This is a book about a woman who has an adulterous affair with a Monk because she is bored with her life. This is a typical midlife crisis story, only it has a woman as the one that gets itchy feet and not the man. There are a number of other things going on in the story, our hero’s mother cuts off her finger. Her father died a tragic death in her childhood that she has always blamed herself for. There is this mysterious bond between the older women of her life and this strange monastery that makes a living…
Category: book review
A Slight Trick of The Mind by Mitch Cullin
The Sherlock Holmes we met in A Slight Trick of The Mind is a 93 year man that walks with two canes and seems to be losing what is left of his once great mind. It is a sad tale that is soaked with nostalgia for the days gone by when Holmes could solve a crime just by looking at the mud on a shoe’s heel or listening to the twang of an accent. Holnes still cares for bees and still roams around the world. He visits the site of the Hiroshima Nuclear Attack and marvels at the steel skeleton…
Douglas Hofstadter-Vegetarian
Twenty years or so ago I ran across a mind boggling book called Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. This book was fun, thought provoking and, honestly, more than a bit baffling. But it helped my thinking a great deal. This is one of those books that reading can and does change your life. The next Hofstadter book I read was The Mind’s I. Another bit of fun, deep thinking and pondering wise. This a book that I never finished. Maybe it was the many brilliant authors all talking at once. Maybe I was going through a lazy phase…
Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl
I don’t eat at fine restaurants, but that didn’t stop me from throughly enjoying Ruth’s book on being a critic. Being a food write, as with most jobs involving writing, has been one of my passing fantasies. But it takes only a casual listen to this wonderful book for me to realized that I am out of my depth. My favorite foods are pizzas and BBQ, not truffles and foie gras. Also sad to say I had never heard of a sommeil before, which seems to be someone who knows a lot about wine. Of course, I don’t drink wine,…
Made to Stick
Walking around the library I find my way to the new books shelve and start scanning the titles. It’s the usual suspects, latest bestsellers and graphic novels, stuff for the restless mind that wants to get away from it all. Then there is a book with a fairly convincing bit of duct tape on the cover. Why some ideas survive and others die. Hmm, sounds like my kind book. And it is. Covering everything from the urban legend of the stolen kidney to the success of the Jared Subway commercials, this is really way cool stuff. Ok, saying really way…
Feed-it’s all been done before
Since I do a bit of traveling, I have the time to listen to a lot of books. I am not working my way through the 100 best books ever written, or following any plan at all for that matter. Just what pops up on the library shelf and looks like I might like it.feed- M.T. Anderson, David Aaron Baker (Narrator)-sounded like a kind of cool sci-fi novel, which I am pretty much a fan of. So I slide the first CD in hoping to have an interesting couple of hours. Somewhere it says satire in relation to this bit…
A single rose can be my garden. . .
Leo Buscalia was a happy loud mouth that liked to state the bleeding obvious and make it sound like a blinding revelation. He was fun to listen to, his books can’t touch the power of his speaking. I only saw him on TV, but he was fun to watch. Leo Buscalia told a story about a young woman in one of his classes. She kills herself one night when her boyfriend neglects to call her. It’s a standard sad and poignant story. But Leo takes it to the next logical step, he asks: What could she have done, besides killing…