library in Korea that had English books that one could check out. There were hungry readers, both Koreans and foreigners, who would come everyday just to read their favorite books.

Maryanne Wolf wrote in her book, "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain", (HarperCollins: 2007) that the skill of reading is not natural to the human brain. Many people have great difficulty reading. Jackie Stewart, the Scottish racing driver talked about rejection as a child because of his dyslexia and how deeply he felt about his inability to read. Many people echoed his feelings. I was lucky. I am dyslexic, but it was in mathematics that it shows as numbers do not show patterns as words do. Emotionally and personally, reading was a natural for me.

I had a rough beginning as a child and books provided the relief I needed to make the transition to adulthood. It seems natural to me now that I would hoard what gave me so much pleasure and happiness during those times and continues to do so now. I will be forever grateful for all of the authors and their words who gave me the courage and strength to survive the bad times and the knowledge to face the unknown. There is a saying that you can't take your riches with you in death. The same goes for everything else. You can sleep in only one bed at a time, drive one car at a time and live in one house at a time. I can read more than one book at a time, but a whole house full of books was just a bit too much.

Joshua Kendall

"The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus" by Joshua Kendal

Putnam: 2008

Peter Mark Roget was born in a family of madness and grief. If anything saved him from these facts, it was the creation of his Thesaurus more than anything else. Joshua Kendal endeavors to produce the circumstances for this and in doing this he writes a biography that is as much entertaining as it is factual and knowledgeable about his subject. Yet, I can't help but think there is more to this story that Kendal with all of his immense research will never uncover, but what he does is fascinating and told well. Even the book itself with its chapters illustrating parts of Roget's definitions are well done.

The Roget family is beset with a genetic make-up for depression but how much is genetic and how much is environmental? That may never be known. Even one of his children seems to have inherited some of the madness and certainly Roget's mother and grandmother had it. Suicide was there too. In the darkness of the night when Roget felt madness and depression closing in around him, he classified words from an early age. It turned out to be his saving grace. His sister and daughter could not create a life of their own as insanity kept them at home. Yet, Roget had no clue as to why his relatives behaved the way they did although he was a medical doctor.

This was a time when science was waking up and making great strides in discovery but not for him. The Victorian Times was also a time when people hung onto their Christian faith and ignored many of the scientific discoveries such as the new science of Evolution by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

Kendall was careful in bringing in the world in which Roget lived in so that all of the information available could be seen in all of its implications. Some biographies, one has to look things up for more information. This is not necessary here. Yet, there is so much that is not known but not because the Kendal did not do his research but because the information simply does not exist.

The writing is clear and the information is well organized. It was enjoyable as it was informative about a remarkable man in a remarkable age. I could not put this book down.

Paul Theroux some short stories

I was introduced to Paul Theroux's work many years ago by his train books. I have read all of them through the years starting with "The Old Patagonian Express" when it came out in 1979 in hardback. I was so impressed with it that I gave it out as presents to friends and then read the rest of his travel books over the years. They remain my favorite books on train travel. I have always considered the author to be a very gifted writer and his prose is very wonderful to read.

The book that I am taking Theroux's short stories from is the following:
"The Pen/O'Henry Prize Stories: The Best Stories of the Year 2009" Edited by Laura Furman Anchor

The 22 small stories in this book are very small, often just three paragraphs long. Theroux states: "The essence of fiction writing-and travel writing too, is storytelling." The author states his influence is folk and fairy tales and this is evident in these wonderful quick and short stories.

The author said he likes to collect them and has about a hundred of them which he likes to call "Long Story Short" because that is the expression story tellers often use when recounting them. He feels that this form is one of the oldest forms of literature in the world and often told at leisure by people sitting around a fire.

Many of them are told in first person and take on the persona of different people who live assorted lives. Because the stories were so short, detail was not necessary so it would seem to be fun for a writer to create and fun for a reader to read because the author put enough in to make them very interesting. I could see people leaning forward in a circle around a fire to listen to these stories. Some of the protagonists were men, some women and all of the stories were believable.

The only question that I had in my mind was whether or not they were published as one block of stories or published in assorted publications? Would a publication print such short stories all by itself? I tended to think they were published as one block.

Carol Heding Munson

"Complete Slow Cooker Cookbook" by Carol Heding Munson Sterling: 2003

There are lots of recipes on the Internet, but I shop at the Redding Canned Foods Outlet which has many things there including fresh meat and produce. One never knows what will be there, but if it is there the price will be nice. The store backs the quality and I have taken back some things and got my money back or replacements.

During the winter, I use my crock pot quite often. I had a very nice one that I bought there a while back which went into my son's kitchen. So, I went there and bought another one for about half the price which made me very glad. I went to Barnes and Noble to pick up a cook book since my son permitted my ex-husband to get rid of my books here at my house while I was in Korea and without my permission. They included many crock pot cook books. The books were donated to the public library and went into their permanent collection. ( I was very angry and the ex-husband is not allowed in this house again. I had given permission for my clothes to be donated as they did not fit me anymore but nothing else.)

Barnes and Noble had some books on crock pots recipes on sale and one of each to a table and went through them. They were all about the same price but not the same. The following was what I wanted in a cook book:

1. I wanted a cook book that would lie flat and would not need something that would hold the book open while I read it and prepared the recipe.

2. I also wanted recipes that did not use prepared ingredients such as Campbell soups for many of them have gluten and other unwanted things in them.

3.I wanted recipes that used simple things and had alternatives such as canned beans or dried beans soaked over night. I don't like labels as I will choose whatever is on sale.

4. I also wanted a book that had an index that was accurate. I found one book with an index that was not accurate. I threw that to the side immediately.

5. I like pictures but not too many. If you have full page pictures, you don't have as many recipes.

6. I wanted a size that would make it small enough to slip in my big purse so that when I was going to the store and I did not know what I was going to make until I saw what was there I could just choose from the book what I was going to make. I could print a recipe from the Internet if I knew what I was going to make. I often don't when shopping at the Outlet.

7. I wanted a book that would use recipes for crock pot of the size I bought which is medium although I bought a large one at a second hand store which was supposedly tested and on sale. I haven't tried it yet but there must be a few recipes I could use if I want to use it later.

8. It would be nice if the recipes were gluten-free but not expected; however the recipes must be able to be converted by me to be gluten free. That is another reason that I don't want recipes to be over-loaded with certain products. For example, I can't use soy sauce. I want alternatives. I am pretty knowledgeable so can switch things but can't do all kinds of switching such as dumplings and the sort.

The above cook book met all of these expectations nicely. There were many recipes that I could use and convert. I could even make some of the meat recipes into meatless ones. It called for substituting dry ingredients with canned. There are pictures but not an abundance. Some of the recipes are main dishes and some are not. What is really important is that many of the recipes call for ingredients that are not too costly. What else would someone make things in a crock pot other than convenience. It means the cook needs to work and keep an eye on the pocketbook.

Ironically, it was also the cheapest priced at $7.98 and 224 pages.

I will report on a black bean and corn chili that I will be going to the store to shop for and cook later today.
January 21, 2011
P.S. The black bean and corn chili turned out excellent. I had to substitute a few things but it did not hurt the main recipe at all.

Libraries

When I was a kid, the public libraries were my life line to civilization, to education, to books which saved my life at a time when I needed it most. I could not afford to buy a book although on occasion I was able to buy a second-hand book from a thrift store. Now, that times are hard in today's economy because of unwise spending, attempts are being made to make up for this on the backs of the less fortunate. This means the young, the poor, the old and disabled and those who can least afford it. One target by the new governor of California , Jerry Brown, is the public libraries.

While Republicans debate tax breaks for those in the upper income levels, it will be those who have no access to the Internet, books, newspapers and to college education that will be carrying the burden of past policies of a broken economy. I am not near the income that is supposedly needing further tax breaks, but I make enough money to buy my own books. I have a college education. I am in no danger of being homeless, but turn the clock around and if I was suddenly back in the 1960's or 1970's I would be in trouble. I would not be able to use the public library to even read the books I did read during that time.

I used to do housework to support my children when I was just out of college with a college degree and would take left overs from my employers in order to feed my children. I could not find a decent paying job until my name came up in the government lottery and my score was high enough to qualify for a job. I never stopped working and retired several years ago so I could work at home. At the time, government jobs paid less than private sector jobs but that was for men and not for women. For women, they were the end of the rainbow for they paid pretty close to what men were paid. I never left government employment. Now, it is government workers that are paid more. It's ironic.

I lived in libraries and got to know the librarians over the years. They were very kind to me and would often hold books under the counter before hold policies were in place. When there was a scandal about "The Last Temptation of Christ" by Nikos Kazantzakis, it was a librarian that gave me the one copy from underneath the counter for me to read. It was an astonishingly beautiful book that gave me a wonderful introduction to Kazantzakis that I was never to forget. I remember reading "Lady Chatterley's Lover" by D.H. Lawrence and realizing that the book was a great book not because of the sex described in the book but because of many other factors. I learned not to depend on what was in the press about books as many journalists never read the books they wrote about.

I learned to do my own research. It was what Rachel Maddow said yesterday on her show. You can't do research on everything on the Internet. She said there is the evident lack of information on sexual matters but there is the lack of information about gun control because of the strength of the gun lobby. Maddow said you still need to use the library. Barnes and Noble is a wonderful book store but they don't carry out of print books. You still need to use a library. If an author is not popular, it will not be in a book store.

Authors fall into popularity and out of it all of the time. The library carries all of them. Some authors are no longer read because of politics or they are associated with the wrong schools of thought. They are still sitting on shelves in libraries as long as no one has noticed them there. Right now there is a ongoing controversy about "Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain. A publisher is going to take some of the "bad words" out of it so it can be put back into the classrooms. Most libraries have the book with the offending words in it. The Library of Congress is supposed to have all of the books.

I believe in free speech which includes saying or writing whatever one wants in a book. Everyone has the right not to read something if it is offensive. I have a Tweet account and every so often I find an account that is offensive to me and will "unfollow" it. I have that right. I have done it only once. I did not report it as offensive as it might not be to someone else. Books can't just jump off the shelf and force the reader to read it. It is the same for my television and for movies. People will complain about what is on television. Well, don't watch it. Turn the darn thing off. I do. I would rather read anyhow.

I intend on writing letters to different people about the importance of the libraries including Governor Brown. I can't think of anything else I can do at this point. When a large portion of the population does not have access to knowledge such is in libraries they will become tools of those who eat at the underbelly of civilization such as the brown shirts of Germany in the 1920's. We, as a people, can't afford this.

Reality and novels

At a local book store, there was an effort to start a book club and I showed up with high hopes. There are so few book clubs in my city. There were three people, counting myself, who did come which seemed a disappointment; but I thought we might be able to pick up some people in the future. My hopes were crushed when one member, a high school science teacher, said that there will not be any books that were fiction. He was very authoritarian and sure of himself being able to set the rules. The other member was a housewife that did the books for her husband's construction business. She said she just wanted to read and did not care what the book was. I asked the teacher why he he would not consider novels.

"Novels are not based on reality." He said firmly. "We should deal with truth only."

Needless to say, the book club never went anywhere. The first book we read was on the Ancient Greeks and the Science teacher said he could have done better. I liked the book, myself. I never went back and it did not attract anymore members and folded.

I have heard this argument before that novels portray life in a fictional mode and do not represent reality. In the Victorian Period, girls were often forbidden to read novels because there was too much reality in novels that girls who were thought to be innocent and pure,were not able to face although many women in the poorer so-called classes in Europe and America, had to deal with a very harsh reality in their lives. They just could not read about it.

D.H. Lawrence put sexuality in his books and stories and poetry. Many people thought of him as a pornographer although his work is considered mild today. Lawrence did more in his books than put sex in. He put the changing reality of England in his books and that also offended many people. A novel does best when it does put reality in the story. People can identify what is going on in a story or novel with what is happening in their lives even if it is described on a planet in another solar system.

Again, I have heard the complaint that novels do not describe reality but are fiction and thus not based on truth. I have heard this from pulpits when I was required to go to church as a child to opinions from people I have known over the years. To my mind, the opposite is true. An author takes what he or she sees as reality and creates a story for people to follow in a book. If it was not plausible, people would not read it. Harry Potter is a boy people get to know in J.K. Rowland's books although the circumstances of wizards and witches are not something that people see everyday or at all. The characters are totally reality based although the circumstances are not. Everyone knows of a man who is ambitious and evil to a fault and gathers followers around him, only to be defeated in the end. An example would be Adolf Hitler. History is full of such people. The character, Sherlock Holmes, was based on someone who was a real person that the author knew.

Novels are truth otherwise no one would read them. What is reality? It is a version of what is before our eyes and can be different. Even history differs from historian to historian. Some biographies are really novels and some novels are really biographies. Transcripts of court proceedings are full of eyewitness accounts that are unlike each other. Some people question whether or not there is a reality but many realities to chose from.

I read "The Last Temptation of Christ" by Nikos Kazantzakis and I never considered the fact that it was true. It was one great book. It was one very good version on the life of Jesus Christ and it may or may not have been accurate. I am not a Christian so it had no significance for me since I am a Buddhist. I will bring up another book, "Siddhartha",a novel by Hermann Hesse. This is a novel on the life of the Buddha that I do not consider to be accurate but a great read. This brings into this discussion why people read novels and that is to read about other people's lives and versions of those lives so that they get clarity about their own. I am sure there are other reasons. Who know what is true and what is not as long as it resembles the truth?

It was a shame about that book club at the book store. The teacher was very dogmatic and looked upon the other woman and me as his students which was out of line. When I was a teacher in high school, I did not run a democracy. A book club of adults is by definition a democracy. He did not understand that, but then his wife was the manager of the book store. He knew he could get away with it. When he said he could write a book as good as the writer of the first book we read, I told him as I said to all wannabee writers: "Then do it." To the best of my knowledge he never has. I am sure he doesn't read novels either which is his loss.

Why read?

The question at the beginning of the post is why read? I don't expect to answer this fully here because the subject area is too vast. I can't even expect to state definitively why I read except that I prefer to read over other forms of gaining information such as watching videos, films, television, movies and so on. I find it so much more satisfying and fulfilling.

There are times I will watch a favorite program such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and will laugh and laugh at the end of the 30 minute program including commercials. There will be some spots in it that I will enjoy more than others and might revisit it on the website. I might watch The Stephen Colbert Show. Colbert is a young and energetic performer who is very talented, but I still prefer Stewart. In 30 minutes, the show is over and I go back to what I was doing before I stopped to watch the show. Stewart is not someone I pick up when I feel like it and then put it down when I get tired unless I am reading one of his book.

When I was a child, I lived in a very dysfunctional situation with parents with huge problems and in a neighborhood also with problems. I found comfort in books. I learned to read in school and my mother had a few books in the house that I read from cover to cover more than several times. I had a favorite aunt who taught me how to use the public library and signed me up for a card. My mother and father never took me there. I walked there often. I also had an imagination which helped and grew when I started to read. There was those few times I went to the show with my family and that was included in my imagination and there was the television still in its infancy. The television was a source of some of my problems as it showed the McCarthy Hearings which were a problem since my mother was born and raised in Russia and the neighborhood had their own witch hunt and picked on my family because of that. Some of our neighbors were ugly and I never forgot that. Books were a refuge and solace from that. This was the early 1950's. I felt I was rejected by people both in my family and neighborhood for who I was but never by a book.

I have two sons. One son rarely reads and watches television most of the time he is awake. The other one rarely watches television and reads often. The one that reads works and owns two companies. The one that does not read has a family of four children and a partner. Each is successful in his own way. The second one is disabled. I took them to the library often when they were growing up. I buy books for my grandchildren. I don't use the library anymore since I had to pay for books that I returned and they said I did not. I do use their second hand book store though.

When I had no choice, I used the library but learned to read too fast because of the due dates that were stamped in the books. That was better than not reading at all. Now, I buy the books and read them at a much slower pace. In college, I was a fast reader. I don't read all that fast anymore because I missed the richness of the language and the way a book was constructed. I also was in a hurry to read all the books I could. Now, I even re-read books as I did in Korea.
It was very fruitful to have done so.

I read children and young adult books now. When I was a young adult there were little to read but now there is a rich treasure of good books to read. Scholastic Press puts out wonderful books at a good price. Unfortunately, it is hard to find such books at a second hand store. There are many books in a second hand store that I don't read, but I have never ran out of good authors although I did when I was in my younger years. I like the current variety that is available and the books written by authors in other countries that are now translated. I find that often I am so familiar with authors that are now translated that it is hard not to skip ahead. An example is C.G. Jung who I am reading now. At one time, I considered learning German to read him. Now, I don't have to.

I am a writer and in order to remain a writer I have to read. I want to read authors who are better than me. I want to see innovative writing but not writing that I can't figure out what is happening. I resisted the group of writers know as the"Beats" for a long time since I got the impression that they were far out of the norm that I was used to. The first book I read out of this group was "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac which forever changed my idea of who they were. I have since read other books by other so-called Beats. I usually try writers who win the Nobel Prize for Literature if I had not read them before. I read authors who win prizes such as the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and so forth just to get names of writers I have not read before. I choose books for their covers, from the recommendations from Bookmarks (I highly recommend this source) Magazines, other writers, Oprah and everyone else that seems to know what is a good writer.

I intend to change this blog which was about books that I had read into more about books in general and anything that comes to mind. I don't seem to have many readers, but if anyone has any recommendations I promise to take it on.

A new direction for this blog, somewhat

I stopped writing in here because I had no access to books for a while. That did not mean that I was not reading for I never stop reading. It was that I was doing it a bit differently. A few people who did read this blog for time to time stopped because I was not adding posts. That was certainly understandable.

I spent a lot of money getting things that were taken from my house including my car. I am living in one room in my house while my youngest son and his family live in the rest of the house. In turn, he takes care of the place and pays the utilities. I will have to wait until I make up for the loss of someone who took it upon himself to clean out my house including hundreds of books, my furniture including bookcases, cars, and so much I can't even put down without bursting into tears. That person no longer has access to my house. That also means not buying books for now.

I can dream though. One book that I am dreaming about is "Bird Cloud, A Memoir" by Annie Proulx. I had read "The Shipping News(1993) and loved it. What has really endeared Proulx to me is the book of short stories, "Wyoming Stories" that I checked out of the library. It included the finest short story I have ever read in my life, "Brokeback Mountain." It appeared in the magazine, The New Yorker. I went to see the movie and thought it was very good but the short story was absolutely outstanding. The use of flashback which was not in the movie and his talking about the relationship he had with his friend and lover was haunting and the movie caught some of it.

The memoir which is listed in the magazine, Bookmarks (No.50 Jan/Feb 2011) states is about the building of her dream house on 640 acres in Wyoming. I just want to know more about who this author is. The house went hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget. I have never built a house in my life and can't see myself doing it. I did buy a new car once and that was nice, but that was years ago. I drove it until it was time for it to go to the junk yard.

One of the reasons I loved Proulx's short stories is that they were easy to understand although not simple plots. They were written in language that used language that is in use today and in simple prose but clear and concise language. When she talked about Wyoming, one could see it quite readily. I did not have to go there in person to see it although I had. Too often I read a story and I don't really understand what is happening. That is one of the reasons I love reading W. Somerset Maugham's stories. There is no doubt what is happening and where my feet are in the telling of it. Perhaps that is why I love murder mysteries.

Catch-up

When I was in Korea, I gave all of my books away to my ex-students. I was going to give them away to some English Teachers but they were members of a Christian Church that did not believe in reading books outside of their faith. So, I gave them to students that wanted to improve their skills and also taught English on occasion. All of the books that I had were classic books but were considered risque by some as they were by such writers as Balzac and Camus. Until I came home, I just re-read the short stories of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on my reader.

Since then, I have returned to the United States and continue to read. I am reading Oliver Sacks, Carl Gustav Jung, and Joseph Campbell as well as some Beat Writers. Unfortunately, I left my Sony Reader in Los Angeles and some books that I was reading there too when I left. Luckily, I got out of Korea before the weather got so bad all over the world and before the rains really hit California. I am working on my own book of short stories.

I have learned to Tweet and am enjoying it very much. One reads a lot when there are tweets out there. I am now watching television but I am watching pretty much the same programs as I did before except more of PBS since I could not get everything. I watch Countdown, The Rachel Maddow Program and The Daily Show and The Stephen Colbert Show. Those were the ones I was watching in Korea. I also follow them by Tweets. Stephen Colbert is especially fun to follow. I do these blogs and have a Facebook account. I now buy the New York Times from time to time as well as follow their tweets. I watched my first Masterpiece since coming back and it was alright.

I have never not read, and I am hoping the books I was reading in LA will be coming in the mail soon from my son in Los Angeles.

Have fun reading.