Books read so far: 33

 

The stack is 27.5 inches high.

Only 71 more books to go! I'm right on schedule for this week, so I feel safe reading I Know This Much Is True, which is about 900 pages long.

This weekend, I'll be a car passenger for about 16 hours so I should have plenty of time for reading.

Trying to Cut Down

 

I don't use the giant mug very often, but I use the middle one a lot! I'm trying to use little coffee cups like the one on the right to slow down my caffeine intake.

I'm not ready to give up coffee yet. I love the ritual of making it, and the smell of it, and the taste and the jolt and how could I ever stop?

This week I'm cutting down from brewing 4ish cups to 3ish cups a day. We'll see how it goes.

Book 33: Master Your Metabolism

Yes, another Jillian Michaels book: Master Your Metabolism. In this one she discusses the effects of foods, drugs, chemicals, and lifestyle on our bodies.



She suggests reducing starchy vegetables, dried fruits, tropical fruits (not my bananas!), excess soy (tofu and miso are fine, but soy milk has too many isoflavones, which make natural DHEA levels drop), excess alcohol, full-fat dairy and fatty meats, canned foods, and caffeine.

Totally avoid hydrogenated fats, refined grains, HFCS, artificial sweeteners, artificial coloring and preservatives, and gluatmates (including MSG).

Also, she recommends buying as much organic food as possible, since it generally contains far lower concentrations of chemicals. Avoid using plastic as much as possible (though she sorts out which kinds are more dangerous), especially in the microwave. Don't use harsh chemicals to clean your house or tend your lawn.

A lot of this is sort of commonsense, but she puts it all together in terms of good health and ability to stay healthy and be lean and look good. Also, we don't often think of these toxins in terms of their cumulative effect, but just think that a small dose of one isn't known to be harmful. Every day, we're taking in multiple doses of chemicals in foods, water, the air, and through our skin, and it adds up.

Some of her criticisms of major food providers (including meat producers and pharmaceutical companies) are pretty harsh (though they are true!). I will be surprised if they don't go after her like the National Cattlemen's Beef Association tried to take down Oprah in 1996.

Michaels has really done her research here -- it appears that you will find the proper scientific reasoning behind all her recommendations, with appropriate citations to the references and studies she relies on (I didn't actually check any of her sources).

Book 32: Buddhism Plain & Simple

Buddhism Plain & Simple by Steve Hagen. It is what it says -- he just breaks down the teachings of the Buddha into very simple terms.

He strips away any idea of religion, tenets, temples, rituals, costumes, incense, gongs, icons, or doctrines. Original buddhism was about none of these things. In fact, once you've awoken, throw out the buddha-dharma -- you don't need to be weighed down by it.

Buddhism is simply being aware of reality. Being aware of our own thoughts, our own convictions which shape the way we see the world, and our own beliefs which lead us to worry and be afraid.

The Buddha said that we all have 83 problems. We always will. Sometimes it will rain too much and sometimes not enough. The real problem is that we want to have NO problems. The real problem is that we can't just accept that there is both good and bad in life, all the time, every day.

Or as The Gits say in Another Shot of Whiskey "You seem to think if you just remove the problem the answers are what will come next... Never thinking that all the good times are what walked in with the bad."

Here's the trick: pay attention to what is real. Notice what we think about the world and situations, and let go of false beliefs. Don't let your imagination or your interpretation make you unhappy. For example, if someone says something mysterious, don't assume it was an insult. Many of our 83 problems come from within our own minds. Don't make extra trouble for yourself. I know -- it's not that easy! So, just keep trying.

Book 31: An American Childhood

Annie Dillard again: An American Childhood. I started reading this last summer, and read four pages before abandoning it. This time I loved it! It's a great autobiography of a girl who's interested in science, drawing, history, boys, detective work, and finally reading and writing.



I love her straight-forward sincerity as she tells us that growing up everyone was convinced that Pittsburgh was the greatest place in the country, and a sure target if the enemy ever dropped a bomb.

On books: "A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds."

[As an aside, I just started I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb, at the suggestion of my friend Sparky, and I feel like I could read all 900 pages at one sitting, if I had nothing else to do. It is no dud.]

She goes on to say how adults did not know how to choose books for children. "Any book which contained children, or short adults, or animals, was felt to be a children's book." Dillard was forced to default to nonfiction, since fiction was so often disappointing.

This piece reminded me of little Tonya: "I believed then, too, that I would never harm anyone. I usually believed I would never meet a problem I could not solve. I would overcome any weakness, any despair, any fear.... Everything was simple. You found good work, learned all about it, and did it."

I wish I could feel that way again now! Some days everything seems so complicated, but as a kid, the answers were obvious. Just be a good person and do the right thing. If you need to fix something, just learn how to do it and then do it. I still feel that way about some things, like when I fixed my sewing machine. It was broken, so I just took it apart and fixed it. I didn't have to think about it and hem and haw and debate. I would like to feel a little more matter-of-fact about a few other areas of my life, including looking for a job. Just figure out what I want to do and then do it!

Dillard also made me remember my own regular disbelief about adults -- as she said, so many things were wrong with them and they were totally unaware of it. One thing that bothered her was that their skin was too loose on their bodies. One thing that bothered me was that some of them seemed to just give up. I thought that we should all keep learning our whole lives, and striving to improve ourselves, and by the time we died, we'd all be just about perfect.

It horrified me to see adults throwing little tantrums or yelling. They should know how to behave by now!

It disgusted me when the minister couldn't read the big words in the Bible. He'd make me or Brian (who shares my birthday, but is one year older than I) read the big words. A grown adult whose job it is to read the Bible should know how to read it!

I was also embarrassed for his wife, who had no eyebrows and had to draw them on -- but here's the part that should have been embarrassing: her hair was brown, but her eyebrows were bright orange! By the time you are an adult, you should know how to apply makeup properly and choose colors that look good.

I was pretty shocked when I was in third grade, memorizing the times tables, and my mom couldn't remember 7x6! I thought that once you knew something, you knew it forever. I thought, and so did Dillard, that I would always remember everything forever. (Man, was I wrong! I can't believe how many things I've forgotten, just in the past few years.)

Dillard writes, "As a child I read hoping to learn everything." I also thought I could someday learn and know everything (at least everything I was interested in). Of course, I also thought that if I tried hard enough, I would catch up to my 5-years-older sister.

A major theme of this book is "awakening," as in just going through the day and then suddenly being self-aware. It happens over and over again, into adulthood. We are just driving along or watching TV or whatever, and realize, "I'm driving around. This is my life. I'm alive."

Food Donation

Today at Wal-Mart, some youths were hanging around out front, smiling and trying to hand out paper bags. It was cold and rainy, so I wanted to hurry up and get inside.

One of the youths asked me, "Would you like to buy a couple of items for the food drive?"

"I'm not sure," I said, as I hustled right past her, looking at the bag but not wanting to be sucked into anything. I acted as though someone were pulling me into the store and I didn't have time to stop.

Two seconds later, I decided that the answer was "Yes. I do want to buy a couple of items for the food drive." So we got the cat food, shampoo, and coffee that we wanted and then tried to figure out what the people who need food need. I didn't want to buy junk food, but I don't think you can put lettuce or bananas in that bin. What about bread? It would probably get smushed.

We decided on some big cans of soup (and I was perplexed that I mostly saw "light" soup -- do I want the needy to think that I think they're fat?), and a jar of peanut butter (will the needy think that I'm trying to give them salmonella?), and a double box of Cheerios.

I spent almost as much on the donation as I did on the cat food. $12.86 v. $14.72.

Book 30: Throw Out Fifty Things

Book 30 is Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life by Gail Blanke.

Blanke walks you through each room in your house, encouraging you to purge things you don't need, don't want, don't like, don't use, as well as things that have bad feelings attached to them. It sounds easy, but if you throw out 40 old magazines, that only counts as one thing. But it IS easy anyway, because there's so much stuff in most of our houses that we can still throw out 40 categories of things fairly easily.

The next section is about throwing out ideas, beliefs, and mindsets that don't help you. One of Blanke's was the need to always be right. I can use that one, too. One of my own is that I need for no one to ever be mad at me.

Another one of mine is the strong, strong desire for things to be the same indefinitely. I want to get my life to a certain good point and then freeze it there forever. Well, I know that's impossible, but it's still been one of my life's works. I'm trying to let go of it. Change is good and fun and exciting AND terrifying. I like change when I initiate it, but I will try to be less resistant to it when it's forced upon me.

Here's a picture of some of the clothes and shoes I donated today (by the way, we rent and so it's not my choice that the wall is mustard yellow):

 

I had a box full in the garage, too. In total, it was 4 garbage bags full, plus they were overflowing. Jason helped me take them to a donation box in a convenience store parking lot. Usually the boxes are red and made of metal. This one looked like a tiny shed from Home Depot. I would never have noticed it, but Jason is good at noticing.

Don't worry; I still have plenty to wear. I'm a little sad about those cowboy boots on the right side of the picture. So cute! But they have like 2-inch heels and I am unable to wear real heels. I can handle about an inch, and after that I'm all wobbly and my feet hurt. I never wore those, and I know I never would, so away they went.

On the other hand, I almost got rid of a pair of sandals that I've rarely worn, and I have other sandals that I like more. But all of a sudden I fell completely in love with those sandals! They're Dr. Scholl's, but with a flat sole that's rubber instead of wood. And the leather is patent turquoise! I felt so sad walking them to the dump pile that I had to keep them. I can always get rid of them later, but maybe this summer I will wear them.

Blanke says that if you really love something, you should keep it even if you don't use it. And if you have things that you use but don't like, perhaps you should get rid of them! That helped me to throw out some clothes that are appropriate for wearing to an office job, but that I don't really like. I don't need them. Honestly, I don't know how I ever think, "I don't have anything to wear." Trying on all those clothes also let me rediscover some things that I'd forgotten about or dismissed. Even if they don't look great on the hanger, they look good on. Now to just remember that when I'm picking out clothes.

I still have several more sections of the house to sort through: a filing cabinet, some boxes of miscellaneous stuff, all my books, the kitchen, and the closet in the basement (mostly law school books -- should I keep those?). If I make another big pile, I'll add an update with a photo of all that stuff.

Blanke is a professional motivator, and she tells a good anecdote. If you want a little encouragement to clean out your house or your mind, you might like this book. There are a few problems with comma usage, and at the end of the book she suddenly starts calling the reader "my friend," but I can get past those very minor annoyances. I'm sure you could do this process on your own, but it's nice to have a bit of encouragement sometimes.

New Sweater!

 

Guess what I received in the mail today! A new sweater, knit by my mom (Thanks, Mom!) and designed by my sister (Thanks, Stef!). I love it.

If you want to make your own (or have your mom make you one) the pattern is from my sister's book, Glam Knits.

Book 29: The Writing Life

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard is great! She includes stories of her own struggles to write, and quotes, and advice. Dillard is extremely friendly and conversational.

I feel inspired by this book and have been actually working on my own novel again after a short break. It helps to be reminded of the same things I learned in college writing classes (where we read essays by Dillard, by the way):

*writing is really difficult
*the best, favorite part of your work is what doesn't fit and will surely need to be cut
*writing takes most of us a very, very long time
*many writers are much crazier than I am in their routines and good luck rituals (I don't even have any writing rituals!)

I will keep this little book at my desk and try to remember to flip through it sometimes and see what I marked with little sticky flags and what I underlined.

House-Shakers

Today a neighbor is having his or her driveway torn out and taken away. It's a townhouse in a building across the street. Somehow the act of removal shook my whole building like an earthquake! I seriously thought a truck hit our house repeatedly.

When I went out to get a closer look, the dude stared at me as if I was the one driving a truck into HIS house while he was trying to do stuff. I looked back like, "what? you want to start something?" And he went back to work. Darn right, he did.

Now, the workers are gone, but they left a bobcat parked in the dirt driveway. AND they left two orange cones, so don't even think about trying to drive in there.

When I Was 10

I was afraid to go to sleep at night, because an ogre-thing was trying to kill me.

My bedroom window didn't lock. This came in handy since I was a latch-key kid and sometimes forgot my key. Sometimes I remembered my key but while getting it out to unlock the door, I'd think, "I hope it doesn't slip from my fingers and fall down in between the boards of the porch!" The next thing I knew, the key was under the porch. How did it fall so perfectly vertically and fit right between the cracks? That's one of the mysteries of a childhood fear of Under The Porch -- of course the key falls right down there every time.

Poor Dad would have to crawl under there AGAIN to retrieve it. He hated that!

In the meantime, it would be hours before my parents would get home, and I could hear the dog whining inside. She had to pee! So I'd get a lawn chair and lug/drag it over to my bedroom window. I'd climb up, take the screen off the window, and put my palm flat on the glass and then push as hard as I could to the side, to make the window open a little. Then I put my fingers in the crack and pull it the rest of way open. Now to just hoist myself up and through the window, and I was safely inside!

Or was I? First of all, a neighbor could have seen me climb in. Or someone hiding in the cornfield behind our house. They could follow me in. Someone could have seen me do it last time, and already be inside waiting, having replaced the screen and closed the window. Would my parents ever hurry up and get home?

Surely if I pretended that everything was normal, it would be. Let the dog out, and carefully don't think about what might be under the porch along with my key. Look around casually to see if anyone was watching me put the screen back and drag the chair back to the patio. But don't look too closely at the cornfield -- if something was in there, I didn't really want to know.

Anyway, at night I couldn't have my bed next to the window because, besides real-life burglars, there was this ogre-troll guy who was going to get me. He had a shrivelly face and a big, hooked nose. He wouldn't need a chair to climb up, either. He'd leap right up to the window sill and hold on with his yellow claws until he could pry off the screen and slide my window open. He'd stand triumphantly in the window, arms spread and a big, yellow snarl on his face. I'd be paralyzed with fear and unable to cry for help!

But my bed couldn't be too close to the closet, either, because there was a trap door in there. During the day, it was all fun and games to try to find it and imagine the wonderful world that lay beyond it, and how much fun it would be to run away and be independent and not have to follow any stupid rules. But at night I knew that the world on the other side had just as much bad as it did good -- it had to balance out. AND that if I ever found and opened that trapdoor, it went both ways. Not only could I go through it, but things could come back after me, especially in the dark.

So I'd sometimes sleep with my light on. I'd surround myself with dolls and stuffed animals as a method of protection. A little girl surrounded by toys couldn't possibly be murdered in her sleep by an ogre-troll or something that crawled out of her closet! I'd stay awake as long as could, reading.

And for a while I just slept in my sister's room, on her floor. Man, it was uncomfortable, but I was safe. Her window locked. Her closet had no trapdoor. And her presence kept my imagination in check. Plus, that little ogre-troll wasn't quite clever enough to find me in the room next door.

Book 28: The Monster of Florence

The Monster of Florence is non-fiction by Douglas Preston, who usually writes fictional thrillers (often with a writing partner, Lincoln Child). It is co-written by Mario Spezi, an Italian journalist. It tells the story of the hunt for an Italian serial killer who still remains at large (or at least was at large at the time of printing, in 2008).

Preston moved to Florence in 2000 and soon learned of this famous killer. He met and befriended the country's expert on The Monster: Mario Spezi. Eventually, they wrote a book together in Italian and then this book. They believe they know who the killer is but they were unable to obtain a confession or get the police to investigate this man.

Spezi's articles detailing the ineptness of the police, their botched investigations, and their nonsensical obsessions so pissed off several important players that he was actually accused of being The Monster and was imprisoned and tried. Preston was also pulled in for questioning and was told to leave Italy and never return.

The mistakes of the police are laughable, as long as you're not the one who's been wrongly accused! One police investigator based his entire theory on the crazy ramblings of a local psychic. Several of the crime scenes were left unsecured and the press was allowed to stomp all over them before the crime scene investigators arrived. Though the FBI provided a profile of a very intelligent young man, and the evidence showed that he must be in good physical condition (he chased down a sprinter and stabbed him to death), the Italian police accused and arrested a string of different old men, one of whom was mentally disabled, and one with terrible health problems. But, just like in the U.S., that kind of incompetence was often rewarded with promotions!

Though this is non-fiction, it is not too dry. It stands in sharp contrast to The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, which I read last year and could barely stand to finish. That one told a great true story, but it was written so dryly that it almost bored me to death. This one made me want to finish it, to find out what happened, and how Preston felt about it.

Cast-Off #1: What's the Matter With Kansas?

What's the Matter With Kansas? by Thomas Frank is my first set-aside book of 2009. I still had a bookmark in it from a few years ago, when I read 96 pages and stopped. This time, I only made it 19 pages before I had to admit that I'm just not into it.

Partly, I think I don't feel like reading about the 2000 election right now. I want to enjoy the current President and Congress as much as possible while I can.

Partly, I want to read a story rather than commentary right now.

There's nothing wrong with it. It's a book that makes me nod along, going, "Yeah, I know! I agree! I said that before." Like, why do farmers tend to vote Republican, when it is completely in their best interests to vote Democratic? Why do poor people vote Republican when that party rips them off more and more every year?

Because of abortion and gay marriage, BUT the Republicans never actually accomplish much, if anything, in the way of outlawing abortion/preventing unwanted pregnancies by reading the Bible OR in the way of disposing of/straightening out/hiding all gay people. So, their voters lose economically and culturally/so-called morally. Frank sees that this is just nonsense, and he does it with humor.

I might come back to it again in a different mood.

Dear book,
It's not you. It's bad timing.
Love,
Tonya

Book 27: All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well

Tod Wodicka's All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well has been likened to A Confederacy of Dunces, and I can see why: a tragi-comic protagonist is out of place in time and culture. But I remember laughing Out Loud repeatedly every time I've read Confederacy, and this book was sad, sad, sad. Confederacy was Funny AND sad AND funny again.

This book has great writing, layering stories from 1105, the 1930s, the 1960s, and current time. Our guy, Bert Hecker, is into recreating medieval times, and not just during conventions. His mother-in-law came from a place that no longer exists, he is an orphan, and his kids feel homeless. Displacement is a major theme. And can you ever re-place yourself? And can relationships be repaired once they've gone really bad?

Here's an example of the beauty and sorrow of Wodicka's writing: "Our three haunted Great War veterans wanted to talk of the Great War and those they saw killed and those who survived the Great War only to be killed later by things like boundless despair."

Or Whoever

Reading all this religious matter has made me think back to my childhood, when I went to Methodist church. I don't seem to have too many real memories -- more like impressions, mostly.

But I do remember one Sunday in youth group, when I must have been 12. I think you were allowed to attend youth group instead of Sunday School when you turned 12. One teen, Kim, was supposed to tell us a particular Bible story. Here's pretty much how it went:

"So then Jesus or whoever was all like, 'Don't do that!' or whatever..."

Did I ever tell you that I used to laugh inappropriately as a child? Like, A Lot. Oh, in church, in school, wherever someone was tripping or slipping or having Freudian slips or whatever. Kim made me giggle a lot.

Another time she asked what "the" meant. You know how sometimes you pronounce it "thee" like if you say "the end"? Sometimes you say "thuh" and sometimes you say "thee". Well, Kim had somehow made it to her teens without ever knowing what people meant by "the end". That was another uproariously funny church moment for me -- or upsnickerously funny, maybe.

Poor Kim. Or whoever.

Book 26: Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana

Anne Rice, who wrote all those entertaining vampire novels, has now written two books told from the perspective of Jesus Christ. This is the second, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Mostly, I have to say that these books are rather boring. I mean, there's a lot of exciting stuff going on! But it's told so sedately and calmly that it feels like nothing. Even if Jesus really would have been sedate and calm, I would like to read an exciting version of the story.

Things I liked: Jesus was human, and so were his contemporaries.
* People resented Jesus. They disparagingly called him "Yeshua the Sinless."
* They goaded him, asking why he wasn't living up to the prophecy.
* They tried to peer pressure him into marrying a 15-year old girl when he was 30.

* Two times he was unkind, and the story had more interest:
1. He told his step-brother James, "I am weary of you, my brother" when James was giving him a hard time. That shut him right up. Yeshua the Sinless had usually put up with ANYTHING.
2. He told Satan, "Get behind me, Satan!" when Satan tried to convince him that together they could form an army of Jews to conquer the world. And called him "Lord of the Flies," which Satan hated.

But mostly it was pretty dull.