Fan Girl Wannabe

I've been waiting a long time for this book. It's number 5 in the Earth's Children series, which started with Clan of the Cave Bear in 1980. The next books followed in '82, '85, 90, and finally, 2002. Of course, I never read them right as they came out either, my mom had them in paperback to begin with, and I read the first 2 back-to-back. She couldn't wait for the 3rd to go to paperback though, so she got that one in hardcover. I was going to check out #5 from the library when it first came out, but never got around to it. The long delay between 4 & 5 I believe was due to a serious illness, but I can't find confirmation of that. A good friend had once told me Auel had died, and the series was never going to be completed. I didn't believe her at the time, and it turned out I was right, a good thing for both Auel and her 34 million fans.

Anyway, I really liked the first 2 books. There was a lot of fresh story to tell, a lot of historical background (technically pre-historical) to learn, and it was fascinating. Book 1 covered about 8-9 yrs of Ayla's life, book 2 picked up the next 3. The 3rd wasn't quite as good, because with the introduction of extra characters (and the excess drama that came with them) and Auel's penchant for over-repeating herself so you'll remember what happened before, there just wasn't alot of new story. I had hoped the 4th would be better, but it was about the same. Books 3 & 4 both covered about a year each. In my mind, Shelters of Stone was the last of the series, so I figured I'd get around to reading it eventually, just for the completion, ya know?

Looking back over my 2006 entries tagged "books" and "movies," I see I had an interesting looking year, but my review writing is not really reflective of how I spend my down time.


That’s the published year in review. The 2007 reading list includes last year’s unfinished or untouched stuff, a couple of poets and a teen-aged wizard’s final chapter.

If You Want to Write (A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit) by Brenda Ueland
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
Flight Into Danger by E. K. Barber
Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) by JK Rowling
Wicked (The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West) by Gregory Maguire
The Cohousing Handbook by Chris Hansen (at this point, not likely to ever be my lifestyle, but still interesting)

And Italian Farmhouse Cookbook by Susan Herrmann Loomis which jumped to the front of the list and is currently underway since I liberated it from bzdchris’s bookshelf last weekend. What? Cookbooks are always going to beat out everything else.

I’ve already finished Heat by Bill Buford (currently on the second pass) which I highly recommend to anyone who has an interest in food, cooking, restaurants, Mario Batali, Italy, or if you just love the sound of the Italian language (we’ve got it in audio format, read by Buford, and he does a great job of the telling and reading). Bill thought he wanted to learn about professional cooking, the underbelly of the restaurant industry, so he indentured himself to Batali, learned tons of stuff along the way, and finally realized that his mission all along had been to learn about real food, real cooking, the kind of stuff you only get from the current holder of generations’ of wisdom, not the stuff you get from three-star restaurants. Love it.

During my last 2 trips to Indiana, I "read" three books:  Living the Art of Allowing by Esther and Jerry Hicks (subtitled the teachings of Abraham), Invisible Acts of Power-Channeling Grace in Your Everyday Life by Caroline Myss, and Gonzo Marketing By Christopher Locke.  One and Three were audio books, with Jerry Hicks and Christopher Locke reading their work.

Living the Art of Allowing was actually the first half of the book, and it mostly dealt with "aligning the vibrational energy" of your wishes or intentions with your beliefs or at least your thinking.  A good example would be a wish of "I want to live a long time" vs. the most common belief of  "there are so many things that could come out of the blue and kill me (cancer, buses, etc.)."  To bring these two conflicting ideas into alignment, you train yourself to readjust your thinking.  The wish "I want to live a long time" is better supported by the thoughts "in this time in our society, we have learned many ways of prolonging life," or "medical science can cure all kinds of bizarre things." Or, you know, anything pollyannaish that you can think of that could be more positive than "omg, I'm gonna die, die, die."  So.  While I do believe in positive thought, being a fairly optimistic person, and therefore predisposed to being accepting of the message of this missive, I also have to say that I was not impressed with the delivery or packaging of the message.  In fact, I suspect that the packaging (HALF the book - which means you'll have to fork over another chunk of money to get to the end (maybe you'll find it in the library, but no guarantee)) will be off-putting to a great deal of the intended audience.  Also, the delivery was wonky, as "Abraham" is purportedly a collective consciousness that loves us and wants us to be happy, and therefore is speaking to us through Esther Hicks.  Jerry just transcribes the message and reads the books to us.  The other piece of the message is that as long as our vibrations are aligned, the universe will never deny us anything we want, and we have the Hicks as examples of this truth.  I have to say that while listening to this, I was vividly reminded of Dianetics a book I purchased at the county fair when I was a teenager, and then did not actually read more than about 20 pages of.  If you're familiar with Christian Science, you'll recognize that this is the gateway message that sucks people in.  I felt extremely uncomfortable with the admonishment to read the book straight through-no skipping around-to get the most of the message.  It was already my practice to read straight through, but this struck me as an exercise in self-brainwashing so I sampled some random pages instead.  The sampling encouraged me to lay the book aside permanently.  Sorry L. Ron, even at that tender and impressionable age, you were never going to get me to blindly go along with whatever you wanted.

Onto Invisible Acts of Power-Channeling Grace in Your Everyday Life wherein Caroline Myss talks about all kinds of acts or examples of grace and how they can be grouped into 7 categories that magically align with your seven chakras.  Yep, chakras.  Thanks to  my good friend, Wilson, any mention of chakras now throws me "out of the room."  Funny thing that, since I don't discount the chakra thing at all, it's just that Wil's made me be much more discerning about the topic.  So she goes throught the acts of grace that correspond, one-to-one and I realize that the whole technique from Living the Art of Allowing is centered on the 5th chakra, resident in the throat, and has to do with the mind's power.  So, mind over matter.  This is really a good read, even though I was tearful in several places, because the book is riddled with personal accounts of people who have been on the receiving end of extraordinary acts of grace.  For me, it was a "pay it forward" validation.  It was a "feel-good" page turner, and I'm glad I picked it up.

Gonzo Marketing would seem to be a totally different type of book, but it had some interesting congruities with the other two.  The idea that "video killed the radio star" is completely outdated by the realization that "the internet killed the marketing stars."  Christopher Locke is intelligent and entertaining and I can buy his spiel hook, line & sinker.  What does this say about me? Here I'm going through these two touchy-feely books, and not swallow them wholesale, but this business-oriented philosophy has captured my brain.  But Locke isn't any ordinary businessman.  He's totally nouveau and completely appealing to my taste.  I learned a heck of a lot in 2.5 hours of cassette tapes, and no, I don't think any of it was at complete odds with the previous 2 titles.  I highly recommend this just for a touching-base with modern day life exercise.  Besides, he totally validates the power of the individual or at least the "micro-market." ::g::

Since we've joined Netflix, we've been getting quite a few things to watch (I finally saw Hard Core Logo!) and the most recent things were The Blue Man Group in a rock-something tour (sorry, bad memory) that was fan-fucking-tastic!  There was this rendition of "I Feel Love" by this woman in a neon-lit dress that was freakin' amazing.  The whole concert was great and had DH and I dancing in the living room. Rupert was also impressed.  I'd love to see these guys in person.

This weekend, we watched Starship Troopers.  Based on the Heinlein book, it turned out to be the goriest movie I've seen in many years, if not ever.  Very campy & cheesy in the 50s sci-fi style.  Fun re: 50s sci-fi, but also disturbing visuals for tenderhearted me.  DH was quite surprised by the heavy nazi symbolism.

We also watched the documentary about baseball park technology from the history channel.  I thought it was very interesting, natch, from a construction & engineering POV, in addition to the baseball POV.  I'm glad I got to see it, and it seemed very timely with the Little League World Series going on.  Those kids really make you believe in the future of baseball.  

A note on Hard Core Logo:  Rupert watched part of it with us and was very intrigued, but I don't think he watched it before we sent it back.  I enjoyed it thoroughly, and was happier for having seen it than I was with Men with Brooms.  CKR is totally hot and sexy in HCL.  PG is just his usual self in MwB, not that that's a bad thing at all, but it's just not as interesting as CKR in my book.  Did I mention the Blue Man Group?  We got one of their tour DVDs and it was AWESOME.  I thoroughly enjoyed their performance, and all the guest performers too.  Especially that woman in the crazy neon-lit dress singing "I Feel Love." 

ETA 8/31:  Wow, I just read this back and realized I talked about the Blue Man Group twice, and said almost the exact same thing twice.  The mind is definitely the first thing to go.  The reason I was re-reading this was to see if I had already written about Starship Troopers and the baseball doc.  sheesh.

No, I'm not really a writer.  I do love reading just about anything that is extremely well-written though.  I'm also pretty decent as a technical writer/editor.  I've dabbled on and off in creative writing, but I rarely finish anything I start because I never think what I'm working on measures up to all the wonderful examples I've personally read.

Earlier this year, I picked up "The Best American Science Writing 2005," edited by Alan Lightman.  It's a fairly small paperback volume that has been riding around in my purse for several months.  I pull it out whenever I'm in a Dr.'s office, which is nearly every Friday this year.  Last week, the article I was reading, "Dining with Robots" by Ellen Ullman turned out to be some fabulous food porn!  I want to share it here, but I've done food to death lately, so today I'm sharing the next-to-last article, "The Sea of Information" by Andrea Barrett.  Ms. Barrett is a novelist, and her essay "...illuminates the differences in the way that artists and scientists work, especially in their use of information" (Lightman).  The passages that struck me most were:


I'm really glad I found this compilation.  There are some fascinating and informative articles and essays in it; only 2 in the whole list didn't hold my attention.  I never would have seen any of these on my own, so the compilation serves a useful purpose in giving these fine works greater exposure.  I'm sure that's exactly what the editors intended, so yay for them.  And yay for me, because I'll be looking for the 2006 volume as soon as the year turns.