Another one of those books I enjoy in audiobook format but due to my natural absent-mindedness I miss a lot of the details while listening. A great part of the book became the soundtrack of my random thoughts and observations I had while walking, but what I can say is that I have had audiobooks inspire my undisturbed attention (such as The Power of Now), therefore this lack of ability to listen with concentration prolonged period of time is not merely a problem of the medium and how I interact with it. Maybe I should try listening to books purposefully, sitting in a sofa or something. Maybe even while doing chores.
For the record, these are the seven habits:
1.Be proactive,
2.Begin with the End in Mind,
3. Put First Things First,
4. Think Win-Win,
5. Seek First to Understand, then to be understood,
6. Synergize
7. Sharpen the Saw
They are useful to remember and keep to heart. I’m sure that if I internalize this list and put it work, I’ll become a better person. Doing the work is the hard part though, isn’t it?
The first part is about this psychiatrist’s time in a number of concentration camps. That was the fascinating, horrifying part of the book and I truly enjoyed it. It put everything else I was doing while reading the book into perspective.
The second part I found confusing and not much from it has stuck with me. Logos, apart from meaning or the ability to think and reason also means speech in Greek and logotherapía means speech therapy, the kind you would get if you couldn’t pronounce r, g or s (and sometimes what I think I need when I realise just how badly and hastily I pronounce some words). I kept subconsciously thinking there was some kind of connection between Frankl’s logotherapy and logotherapía, which isn’t the case at all.
In the end I didn’t come out having understood what this book was about. If you ask me what Dr. Frankl’s logotherapy is, I wouldn’t be able to accurately tell you. However, I don’t think that it’s the book’s fault; on the contrary, it was well structured and argued. Perhaps I just wasn’t so interested. The first part though… that was intense.
Refreshing in its simplicity and messages. I was genuinely taken aback by the occasional brutality: limbs casually getting chopped off, animals dying by the hundreds, perhaps as a punishment for choosing the wrong side, and characters facing terrible prospects but somehow remaining amazingly, contagiously, cheerful. That’s what fairy tales were like in the past, I suppose.
This is a story told many times which remains more than a century after it was written very strange and counter-intuitive. Reading it actually felt like a meta-trip to Kansas for me—“how can a fairy tale be so strange? From the pacing to the characters to everything! What would it feel like listening to this story as a child? What would have made the most impression on me? What would I need most, a heart, brains, courage, or a ticket back to Kansas? Actually, wait, wh-what happened? I’m 25 years old!”
Finally, after three years of idling, finish it I did! I was stuck since 2011 (dunno why) at the part right before the party got into the mountain. Then I watched the first and third films and disliked them, so I got very close to never actually finishing The Hobbit. However, since this is book-a-week year (just finishing books counts too!) I couldn’t resist the temptation…
I have to say I quite enjoyed Tolkien’s writing, at least in The Hobbit. I think it was the perfect balance between complex descriptions and enjoyable dialogues, and I’m saying that having read LOTR in Greek many years ago and knowing what kind of an experience having the scale lean towards the descriptions and the story of everybody, their friends and their friends’ friends’ dog’s grandmothers side is.
In a few words: The Hobbit in book format was more enjoyable than the films, while in LOTR’s case the reverse was true for me. But books such as Tolkien’s are difficult to criticise because they are so deeply influential and part of everybody’s “discovering the realm of high fantasy” phase, somewhere between the ages of 11 and 14.
Is The Hobbit the post-war Harry Potter? Will teens enjoy Harry Potter 50 years from now the way I did growing up? Will Harry Potter eventually spawn a universe of influences unforeseeable to us today? Did Tolkien ever imagine what kind of worlds he would inspire in the imaginations of others?
Haunting music. The scene where it plays during the film does give off masterfully the otherworldliness, the raw hit to the senses that are Grenouille’s perfumes. Here it is — it’s very close to the end of the film, so spoilers, obviously.
Tom Tykwer directed the film and he was in the composing team for the OST. Talk about a man of many talents. Between this and Lola Rennt, he’s made two of the films that rank very high in my list of favourites—as well as worked on their soundtracks.
Also, here’s my review for the book. If I had to choose between the book and the movie, I’d say “who’s to say we can’t enjoy them both?” As is the case with Game of Thrones, it’s one of these cases where book and visual representation each stands on its own merits. I haven’t actually read the GoT books because they’re stupidly long, I already know the main plot and people have told me that the series follows the books closely, but I’m sure that, in a parallel universe where I had read them, I wouldn’t regret it a bit and I’d try to convince my present-universe self to take the plunge. Still, I don’t feel inclined. Does that make sense?
This book is a blithe and glorious (yes) collection of such amazing, curious and sidesplitting book titles as:
(double entendres) Drummer Dick’s Discharge, Beatrix M. De Burgh, Ernest Nister, 1902 Penetrating Wagner’s Ring, John Louis DiGaetani, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978 Boobs as Seen by John Henry, George Vere Hobart, New York: G. W. Dillingham, 1914 Memorable Balls, James Laver, Derek Verschoyle, 1954 Invisible Dick, Frank Topham, D. C. Thomson & Co., 1926
“Jeehosophat! What a disgraceful scene!” said Dick Brett, doing a series of physical jerks behind a bush, as he began to grow into visibility.”
(authors–right or wrong)
The Ethics of Peace and War, I. Atack, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005
Motorcycling for Beginners, Geoff Carless, East Ardsley: EP Publishing, 1980
Industrial Social Security in the South, Robin Hood, Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1936
Obesity: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment, Louis Lasagna, New York: Medcom Press, 1974
Metabolic Changes Induced by Alcohol, G. A. Martini, Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1971
Frozen Future: The Arctic, the Antarctic and the Survival of the Planet, Daniel Snowman, Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1993
There Are No Problem Horses, Only Problem Riders, Mary Twelveponies, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1982
etc etc, going through a wealth of subjects and book types. I feel weirdly proud of owning this book. Apart from being a little treasure all of its own, it reminds me how anybody can publish a book and indeed how many different tiles have been published through the centuries, that we’ll never know about no less. Time to start writing now then!
BTW: I’m not including this to the 2015 reading challenge because I read 95% of it in 2014. In fact it was a gift from my mother. Spot-on, wasn’t it?
Maria, my former Danish colleague in Sofia City Library and fellow EVSer/roomie, suggested I give this one a shot after she had given me The Tale of Despereaux to read. With that book, we both agreed that it was horrible. We were in agreement about Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, too; with the only difference that this one was actually good. Very good.
Here’s a beautifully illustrated children’s fairy tale inspired by Chinese legends and folk stories. It’s been a few months since I read it now so I don’t remember very well–I’m finally writing this review since I’m currently right here in Denmark visiting Maria and so was inspired to stop postponing it. What I do remember is that the stories themselves are excellent, well-written and with messages I would like my children to come away with, were they ever to read this book (and, first things first, come into existence).
Maybe I’m rating it so highly because after reading Despereaux I was… ahem, desperate for a good book and a good story. I couldn’t have hoped for a greater contrast between Despereaux and this, which only fueled my flaming dislike for the former. This is what children’s books should be like: inspiring multicultural folktale curiosity, well-illustrated, well-meaning, well-everything. I have only praise for this exquisite book. Bravo, Grace, and thank you. Excellent cover too.
Got this from Audible. Actually, no: I got it for free as a kind of gift for being a subscriber but got tired of Audible and its DRM bullshit so I downloaded and listened to a pirated version of this and subsequently unsubscribed from Audible. Ahem.
In this surprisingly old book (it was written in 2002) journalist and plant aficionado Michael Pollan takes the well-worn trope of humans using the evolution of plants for their own benefit (i.e. agriculture) and turns its on its head: what if plants have actually used the evolution of humans for their own benefit?
Just to clarify, and Mr. Pollan was well-aware of this too, anthropomorphising evolution or nature and endowing it with such properties as intelligence and design (or intelligent design) is a figure of speech: as far as we know evolution is as purposeful as the flowing of the rivers and the burning of the stars. I’ll leave that one to you.
Botany of Desire
So, Michael Pollan’s idea was to take four species of plants–the tulip, cannabis, the apple and the potato– and examine how not just we humans have used them for our own needs, but also how the plants themselves, in an evolutionary tango with our own species, played on our desires and took advantage of us, too. The book has four chapters, one for each human desire responsible for the propagation of each of the four species of plant: sweetness for apples, beauty for tulips, intoxication for cannabis and control for potatoes.
“Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance.”
In the first part of the book, I enjoyed Pollan’s comparison between the Dionysian and the Apollonian; chaos and order; female and male; yin and yang; nature and culture; the apple’s story and the tulip’s story, which both hold the sperms of their opposite inside them, in true dualist nature. I found this quote particularly interesting: “Great art is born when Apollonian form and Dionysian ecstasy are held in balance”, and it becomes more and more relevant as one goes through the book, seeing in every plant’s story the art manifesting itself through the tug–which at the same time is a balancing act–between human structures imposed on nature and nature’s tendency to defy control. Then there’s structure in nature’s chaos and a part that is natural in human structures and so on.
The chapter on cannabis was a little more daring, given marijuana’s legal status (which is, however slowly, changing around the world) and Mr. Pollan shares his insights on that topic and how human societies brought a species underground, where it’s found new life, too. The Apollonian has won, even though the desire itself is Dionysian. Hm. Are all human desires Dionysian, I wonder?
The last chapter was about GMOs and Monsanto’s control on patented potato seeds, including many many other agricultural plants of course. It’s amazing and telling that this chapter, written 12 years ago, seems to sketch the current situation so eloquently. Even though I come from a family background which is 100% anti-GMO, the arguments posited here about the pros and cons of GMOs as well as the pros and cons of organic agriculture seemed very well balanced and neutral to me, and most of all well-argued; in a few words, as close to an objective view as I could hope for. It’s still pro-organic, but cleverly so: it adds an interesting twist from a philosophical, pragmatical and experiential perspective–e.g. the story of the writer’s own batch of GMO potatoes. I would even suggest reading this chapter alone for a nice eagle’s eye view of what’s wrong with GMOs, what they’re supposedly trying to solve and why they’re most probably not going to solve it, creating other unforeseeable problems along the way.
Pollan managed to blend personal experience with journalistic research quite seamlessly and enjoyably, and I feel as though I came out of this read listen more complete and with a greater sense of appreciation for agriculture. Cause you can’t have agriculture without culture. I’m not giving it five stars because… oh I can’t come up with a reason, but hey, I don’t have to give you one, it’s my gut score! It might have to do with the reader of the audiobook whose voice and intonation sometimes annoyed me. I’d give it a 4.5 though, easily.
Thanks go to Karina for first telling me about this book two years ago or so.
I’d been noticing this sitting on varying desks in the American Corner of Sofia City Library for a while now and finally decided to give it a try. I must say that it wasn’t as good as The Power of Now, which I loved and want to return to. It could be because this one I read, while The Power of Now I listened to Eckhart Tolle himself reading, which was an experience in its own right. A New Earth was sort of repetitive and nothing really new was introduced, as if Tolle was contractually obliged to write something but couldn’t come up with anything new. But as I’m writing these words I wonder: what new could there be? I suppose the lesson is and will always be the same – though you can play around with the presentation: awareness is all there is, be wary of the ego in yourself and others, meditate. Maybe my criticism is invalid, then, which wouldn’t however change the fact that I didn’t find it as appealing as The Power of Now. But for you, if you read or listened to this one first, it could – for all I know – work the other way around.
These are two of my favourite bits:
“The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction, its own madness.”
“Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man’s land between two world’s. They are no longer run by the ego, yet the arising awareness has not yet become fully integrated into their lives. Inner and outer purposes have not merged.”
I thought the cover was beautiful too. Here’s something similar I stumbled upon on Tumblr yesterday. Click on the pic for the post.
If you don’t enjoy being patronised, don’t read this book.
I was thinking the other day: what would you do if you had a negative (and I mean really negative) opinion on a book but by chance happened to come across its author? What would you tell them if they asked you what you thought about their book?
Without the luxury of the internet or reviews or all the other ways we have of expressing a negative opinion on things without having to come into direct contact with their creator, we tend to be more insensitive with our criticism. The medium is the message… What is the message the medium of criticism conveys? That, perhaps, individual works of art can be analysed, praised or attacked as if they existed in a void – as if they weren’t created by people with flaws and feelings. I understand that criticism is necessary in a world as saturated with works of art as the one we live in, if only for us to be able to timidly navigate through this ever-expanding sea of creativity. However, I also believe it’s necessary to look at established institutions a little more, ahem, critically from time to time.
So: should we be writing criticism we wouldn’t be able to say it to the authors’ faces?
I’ll let you ponder that a for a sec.
…
Done? Great! At this point I’ll contradict myself, as I so happily and readily do, and say what I can say from the safety and isolation of my Goodreads account, albeit signed with my real name, a move I would predictably not make if I knew my review would be read by Kate DiCamillo and not get lost in the ego-stroking labyrinth of positive comments and reviews this piece of work has disappointingly received.
This, people, is one of the worst books I’ve ever read.
Terribly obnoxious, annoying, arbitrary characters; events I did not care about reading and that made me feel worse than before (what was up with the cauliflower ears? Come on!); an arrogant, didactic style of writing that’s pretending not to be so but which cannot help but seep through… I’d go on but it’s already been a couple of months since I read it so most of my vitriol has evaporated; that is, I can’t really remember more of the exact reasons I didn’t enjoy this book at all, but what I can tell you is that it managed to solidify itself in my memory as a bad reading experience, one that made me feel uncomfortable, a kind of uncanny sick inside. Maria did warn me, but I just had to sneak a peek at this train wreck… To not make this review longer than it should be, I’ll just say that I’d never read this to my child.
7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey
