War and Peace Wednesdays: So Far, Way Better Than Anna Karenina!

That's my opinion, and I'm stickin' to it!  Although I'm only 1/4 of the way through at page 346 in my edition, I'm finding War & Peace so much more interesting and entertaining in every way than Anna.

I wonder if reading the latter chunkster last summer primed the literary pump here, or if War and Peace would have struck me as this enjoyable if I'd read it a year ago instead.  Surprisingly, I'm still engaged by the dual foci of the sociology/psychology of the men when they're actively engaged in military maneuvering and battles versus the subtle and substantive domestic dramas of the families (and the same men) at home.

This section breezed by, relatively speaking for such a literally and figuratively hefty work, with unexpected plot turns and character developments galore.

And for Three Tempting Threesomes in this section of War & Peace... (possible spoilers, but good stuff!)

I'm Dying To Meet You!

Twice. 

Today's Top 10 Tuesday from The Broke and The Bookish asks me to select my top 10 "writers I'd DIE to meet", but that forces me to narrow down my field of wanna-meets to too few for my expansive mood.  So I'm going with a "truly dead" list and a "still in the corporeal sphere" one.  Indulge me, and then tell me whom I've missed and your absolute must-meet in each category!

Hurston.

 The Truly "To Die For" List

• Jane Austen: In hopes that a conversation with her would help me understand what all the fuss is about.
• James Joyce: My first literary love, and perhaps he'd take me on a tour of Dublin.
• Zora Neale Hurston: As both a writer and a social anthropologist/folklorist, she'd have so much to teach me.
• William Shakespeare:  Just exactly who are you, anyway, and do you converse as eloquently and entertainingly as you pen?


Beckett.


• Lao Tse:  And who are you as well (are you multiple people)? And what did # 27 in the Tao Te Ching mean anyway?
• Rumi:  Please show me how you compose those spiritually transcendent play-for-mortal-stakes verses, and please introduce me to Shams as well.
• Edna St. Vincent Millay:  Let's just pal around for a few days, wild spirit-sprite of your age!
• Kahlil Gibran:  One long stroll as he recites his poetry to me and a gathering gaggle of fans.  We all pause in a garden and he makes a drawing to bring back with me...
• Samuel Beckett: Just meandering in circles as he spins out comic profundities punctuated by the occasional piercing glance.
• Emily Dickinson: Kindred spirits, we'd likely just sit in her big back yard, sipping tea and silently, companionably taking in the day. Much madness not to ask her to parse a single poem, but divinest sense as well.

The "With Any Luck, Someday" List

Thay.

• Thich Nhat Hanh - Vietnamese Buddhist monk, author of over 25 books of prose and poetry, all of which bring solace and offer compassionate, practical wisdom (start with Peace Is Every Step)
• Fareed Zakaria - Indian-American journalist and commentator on world events (Newsweek, Time, Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN), whose best-selling The Post American World, Release 2.0 is at the top of my TBR pile
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Nobel-winning novelist and journalist from Colombia, writer of two of my favorite fictions ever: Love In The Time of Cholera and "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" (Yes, he's old and reportedly infirm, but still...)

Wiesel.

• Louise Erdrich - Native American novelist who treads Garcia Marquez's path by setting many of her novels in the same physical area and populating them with some of the same characters or their relatives, weaving a rich world over time and texts.  Try Tracks, her first novel, and if you like it, jump over to The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse to see entirely new sides of some of the same characters and note Erdrich's evolution as a writer..
• Elie Wiesel - professor, scholar, novelist, Holocaust survivor.  Begin with Night.
• Francine Prose - her Reading Like A Writer is a must for all of us.  And her darkly comic novel of ideas, A Changed Man, features a character curiously similar to Elie Wiesel (or Simon Wiesenthal...)
• Salman Rushdie - Indian-born British novelist, essayist, children's book writer.  Try Haroun & The Sea of Stories (for kids and adults, my review linked) or Shalimar The Clown (definitely for adults, despite the title).
• Margaret Atwood - Canadian fiction writer, essayist, activist.  Her short story collection Bluebeard's Egg got me started, and The Robber Bride and Cat's Eye got me hooked.  Many of my students began with Oryx and Crake and are now moving archaeologically through her earlier works...


Lee.


• Maile Meloy - American fiction writer, esp. Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It (review linked) soon to release her first Y.A. novel, The Apothecary
• Stephen Sondheim (a composer/lyricist for good measure) - West Side Story, On The Town, and Sunday In The Park With George, to name a few...
• Ooh!  And Harper Lee.  She'll be immediately won over and take me into her confidence, offering me editorship of her second - and only unpublished - novel.  Wouldn't that be the ultimate readerly coup??  What if her conversation's as stellar as her writing?  And we could all find out what she's been up to all these years since To Kill A Mockingbird!

MFB in a happy fantasy,
L

Now tell me who you'd pick, and go visit everybody's choices through The Broke and the Bookish's Top 10 Tuesday blog hop!

Change Anything - Review



Take a look inside, then get it at Amazon.

If you're interested in personal change, I can't imagine you'd find any clearer, more action-oriented resource than this one.  This book's unique take: not one, but six different categories of approach (based on the six sources of influence noted below) should be tailored to your own personal situation and temperament, then employed, monitored, and adjusted if you want the best chance at making any lasting change.

The authors draw on years of research in the field of personal change, in addition to their own current studies, to offer many ideas for how you can personally create your own actions in each category of influence.

What are these categories, these sources of influence?

* personal motivation - tap into your existing desires and wants
* personal ability - learn new skills to promote change
* social motivation - turn accomplices into friends that help you make positive changes
* social ability - use confederates to enable good choices
* structural motivation - directly link short-term rewards and punishments to your new habits
* structural ability - change your environment to one more likely to promote the change you want

One especially helpful process suggestion (one that's more of an attitude rather than one of their influence-based approaches) is this: Few people change any entrenched or persistent habit or pattern in one attempt, so consider yourself the subject of your own curiosity and make your responses the "data" for your own research. Take note of how you respond to each of your approaches, and keep adjusting after any backslide, not blaming yourself - or your lack of willpower - for lapses, but studying each one so you can adjust your strategies, knowing that you can indeed make any positive change you wish, if you persist.

FYI: I listened to the audiobook on CD, thanks to the generosity of Hachette Audio, and thought that the reader - co-author Joseph Grenny - conveyed the text engagingly and clearly.  On the other hand, I wish I had the hard copy for easy reference, so I'd suggest you sample the audiobook and perhaps consider a 'tandem read'.  One bonus of the either mode of the book: You get a month of free access to the tools and additional information on the ChangeAnything website via a special code within the 'text'.

My opinion:  I've already begun using these approaches to shift entrenched habits I don't want to keep into positive habits that support my own well being, my life desires, and all those whose lives I impact, and it's working.  Time will tell, but for now I feel nothing but gratitude that this book and its techniques came into my life.

MFB,

L

Looking for the latest update on Kunta Kinte's harrowing experiences in the Roots Read-Along?

Are You Ready for A Stay-Cation?

Celebrate local writers and your local community with us in July-August for our first annual "Stay-cation Reads" here at What She Read and on participating blogs, sponsored by our social network for bookish world- and life-changing people, ActionReaders.

Feature a local author or book-setting (or two!) on your blog in these two months, take a local action in your community related to that author or book in some way, and then spread the love of your local community through the ActionReaders website and here on What She Read, telling us what you value - and even what you'd like to help change - about your town, county, or state. 

To get you started, I've offered two questions on the ActionReaders forum.  It takes mere seconds to become a member so you can participate, and it's entirely free - kinda like Facebook, only with fellow readers who are changing their lives and their communities, one book at a time. 

And just for fun, we'll be offering random drawings for gift certificates at Indiebound.org, Book Depository, and Betterworldbooks.com for "Stay-cation Reads" participants, and we're considering hosting a big book swap/give-away hop for the local books we read this summer.

Questions?  Enthusiastic support?  Great local author or book to champion?  Ready to jump in?  Go hop into the forum at ActionReaders.com or leave a comment here so I'll be sure to update you on opportunities to connect with other readers & bloggers as the Stay-cation continues... 

Expect Sunday updates here and at ActionReaders, and do offer up ideas about how to make our Stay-cation that much more enjoyable and fulfilling.

MFB,
L

p.s. Are you running a summer program in your community?  Why not get your participants involved too?  Email me, Laurie, at actionreaders(at)gmail(dot)com for details and support.

Poem In Your Post Blog Hop: Summer's Beauty

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

                             e.e. cummings

Which poems epitomize the surprised bliss of a summer sunset or an osprey unexpectedly overhead or the fireworks spread out beneath you at the foot of your own home town?  Try that for a focus this week, or simply choose any poem that's speaking to you right now.  Link your post below, or leave your poem in the comments (and do check there: The Parrish Lantern almost always posts a stunning poem in the comments here)...



And do support the poets who change us with their art.  Poets.org is a great place to start...

MFB,
L

Friday First Sentence & Fifty-Six: Haroun and the Sea of Stories Review (briefly)

Apparently, it's a man's week.  And a week of 'classics' too.  I'm reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Roots by Alex Haley, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, and Favorite Sons by Robin Yocum. But wait: there's one more to add to my list, and it's my favorite:

There's Haroun, riding Butt the Hoopoe.

For language play and fun, fun, fun you can't do better than this staple in my read-again-and-again pile.  It is, of course, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the 'children's' book written by Salman Rushdie in 1990.  And the opening line presages the language play of things to come:

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name.  It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue.

Rushdie penned this allegorical novel about the energy of language, the transformative power of a son's love for his imperfect father, and the dangers of 'khattam shud' - in this context, silencing others - for his own son, from whom Rushdie was estranged while he was in hiding from death threats, including the fatwa pronounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini.  Despite the dire circumstances, this novel is decidedly light-hearted (in the main) and full of the sort of humor both young boys and adults of all notions can enjoy.  I've read it at least half a dozen times and return to it when I need a lightening of my reading heart, but with depth of soul. 

On page 56, Haroun calls upon Iff, the Water Genie, to help restore the storyteller's gifts to his father: Rashid Khalifa, the Shah of Blah, the Ocean of Notions.  It's a simple matter of plumbing, apparently:  Rashid Khalifa maintains a subscription to the Sea of Stories whose magical streams course through pipes and into the bathtub, when all is well.  But all is not well.  Khalifa's wife, Haroun's mom Soraya, has left him for a less fanciful man, and he can no longer remember his stories.  And so, the pipes won't run and Iff pops by to try to fix them:

  "The Disconnector", the other pointed.  "Hand it over, return to sender, restore to rightful owner: give up, yield, surrender."
   Now Haroun noticed that the tool he held was no more like a monkey wrench than the blue-beard's head was like an onion: in other words, it had the general outline of a wrench, but it was somehow more fluid than solid, and was made up of thousands of little veins flowing with differently coloured liquids, all held together by some unbelievable, invisible force.  It was beautiful.

If you haven't yet read Haroun, you'll find it a lively summer read, and it's readily available just about everywhere. 

Now why not relax at the end of a long week by sampling a few more "Book Beginnings" and 'Friday 56' peeks at your next great reads?

MFB,
L

p.s.  Don't forget:  Poem In Your Post Blog Hop this (and every) weekend.  Just post a poem and link up here to share the language-love!

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray - Review

Get it at betterworldbooks.com or indiebound.org.

It's disappointing, especially for a Libba Bray fan.  Sure, she delivers her usual page-turning, wry-smile-inducing read, but Bray's new young adult novel seems cobbled together and more than a little self-conscious, preachy, after school special-y, and almost B-movie-esque, but not in the ways she intends.

To sum up: A plane-load of teen beauty queens crashes on a tropical island already inhabited by a secret arms-dealing branch of The Corporation.  Giant snakes, hallucinatory berries, and exploding Lady 'Stache-Off hair remover are the least of the young women's worries, but the question is: Will the reality-TV pirates be able to save them or will they save the pirates?

My Opinion:  This parody/social satire seems to have gone to press way too soon: way too many characters that seem pre-cast with Hollywood A-listers just waiting for the screenplay; unsuccessful shifts and lapses in rhetorical stance; attempts at (David Foster Wallace-esque?) footnoting that jar us out of Bray's trademark breezy, forceful plotting; surfacey attempts to address dozens of social issues faced by teens and our society at large; and fantasy elements mixing with a reality-TV concept at way-too-coincidental moments combine to make this novel a true let-down.

I'm sorry, Libba: I still admire your humor and creativity, but you and David L. rushed this too closely on the heels of Going Bovine, I'll warrant. Another draft in which you honed Beauty Queens in every regard would have made this another exceptional effort. As it stands, it's a mixed up, though often entertaining, mess.

MFB,
L