Don Quixote

 

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Full disclosure: I wrote an Honors English paper on Don Quixote as an undergraduate. I never actually read it. What's more, I got an A, which means my professor had probably never read it either. So now, about 30 years later I can finally say I've read it. When you consider that this was written in 1605-1615, it really holds up remarkably well. There is something undeniably inspiring in a person who follows their dreams especially in the face of naysayers. What I loved is how in part 2, Quixote actually becomes a knight for all intents and purposes, as people start treating him that way. In fact, everything he sets out to do, he does. Plenty of humor, entertaining anecdotes, and wise words. If it goes just a bit too long, most good novels do.

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“It is your fear, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “that keeps you from seeing or hearing properly, because one of the effects of fear is to cloud the senses and make things appear other than they are;

His only obligation is to help them because they are in need, turning his eyes to their suffering and not their wickedness.

Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha

the madness of the master, without the simplicity of the servant, would not be worth anything.”

Not all those called knights are knights through and through; some are gold, others alchemical, and all appear to be knights, but not all can pass a test by touch-stone. 3

there is no poet who is not arrogant and does not think himself the greatest poet in the world.”

deceivers are as mad as the deceived,

when I’m busy digging I never think about my better half, I mean my Teresa Panza, and I love her more than my eyelashes.”

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This much talked-about book is hard to rate. It is mostly a memoir, with factoids about therapy, and the stories of the people whom this therapist sees. While I didn't particularly relate to Gottlieb and at times found her humble-brags a bit annoying, I respected her need to seek out therapy for a crisis in her life. Her observations about therapy are also helpful and well demonstrated by her patients' stories which are in turns entertaining, heart-breaking, and inspiring. However, I couldn't get past that regardless of changed names, disguised story-lines, permissions granted, these are real peoples's stories and if I ever went to a therapist and then read about my life in a book, I would feel violated and vulnerable. Especially since it's more than the story--it's her reaction and interaction with the patients. In fact, I think I am less inclined to go to a therapist now than before I read this, wondering if my therapist is tolerating me, confused by me, or even annoyed by me. What I took away from this is that we could all use some introspection, that we are often the ones stopping ourselves from progressing, and that the future matters more than the past.

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People want to be understood and to understand, but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don't know what our problem is.  We keep stepping in the same puddle.  why do I do the very thing that will guarantee my own unhappiness over and over again?

irrational fear of joy: cherophobia (hero is the Greek word for "rejoice").

Christ and the New Covenant

Christ and the New Covenant: The Messianic Message of the Book of Mormon by Jeffrey R. Holland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What I found most helpful in this exposition of teachings from the Book of Mormon, besides having teachings laid out clearly and concisely (and pretty well written), was the example of taking an event in the scriptures and actually breaking it down into its teaching parts to gain the most from it. You can generalize and say, oh Abinadi taught about the atonement, but what exactly did he teach? Also, just love Holland's take on life.

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Geek Sublime

Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software by Vikram Chandra
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Right now I am obsessed with the power of language. In it we can pass down eons of thought, insight, instruction. And saying things, putting it out in the universe, somehow allows for something to happen. That is why you write down goals, speak affirmations, shy away from talking about death. This book was described as explaining how coding and fiction are similar, and not knowing much about coding, I thought this might be interesting. I feel like there are some really good nuggets in here: how computers break all language down into 1's and 0's (and why), and how Sanskrit has been preserved for centuries as an uncorrupted language; how fiction and poetry use words to get to the emotion beneath the words and the limitations of any language. Still, I felt like I had to wade in deep, deep mud for any of these nuggets. Each chapter did not flow to the next, but dealt specifically about a subject: coding, Sanskrit, the gender politics of coding and writing, etc. And in each of these, there was so much technical detail, or foreign terms, or just minutiae that I often wondered what the point was. He attempts to make it cohesive in the final chapter, but even then I'm not sure I understood the point. Its a vomit of information--like the rough draft of a research paper. I feel like a few more passes over this, pruning away the extraneous and adding some rather pointed bits on how this is all related (probably obvious to Chandra who is so close to this, but lost on the rest of us regular non-coders and non-published writers) would make this a much more accessible and helpful read.

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the cult of modernity, in order to demonstrate the newness of modernity, needs to always insist on the chasms that separate modernity from the past.

the Vedas are chanted today exactly as they were almost four millennia ago, complete with archaic tones and usages present nowhere in the Sanskrit that followed.

So rasa—the word literally means “taste” or “juice”—is not emotion (bhava); it is the aestheticized satisfaction or “sentiment” of tasting artificially induced emotions.

The naive spectator who ascribes some sort of reality to what is happening on the stage and identifies personally with the emotions of the characters is incapable of rasa, which is an impersonal, disinterested pleasure.

The rasa is in the tasting of grief, in the relishing of grief, in the reflective cognizing of grief.

The pleasure of rasa comes from the meta-experience of experiencing oneself experience the stable emotions.

7. The Code of Beauty: Abhinavagupta

During the experience of rasa, according to Abhinavagupta, “what is enjoyed is consciousness itself.”

here, one’s own latent and personal memories of grief are liberated into “a universal, impersonal flavour.”

even language that does not cohere or produce mundane meaning may produce rasa.

the variety of suggestiveness is placed outside the human mind; it is the cause, not the result of poetic imagination.

Such a view is in harmony with the origin of the Sanskrit word for poet, kavi. A kavi is a seer, a revealer.

Sometimes the sheer vastness of what I want to put into fiction terrifies me.

The Octunnumi

 

The Octunnumi Fosbit Files Prologue by Trevor Alan Foris
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Foris gets lost in his own imagination so much that the reader is so overwhelmed by all the characters and Insominids (worlds) that they start not caring too much about it. There is some quick banter, tried and trite stock characters, and an almost developed plot line--(I really did care where the missing children and Nate were--until I didn't). The described worlds really are very imaginative and if the characters stayed in any of them long enough to really experience them, it could be a very stimulating and refreshing read. As it is, the reader is just too inundated to look around and take in the scenery. My niece bought the book because of the amazing marketing--the publicity, book design and packaging is really well-thought out and creates excitement--it even comes with a book mark. Hopefully, the rest of the series settles down a bit and concentrates more on less.

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More Than a Body

 

More Than a Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament by Lexie Kite
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This isn't 4 star in terms of writing--it can be clunky with overextended metaphors BUT it identifies an issue I think every woman I know, including myself, struggles with. And more than struggles with--it constitutes up the majority of what we think about, talk about, and spend money on. We all know we are more than what we look like, but knowing and KNOWING is two very different things when we are constantly bombarded with messages from media and friends and family that how we look is paramount (especially for women). But more than identifying an issue everyone knows is there, the Kite sisters give practical and important alternatives to the constant stream of self-judgement and judgement of others we are constantly making. By changing how we think about comparisons, judgements, criticisms, we change behavior. I have found myself being happier and kinder as a result. I would recommend every woman read this to help make adjustments in how we perceive ourselves and others.

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The Wretched of the Earth

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is not an easy read for several reasons, but it was one of the most enlightening reads about racial issues I've read. Fanon talks (this book was apparently dictated from his hospital bed) about the psychological impact of colonization, especially on the colonized. From South America to Africa he has identified certain cycles and predicted behaviors and outcomes stemming from colonialism. Although the age of colonialism is mostly behind us, the roles of the colonized (marginalized minorities) and colonizer (majority in position of power) still exist, and it helps explain some of the phenomenon we can still see in society today (why is there Black on Black violence, why are there gangs, why is there such animosity toward those in power when "they are only trying to help lift them", how does racism even occur). The psychology may not be what you think--but Fanon spells it out with examples. This is not to say I didn't have to re-read almost every sentence twice--it's very dense. Also, toward the end, his case studies on those who torture and those who get tortured show that in war everyone loses. Those were easier to understand, but harder to read because of the emotional impact it had. So, not a beach read, but important to start understanding power/post-conlonialism/ racial theories.

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For me words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question-mark."

Preface

Roughly, this meant: You are making monsters out of us; your humanism wants us to be universal and your racist practices are differentiating us.

Europe, therefore, has hardened the divisions and conflicts, forged classes, and in some cases, racism, and endeavored by every means to generate and deepen the stratification of colonized societies.

Read Fanon: you will see that in a time of helplessness, murderous rampage is the collective unconscious of the colonized.

This repressed rage, never managing to explode, goes round in circles and wreaks havoc on the oppressed themselves. In order to rid themselves of it they end up massacring each other, tribes battle one against the other since they cannot confront the real enemy—and you can count on colonial policy to fuel rivalries;

I. On Violence

The colonized know all that and roar with laughter every time they hear themselves called an animal by the other. For they know they are not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory.

The colonies have become a market. The colonial population is a consumer market.

colonialist bourgeoisie is aided and abetted in the pacification of the colonized by the inescapable powers of religion.

The very same people who had it constantly drummed into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now decide to express themselves with force.

II. Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity

The unions, the parties and the government, in a kind of immoral Machiavellianism, use the peasant masses as a blind, inert force of intervention. As a kind of brute force.

III. The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness

In the underdeveloped countries a bourgeois phase is out of the question. A police dictatorship or a caste of profiteers may very well be the case but a bourgeois society is doomed to failure.

For the people the party is not the authority but the organization whereby they, the people, exert their authority and will.

People must know where they are going and why.

And in the more or less long term a people gets the government it deserves.

The citizen must appropriate the bridge. Then, and only then, is everything possible.

The army is never a school for war, but a school for civics, a school for politics.

IV. On National Culture

When the colonized intellectual writing for his people uses the past he must do so with the intention of opening up the future, of spurring them into action and fostering hope.

By imparting new meaning and dynamism to artisanship, dance, music, literature, and the oral epic, the colonized subject restructures his own perception.

We believe the conscious, organized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation that exists.