Hi friends! Just 3 books this month. I did read a couple other fluff books that aren’t really worth a review. More often than not this month, I was working puzzles at the dining room table rather than reading. It was a much-needed mental break. Please share what you’ve been up to and any good books you recommend.
Get ready for Self-Compassion September! That right, a full month of posts all about being kind in how we treat ourselves. I’m not the best at this, as we all know, but we will dive in together and look at how we can change this. I am making my way through an online Self-Compassion workshop co-facilitated by Drs. Kristin Neff (Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself
She shouldn’t take any notice of what those muppets think, says Granny. Because all the best people are different—look at superheroes. After all, if superpowers were normal, everyone would have them. Granny is seventy-seven years old, going on seventy-eight. She’s not very good at it either. You can tell she’s old because her face looks like newspaper stuffed into wet shoes, but no one ever accuses Granny of being grown-up for her age.
I just had to read this one because I loved Britt-Marie Was Here. Elsa is a lonely 7-year-old and is rather mature for her age. Her best friend, her rather nutty grandmother, dies and leaves a series of letters for Elsa to find and deliver. I found the fairy tale world/sci fi part of the book so imaginative and unexpected. I enjoyed the characters very much and really felt I got to know them and understand them and their relationships to each other as they unfolded. Recommend.
One day at a time. One dream at a time. And one could say it’s right and one could say it’s wrong. And probably both would be right. Because life is both complicated and simple. Which is why there are cookies.
This biography came out three years ago but is now a movie, which must be why it came up as recommended to me on Amazon. It took me a couple weeks to get through it, but I could not stop reading it or skip ahead. Something was so compelling about getting an honest account of how Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe approached their writing and the struggles and relationships they encountered. Perkins’ intimate connections and continual support were the reason their books came to be. He behaved as if literature were a matter of life and death. Perkins also altered the traditional notion of the editor’s role. He became a change agent by seeking out and publishing authors who spoke in a new voice. Highly recommend.
Max Perkins was unsurpassed. His literary judgment was original and exceedingly astute, and he was famous for his ability to inspire an author to produce the best that was in him or her. More a friend to his authors than a taskmaster, he aided them in every way. He helped them structure their books, if help was needed; thought up titles, invented plots; he served as psychoanalyst, lovelorn adviser, marriage counselor, career manager, money-lender.
“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”
It does sound dense and boring, but it is exactly the opposite. This book is written clearly, with a dose of humor, and so beautifully that it was a disappointment to me when I’d finished it and there was no more to learn. I feel like this should be required reading for every human on the planet.
“When judging modernity, it is all too tempting to take the viewpoint of a twenty-first-century middle-class Westerner. We must not forget the viewpoints of a 19th-century Welsh coal miner, Chinese opium addict, or Tasmanian Aborigine…. We can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern Sapiens only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals.”
“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.” Groups of people make cultures or certain tools (like money, “the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised“) work because every member believes in them.
How the world and its peoples evolved to be how we are today is fascinating. This is the story of how we went from many individual small tribes to the (almost) single global group that humankind is today. There are many, many parts of the book I’d love to share with you, but I’ll settle for a few…
“It’s a common fallacy to envision these species as arranged in a straight line of descent, with Ergaster begetting Erectus, Erectus begetting the Neanderthals, and the Neanderthals evolving into us. This linear model gives the mistaken impression that at any particular moment only one type of human inhabited the earth, and that all earlier species were merely older models of ourselves. The truth is that from about 2 million years ago until around 10,000 years ago, the world was home, at one and the same time, to several human species. And why not? Today there are many species of foxes, bears, and pigs. The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man. It’s our current exclusivity, not that multi-species past, that is peculiar.”
“Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain.”
“Over the past 10,000 years, Homo sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it’s hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation, and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.”
Did you all know this? That there were many different species of man? Fascinating. I also read that our rather sudden leap from the middle to the top of the food chain (in the Agricultural Revolution) is what has caused huge consequences. Other animals at the top, lions or sharks for example, took millions of years to get to that point and evolved the necessary functions to be there. We assumed it with very little change in brain size or other checks and balances in the surrounding environment so we could not (ahem) wreak too much harm on the earth and other species.
“We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.”
Truly fascinating, right?
A common plot device in speculative fiction is the introduction of another kind of human, whether by existing in an undiscovered enclave of the world, spontaneously arising from random evolution, or being deliberately created by scientists. As an affront to Homo Sapiens’ assumption that they are the pinnacle of creation, this creates ready-made conflict.
SKJAM! recently posted…Book Review: The Sculthorpe Murder
How interesting. What selfish egotistical creatures we are!
I read all of Fredrik Backman’s. My favorite was A Man Called Ove.
Ooh, that one’s next for sure.
I always like reading book reviews because I love to read! “My Grandmother Told Me” sounds delightful. Will put it on my list. I am looking forward to Self Compassion September. I think most people can use tips on being more compassionate with themselves. I know I can! Thanks for posting:)
Nancy Jambor recently posted…I Know I Can!
I may have comments fixed now. We’ll see. Yours came through despite the error message you got. I’m looking forward to more self-compassion as well. 🙂
It’s always fun and expansive to switch up our usual patterns isn’t it Naomi? Less reading and more puzzle building sounds like a perfect way to spent the dog days of August.
Of your recommendations, I think My Grandmother Told Me is one that’s going on my list. A friend just sent me a book “A Mind’s Cargo Shifting” by John Levy and I’m hoping to crack it open tonight. He’s a lawyer who writes poetry and makes up words, and this book is a collection of short fictions.
Deborah Weber recently posted…Random Musing: Z is for…
That is one book I would never have heard of but it looks unconventional and great. I’m going to try it!