My Favorite Book So Far

#33.  A Pilgrimage to Eternity. From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith. - Timothy Egan 

I loved this book.  It's probably something more to appeal to people who have, or had, some religious leaning at some point in their lives: Catholic or mainstream Protestant.  Or perhaps anyone who has ever gone on pilgrimage.  The hero's journey.  The time out of time.  The search for miracles or clarity.  I know them well.  I see other people's stories daily.

I read "The Good Rain" in college, as part of my studies (Natural History/Ecology).  He's been writing a long time, has a journalists eye and sensibility, and has twenty pages of bibliography at the end of the book.  He winds his journey in the twines of church history, place history, stories of saints, stories from his personal life, the every day struggle of being a pilgrim in the present, and his encounters along the way to Rome into a whole that leads you, too, from Canterbury to Rome, and across 2000 years of history.  I've walked the same journey via different roads, other countries.

Are there ultimate answers that prove a faith?  I don't know.  I understood things when there was the space and simplicity of repetition allowed to clear the clutter of busy and shoulds from my every day. And he found this, too.  

A pilgrimage is in three parts: calling/beginning (physical), wrestling (mental), return/reintegration.  It was curious to me, the tradition on this route, too, that he carried a stone to leave behind on the third section of the journey.  There was also a reason why on the Camino Frances, through Spain, that the Cruz de Ferro, where millions of pilgrims have left behind a stone on a mountain, is between the "big empty", as I think of it, the Meseta, and entering Galicia, where one prepares to return back home.  You've had the Meseta to wrestling with yourself, and then it's time to let the burdens you've been carrying go (symbolically, with the stone.)  Then you learn how to be with people again, without that burden.  Is this a universal truth of a pilgrimage?

I trace my fingers through the pages as if a labyrinth.  When I find my way out, I'm ready to be in the world again.  I've changed, so the world I'm in has changed, too.

Forms of Lonely

#31.  Seek You - A Journey Through American Loneliness - Kristen Radtke

Science, personal experience, and stories about loneliness, distilled into graphic novel form.  Well written, and intelligent.  Another book I'd recommend to everyone.

#32.  Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine

This is another book I've had around for a couple of decades, bought it from an old used bookstore.  I started reading it a month or so ago, and then it got buried by other books and papers when I recently had to rearrange to figure out how to fit an air conditioner in here.  Uncovered it today, and read the last chapter. 

Adams is best known for his irreverent, comic, science fiction writing, and Carwardine is a zoologist, at the time working with the World Wildlife Fund.  Initially, they were paired to go to Madagascar and search for an endangered lemur called the "aye-aye," by the Observer Color Magazine.  The pairing was a success and they ended up travelling across the globe to search for other endangered species for BBC Radio.  It's both funny and heartbreaking.  Adams will write with irreverence, and then drop in a thought deeply insightful, such as (when inches from a mountain gorilla): I began to feel how patronizing it was of us to presume to judge their intelligence, as if ours was any kind of standard by which to measure.  I tried to imagine instead how he saw us, but of course that's almost impossible to do, because assumptions you end up making as you try to bridge the imaginative gap are, of course, your own, and the most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making...But somewhere in the genetic history that we each carry with us in every cell of our body was a deep connection with this creature, as inaccessible to us now as last year's dreams, always invisibly and unfathomably present. (From the chapter, Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat.)

In the epilogue, Adams tells the fable (?) of a prosperous village visited by an old woman who wishes to sell them a volume of 12 books which contain all the world's wisdom, they laugh at her, and she burns half of them.  Each year she returns with the remaining volumes, increasing the price, they continue to rebuff her, and each year she destroys a portion of what remains.  The village falls on hard times, the price too steep to pay when it comes down to the final remaining book, as she moves to destroy it, they finally pay the price, all that they have.  But what was lost that can never be restored in the eleven that were destroyed?  Every time we willfully, or passively, allow the destruction of a species, or even an ecosystem (we want it to be more like where we came from, or we want to extract as much wealth as we can before someone else gets there) we lost a collective memory, a collective wisdom, a collective story that we cannot restore.  We don't know what holds the fabric of life together, which once removed will cause an unravelling we cannot stop.  Sure, it might be possible to collect DNA from a piece of amber, but we don't have the environment, other species, or open spaces for that species to thrive.  We hold possibilities and shadows of what once was even as we continue to destroy what is. (And the same could be said for the loss of languages and cultures, we lose an understanding of the universe that can't be translated.)

Two of the species in this book have since gone extinct in the wild: the northern white rhino, and the Yangtze River dolphin.  And countless others not covered in this book.  As Carwardine says in his epilogue, There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary...And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.

And Least Favorite So Far

#30. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte.  

I quite disliked this book, yet forced my way through it as a form of inoculation, that obsession and control are not a form of love.  And why this is ever billed as a "love" story is beyond me.  The writing is good, and Bronte's playing with time and story-telling is interesting (Lockwood relaying the story Nelly Dean relayed to him, very little of it happening in the present moment of the novel.)  But it takes a long time to tell the story, and the main two characters are detestable, maybe born that way, but also the result of abuse (and indulgence) rained down over and over again for no reason than for the sake of cruelty itself, or the need to be superior over someone else.  It got more readable for me when it was the story of the offspring.

Bronte was very insightful as to human character, especially with Heathcliff, he could be the poster child for what is now known as dark triad personality disorder.  He's cruel, vengeful, violent, manipulative, remorseless, selfish, obsessive, controlling, malevolent, moody, mercurial, and vile.  Cathy is more immature, selfish, indulgent, and somewhat obsessive, and one wonders how she would've turned out with more loving parental guidance, but her father was also obsessed and indulgent of Heathcliff, the mystery child.

In the end, even Hell expelled them, leaving Catherine and Heathcliff to haunt the moors.

Most laugh-inducing, so far

#29 - Hyperbole and a Half - Allie Brosh

Yes.  A graphic (novel?) of a blog in print form.  Made me both laugh out loud (all the dog stuff - why did they think they had "dog whisperer" abilities and adopt the scariest dog in the joint?  Although, I do love that they made that dog part of their family anyway - plus recognition of so much of her struggles in me) and cry.  Plus, drawing herself like a sad amphibian is endearing.  Or as I've started using the term all the time now, "sad guppy."

Almost Thirty

#26 - The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett, illustrated by Inga Moore.

Not without controversy, for comments about race.  Two ill-tempered and ill children find one another, and heal from the power of nature and the power of being known.  The tending of a garden, of the soul, and the effect of our thoughts on our well-being and will to live.

#27 - Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

Janie Crawford is raised by a former slave to be satisfied with the scraps of life, but feeling inside herself that there is more being fully alive.  She's married off at 16 to an older man, Logan Killicks, who doesn't treat her poorly, but also doesn't allow for her to develop as a person.  She then runs off with another man with big dreams for himself, Joe Starks, who hears of a new town being formed and sweeps in and pulls it together, becoming shopkeeper, landlord, postmaster, and mayor.  But who also keeps Janie on a pedestal apart from all society, leaving her lonely and boxed in.  After he dies, and she inherits their wealth, she runs off to the swamp with a much younger man, Tea Cake, to make their way through picking beans and gambling. They survive a hurricane together only to have Tea Cake succumb to rabies from a dog bite while saving Janie (a horrible way to die, and much more prevalent before widespread vaccinations in pets.)  With Tea Cake, Janie came into herself, and after his funeral, she returns to her home and tells her life story to her friend Phoeby.  It's unclear at the end what her fate will be (Tea Cake bit her as he died.)

It's Janie believing she can decide her fate, that there is more that she can become besides what she has been told she can be.  More that her Grandma, her husbands, or society tell her she has to be.  It's wanting more than merely surviving, it's believing that a full life is for her, to fully embrace what can be and what she wants.

#28 - Crimes of the Heart (Play) - Beth Henley

Inclusiveness

#25 - Disability Visibility First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong

One of the few books I think should be required reading.  We live in a very ableist world, we have a very narrow definition of what we perceive as "normal" and our societal definition of useful and meaningful life follows from that narrow definition.  Begin to conceive it isn't the only one.  Begin to conceive and view an inclusive world where all people can contribute their gifts, are not facing barricades: accessibility, clothing, transportation, communication, help, healthcare, mobility, discrimination,, etc., from reaching their potential.  See the world from someone else's point of view.  (Which I might add, is also kinda' the point of reading.)

We fall so short of what could be.  We do enough to be ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) compliant, and miss the spirit of what it means to be inclusive.  (For instance, my apartment building has an elevator and ADA compliant units, but non-ADA compliant entrances to the building.  If you needed a wheelchair if would be very difficult to get into the building without assistance.  The key fob is high up on a wall, 4' perhaps?  and then you have to get to the door and pull it open before the buzzer stops.  It's hard enough to do if you are carrying anything, much less have mobility constraints.  A push pad to open the door would solve that, though not solve security issues.) What it means to be open and welcoming.  To say, we are happy to have you here.  To say this place is for all, and we welcome your contributions, you have a place at the table.

Screenplay for "Sense and Sensibility"

24 - Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries - Emma Thompson

I was late to Jane Austen.  Something about the titles sounded trite to me as a teenager, and I didn't take the Senior English class that read Austen.  So, my introduction was this movie.  I'd gotten sick, thinking it was a cold, which progressively got worse over a course of days to the point where I could no longer swallow food (and actually, liquids were pretty painful as well) and finally hauled myself to a doctor, who had me open my mouth, took a look down my throat and proclaimed, "Yuck.  Looks like Strep." And then sent me off for antibiotics.  By the point I could swallow ice cream (half-melted), a couple days into the liquid anti-biotics, my roommate told me she was going to take me to a movie, to make me feel better, and because she owed me money for tp or something.  She took me to a matinee of Ang Lee's "Sense and Sensibility" saying something about needing tissues (I think she had already watched it once.)  I was crying my eyes out, and fell in love with Jane Austen on the spot.  And then of course, started reading her.  My sister, I think, gave me this book later that year.  I've looked over it before, but I've not read the whole thing.  Began and finished it this afternoon.  Reading straight for the past couple of hours to the point where Emma Thompson's voice is in my head.  The diary is entertaining that way.  And I haven't seen the movie in a while, but I think there are changes between this version of the screenplay and the movie, added dialogue, dropped dialogue/scenes from the final cut.