Ed's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 24 Mar 2025 01:16:36 -0700 60 Ed's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Dart 1037864 64 Alice Oswald 057121410X Ed 4 3.98 2002 Dart
author: Alice Oswald
name: Ed
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves:
review:
There can’t be many books from the point of view of a river, and even less really good ones. So big in scope, it magically blends the river with the people who’ve lived and died on it, creating a grand, swirling tapestry of torrents and stillness that encompasses all from the tiny intentions of birth to the majestic swells of the ancient open sea that swamp into everywhere, and all that lies in between.
]]> On Becoming a Person 25621503 431 Carl R. Rogers 1845290577 Ed 5 4.22 1961 On Becoming a Person
author: Carl R. Rogers
name: Ed
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/17
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves:
review:
A true genius, without doubt. A genius of compassion. How someone can be so dedicated to enabling spiritual, emotional, personal growth in other people, and to be so good at it, it leaves me in awe. Whether it’s through some innate or ability, or his whittling his own self towards it over a lifetime of hard work, to the point where the two become indistinguishable, it makes me realise that it is worth having heroes. A hero of self-acceptance.
]]> The Colossus and Other Poems 11627 84 Sylvia Plath 0375704469 Ed 5 4.19 1960 The Colossus and Other Poems
author: Sylvia Plath
name: Ed
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1960
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves:
review:
These poems are addictive, so delicious on the tongue I just can’t help but read another one. And another one. I love the way they the taste of the world, the vividness with which they come to life. And those particular tastes they bring forth� images, impressions, collected through a mind that collects them like a hungry magpie, filling out it’s nest on the page for your brain to rest in.
]]> Tilt 214151301 Set over the course of one day, a heart-racing story about a woman facing the unimaginable, determined to find safety

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, she realizes there’s nothing to do but walk.

Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. She’s determined to change her life if she can just make it home.]]> 229 Emma Pattee 1668055473 Ed 0 to-read 3.72 2025 Tilt
author: Emma Pattee
name: Ed
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[North With the Spring: A Naturalist's Record of a 17,000-Mile Journey With the North American Spring (American Seasons, 1st Season)]]> 838101 358 Edwin Way Teale 0312044577 Ed 0 to-read 4.35 1951 North With the Spring: A Naturalist's Record of a 17,000-Mile Journey With the North American Spring (American Seasons, 1st Season)
author: Edwin Way Teale
name: Ed
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1951
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> North Woods 125982404
In his transcendent fourth novel, Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason delivers a magisterial and highly inventive tale brimming with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we're connected to our environment, to history and to each other. It is not just an unforgettable novel about buried secrets and inevitable fates, but a way of looking at the world.]]> 372 Daniel Mason Ed 5 4.26 2023 North Woods
author: Daniel Mason
name: Ed
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves:
review:
I loved this beautiful book. It was like reading a book I'd been long waiting for, but didn't know I had been. A sprawling, growing book about a sprawling, growing house and those who live in it. Their stories, miniatures of a whole, wound together, all enthralled in some way by the magic of the woods and the world around it, timeless, yet slowly being lost as time moves onwards. Capturing the not-quite-sureness of whether there is some kind of magic and ghosts at work behind the wonder of what we're presented with.
]]> Walt Whitman's America 45289 Finalist for the National for the Book Critics Circle Award

In his poetry Walt Whitman set out to encompass all of America and in so doing heal its deepening divisions. This magisterial biography demonstrates the epic scale of his achievement, as well as the dreams and anxieties that impelled it, for it places the poet securely within the political and cultural context of his age.

Combing through the full range of Whitman's writing, David Reynolds shows how Whitman gathered inspiration from every stratum of nineteenth-century American life: the convulsions of slavery and depression; the raffish dandyism of the Bowery "b'hoys"; the exuberant rhetoric of actors, orators, and divines. We see how Whitman reconciled his own sexuality with contemporary social mores and how his energetic courtship of the public presaged the vogues of advertising and celebrity. Brilliantly researched, captivatingly told, Walt Whitman's America is a triumphant work of scholarship that breathes new life into the biographical genre.]]> 672 David S. Reynolds 0679767096 Ed 0 to-read 4.18 1995 Walt Whitman's America
author: David S. Reynolds
name: Ed
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Names 217245618
In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...

Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of Cora's and her young son's lives, shaped by her choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.

With exceptional sensitivity and depth, Knapp draws us into the story of one family, told through a prism of what-ifs, causing us to consider the "one . . . precious life" we are given. The book’s brilliantly imaginative structure, propulsive storytelling, and emotional, gut-wrenching power are certain to make The Names a modern classic.]]> 336 Florence Knapp 0593833902 Ed 0 to-read 4.34 2025 The Names
author: Florence Knapp
name: Ed
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Bright Years 214152211 One family. Four generations. A secret son. A devastating addiction. A Texas family is met with losses and surprises of inheritance, but they’re unable to shake the pull back toward each other in this big-hearted family saga perfect for readers of Mary Beth Keane and Claire Lombardo.

Ryan and Lillian Bright are deeply in love, recently married, and now parents to a baby girl, Georgette. But Lillian has a son she hasn’t told Ryan about, and Ryan has an alcohol addiction he hasn’t told Lillian about, so Georgette comes of age watching their marriage rise and fall.

When a shocking blow scatters their fragile trio, Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. Years later, Lillian’s son comes searching for his birth family, so Georgette must return to her roots, unearth her family’s history, and decide whether she can open up to love for them—or herself—while there’s still time.

Told from three intimate points of view, The Bright Years is a tender, true-to-life novel that explores the impact of each generation in a family torn apart by tragedy but, over time, restored by the power of grace and love.]]> 288 Sarah Damoff 1668061449 Ed 0 to-read 4.42 2025 The Bright Years
author: Sarah Damoff
name: Ed
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Actual Air 160653 David Berman is a young Virginian poet with a sly,
intense regard for the past. He comes on like a prankster, restocking the imperial orations of Wallace Stevens and the byzantine monologues of John Ashbery with the pop- cultural bric-a-brac of a new generation: "I am not cub scout seduced by Iron Maiden's mirror worlds." But his words have an easy, eloquent gait; each line needs to be a line. The landscapes are crisply American, and history, especially Southern history, casts a shadow. � The New Yorker

David Berman's poems are beautiful, strange, intelligent and funny. They are narratives that freeze life in impossible contortions. They take the familiar and make it new, so new the reader is stunned and will not soon forget. I found much to savor on every page of Actual Air. It's a book for everyone. � James Tate]]> 96 David Berman 1890447048 Ed 4 4.38 1999 Actual Air
author: David Berman
name: Ed
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/29
date added: 2025/01/29
shelves:
review:
From the master of mythologising the peculiarities of his own existence. Making his own here and now seem eternal. Everything i hoped for: Metaphors like a sweet juice extracted from life and it’s citizens. Characters that dreamily sit above the people that inspired them, like their own daydreams of who they are in the world. A vivid tapestry of how he’s sees the world and the things it contains. A kaleidoscope of living trinkets that populate an inner world preserved, interacting forever within it, a town of invented curiosities that sadly outlives the man who invented them.
]]> Butter 209220917 The cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story.

There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine.

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, "The Konkatsu Killer", Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.]]> 464 Asako Yuzuki 0008511683 Ed 3 3.54 2017 Butter
author: Asako Yuzuki
name: Ed
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/24
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves:
review:
I don't really know what to make of this book. I liked bits of it, and it was enough to keep me going, but it wasn't the sumptuous feast it wanted to be. To be true, it felt more like Margarine than Butter.
]]> The Paris Trilogy 209607566
Writing in response to Annie Ernaux and in conversation with Elena Ferrante, Colombe Schneck's three semi-autobiographical takes on a woman’s life form an elegant, powerful exploration of sexuality, bodily autonomy, friendship, loss and renewal.

Colombe is seventeen in 1984 and carefree, busy discovering sex and studying for her baccalauréat. When she becomes pregnant her choice to have an abortion is never in question. Yet suddenly she must grapple with the body that has brought the precarity of her freedom into focus.

Colombe and Héloïse are two little Parisian liberals, friends since the age of eleven. They look alike, have similar upbringings and for years they follow parallel paths: university, love affairs, work, marriage, children, divorce, more love affairs. They are the most enduring witnesses to each other’s lives, until illness betrays them.

Colombe reconnects with Gabriel in her fifties; their relationship is passionate and transformative. As it unfolds, Colombe discovers many things about herself, including a newfound appreciation for swimming, and the euphoria and strength of a body learning when to push and when to let go.]]> 240 Colombe Schneck 1398529397 Ed 3
The third, 'Swimming', I especially enjoyed, the way it weaved a physical and philosophical understanding of the act of swimming into the course of this short-lived relationship, to feel like she was left with something after the relationship had gone from her life. And we were left with something too, this book. Something she touches on as well, adding to the impression she gives by writing these auto-biographical stories in such a 'novel-ly' way, blurring the line between life and story.]]> 4.10 The Paris Trilogy
author: Colombe Schneck
name: Ed
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves:
review:
Three taut books that each pierce the author's mind and expose how an event has shaped her life. An abortion, a lifelong (for one of them) friendship, and a relationship. Each written about with such clarity, an honesty that almost shocks you, but leaves you grateful for being allowed a look in to the life of another.

The third, 'Swimming', I especially enjoyed, the way it weaved a physical and philosophical understanding of the act of swimming into the course of this short-lived relationship, to feel like she was left with something after the relationship had gone from her life. And we were left with something too, this book. Something she touches on as well, adding to the impression she gives by writing these auto-biographical stories in such a 'novel-ly' way, blurring the line between life and story.
]]> A Way of Being 174876 A profound and deeply personal collection of essays by renowned psychologist Carl Rogers

The late Carl Rogers, founder of the humanistic psychology movement and father of client-centered therapy, based his life's work on his fundamental belief in the human potential for growth. A Way of Being was written in the early 1980s, near the end of Carl Rogers's career, and serves as a coda to his classic On Becoming a Person. More philosophical than his earlier writings, it traces his professional and personal development and ends with a prophetic call for a more humane future.]]> 395 Carl R. Rogers 0395755301 Ed 0 to-read 4.23 1980 A Way of Being
author: Carl R. Rogers
name: Ed
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> England's Green 60759486 England's Green, we are invited to look at the place and the language we think we know, and we are made to think again. With everything so newly set, we are alert, as the poet is, to the 'dark missing / step in a stair', entering this new world with bated breath. By such close attention to the parts, the poems have a genius for invoking absence, whether that be a missing father, the death of a mother or a path not taken. Fully formed, they share a centre of gravity: migrations, memories, little transgressions and disturbances, summoned and contained in small gestures - a hand held, the smell of a newly bred rose or the scratch a limpet makes to mark its home.]]> 70 Zaffar Kunial 0571376797 Ed 2
Though I did love the foray into how the immigrant experience meets the traditions of an english summer.]]> 3.98 England's Green
author: Zaffar Kunial
name: Ed
average rating: 3.98
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2024/12/14
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves:
review:
There were some congealing moments of the english pastoral beauty I was looking for, but mostly I feel he was too caught up in dismantling and looking at the words and lost sight of what was being built with them.

Though I did love the foray into how the immigrant experience meets the traditions of an english summer.
]]> A Thousand Acres 41193 371 Jane Smiley 1400033837 Ed 0 to-read, abandoned 3.82 1991 A Thousand Acres
author: Jane Smiley
name: Ed
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/30
shelves: to-read, abandoned
review:

]]> Small Things Like These 56943582
Small Things Like These is an unforgettable story of hope, quiet heroism and tenderness.]]> 116 Claire Keegan 0571368689 Ed 4 4.21 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Ed
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/26
date added: 2024/11/26
shelves:
review:
A beautiful little punch of a book. It sings a transformative kindness. The kind that can change the world, and isn't disrupted by it's own first failed attempts.
]]> Walt Whitman: A Life 45291 464 Justin Kaplan 0060535113 Ed 0 to-read 3.94 1980 Walt Whitman: A Life
author: Justin Kaplan
name: Ed
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Living Mountain 25773742 This is an alternate Cover Edition for ISBN10: 0857861832/ ISBN13: 9780857861832.

The Living Mountain is a lyrical testament in praise of the Cairngorms. It is a work deeply rooted in Nan Shepherd's knowledge of the natural world, and a poetic and philosophical meditation on our longing for high and holy places. Drawing on different perspectives of the mountain environment, Shepherd makes the familiar strange and the strange awe-inspiring. Her sensitivity and powers of observation put her into the front rank of nature writing.]]> 157 Nan Shepherd Ed 3
It felt like going on a guided tour and being more bewitched by the guide than what she's guiding you to, and yet she insists on talking about the mountain than about her wild self.]]> 4.29 1977 The Living Mountain
author: Nan Shepherd
name: Ed
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1977
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/13
date added: 2024/11/14
shelves:
review:
This is a good book, no doubt, but after all I'd heard about it, I expected... more. It felt like nature writing, with tinges of mysticality poking through. Heavy on the observations and not on the personal. I wanted to know more about the woman who sleeps out on the open mountain, not so much about the eagles she sees and clumps of heather she walks barefoot across.

It felt like going on a guided tour and being more bewitched by the guide than what she's guiding you to, and yet she insists on talking about the mountain than about her wild self.
]]> <![CDATA[The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Sacred Activism)]]> 17345270
Throughout the book, Eisenstein relates real-life stories showing how small, individual acts of courage, kindness, and self-trust can change our culture’s guiding narrative of separation, which, he shows, has generated the present planetary crisis. He brings to conscious awareness a deep wisdom we all innately know: until we get our selves in order, any action we take—no matter how good our intentions—will ultimately be wrongheaded and wronghearted. Above all, Eisenstein invites us to embrace a radically different understanding of cause and effect, sounding a clarion call to surrender our old worldview of separation, so that we can finally create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

With chapters covering separation, interbeing, despair, hope, pain, pleasure, consciousness, and many more, the book invites us to let the old Story of Separation fall away so that we can stand firmly in a Story of Interbeing.]]> 288 Charles Eisenstein 1583947248 Ed 0 to-read, abandoned 4.34 2013 The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Sacred Activism)
author: Charles Eisenstein
name: Ed
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/09
shelves: to-read, abandoned
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power]]> 26195941 The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification."

The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit--at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.

With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future--if we let it.

Table of contents

INTRODUCTION
1. Home or exile in the digital future

I. THE FOUNDATIONS OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
2. August 9, 2011: Setting the stage for Surveillance Capitalism
3. The discovery of behavioral surplus
4. The moat around the castle
5. The elaboration of Surveillance Capitalism: Kidnap, corner, compete
6. Hijacked: The division of learning in society

II. THE ADVANCE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
7. The reality business
8. Rendition: From experience to data
9. Rendition from the depths
10. Make them dance
11. The right to the future tense

III. INSTRUMENTARIAN POWER FOR A THIRD MODERNITY
12. Two species of power
13. Big Other and the rise of instrumentarian power
14. A utopia of certainty
15, The instrumentarian collective
16. Of life in the hive
17. The right to sanctuary

CONCLUSION
18. A coup from above

Acknowledgements
About the author
Detailed table of contents
Notes
Index]]> 691 Shoshana Zuboff 1610395697 Ed 4 4.05 2018 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
author: Shoshana Zuboff
name: Ed
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2020/05/13
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back]]> 43080056
Who owns England?

Behind this simple question lies this country’s oldest and best-kept secret. This is the history of how England’s elite came to own our land, and an inspiring manifesto for how to open up our countryside once more.

This book has been a long time coming. Since 1086, in fact. For centuries, England’s elite have covered up how they got their hands on millions of acres of our land, by constructing walls, burying surveys and more recently, sheltering behind offshore shell companies. But with the dawn of digital mapping and the Freedom of Information Act, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for them to hide.

Trespassing through tightly-guarded country estates, ecologically ravaged grouse moors and empty Mayfair mansions, writer and activist Guy Shrubsole has used these 21st century tools to uncover a wealth of never-before-seen information about the people who own our land, to create the most comprehensive map of land ownership in England that has ever been made public.

From secret military islands to tunnels deep beneath London, Shrubsole unearths truths concealed since the Domesday Book about who is really in charge of this country � at a time when Brexit is meant to be returning sovereignty to the people. Melding history, politics and polemic, he vividly demonstrates how taking control of land ownership is key to tackling everything from the housing crisis to climate change � and even halting the erosion of our very democracy.

It’s time to expose the truth about who owns England � and finally take back our green and pleasant land.]]> 385 Guy Shrubsole 0008321698 Ed 4 4.22 2019 Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
author: Guy Shrubsole
name: Ed
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2020/10/20
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Light of the World: A Memoir]]> 26031245 240 Elizabeth Alexander 1455599867 Ed 4
A sad and beautiful book, that feels like a catharsis, making a sculpture of him out of words, for one last vivid memory. It shows how much a person can live on through their memories in another. The pain of that, but also the beauty. The gift of being alive on earth in the intimate company of others. To share your years with them.

And too, for her to share with us a glimpse in to the life processes of man who sounded so full of personality and so dedicated to finding joy and beauty in life, in portraying that through his art, sharing it in that art, and in daily life as he lived it. So well encapsulated in one of his favourite lines:

"O Beauty, you are the light of the world!"]]> 4.21 2015 The Light of the World: A Memoir
author: Elizabeth Alexander
name: Ed
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/06
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves:
review:
I didn't realise this was a memoir, so reading it I was thinking "wow, what an incredibly rich and detailed character she's brought to life, and what a devastating sadness to have him die and leave the narrator's life", and then to find out he was a real man, and her actual husband... well, it shows how she was so intimately able to portray him!

A sad and beautiful book, that feels like a catharsis, making a sculpture of him out of words, for one last vivid memory. It shows how much a person can live on through their memories in another. The pain of that, but also the beauty. The gift of being alive on earth in the intimate company of others. To share your years with them.

And too, for her to share with us a glimpse in to the life processes of man who sounded so full of personality and so dedicated to finding joy and beauty in life, in portraying that through his art, sharing it in that art, and in daily life as he lived it. So well encapsulated in one of his favourite lines:

"O Beauty, you are the light of the world!"
]]> The Years 40491227 The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre � the collective autobiography � in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is ‘a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism� (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.]]> 232 Annie Ernaux 1910695785 Ed 4
To capture 60 years of a nation’s collective experience though the memory of one person living it. A self, transcended, a population distilled, and us getting to witness where they meet. History only exists where there are people together to experience it. A person’s history is what it is through living in that country at that time. A time in a country made up of millions of these people.]]> 4.33 2008 The Years
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Ed
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/01
date added: 2024/11/04
shelves:
review:
A big swirling dream of a book. An autobiography of a nation and a person. To come across the author forming their ideas for the book, talking about their intention with the book, and over the past however many pages you realise how well they achieved what they set out to do: “To save something from the time where we will never be again.�.

To capture 60 years of a nation’s collective experience though the memory of one person living it. A self, transcended, a population distilled, and us getting to witness where they meet. History only exists where there are people together to experience it. A person’s history is what it is through living in that country at that time. A time in a country made up of millions of these people.
]]> The Years 17909734 The Years is a savage indictment of British society at the turn of the century, edited with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson in Penguin Modern Classics.

The Years is the story of three generations of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decades of the twentieth century. Growing up in a typically Victorian household, the Pargiter children must learn to find their footing in an alternative world, where the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing-room to the air-raid shelter. A work of fluid and dazzling lucidity, The Years eschews a simple line of development in favour of a varied and constantly changing style, emphasises the radical discontinuity of personal experiences and historical events. Virginia Woolf's penultimate novel celebrates the resilience of the individual self and, in her dazzlingly fluid and distinctive voice, she confidently paints a broad canvas across time, generation and class.]]> Virginia Woolf Ed 5
Nature sits quietly, humming and swirling in the background between scenes, between conversations, before making some heart-rending flourish when there’s a break in the action. Time too, is a character all of it’s own, silently going about it’s business, changing all that exists. The human characters in the book are so aware of what they’ve lost to time, yet they only seize upon what they yearn for� that connection and meaning� when it’s already started slipping out their hands. But when they’re in these moments, their hearts and minds seem to wander, seeking something else.

I too, would drift off in the sections of speech, but be utterly enamoured by the descriptive passages between. Fleeting moments where the beauty of life crystallises and you cherish the harmony between the experience and the appreciation of it.

Like life, I didn’t want it to end.]]> 4.00 1937 The Years
author: Virginia Woolf
name: Ed
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1937
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/18
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves:
review:
What a strange and sad, yet intensely beautiful book. It offers glimpses into the life of a family over the span of 50 years, and seems both so concerned with what has been lost to time and the beauty that pokes through in these moments.

Nature sits quietly, humming and swirling in the background between scenes, between conversations, before making some heart-rending flourish when there’s a break in the action. Time too, is a character all of it’s own, silently going about it’s business, changing all that exists. The human characters in the book are so aware of what they’ve lost to time, yet they only seize upon what they yearn for� that connection and meaning� when it’s already started slipping out their hands. But when they’re in these moments, their hearts and minds seem to wander, seeking something else.

I too, would drift off in the sections of speech, but be utterly enamoured by the descriptive passages between. Fleeting moments where the beauty of life crystallises and you cherish the harmony between the experience and the appreciation of it.

Like life, I didn’t want it to end.
]]> <![CDATA[Songs of Innocence and of Experience]]> 240095
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a rare and wonderful book, its seeming simplicity belying its visionary wisdom. Internationally recognised as a masterpiece of English literature, it also occupies a key position in the history of western art. This unique edition of the work allows Blake to communicate with his readers as he intended, reproducing Blake's own illumination and lettering from the finest existing example of the original work. In this way, readers can experience the mystery and beauty of Blake's poems as he first created them, discovering for themselves the intricate web of symbol and meaning that connects word and image. Each poem is accompanied by a literal transcription, and the volume is introduced by the renowned historian and critic, Richard Holmes. This beautiful edition of The Songs of Innocence and Experience will be essential for those familiar with Blake's work, but also offers an ideal way into his visionary world for those encountering Blake for the first time.

Cover may vary.]]> 54 William Blake 1854377299 Ed 3 4.21 1794 Songs of Innocence and of Experience
author: William Blake
name: Ed
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1794
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/17
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves:
review:
Blake turned himself into the Ancient Bard he envisioned himself as, mythologising himself as this prophet of the two sides of humanity he saw. So lovingly describing the innocence and sweet natural state of humans that is inevitably corrupted by their experience on Earth with other people. He sings visions that come from somewhere beyond himself, and the way he communicates them, preserved in this edition on florid etching plates, is something special and unique that lifts the verses above the simplicity with which I might otherwise see rhymes so old.
]]> Once a Runner 98250 248 John L. Parker Jr. 0915297019 Ed 4
The way he writes about the appeal of being out there on the trails, chasing something that only exists when you're out there chasing it. Some strange mix of chasing happiness, or satisfaction, and running away from whatever demons are lurking in the corners of your being, and how when you're running it somehow lines up and suspends you between the two.

How he captures an experience that 99.999% will never be able to, that of being an olympic level runner, yet he captures it vividly enough that you feel like you do understand the experience. I mean, reading the climactic race, I could actually feel my heart rate rising towards a running level.

He beautifully describes the bittersweet beauty of chasing your peak physical ability, and how tied into the pursuit of that is that one day you'll inevitably lose it. How you can be not even sure why you're doing this relentless, difficult thing, other than the feeling of it is utterly irresistable and tied into your very being.]]> 4.10 1978 Once a Runner
author: John L. Parker Jr.
name: Ed
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/23
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:
I never would have guessed a novel about running could be this good, in fact I only started reading it becasue I thought it was a biography, then found out it was fiction when I went to look up who one of the runners was.

The way he writes about the appeal of being out there on the trails, chasing something that only exists when you're out there chasing it. Some strange mix of chasing happiness, or satisfaction, and running away from whatever demons are lurking in the corners of your being, and how when you're running it somehow lines up and suspends you between the two.

How he captures an experience that 99.999% will never be able to, that of being an olympic level runner, yet he captures it vividly enough that you feel like you do understand the experience. I mean, reading the climactic race, I could actually feel my heart rate rising towards a running level.

He beautifully describes the bittersweet beauty of chasing your peak physical ability, and how tied into the pursuit of that is that one day you'll inevitably lose it. How you can be not even sure why you're doing this relentless, difficult thing, other than the feeling of it is utterly irresistable and tied into your very being.
]]> A Man's Place 55876894 80 Annie Ernaux 1913097366 Ed 3 3.98 1983 A Man's Place
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Ed
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1983
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/26
date added: 2024/09/28
shelves:
review:
Beautiful in a sparse way, writing about her own father in such a detached way it was like a craftsman inspecting a fine bit of wooden furniture, seeing the intricacy and completeness of it in a way that maybe wouldn't be possible if clouded by emotion. A magical thing to be able to read, a portrait of a man by someone who knows him so well, his backstory, his life, the things that made him who he is, yet portrayed in this plain and objective manner that lets you see him as honestly as if he were before your very eyes, but with his whole life right there visible in front of you as well.
]]> <![CDATA[Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance]]> 41014339 From the National Magazine Award-winning Runner’s World columnist, frequent New Yorker online contributor, and Cambridge-trained physicist: a fascinating and definitive exploration of the extraordinary science of human endurance and the secrets of human performance, for fans of The Sports Gene, Born to Run, and Grit.

From running a two-hour marathon to summiting Mount Everest, we’re fascinated by the extremes of human endurance, constantly testing both our physical and psychological limits.

How high or far or fast can humans go? And what about individual potential: what defines a person’s limits?

For years, physiology determined the answer: heart size, lung capacity, and muscle strength. But over the past decade, a wave of dramatic findings in the cutting-edge science of endurance has completely overturned our understanding of human limitation. Endure widely disseminates these findings for the first time: It’s the brain that dictates how far we can go—which means we can always push ourselves further.

Hutchinson presents an overview of science’s search for understanding human fatigue, from crude experiments with electricity and frogs� legs to sophisticated brain imaging technology. Going beyond the traditional mechanical view of human limits (like a car with a brick on its gas pedal, we go until the tank runs out of gas), he instead argues that a key element in endurance is how the brain responds to distress signals—whether heat, or cold, or muscles screaming with lactic acid—and reveals that we can train to improve brain response.

An elite distance runner himself, Hutchinson takes us to the forefront of the new sports psychology—brain electrode jolts, computer-based training, subliminal messaging—and presents startling new discoveries enhancing the performance of athletes today and shows how anyone can utilize these tactics to bolster their own performance—and get the most out of their bodies.]]> 333 Alex Hutchinson Ed 3
I love running for it’s part to play in that. We can understand the biomechanics, oxygen uptake in our blood, running economy, glycogen storage, yet there’s always some mysterious magic in it to sweep us away.]]> 4.11 2018 Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance
author: Alex Hutchinson
name: Ed
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/16
shelves:
review:
A well-written and fascinating look at what we can achieve with our bodies (namely in endurance sports) and how big a part the brain has to play when it comes to doing that. It’s a testament to the wonder of the brain and body that there’s all this research into understanding how they work, and yet the findings so often reveal how it is a fabulous and inscrutable thing that demands marvelling rather than offering much in the way of concrete understanding.

I love running for it’s part to play in that. We can understand the biomechanics, oxygen uptake in our blood, running economy, glycogen storage, yet there’s always some mysterious magic in it to sweep us away.
]]> <![CDATA[Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels, #3)]]> 23156040 418 Elena Ferrante Ed 0 to-read 4.38 2013 Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Neapolitan Novels, #3)
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Ed
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Simple Passion 57371655 80 Annie Ernaux 1913097552 Ed 3 4.05 1991 Simple Passion
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Ed
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1991
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/27
date added: 2024/08/28
shelves:
review:
Like climbing into someone's own heart and watching a relationship play out from within there.
]]> Balladz 60803201 176 Sharon Olds 1787334228 Ed 5
They are poems that seem so big and so little at the same time. They swell, vast, with the scope of all the things that take her attention, and yet they are little things that could pass in insignificance if her eye weren’t so magical.

Big things like chasmic life events become small, and small things, minor details in the story become massive, big enough to live on the horizon, like someone’s frown become a rainbow. They swell to giant totems of the moment they are a part of, representing them in a way more profound than the thing itself.

And the poems that close out the book, the ‘elegy� poems, they feel like elegies for life and love itself, all wrapped up in the last heart of a human being. Those final heartbeats like last words that celebrate the whole life it lived, before being lowered down silent, a red box into the earth’s chest.]]> 3.09 2022 Balladz
author: Sharon Olds
name: Ed
average rating: 3.09
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/24
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves:
review:
When I first read Sharon Olds, I was scared away by the horror of the subjects she conjured up so clearly with her vivid poetic voice. But like life itself, she is capable of both such horror and such beauty, and thankfully this collection is on the kinder side.

They are poems that seem so big and so little at the same time. They swell, vast, with the scope of all the things that take her attention, and yet they are little things that could pass in insignificance if her eye weren’t so magical.

Big things like chasmic life events become small, and small things, minor details in the story become massive, big enough to live on the horizon, like someone’s frown become a rainbow. They swell to giant totems of the moment they are a part of, representing them in a way more profound than the thing itself.

And the poems that close out the book, the ‘elegy� poems, they feel like elegies for life and love itself, all wrapped up in the last heart of a human being. Those final heartbeats like last words that celebrate the whole life it lived, before being lowered down silent, a red box into the earth’s chest.
]]> Tongues of Fire 52544242 A remarkable first collection by an important new poet

In this collection, Seán Hewitt gives us poems of a rare musicality and grace. By turns searing and meditative, these are lyrics concerned with the matter of the world, its physicality, but also attuned to the proximity of each moment, each thing, to the spiritual.

Here, there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. Drawing on the religious, the sacred and the profane, this is a collection in which men meet in the woods, where matter is corrupted and remade. There are prayers, hymns, vespers, incantations, and longer poems which attempt to propel themselves towards the transcendent.

In this book, there is always the sense of fragility allied with strength, a violence harnessed and unleashed. The collection ends with a series of elegies for the poet’s father: in the face of despair, we are met with a fierce brightness, and a reclamation of the spiritual. ‘This is when / we make God, and speak in his voice.�

Paying close attention to altered states and the consolations and strangeness of the natural world, this is the first book from a major poet.]]> 80 Seán Hewitt 1787332268 Ed 4 Willing to look at them deeply and at length, to give them the time to tell their secrets.

Especially so the cycle about Buile Suibhne, that, to me, seemed to be about the solace you can find in trees, how madness and sadness lose their sharp definiteness in such company.

So often they seem to hover and settle on the cusp of love and loss, between understanding and total wonderment, knowing that is where life exists too. Life speaks to itself in a language we don’t understand.

He turns the woods into a mystical talisman of life itself, speaking to itself in a language we can’t understand. So rich with things we cannot know]]> 4.19 2020 Tongues of Fire
author: Seán Hewitt
name: Ed
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/16
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves:
review:
A book by someone so clearly in love with trees, with all their forms, in love with the effect they have on him, willing to explore the way they’ve sculpted his life.
Willing to look at them deeply and at length, to give them the time to tell their secrets.

Especially so the cycle about Buile Suibhne, that, to me, seemed to be about the solace you can find in trees, how madness and sadness lose their sharp definiteness in such company.

So often they seem to hover and settle on the cusp of love and loss, between understanding and total wonderment, knowing that is where life exists too. Life speaks to itself in a language we don’t understand.

He turns the woods into a mystical talisman of life itself, speaking to itself in a language we can’t understand. So rich with things we cannot know
]]> <![CDATA[By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept]]> 48986 By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is an enigmatic and nearly indescribable book, a small classic of poetic prose whose author has been compared with Anaïs Nin and Djuna Barnes. In lushly evocative language, Smart recounts her love affair with the poet George Barker with an operatic grandeur that takes in the tragedy of her passion; the suffering of Barker's wife; the children the lovers conceived. Accompanied in this edition by The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals, a short novel that may be read as its sequel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has been hailed by critics worldwide as a work of sheer genius.]]> 112 Elizabeth Smart 0586090398 Ed 3
Interestingly, the cover art changed how I related to the book. The edition I read had a serene black and white photo of the interior of Grand Central Station with light streaming through the windows, illuminating the cavernous space. This set me up for an experience I thought would be a lot more grounded in real spaces, and concrete events. What I actually found was a much more abstract and disconnected series of feelings, interior responses to outside events that were hidden to the reader. The cover art I found on ŷ (this one) was a much more fitting representation of how that came across, and I think would have prepared me better.]]> 3.51 1945 By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
author: Elizabeth Smart
name: Ed
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1945
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/05
date added: 2024/08/25
shelves:
review:
By the way the cover quotes and introduction heaped venerations upon this book, I thought it was going to be some startling culmination of all literature up until this point. What I did find was a book full of beautiful language and flourishing descriptions of love, but to me, it was inscrutable. I couldn't work out who it was about, what was happening, or even what the feelings were at times, if the love was positive or if it was heartbreak. It felt so loyal to chasing an inner experience that it lost sight of what was directing that experience. So focused on itself that it floated off from the world around it.

Interestingly, the cover art changed how I related to the book. The edition I read had a serene black and white photo of the interior of Grand Central Station with light streaming through the windows, illuminating the cavernous space. This set me up for an experience I thought would be a lot more grounded in real spaces, and concrete events. What I actually found was a much more abstract and disconnected series of feelings, interior responses to outside events that were hidden to the reader. The cover art I found on ŷ (this one) was a much more fitting representation of how that came across, and I think would have prepared me better.
]]> <![CDATA[Akenfield: Ronald Blythe's Famous Portrait of an English Village]]> 2614317 336 Ronald Blythe 0140034617 Ed 5
It is unique in that the tales are told through interviews that were made in the 60s, with people who were living then, and the author has a brilliant way of keeping that persons voice and experience alive while adding his vividly poetic touch to it, so that the impression of how it was really is preserved.

The structure is really beautiful, the way it starts with stories from the oldest people interviewed, people who worked the fields by hand and horse, people who were invested in the deep traditions, bell-ringing in the church, sounds that have rung out across the land for centuries, working the ringers up into a religious fervour that barely seems imaginable today. Then it moves to more modern changes, how the kids now move to the city and leave traditional ways of life. And fittingly, finally, to the gravedigger, the need for whom will never die, and neither will the existence of strange characters like him.]]> 4.35 1969 Akenfield: Ronald Blythe's Famous Portrait of an English Village
author: Ronald Blythe
name: Ed
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/12
date added: 2024/08/14
shelves:
review:
I've never read a book quite like it, a rare gem that paints a picture of a lost England through the eyes of people who lived in it. Telling of ways of life in a countryside that still holds somewhere in our collective memory but gets ever harder to actually find. When the woods were full of wildlife, fields were full of farm-workers, and the villages were full of people in their cottages.

It is unique in that the tales are told through interviews that were made in the 60s, with people who were living then, and the author has a brilliant way of keeping that persons voice and experience alive while adding his vividly poetic touch to it, so that the impression of how it was really is preserved.

The structure is really beautiful, the way it starts with stories from the oldest people interviewed, people who worked the fields by hand and horse, people who were invested in the deep traditions, bell-ringing in the church, sounds that have rung out across the land for centuries, working the ringers up into a religious fervour that barely seems imaginable today. Then it moves to more modern changes, how the kids now move to the city and leave traditional ways of life. And fittingly, finally, to the gravedigger, the need for whom will never die, and neither will the existence of strange characters like him.
]]> The Lip 56575658
Melody Janie is hidden. She lives alone in a caravan in Bones Break: a small cliff-top on Cornwall's north coast. She spends her time roaming her territory, spying on passing tourists and ramblers, and remembering. She sees everything and yet remains unseen.

However, when a stranger enters her life, she is forced to confront not only him but the terrible tragedies of her past.

The Lip is a novel about childhood, isolation and mental health, told in the unique and unforgettable voice of Melody Janie.

'All of this is Bones Break. All of this is mine.

I know every inch of it; I know it as intimately as the seagulls. I stand at dead-centre, my feet teetering on the edge of the lip. Below, the thundering tattoo of waves on rock. Wind catches the tips of my hair, lifting them above my ribs: less force than it takes to knock me down; enough to make me right myself with a step to the left, and then another back again. Here on the lip, it is vital to know where my feet are.']]> 384 Charlie Carroll 1529334179 Ed 0 to-read 3.93 The Lip
author: Charlie Carroll
name: Ed
average rating: 3.93
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed]]> 44494144
Homesick for the landscape of her childhood, in the far west of Cornwall, Catrina decides to give up the box-room and face her demons. As a child, she saw her family and their security torn apart; now, she resolves to make a tiny, dilapidated shed a home of her own.

With the freedom to write, surf and make music, Catrina rebuilds the shed and, piece by piece, her own sense of self. On the border of civilisation and wilderness, between the woods and the sea, she discovers the true value of home, while trying to find her place in a fragile natural world.

This is the story of a personal housing crisis and a country-wide one, grappling with class, economics, mental health and nature. It shows how housing can trap us or set us free, and what it means to feel at home.

'You will marvel at the beauty of this book, and rage at the injustice it reveals' - George Monbiot]]> 269 Catrina Davies 1787478645 Ed 0 to-read 4.24 2019 Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed
author: Catrina Davies
name: Ed
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Feast 3409731
A Cornish cliff collapses on top of a seaside resort hotel, squashing everybody but those lucky enough to be away on a picnic. The story tells why some were spared and some were not...

The germ of the idea for The Feast - Margaret Kennedy's ninth novel and perhaps her most ingenious, first published in 1950 - came to the author in 1937 when she and a social gathering of literary friends were discussing the Medieval Masque of the Seven Deadly Sins. The talk turned excitedly to the notion that a collection of stories might be fashioned from seven different authors, each re-imagining one of the Sins through the medium of a modern-day character. That notion fell away, but something more considerable stayed in Margaret Kennedy's mind over the next ten years, and so she conceived of a story that would gather the Sins all under the roof of a Cornish seaside hotel managed by the unhappy wife of Sloth.

Among The Feast's entertaining cast of characters are a clergyman, a gaggle of adolescents and children, a quarter of lovers, and a clutch of frustrated husbands & wives - all serving Kennedy's dark and witty moral fable, which bears out the Biblical adage that many are called but only a very few chosen.]]> 308 Margaret Kennedy 0718208110 Ed 0 to-read 3.95 1949 The Feast
author: Margaret Kennedy
name: Ed
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1949
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Alias Grace 72579
An up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story while bringing her closer and closer to the day she cannot remember. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories?

Captivating and disturbing, Alias Grace showcases best-selling, Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood at the peak of her powers.]]> 468 Margaret Atwood 0385475713 Ed 0 to-read 4.08 1996 Alias Grace
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Ed
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Field Work (Faber Poetry) 32490611 Guardian). From his remarkable debut in 1966, he pioneered the poetry of our times across five decades of cultural and political change, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

Field Work, his fifth volume, from 1979, is a collection of poems that were among the finest he would ever write. Inspired by the four years that Heaney and his family spent in rural County Wicklow after leaving the violence of Belfast, Field Work is one of the poet's most celebrated volumes.

The collection contains some of his best-loved poems, 'Oysters', 'Casualty', 'The Otter', 'The Strand at Lough Beg', and 'The Skunk', as well as his defining sequence 'Glanmore Sonnets'.]]> 80 Seamus Heaney 0571331181 Ed 5
I’m in awe of these poems. He manages to create moments that I yearn to be a part of, they so perfectly and artistically represent some unique moment among the millions of moments experienced by all the millions of people. They feel universal yet so unbelievably personal. A way of seeing the world possible through only his eyes, and then given as a gift to us all. They capture the beauty of the countryside, and people living in the countryside, and the subtle ways that light shifts and time hangs and lets the people see the beauty.

There is a vividness to them, like they’re crawling out his dreams, like we’re witnessing him painting what he sees with the interpretation of his conscious, like even he can’t see the difference between his own beautiful vision and the world as it exists.

“The end of art is peace.�

A fitting line, for when I read these poems I feel like I’ve found peace in my heart, the peace at the end of the scrambling search for life’s meaning. I can be at ease, satisfied that someone has seized upon that beautiful thing that is fully experiencing life as it’s given to us.]]> 3.97 1979 Field Work (Faber Poetry)
author: Seamus Heaney
name: Ed
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1979
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/22
date added: 2024/07/23
shelves:
review:
“already homesick for the big lift of these evenings,�

I’m in awe of these poems. He manages to create moments that I yearn to be a part of, they so perfectly and artistically represent some unique moment among the millions of moments experienced by all the millions of people. They feel universal yet so unbelievably personal. A way of seeing the world possible through only his eyes, and then given as a gift to us all. They capture the beauty of the countryside, and people living in the countryside, and the subtle ways that light shifts and time hangs and lets the people see the beauty.

There is a vividness to them, like they’re crawling out his dreams, like we’re witnessing him painting what he sees with the interpretation of his conscious, like even he can’t see the difference between his own beautiful vision and the world as it exists.

“The end of art is peace.�

A fitting line, for when I read these poems I feel like I’ve found peace in my heart, the peace at the end of the scrambling search for life’s meaning. I can be at ease, satisfied that someone has seized upon that beautiful thing that is fully experiencing life as it’s given to us.
]]> Big Swiss 60701439
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…]]> 336 Jen Beagin 1982153083 Ed 4 3.69 2023 Big Swiss
author: Jen Beagin
name: Ed
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/18
date added: 2024/07/19
shelves:
review:
I was enamoured by this book. As someone who's fascinated by people's stories, of course a book about someone who's fascinated by people's stories would appeal to me. And it's exactly the kind of book I like, filled with strange and interesting characters, vivid and packed full of quirks to the point where they almost burst, stretched to the limits of believability, soaked in strangeness. So endearing that you become desperate to see the ways they interact with each other, bringing out behaviours and backstories that further endear you to them.
]]> <![CDATA[Travelers to Unimaginable Lands: Stories of Dementia, the Caregiver, and the Human Brain]]> 61065376
“This book will forever change the way we see people with dementia disorders—and the people who care for them.”—Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Inspired by Dasha Kiper’s experience as a caregiver and counselor and informed by a breadth of cognitive and neurological research, Travelers to Unimaginable Lands dispels the myth of the perfect caregiver. In these compassionate, nonjudgmental stories of parents and children, husbands and wives, contending with dementia disorders, Kiper explores the existential dilemmas created by this a man believes his wife is an impostor; a woman’s imaginary friendships with famous authors drive a wedge between her and her devoted husband; another woman’s childhood trauma emerges to torment her son; a man’s sudden, intense Catholic piety provokes his wife.

Kiperexplains why the caregivers are maddened by these behaviors, mirroring their patients� irrationality, even though they’ve been told it’s the disease at work. By demystifying the neurological obstacles to caregiving, Kiper illuminates the terrible pressure dementia disorders exert on our closest relationships, offering caregivers the perspective they need to be gentler with themselves.]]> 272 Dasha Kiper 0399590536 Ed 3 4.17 Travelers to Unimaginable Lands: Stories of Dementia, the Caregiver, and the Human Brain
author: Dasha Kiper
name: Ed
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves:
review:
An insight into what it's like to care for someone with dementia. A well-considered mix of personal storytelling with scientific insight that shows how the disease changes both carer and patient. How the mind of someone suffering with it knits itself together to make up for the growing holes in it's experience, and how the carer is drawn into treating the person a certain way in order to maintain their idea of who that person was both for their own sake and that persons.
]]> The Rachel Incident 63094957
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.]]> 304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593535707 Ed 0 to-read 4.06 2023 The Rachel Incident
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: Ed
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Our Wives Under the Sea 58659343
Moving through something that only resembles normal life, Miri comes to realize that the life that they had before might be gone. Though Leah is still there, Miri can feel the woman she loves slipping from her grasp.

Our Wives Under The Sea is the debut novel from Julia Armfield, the critically acclaimed author of Salt Slow. It’s a story of falling in love, loss, grief, and what life there is in the deep deep sea.]]> 240 Julia Armfield 152901722X Ed 0 to-read 3.75 2022 Our Wives Under the Sea
author: Julia Armfield
name: Ed
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Dark Night of the Soul 117531 On the mystical path, the experience of night is neither dark, nor dramatic, nor tragic. This magnificent poetic treatise shows, on the contrary, that she is the recipient of divine lessons. A major work of the negative path.


« Plus les choses divines sont en soi claires et manifestes, plus elles sont naturellement obscures et cachées à l’âme. Il en est ici comme de la lumière naturelle : […] plus on veut fixer le soleil en face, et plus on éblouit la puissance visuelle et on la prive de lumière […]. De même, quand cette divine lumière de la contemplation investit l’âme qui n’est pas encore complètement éclairée, elle produit en elle des ténèbres spirituelles, parce que non seulement elle la dépasse, mais parce qu’elle la prive de son intelligence naturelle et en obscurcit l’acte. »
Sur le chemin mystique, l’expérience de la nuit n’est ni noire, ni dramatique, ni tragique. Ce magnifique traité poétique montre au contraire qu’elle est réceptrice de leçons divines. Une œuvre majeure de la voie négative.]]> 111 John of the Cross 0486426939 Ed 4
While the others don't quite reach up to the heights of the namesake, they are still so beautiful. This way he has of capturing the beauty of nature, the living god within it, personifying it, laying down in the long grass with it as someone you can marry, and hold in your arms, and know they will hold you in return.]]> 4.17 1584 Dark Night of the Soul
author: John of the Cross
name: Ed
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1584
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/02
date added: 2024/07/12
shelves:
review:
I don't fully understand the title poem of this book, but I appreciate it all the same. This transforming beauty of the dark places, the dark parts of yourself, and of life, that extend almost like a cave outwards from what you thought you knew. Fearful before of the empty fathoms, when you sit within them, you lose your fear and gain a peaceful acceptance. And when you see the light again, you can marvel at how beautiful and transforming it is, but you know too that that darkness holds a beauty of it's own.

While the others don't quite reach up to the heights of the namesake, they are still so beautiful. This way he has of capturing the beauty of nature, the living god within it, personifying it, laying down in the long grass with it as someone you can marry, and hold in your arms, and know they will hold you in return.
]]> Swimming Home 16029562 160 Deborah Levy 0571299601 Ed 5 3.33 2011 Swimming Home
author: Deborah Levy
name: Ed
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/07/08
shelves:
review:
I loved this book. Every page is a treat. The settings and characters so rich and vivid they come alive in front of you, not only in 3d, but in 4d, their histories worn on their bodies, as present and visible as their clothes. You can see them walk off and disappear into the crease of the books spine, to emerge again in the dawn of the next page. And it manages to do that remarkable thing, of describing people with all their flaws and strangenesses and making it seem naturally beautiful. Their interactions flowing with human spontaneity, yet with the perfect inevitability of an ancient four-act play.
]]> Le Grand Meaulnes 794779 206 Alain-Fournier 0140182829 Ed 0 to-read 3.78 1913 Le Grand Meaulnes
author: Alain-Fournier
name: Ed
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1913
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> What the Living Do: Poems 206472 91 Marie Howe 0393318869 Ed 4 4.32 1997 What the Living Do: Poems
author: Marie Howe
name: Ed
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/07
date added: 2024/07/07
shelves:
review:
These poems tell a story, a story of what it means to come alive over the course of a life. They create a cherished image, a personal stream of remembrances, so vibrant it’s like you’re in there, reliving those memories. Nights and days, sights, sounds, and smells of a summer you never lived in but it feels so much like you did. Someone else’s sadness and all the little bits of joy packed in around the edges, that in retrospect, look like hope for the person they become.
]]> <![CDATA[The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma]]> 18693771 A pioneering researcher transforms our understanding of trauma and offers a bold new paradigm for healing.

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world's foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers' capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain's natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk's own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.]]> 464 Bessel van der Kolk 0670785938 Ed 5 4.36 2014 The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
author: Bessel van der Kolk
name: Ed
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/07
date added: 2024/07/07
shelves:
review:
A brilliant book, feels like a revelatory way of looking at how the trauma people have gone through affects the way they are and respond to the world around them. A man so compassionate in his desire to understand people and help them transform those responses and live lives dictated by their selves and not the things that have happened to them. To have the skill and understanding to pass that compassion and that way of seeing people forwards, i’m glad he exists, as i’m sure so many other people are.
]]> Old God's Time 61358640 From the two-time Booker Prize finalist author, a dazzlingly written novel exploring love, memory, grief, and long-buried secrets

Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return, of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children, Winnie and Joe.

But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past.

A beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God's Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.]]> 261 Sebastian Barry 0593296109 Ed 3 3.76 2023 Old God's Time
author: Sebastian Barry
name: Ed
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/05/03
date added: 2024/05/03
shelves:
review:
I don't know what to make of this book. It carries you along in it's stream of conscious appreciation of how the narrator, in his old age, sees, and revels in, the beauty in the world. And he sees so much beauty, spread out beneath him from his clifftop home. But bit by bit what haunts him from his past creeps into his serene but confused existence. And those ghosts get more and more cruel and punishing until you start see his beautiful musings as a desperate clinging to what you're left with when everything you loved has been taken away from you. Like the hands of fate had it out to take every joyous thing they'd once gifted him, until they finally come for him too.
]]> <![CDATA[Thomas Traherne: Poetry And Prose]]> 1605901 144 Thomas Traherne 0281054681 Ed 3 4.19 2003 Thomas Traherne: Poetry And Prose
author: Thomas Traherne
name: Ed
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/29
date added: 2024/04/30
shelves:
review:
Like some sort of Walt Whitman of the middle ages, celebrating the beauty of his mind’s inner pastures, where his spirit roams and God’s love blooms, in the same way WW celebrated the wide open spaces of the world and the physical bodies that inhabited them. A world he’s elated to live and revel in, however true it is, caught somewhere between his imagination and the real thing.
]]> <![CDATA[The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs]]> 17834508 292 Joanna Moncrieff 1137277424 Ed 0 to-read 4.24 2013 The Bitterest Pills: The Troubling Story of Antipsychotic Drugs
author: Joanna Moncrieff
name: Ed
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness]]> 40180010 Mind Fixers, Anne Harrington, author of The Cure Within, explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated struggle to understand mental disorder in biomedical terms. She shows how the stalling of early twentieth century efforts in this direction allowed Freudians and social scientists to insist, with some justification, that they had better ways of analyzing and fixing minds.


But when the Freudians overreached, they drove psychiatry into a state of crisis that a new “biological revolution� was meant to alleviate. Harrington shows how little that biological revolution had to do with breakthroughs in science, and why the field has fallen into a state of crisis in our own time.


Mind Fixers makes clear that psychiatry’s waxing and waning biological enthusiasms have been shaped not just by developments in the clinic and lab, but also by a surprising range of social factors, including immigration, warfare, grassroots activism, and assumptions about race and gender. Government programs designed to empty the state mental hospitals, acrid rivalries between different factions in the field, industry profit mongering, consumerism, and an uncritical media have all contributed to the story as well.


In focusing particularly on the search for the biological roots of schizophrenia, depression, and bipolar disorder, Harrington underscores the high human stakes for the millions of people who have sought medical answers for their mental suffering. This is not just a story about doctors and scientists, but about countless ordinary people and their loved ones.


A clear-eyed, evenhanded, and yet passionate tour de force, Mind Fixers recounts the past and present struggle to make mental illness a biological problem in order to lay the groundwork for creating a better future, both for those who suffer and for those whose job it is to care for them.]]> 384 Anne Harrington 0393071227 Ed 4 4.14 2019 Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness
author: Anne Harrington
name: Ed
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/09
date added: 2024/04/11
shelves:
review:

]]> When I Sing, Mountains Dance 57693608
When I Sing, Mountains Dance, winner of the European Union Prize, is a giddy paean to the land in all its interconnectedness, and in it Sola finds a distinct voice for each extraordinary consciousness: the lightning bolts, roe deer, mountains, the ghosts of the civil war, the widow Sió and later her grown children, Hilari and Mia, as well as Mia’s lovers with their long-buried secrets and their hidden pain.

Irene Solà animates the polyphonic world around us, the fierce music of the seasons, as well as the stories we tell to comprehend loss and love on a personal, historical, and even geological scale. Lyrical, elemental, and mythic, hers is a fearlessly imaginative new voice that brilliantly renders both our tragedies and our triumphs.]]> 216 Irene Solà 1644450801 Ed 5 4.12 2019 When I Sing, Mountains Dance
author: Irene Solà
name: Ed
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/07
date added: 2024/04/08
shelves:
review:
A treasure of a book. The story of a mountain and everything that makes it beautiful, the clouds, the rock, the people and the animals, the way their existences intertwine, wrap around each other and stretch through time, down the mountain slopes and into the reaches of the city and back again. Dancing between perspectives, all told so vividly that you see through the eyes of these things, and they all combine to a unified picture. Scenes in the trees, in wooden houses, in the open air thick with the sound of folk ritual.
]]> The Republic of Motherhood 40808832 ‘I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood
and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.�

In this bold and resonant gathering of poems, Liz Berry turns to the ‘transformative wild experience� of motherhood. Her poems sing the body electric, from the joy and anguish of becoming a new mother; through its darkest hours to its brightest days. Full of solace, honesty and unabashed beauty, they bear witness to that most tender of experiences -- when a new life arrives, and everything changes.

]]> 32 Liz Berry Ed 4 3.67 The Republic of Motherhood
author: Liz Berry
name: Ed
average rating: 3.67
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/28
date added: 2024/03/28
shelves:
review:
What a gem of a book. So much image packed into it's small pages. And I loved it's form, how reading it felt like a little passport you could leaf through and read the owner's journey into this vivid 'Republic of Motherhood'. A place I may never gain entry to, but I can look at the mementos: the oak leaves, the owl feathers, the moth dust shrines, the wet grass, the penny moons.
]]> <![CDATA[Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope]]> 44016721
Lost Connections offers a radical new way of thinking about this crisis. It shows that once we understand the real causes, we can turn to pioneering new solutions - ones that offer real hope.]]> 321 Johann Hari Ed 3
Some particular favourites of mine were: the idea that generalised depression is a "grief for our own lives not being as they should"; that Spain has low levels of depression thanks to the strength of it's culture's focus on community; and that long-term stress and severe life-events are very reliable indicators for getting depression, this idea that all depression has a backstory, it can all be traced back to something.]]> 4.15 2018 Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope
author: Johann Hari
name: Ed
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/25
date added: 2024/03/28
shelves:
review:
You have to read this with a very big grain of salt... like horse-sized salt lick big. I'm on board with his journey to prove that social connectivity is a better cure for depression then chemical anti-depressants aren't the cure to depression, but he goes about it, or at least, starts off going about it in such a pig-headed, blinkered way that made me want to put the book down. I'm glad I didn't, because once he's done with attacking anti-depressants he's got some really interesting case studies and theories.

Some particular favourites of mine were: the idea that generalised depression is a "grief for our own lives not being as they should"; that Spain has low levels of depression thanks to the strength of it's culture's focus on community; and that long-term stress and severe life-events are very reliable indicators for getting depression, this idea that all depression has a backstory, it can all be traced back to something.
]]> Unsettled Ground 58036822 What if the life you have always known is taken from you in an instant?

What would you do to get it back?

Twins Jeanie and Julius have always been different from other people. At 51 years old, they still live with their mother, Dot, in rural isolation and poverty. Inside the walls of their old cottage they make music, and in the garden they grow (and sometimes kill) everything they need for sustenance.

But when Dot dies suddenly, threats to their livelihood start raining down. Jeanie and Julius would do anything to preserve their small sanctuary against the perils of the outside world, even as their mother's secrets begin to unravel, putting everything they thought they knew about their lives at stake.

Unsettled Ground is a heart-stopping novel of betrayal and resilience, love and survival. It is a portrait of life on the fringes of society that explores with dazzling emotional power how we can build our lives on broken foundations, and spin light from darkness.]]> 287 Claire Fuller 0241457467 Ed 5
It's almost like watching the diorama of someone's life be turned upside in front of your eyes. Like finding something in the garden that's being lying there forever and you peel it from the ground, where the grass has grown over it's edges and the soil is pressed flat and holey underneath, and the exposed woodlice scuttle around, but when you flip it over you find something you didn't expect at all on the other side.

The revelations of this book, that at first act as way to compel you to keep reading, by the end make you question what it means to have an attachment to truths so strong that it can alter your entire way of existing, through your own assumptions but also ones that have been thrust upon you with no fault of your own. How are you meant to challenge a belief if you don't even know it's a belief?]]> 3.74 2021 Unsettled Ground
author: Claire Fuller
name: Ed
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/24
date added: 2024/03/24
shelves:
review:
A weird book. Consistently unsettling. I had the sense when reading it that the characters were like human animals, cut off from the modern world, living in their little cottage, tending the garden and playing music and living by the seasons. The events of the book throw them out into this world and we witness, in discomfort, their innocence encountering it.

It's almost like watching the diorama of someone's life be turned upside in front of your eyes. Like finding something in the garden that's being lying there forever and you peel it from the ground, where the grass has grown over it's edges and the soil is pressed flat and holey underneath, and the exposed woodlice scuttle around, but when you flip it over you find something you didn't expect at all on the other side.

The revelations of this book, that at first act as way to compel you to keep reading, by the end make you question what it means to have an attachment to truths so strong that it can alter your entire way of existing, through your own assumptions but also ones that have been thrust upon you with no fault of your own. How are you meant to challenge a belief if you don't even know it's a belief?
]]> The Mabinogi 33010975 through the space between one world and another . . .'

The Mabinogi is the Welsh national epic, a collection of prose tales of war and enchantment, adventure and romance, which have long fascinated readers all over the world. Matthew Francis's retelling of the first four stories (the Four Branches of the Mabinogi) is the first to situate it in poetry and captures the magic and strangeness of this medieval Celtic world: a baby is kidnapped by a monstrous claw, a giant wades across the Irish Sea to do battle, a wizard makes a woman out of flowers, only to find she is less biddable than he expected. Permeating the whole sequence is a delight in the power of the imagination to transform human experience into works of tragedy, comedy and wonder.

The Mabinogi is an important contribution to the storytelling of the British Isles.

'I have waited a life for this book: our ancient British tales re-told, in English, by a poet, as they were in their original Welsh. This is more than translation. It picks up the harp and sings.' Gillian Clarke]]> 89 Matthew Francis 0571333761 Ed 0 to-read 4.41 2017 The Mabinogi
author: Matthew Francis
name: Ed
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/19
shelves: to-read
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]]> Sorrow and Bliss 49110165
Martha told Patrick before they got married that she didn't want to have children. He said he didn't mind either way because he has loved her since he was fourteen and making her happy is all that matters, although he does not seem able to do it.

By the time Martha finds out what is wrong, it doesn't really matter anymore. It is too late to get the only thing she has ever wanted. Or maybe it will turn out that you can stop loving someone and start again from nothing - if you can find something else to want.]]> 352 Meg Mason Ed 0 to-read 4.08 2020 Sorrow and Bliss
author: Meg Mason
name: Ed
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Home Child 61242238 'Ground-breaking' Benjamin Zephaniah
'Exquisite' Hannah Lowe , author of The Kids ' Home's not a place, you must believe this,
but one who names you and means beloved . ' In 1908, Eliza Showell, twelve years old and newly orphaned, boards a ship that will carry her from the slums of the Black Country to rural Nova Scotia. She will never return to Britain or see her family again. She is a Home Child, one of thousands of British children sent to Canada to work as indentured farm labourers and domestic servants. In Nova Scotia, Eliza's world becomes a place where ordinary things are transfigured into treasures - a red ribbon, the feel of a foal's mane, the sound of her name on someone else's lips. With nothing to call her own, the wild beauty of Cape Breton is the only solace Eliza has - until another Home Child, a boy, comes to the farm and changes everything. Inspired by the true story of Liz Berry's great aunt, this spellbinding novel in verse is an exquisite portrait of a girl far from home. ' Vivid, compassionate and makes Eliza Showell's voice heard at last ' Financial Times *Best Poetry Books of summer 2023* 'A haunting, deeply compelling narrative ' Andrew McMillan , author of physical ' Only Liz Berry could write such raw and staggeringly beautiful poems ' Fiona Benson , author of Vertigo & Ghost]]> 80 Liz Berry 1784742686 Ed 0 to-read 4.34 2023 The Home Child
author: Liz Berry
name: Ed
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/14
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Divided Self 1457427 218 R.D. Laing 0140207341 Ed 5 4.05 1960 The Divided Self
author: R.D. Laing
name: Ed
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1960
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/10
date added: 2024/03/10
shelves:
review:
I'll admit, I only fully understood about half of this, as he's clearly a very intelligent guy with some very complex ideas about the human psyche. But the half I did understood I found illuminating. These 'ontological' splits where someone can end up with a false self created to interact with the world in order to protect atrue self that remains buried within. A very hopeful book too, that all madness is understandable, it all comes from somewhere, and because of that can be understood, and the true self can be retrieved like 'the pearl at the bottom of the ocean'.
]]> Hex 60003006 On this, the last night of her life, in a prison cell several floors below Edinburgh's High Street, convicted witch Geillis Duncan receives a mysterious visitor - Iris, who says she comes from a future where women are still persecuted for who they are and what they believe.
As the hours pass and dawn approaches, Geillis recounts the circumstances of her arrest, brutal torture, confession and trial, while Iris offers support, solace - and the tantalising prospect of escape.

Hex is a visceral depiction of what happens when a society is consumed by fear and superstition, exploring how the terrible force of a king's violent crusade against ordinary women can still be felt, right up to the present day.]]> 104 Jenni Fagan 1846975689 Ed 3 3.82 2022 Hex
author: Jenni Fagan
name: Ed
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/03/08
date added: 2024/03/09
shelves:
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A tragic, gnarled little nut of a book. Sad to think that maybe forever women will be tormented for being women, but this book celebrates the magic wonder of that certain humanity, always alive inside, treasured by those who see it. You can kill a witch, but you can't kill what makes her a witch.
]]> The Dream of a Ridiculous Man 329866 32 Fyodor Dostoevsky 1419160222 Ed 0 to-read 4.15 1877 The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Ed
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1877
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/09
shelves: to-read
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]]> Poems (Arts & Literature) 71691104 84 Edward Thomas 1901623114 Ed 5 5.00 Poems (Arts & Literature)
author: Edward Thomas
name: Ed
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/07
date added: 2024/03/07
shelves:
review:
A man in love with the countryside, who resides in the pastoral bittersweetness of life, preserved there forever. Savouring the sweetness of moments, yet knowing the sadness of their inevitable passing. And thanks to his loving skill with words, he managed to preserve those moments for us too.
]]> In Pursuit of Spring 14316614 278 Edward Thomas 1408624230 Ed 0 to-read 3.33 2002 In Pursuit of Spring
author: Edward Thomas
name: Ed
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/03/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Women Who Run With the Wolves 241823
In "Women Who Run With the Wolves," Dr Estes unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairytales and stories, many from her own family, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine. Dr Estes has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.]]> 537 Clarissa Pinkola Estés 0345409876 Ed 0 to-read 4.12 1992 Women Who Run With the Wolves
author: Clarissa Pinkola Estés
name: Ed
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/29
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century]]> 568236 Barbara Tuchman anatomizes the century, revealing both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived.]]> 714 Barbara W. Tuchman 0345349571 Ed 0 to-read 4.04 1978 A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
author: Barbara W. Tuchman
name: Ed
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1978
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read
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]]> Mass for Hard Times 2702338
The rewards in publishing poetry are sometimes sublime, as opposed to commercial, but reader response over the years has justified our commitment. The strength of the list is evidenced on this page, on which we salute recent prize-winners whose books are currently being read throughout the world.]]> 96 R.S. Thomas 1852242299 Ed 4 4.17 1992 Mass for Hard Times
author: R.S. Thomas
name: Ed
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1992
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/26
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves:
review:
Beautiful, and always just a bit inscrutable, like that essence of life that he approaches. The resolute truth from which you can extract sweetness, a truth that softens to those who yearn for it, yet hardens to those who disparage it. Something much older than us, that will not be replaced by anything we create, and will not be captured by any attempt we make to do so. We can only ever bathe in the midway, between awareness and understanding, and he seems to be at a hard-won peace wit that knowledge.
]]> <![CDATA[The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays]]> 40121993 224 Esmé Weijun Wang 1555978274 Ed 3 4.14 2019 The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
author: Esmé Weijun Wang
name: Ed
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/27
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves:
review:
An interesting book, illuminating to see the lived perspective of someone living through the trials of schizophrenia, but I got the impression of her always trying to sit a distance from it, or sculpt it into a shape of her choosing rather than an objective view. Which is, of course, understandable from a lived perspective.
]]> <![CDATA[The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness]]> 1098486
Saks was only eight, and living an otherwise idyllic childhood in sunny 1960s Miami, when her first symptoms appeared in the form of obsessions and night terrors. But it was not until she reached Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar that her first full-blown episode, complete with voices in her head and terrifying suicidal fantasies, forced her into a psychiatric hospital.

Saks would later attend Yale Law School where one night, during her first term, she had a breakdown that left her singing on the roof of the law school library at midnight. She was taken to the emergency room, force-fed antipsychotic medication, and tied hand-and-foot to the cold metal of a hospital bed. She spent the next five months in a psychiatric ward.

So began Saks's long war with her own internal demons and the equally powerful forces of stigma. Today she is a chaired professor of law who researches and writes about the rights of the mentally ill. She is married to a wonderful man.

In The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn Saks discusses frankly and movingly the paranoia, the inability to tell imaginary fears from real ones, and the voices in her head insisting she do terrible things, as well as the many obstacles she overcame to become the woman she is today. It is destined to become a classic in the genre.]]> 340 Elyn R. Saks 140130138X Ed 0 to-read 4.29 2007 The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness
author: Elyn R. Saks
name: Ed
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Tinkers 4957350
At once heartbreaking and life affirming, Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, illness, faith, and the fierce beauty of nature.]]> 192 Paul Harding 1934137197 Ed 0 to-read 3.41 2009 Tinkers
author: Paul Harding
name: Ed
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/02/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence]]> 58772732 Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle's Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence--plant, animal, human, artificial--and how they transform our understanding of humans' place in the cosmos.

What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans, or shared with other beings--beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in "artificial" intelligence. But as it approaches, it also gets weirder: rather than a friend or helpmate, AI increasingly appears as something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us.

At the same time, we're only just becoming aware of the other intelligences which have been with us all along, even if we've failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others--the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we've built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction, and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics, to live better and more equitably with one another and the non-human world?

Artist and maverick thinker James Bridle drawn on biology and physics, computation, literature, art, and philosophy, to answer these unsettling questions. Startling and bold, Ways of Being explores the fascinating, strange and multitudinous forms of knowing, doing, and being which are becoming evident in the present, and which are essential for our survival.

Includes illustrations]]> 384 James Bridle 0374601119 Ed 3 4.17 2022 Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
author: James Bridle
name: Ed
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2022
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/01
date added: 2024/02/20
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I enjoyed this a lot, or rather I found it really interesting, and thought provoking on the idea of intelligence and how we look at it as a very human-orientated thing, rather than embracing the possibilities of seeing human-intelligence as one specific aspect of a grander, universal intelligence. Whether I needed a book QUITE so long to mull it over is another thing. I think I mostly just enjoy thinking about trees being smarter than us.
]]> Girl, Interrupted 68783
Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching documnet that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.]]> 169 Susanna Kaysen 0679746048 Ed 0 to-read 3.95 1993 Girl, Interrupted
author: Susanna Kaysen
name: Ed
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/15
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]]> Cane 765172 Cane is a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking black life in the South. The sketches, poems, and stories of black rural and urban life that make up Cane are rich in imagery. Visions of smoke, sugarcane, dusk, and flame permeate the Southern landscape: the Northern world is pictured as a harsher reality of asphalt streets. Impressionistic, sometimes surrealistic, the pieces are redolent of nature and Africa, with sensuous appeals to eye and ear.
]]> 116 Jean Toomer 0871401517 Ed 0 to-read 3.86 1923 Cane
author: Jean Toomer
name: Ed
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1923
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimizing the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs]]> 13592853 Which is more harmful—Ecstasy or alcohol? Can addiction be cured? and Does the "War on Drugs" have serious unintended effects that can hurt children?, this analysis equips readers with the ability to make educated decisions regarding drugs both personally and in their communities. Broadening the scope of the discussion, a framework is explored for formulating national drug policies that will minimize a myriad of harms—social, medical, criminal, financial, and environmental.
]]> 320 David J. Nutt 1906860165 Ed 4 4.42 2012 Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimizing the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs
author: David J. Nutt
name: Ed
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/11
date added: 2024/02/13
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]]> The Covenant of Water 180357146 From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]> 715 Abraham Verghese 0802162177 Ed 0 to-read 4.34 2023 The Covenant of Water
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Ed
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/08
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions]]> 61724281
“Immensely emotional and unforgettably haunting.� � Wall Street Journal

Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand—and fail to understand—mental illness.

When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable.Both children of college professors, the boys were best friends and keen competitors, and, when they both got into Yale University, seemed set to join the American meritocratic elite.

Michael blazed through college in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. But all wasn’t as it seemed. One day, Jonathan received the Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Michael was still in the hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and still battling delusions when he decided to trade his halfway house for the top law school in the country. He not only managed to graduate, but after his extraordinary story was featured in The New York Times , solda memoir for a large sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, stabbed Carrie to death with a kitchen knife and became a front-page story of an entirely different sort.

The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's brilliant and heartbreaking account of an American tragedy. It is a story about the bonds of family, friendship, and community; the promise of intellectual achievement; and the lure of utopian solutions. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, at times almost unbearably sad, The Best Minds is an extreme version of a story that is tragically familiar to all too many.In the hands of a writer of Jonathan Rosen's gifts and dedication, its significance will echo widely.]]> 576 Jonathan Rosen 1594206570 Ed 0 to-read 3.99 2023 The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
author: Jonathan Rosen
name: Ed
average rating: 3.99
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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]]> Martyr! 139400713 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Ed 0 to-read 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Ed
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry]]> 22675850
Psychiatry has come a long way since the days of chaining "lunatics" in cold cells and parading them as freakish marvels before a gaping public.

But, as Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, the former president of the American Psychiatric Association, reveals in his extraordinary and eye-opening book, the path to legitimacy for "the black sheep of medicine" has been anything but smooth.

In Shrinks , Dr. Lieberman traces the field from its birth as a mystic pseudo-science through its adolescence as a cult of "shrinks" to its late blooming maturity � beginning after World War II � as a science-driven profession that saves lives. With fascinating case studies and portraits of the luminaries of the field � from Sigmund Freud to Eric Kandel � Shrinks is a gripping and illuminating read, and an urgent call-to-arms to dispel the stigma of mental illnesses by treating them as diseases rather than unfortunate states of mind.

“A lucid popular history...At once skeptical and triumphalist. It shows just how far psychiatry has come.� —Julia M. Klein, Boston Globe]]> 352 Jeffrey A. Lieberman 0316278866 Ed 0 to-read 4.09 2015 Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry
author: Jeffrey A. Lieberman
name: Ed
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/02/07
shelves: to-read
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]]> Girl with a Pearl Earring 76847 History and fiction merge seamlessly in Tracy Chevalier's luminous novel about artistic vision and sensual awakening. Through the eyes of sixteen-year-old Griet, the world of 1660s Holland comes dazzlingly alive in this richly imagined portrait of the young woman who inspired one of Vermeer's most celebrated paintings.

]]> 233 Tracy Chevalier 0452282152 Ed 2 3.74 1999 Girl with a Pearl Earring
author: Tracy Chevalier
name: Ed
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1999
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/18
date added: 2024/01/18
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I knew while reading this that it wasn't that good, though I enjoyed reading it nonetheless. It felt like historical pulp, but I was drawn into the soggy romantic intrigue just like Griet was drawn into the lavish world of Vermeer and Co. Hynotised by the rich beauty of his imagery, hinting at greatness, and of being part of it, yet in the end being thrown back into a pedestrian life, knowing that that world wasn't real, but wanting to be part of it anyway, to believe in something better, clinging to it for as long as the illusion would last.
]]> <![CDATA[The Lost Rainforests of Britain]]> 61326124 Sunday Times-bestselling author of Who Owns England?, a mesmerising chronicle of our forgotten rainforests � and an inspiring intervention to help restore them to the places they once were.

In 2020, writer and campaigner Guy Shrubsole moved from London to Devon. As he explored the wooded valleys, rivers and tors of Dartmoor, Guy discovered a spectacular habitat that he had never encountered before: temperate rainforest. Entranced, he would spend the coming
months investigating the history, ecology and distribution of rainforests
across England, Wales and Scotland.

Britain, Guy discovered, was once a rainforest nation.

This is the story of a unique habitat that has been so ravaged, most people today don’t realise it exists. Temperate rainforest may once have covered up to one-fifth of Britain and played host to a dazzling variety of luminous life-forms, inspiring Celtic druids, Welsh wizards, Romantic poets, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s most loved creations. Though only fragments now remain, they form a rare and internationally important habitat, home to lush ferns and beardy lichens, pine martens and pied flycatchers. But why are even environmentalists unaware of their existence? And how have we managed to so comprehensively excise them from our cultural memory?

Taking the reader on an awe-inspiring journey through the Atlantic oakwoods and hazelwoods of the Western Highlands and the Lake District, down to the rainforests of Wales, Devon and Cornwall, The Lost Rainforests of Britain maps these under-recognised ecosystems in exquisite detail � but underlines that without immediate political and
public support, we risk losing them from the landscape, and perhaps our collective memory, forever. A rich, elegaic and boundary-pushing feat of research and reportage, this is the extraordinary tale of one person’s quest to find Britain’s lost rainforests, and bring them back.]]> 326 Guy Shrubsole 0008527954 Ed 2 4.29 2022 The Lost Rainforests of Britain
author: Guy Shrubsole
name: Ed
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/10
date added: 2024/01/18
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This was good, and interesting, but way too long. He just prattles on repeating himself, which I'm sure listening to it on audiobook didn't help. He sounds so self-satisfied with his latest interest, "the lost rainforest" without really seeming to relate it to a bigger picture or meaning. There was loads of great info, but it kept feeling like it was through this lens of how it relates to him, not simply for the trees themselves.
]]> Revelations of Divine Love 529415
After fervently praying for a greater understanding of Christ's passion, Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century anchorite and mystic, experienced a series of divine revelations. Through these 'showings', Christ's sufferings were revealed to her with extraordinary intensity, but she also received assurance of God's unwavering love for man and his infinite capacity for forgiveness. Written in a vigorous English vernacular, the Revelations are one of the most original works of medieval mysticism and have had a lasting influence on Christian thought.

This edition of the Revelations contains both the short text, which is mainly an account of the 'showings' themselves and Julian's initial interpretation of their meaning, and the long text, completed some twenty years later, which moves from vision to a daringly speculative theology. Elizabeth Spearing's translation preserves Julian's directness of expression and the rich complexity of her thought. An introduction, notes and appendices help to place the works in context for modern readers.]]> 213 Julian of Norwich 0140441778 Ed 0 to-read 3.77 1393 Revelations of Divine Love
author: Julian of Norwich
name: Ed
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1393
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Cloud of Unknowing: The Classic of Medieval Mysticism]]> 305358 The Cloud of Unknowing offers an approach to contemplative life that finds holiness at a level deeper than physical experience and beyond language or image. The author advises placing all thought and mental imagery behind a metaphorical "cloud of forgetting" while seeking to love the divine. Hidden from the infinite consciousness by a "cloud of unknowing," divine love can be reached through monologistic prayer � a single-word prayer, like a mantra, that assists in abandoning all extraneous thought. Seekers can thus attain an inner silence, where they may "be still and know the sacred."
The author's spiritual gifts, combined with his humorous and straightforward approach, offer a view of divinity that never loses the common touch. Written in everyday language and edited by a popular authority on mysticism, this venerable work can be understood and appreciated by any reader.]]> 176 Anonymous 0486432033 Ed 0 to-read 3.57 1400 The Cloud of Unknowing: The Classic of Medieval Mysticism
author: Anonymous
name: Ed
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1400
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/21
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation]]> 403846 Caliban and the Witch is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization.

"It is both a passionate work of memory recovered and a hammer of humanity's agenda." Peter Linebaugh, author of The London Hanged"]]> 288 Silvia Federici 1570270597 Ed 0 to-read 4.55 2004 Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
author: Silvia Federici
name: Ed
average rating: 4.55
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/12/20
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life]]> 143675
“Jack is helping to pave the path for American Buddhism, bringing essential basics into our crazy modern lives. And the language he uses is as simple and as lovely as our breath.”—Natalie Goldberg

Perhaps the most important book yet written on meditation, the process of inner transformation, and the integration of spiritual practice into our American way of life, A Path with Heart brings alive one by one the challenges of spiritual living in the modern world. Written by a teacher, psychologist, and meditation master of international renown, this warm, inspiring, and expert book touches on a wide range of essential issues including many rarely addressed in spiritual books. From compassion, addiction, and psychological and emotional healing, to dealing with problems involving relationships and sexuality, to the creation of a Zen-like simplicity and balance in all facets of life, it speaks to the concerns of many modern spiritual seekers, both those beginning on the path and those with years of experience.

A Path with Heart is filled with practical techniques, guided meditations, stories, koans, and other gems of wisdom that can help ease your journey through the world. The author’s own profound—and sometimes humorous—experiences and gentle assistance will skillfully guide you through the obstacles and trials of spiritual and contemporary life to bring a clarity of perception and a sense of the sacred into your everyday experience. Reading this book will touch your heart and remind you of the promises inherent in meditation and in a life of the the blossoming of inner peace, wholeness, and understanding, and the achievement of a happiness that is not dependent on external conditions.

Sure to be a classic, A Path with Heart shows us how we can bring our spirituality to flower every day of our lives. It is a wise and gentle guidebook for an odyssey into the soul that enables us to achieve a deeper, more satisfying life in the world.]]> 384 Jack Kornfield 0553372114 Ed 3 4.23 1993 A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life
author: Jack Kornfield
name: Ed
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/08
date added: 2023/12/20
shelves:
review:
A beautiful look into a man's wrangling with Buddhism. I didn't finish this, as it went a bit far down the Buddhist track, I felt I couldn't relate anymore to transcendelity of experience, or the specific language and references used to describe it, so I had to bail. But I did like how far I did get.
]]> <![CDATA[Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory]]> 56614549
An intense conversation, a spat with a partner, or even an obnoxious tweet―these situations aren’t life-or-death, yet we often react as if they are. That’s because our bodies treat most perceived threats the same way. Yet one approach has proven to be incredibly effective in training our nervous system to stop overreacting and start responding to the world with greater safety and Polyvagal Theory.

In Anchored , expert teacher Deb Dana shares a down-to-earth presentation of Polyvagal Theory, then brings the science to life with practical, everyday ways to transform your relationship with your body. Using field-tested techniques, Dana helps you master the skills to become more aware of your nervous system moment to moment―and change the way you respond to the great and small challenges of life.

Here, you’ll

� Polyvagal Theory―get to know the biology and function of your vagus nerve, the highway of the nervous system
� Befriending Your Nervous System―attune to what’s going on in your body by developing your “neuroception�
� Using Your Vagal Brake―discover key techniques to consciously regulate the intensity of your emotions
� Connection and Protection―learn to recognize and influence your internal cues for safety and danger
� Your Social Engagement System―find ways to create nourishing relationships with others and the world around you
� Practices and guidance to gently shape your nervous system for greater resilience, intuition, safety, and wonder

Through guided imagery, meditation, self-inquiry, and more, Anchored offers a practical user’s manual for moving from a place of fear and panic into a grounded space of balance and confidence. “Once we know how our nervous system works, we can work with it,� teaches Deb Dana. “We can learn to access an embodied, biological resource that is always present, available, and there to guide us toward well-being.”]]> 208 Deb Dana 1683647068 Ed 3 3.94 Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory
author: Deb Dana
name: Ed
average rating: 3.94
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2022/12/30
date added: 2023/12/20
shelves:
review:
Okay, I didn't actually finish this, but I got a lot of good stuff from it! Awareness of the polyvagal system. I'll come back to it one day, I'm sure.
]]> The Lost Pianos of Siberia 53176764 448 Sophy Roberts 1784162841 Ed 3 3.87 2020 The Lost Pianos of Siberia
author: Sophy Roberts
name: Ed
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/20
date added: 2023/12/20
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A beautiful book of finding what you didn't set out to look for. Of keeping your eyes open and your feet searching so you always stand a chance of finding it.
]]> The Other Side of the Fire 1207096 Book by Ellis, Alice Thomas 156 Alice Thomas Ellis 0670529591 Ed 3 3.77 1983 The Other Side of the Fire
author: Alice Thomas Ellis
name: Ed
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1983
rating: 3
read at: 2019/11/15
date added: 2023/12/11
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]]> <![CDATA[The Varieties of Religious Experience]]> 28820
When William James went to the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver a series of lectures on "natural religion," he defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Considering religion, then, not as it is defined by--or takes place in--the churches, but as it is felt in everyday life, he undertook a project that, upon completion, stands not only as one of the most important texts on psychology ever written, not only as a vitally serious contemplation of spirituality, but for many critics one of the best works of nonfiction written in the 20th century. Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience, it is easy to see why. Applying his analytic clarity to religious accounts from a variety of sources, James elaborates a pluralistic framework in which "the divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions." It's an intellectual call for serious religious tolerance � indeed, respect � the vitality of which has not diminished through the subsequent decades.]]> 519 William James 1402199031 Ed 0 to-read 4.00 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience
author: William James
name: Ed
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1902
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933�1957]]> 25246828
Leap Before You Look is a singular exploration of this legendary school and of the work of the artists who spent time there. Scholars from a variety of fields contribute original essays about diverse aspects of the College—spanning everything from its farm program to the influence of Bauhaus principles—and about the people and ideas that gave it such a lasting impact. In addition, catalogue entries highlight selected works, including writings, musical compositions, visual arts, and crafts. The book’s fresh approach and rich illustration program convey the atmosphere of creativity and experimentation that was unique to Black Mountain College, and that served as an inspiration to so many. This timely volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in the College and its enduring legacy.]]> 400 Helen Molesworth 0300211910 Ed 0 to-read 4.66 2015 Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957
author: Helen Molesworth
name: Ed
average rating: 4.66
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/04
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]]> Something in Disguise 723656 288 Elizabeth Jane Howard 0330332023 Ed 0 to-read 3.89 1969 Something in Disguise
author: Elizabeth Jane Howard
name: Ed
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1969
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/04
shelves: to-read
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]]> The Western Wind 40554129
Moving back in time towards the moment of Thomas Newman’s death, the story is related by Reve � an extraordinary creation, a patient shepherd to his wayward flock, and a man with secrets of his own to keep. Through his eyes, and his indelible voice, Harvey creates a medieval world entirely tangible in its immediacy.]]> 304 Samantha Harvey 1784708038 Ed 4 3.40 2018 The Western Wind
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Ed
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/30
date added: 2023/11/30
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A book of beautiful prose, of characters that come to life, written with such intricate care, as if intriciately carved in the oak of the priests confessional booth. The wind and engorged, furious river characters too, the mud and cold that lives around them, decorating their lives in things that aren't always pleasant, but bring light to their candles nontheless.
]]> Bright Travellers 18300254 Winner of the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize
Winner of the 2015 Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize for First Full Collection

In this remarkable, intensely moving, first collection, Fiona Benson shows her fascination with human experience. The poems move on archaeological fast-forward from submerged Devonian forests and a Paleolithic cave-bear skull to the site of decommissioned submarines at HMNB Devonport, where the sea is ‘still a torpedo-path, / an Armageddon road�. She explores the shared human continuum of bodily longing � from the Prehistoric maker of a wooden fertility fetish, to a modern-day couple wading through summer pollen � and the timeless cycles of conception, birth and child-rearing.

A central sequence of dramatic monologues addressed to Van Gogh allows for a focussed exploration of depression, violence, passion and creativity. In these poems, as in all the poems in this impressive debut, we feel keenly the sense of life lived at the edge of threat � catastrophe, even � but also on the cusp of beauty and happiness. Other poems about the bewildering loss of miscarriage are hard to read and impossible to forget, moving with grace and authority through great grief to arrive at a hard-won destination of selfless, unqualified love.

‘I remember again / the corridor / of the labour ward // and that woman / sitting weeping / with her man // having given birth / to a death � / small grey face, // no breath, / something you cannot help / but love � // habibi, akushla, /I go home alone / but carry you, // courie you, / little slipped thing, / to the ends of the earth.’]> 80 Fiona Benson 0224099493 Ed 4 4.04 2014 Bright Travellers
author: Fiona Benson
name: Ed
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/29
date added: 2023/11/29
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A beautiful book. So rare is the ability to completely to transport me into somebody's experience, to make it come alive as if I were living it myself. And though I never will, be a mother to a daughter, it felt like I was whilst I were reading those pages.
]]> <![CDATA[Selected Poems (English and Russian Edition)]]> 1592065 The Clay Verge in 1951 to 1995’s The Cured Arno. Awkward, radical, nature-baiting landscape poems full of pain and anguish give way to monologues, biographical sketches, broader themes and looser forms. The settings of white tips, flooded pits and the grinding works of the industrial-rural clayscape are replaced by the rivers and bridges of Florence and Venice and the coastal ease of Dorset. However, as Rowan Williams states in his introduction, ‘mellow is not the word� for this transformation. Clemo remained till the end a rare rebellious voice, representing a unique poetic perspective and personal experience.]]> Jack Clemo 1852240520 Ed 3 3.67 1993 Selected Poems (English and Russian Edition)
author: Jack Clemo
name: Ed
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2023/11/15
date added: 2023/11/14
shelves:
review:
A man forever tied to the clay. To read his life's journey in relation to the clay that birthed him and stayed with him to the end. I never knew the clay could have such power over a man. It's not one I feel a kinship too, but I understood it's hold over him, and could appreciate the gleaning's he got from it. The medium through which one can see one's relation to the world. To the world that made us, sculpted us, absorbs our sins, and can ultimately allow us to be reformed in the heavy shape that we choose.
]]> The Woman in Me 63132652 The Woman in Me is a brave and astonishingly moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.

In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

Written with remarkable candor and humor, Spears’s groundbreaking book illuminates the enduring power of music and love—and the importance of a woman telling her own story, on her own terms, at last.]]> 6 Britney Spears 1797159518 Ed 4 3.90 2023 The Woman in Me
author: Britney Spears
name: Ed
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/13
date added: 2023/11/13
shelves:
review:
A well-crafted modern horror story. So heartbreaking that it happens to be true. The shackles put on a sweet woman's mind, body and spirit, to turn her into a golden goose that has no option but to keep laying those sparkling eggs.
]]> Sounds Wild and Broken 58598884 An awe-inspiring exploration of the sounds of the living Earth, and the joys and threats of human music, language and noise. 'A symphony, filled with the music of life . . . fascinating, heartbreaking, and beautifully written.'ELIZABETH KOLBERT, author of The Sixth Extinction'Sounds Wild and Broken affirms Haskell as a laureate for the earth, his finely tuned scientific observations made more potent by his deep love for the wild he hopes to save.' NEW YORK TIMES 'Wonderful . . . a reminder that the narrow aural spectrum on which most of us operate, and the ways in which human life is led, blocks out the planet's great, orchestral richness.' GUARDIAN We live on a planet alive with song, music, and speech. David George Haskell explores how these wonders came to be. In rainforests shimmering with insect sounds and swamps pulsing with frog calls we learn about evolution's creative powers. From birds in the Rocky Mountains and on the streets of Paris, we discover how animals learn their songs and adapt to new environments. Below the waves, we hear our kinship to beings as different as snapping shrimp, toadfish, and whales. In the startlingly divergent sonic vibes of the animals of different continents, we experience the legacies of plate tectonics, the deep history of animals and their movements around the world, and the quirks of aesthetic evolution.Starting with the origins of animal song and traversing the whole arc of Earth's history, Haskell illuminates and celebrates the emergence of the varied sounds of our world. In mammoth ivory flutes from Paleolithic caves, violins in modern concert halls, and electronic music in earbuds, we learn that human music and language belong within this story of ecology and evolution. Yet we are also destroyers, now silencing or smothering many of the sounds of the living Earth. Haskell takes us to threatened forests, noise-filled oceans, and loud city streets to show that sonic crises are not mere losses of sensory ornament. Sound is a generative force, and so the erasure of sonic diversity makes the world less creative, less beautiful. Sounds Wild and Broken is an invitation to listen, wonder, act.'Absolutely fascinating.' MARIELLA FROSTRUP, TIMES RADIO'Enlightening and sobering.' JINI REDDY, METRO]]> 448 David George Haskell 0571361978 Ed 5
(I especially liked the bit where he talked about how violins use the human skull to receive and amplify their reverberations, and how this is an intimate part of their sound. It made me want to hold the guitar as close as I can to my body when I play. To feel the vibrations of wood and steel carry through my chest, to feel it in my whole being, not only my ears.)]]> 3.80 2022 Sounds Wild and Broken
author: David George Haskell
name: Ed
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/27
date added: 2023/10/28
shelves:
review:
A beautiful book. Felt like a guided exploration of sound through all it's dimensions, from it's hugest scopes, as big as trees and the wind, or whales and the seas, to the tiny individual insect sounds that make up the choruses of the millions, lighting up the summer fields. From the ancient evolution of noise, the first beginnings of animal sound, to the modern day. From the peaceful quiet of the forest to the mad clamour of the modern city. And the author was a brilliant tourguide, with the interest of a scientist, but a level of artistry with words that made each subject come alive in your mind and make each sentence a joy to read.

(I especially liked the bit where he talked about how violins use the human skull to receive and amplify their reverberations, and how this is an intimate part of their sound. It made me want to hold the guitar as close as I can to my body when I play. To feel the vibrations of wood and steel carry through my chest, to feel it in my whole being, not only my ears.)
]]> The Go-Between 258079 The Go-Between is edited with an introduction and notes by Douglas Brooks-Davies in Penguin Modern Classics.

'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'

When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy's awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.

Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972) was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. For more than thirty years from 1923 he was an indefatigable fiction reviewer for periodicals including the Spectator and Saturday Review. His first book, Night Fears (1924) was a collection of short stories; but it was not until the publication of Eustace and Hilda (1947), which won the James Tait Black prize, that Hartley gained widespread recognition as an author. His other novels include The Go-Between (1953), which was adapted into an internationally-successful film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, and The Hireling (1957), the film version of which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

If you enjoyed The Go-Between, you might like Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Magical and disturbing'
Independent

'On a first reading, it is a beautifully wrought description of a small boy's loss of innocence long ago. But, visited a second time, the knowledge of approaching, unavoidable tragedy makes it far more poignant and painful'
Express]]> 326 L.P. Hartley 0940322994 Ed 0 to-read 3.99 1953 The Go-Between
author: L.P. Hartley
name: Ed
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1953
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Month in the Country 60707 160 J.L. Carr 0940322471 Ed 0 to-read 4.10 1980 A Month in the Country
author: J.L. Carr
name: Ed
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/10/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment]]> 28012
According to esteemed psychologist and bestselling author Martin Seligman, happiness is not the result of good genes or luck. Real, lasting happiness comes from focusing on one’s personal strengths rather than weaknesses—and working with them to improve all aspects of one’s life. Using practical exercises, brief tests, and a dynamic website program, Seligman shows readers how to identify their highest virtues and use them in ways they haven’t yet considered. Accessible and proven, Authentic Happiness is the most powerful work of popular psychology in years.]]> 336 Martin E.P. Seligman 0743222989 Ed 4 3.91 2002 Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment
author: Martin E.P. Seligman
name: Ed
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/25
date added: 2023/10/27
shelves:
review:
My heart and my head are a bit more open now. To see the value of keeping yourself flying, rather than trying to pick yourself back up off the floor after you've crashed. How much easier it is to make adjustments in the air than to fix your broken wings from hitting the ground.
]]> <![CDATA[Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism]]> 75560036
Capitalism is dead. Welcome to technofeudalism. The perfect Christmas gift for the political visionaries in your life.

In his boldest and most far-reaching book, the visionary economist and number-one bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis shows how the owners of big tech became the world's feudal overlords � replacing capitalism with a fundamentally new system that enslaves our minds, defies democracy and rewrite the rules of global power.

But as Varoufakis also reveals, technofeudalism contains new opportunities to thwart and overturn it, bringing into focus more clearly than ever the revolution we need to escape our digital prison.

‘An epochal, once-in-a-millennium shift . . . this isn't just new technology. This is the world grappling with an entirely new economic system and therefore political power� Observer

‘An urgent demand to seize the means of computation� CORY DOCTOROW

A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR]]> 224 Yanis Varoufakis Ed 0 to-read 4.04 2023 Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
author: Yanis Varoufakis
name: Ed
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/09/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Sunflower 382619
In Sunflower young Eveline leaves the city and returns to her country estate to escape the memory of her desperate love for the unscrupulous charmer Kálmán. There she encounters the melancholy Álmos-Dreamer, who is languishing for love of her, and is visited by the bizarre and beautiful Miss Maszkerádi, a woman who is a force of nature. The plot twists and turns; elemental myth mingles with sheer farce: Krúdy brilliantly illuminates the shifting contours and acid colors of the landscape of desire.

John Bátki’s outstanding translation of Sunflower is the perfect introduction to the world of Gyula Krúdy, a genius as singular as Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz, or Joseph Roth.]]> 229 Gyula Krúdy 1590171861 Ed 4 3.77 1918 Sunflower
author: Gyula Krúdy
name: Ed
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1918
rating: 4
read at: 2023/08/20
date added: 2023/08/21
shelves:
review:
Such beautiful, unraveling prose. It loops from subject to event, to setting, to metaphor, to further dreamlike metaphors that wind and spiral away from the origin and finally come back after a journey into the sky above, and somehow, what was happening still matters, but so does the journey you went, and your mind's left reeling, in a daze, trying to connect them together. And sometimes you become just a bit too untethered to hold it together, but it doesn't matter, because you're having a nice time reading it. The plot seemed to do this as well, until by the end of the book I couldn't remember if it was even about the same characters anymore. And it doesn't matter anyway, because those "crazy live(s) rush headlong on the highway for others; we shall contemplate the sunflowers, watch them sprout, blossom, and fade away."
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