Books without pressure!

Well, I'm in the middle of a bunch of books! It's so nice to have no self-imposed pressure to finish them quickly. If I were trying to read 2 a week again, I'd be behind already.

And I know I'm reading a lot of books at one time, but believe me when I say I'm holding myself back from about 20 others that are waiting on the shelf. I've wanted to read 2666 by Bolano since about a year ago, and I have the first two of Steig Larsson's trilogy, and a Paul Auster that I haven't read, and one about Darwin, and one about The Great Wall of China, and a bunch more.

My Mom and I are both reading The Artist's Way, which has activities aimed at increasing creativity. The first task is that every morning, you write 3 pages in longhand in a journal. Just stream-of-consciousness stuff that no one will ever see. It helps to get the crap out so you can move on with your day without being bogged down. I'm still struggling to remember to do it in the morning, but I'm doing it every day and I think it is really useful. So far, so good.



Living Your Yoga has suggested practices, too, but so far I'm only reading. And sometimes thinking, "yes, I should do that." There are three main parts, with seven chapters in each part. The parts are:
Awakening Awareness: Yoga within Yourself;
Widening the Circle: Yoga and Relationships; and
Embracing All Life: Yoga in the World

The chapters are entitled things like Courage, Control, Patience, and Nonviolence. It's pretty good for reading a little bit each day and thinking about how to be a better person all the time. It's not woo-woo or New Agey.



The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is really, really good. It's over 700 pages of (sometimes) amazing short stories. I'm going to try to make it last a long time rather than gulping it all down quickly, because it's so good.




The Origins and Development of the English Language was a textbook in one of my college classes and now I want to read it again. I'm sure I'll skim some parts of it, but I feel really interested in the history of English right now, and I've forgotten a lot of it. I have a habit of re-reading books years later. That's why it is tough for me to get rid of books -- some day I will probably wish that I could read them again and I'll have to BUY them again. But this one, I got used for only a couple bucks. My copy is from 1993, and there are newer editions, but they cost a lot more.



Stranger in a Strange Land is a 1960s sci-fi novel (according to its own cover, "The most famous science fiction novel ever written"). I'll tell you if I think it deserves that honor when I'm done with it. It's sort of cheesy, but for the genre, not that bad.

The plot: astronauts went to Mars and had a baby and then they died. The baby was raised by Martians. When the baby is 25 years old, more Earth astronauts land on Mars and convince him to go to Earth with them. He's totally Martian in terms of culture, thought process, concepts, language, and traditions. Everyone wants a piece of him.



Cleaving is pretty awful. It's by the woman who wrote Julie and Julia, and in this memoir, she tells us all about becoming a butcher AND about cheating on her husband for two years. You'd think the graphic details of chopping up animals would be the gross part, but it isn't. Yet I must read the whole thing. I really like her writing style, but I really dislike HER.


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