Inside the Fishbowl

I Succumbed

Yesterday I began my week with the goal to clean my house really well.  I had a great day.  I cleaned out my room (it gets really messy during my company-heavy guest season--everything that I didn't have time to clean just gets shoved in there), dusted all of the furniture and blinds, cleaned my bathroom, cleaned out under my bed and night stands, vacuumed and shampooed my carpets.  My room is immaculate.  Add to that 11 loads of laundry, a partially clean kitchen and a straightened family room, and I would say I had a pretty good day.  Then I sat down to read my book club book, The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins.  At 11:00 I could hardly stand to put my Kindle down.  This morning I set my kids up in front of the TV for their morning cartoons and snuck upstairs to read for a little while before I had to start getting ready for the day.  I got the kids off to school and then went out to run errands.  I should have been home by noon.  I should have had 2 and a half hours to work on finishing cleaning my main floor.  It really, really what I intended to do.  But I couldn't.  I had to give myself over to the power of the book.  It was that good!  I finished it around 2:00 today.  Of course I wanted to start the next book in the series, Catching Fire immediately so I turned on the Kindle's wireless and searched.  It wasn't there.  IT. WASN"T. THERE!  How dare they lure us in and then not give us more!  Luckily today is dance day.  Dance brings me within a few miles of a Barnes and Noble.  I am now the proud owner of Catching Fire.  I will begin it tonight when I finish my Relief Society visits.  I can hardly wait!  Sorry house.  You have been moved to the back burner.

Two Books

I read two really good books that last few weeks of the year that I thought I'd share with you.  

The first was The Wednesday Sisters.  It's a great story about the power of friendship among a group of women.  This one really rang true with me.  I loved all of the women in the story.  

The second was The Whistling Season.  It's a coming of age story about a 13 year old boy on the Montana prairie in the early 1900s.  I didn't expect to like this one as much as I did.  I now want to read more of Ivan Doig's work to see if his other books are as engaging.  If you're looking for a good book to read, I would recommend either of these to anyone.

Reading

Just a quick post to tell you all that I just finished The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society last night after ignoring my children all day to read it.  I couldn't put it down.  I. Loved. It.  Period.  But that's all I can say right now because it's a book club book, and we do not allow any pre-book club discussion (PBD).

Now I'm busy looking up pictures of Guernsey in Google Images and plotting how I'm going to get myself there next year.

Go out and get it.  They may still have it a Costco even, so it will be cheap.  You won't regret it.  I promise.

Now I can begin my Wednesday afternoon date with my Kitchenaid.  Home baked bread in 3 hours. Anybody want some?

The Gentle Art of Domesticity

I cannot say how much I loved this book!  I finished it on Saturday and I've been in deep mourning ever since.  I'm even considering reading it again, but alas, Hardy's Tess awaits me.  Maybe after I read that tragedy I'll need a little of the domestic arts again.  I'll at least flip through it to look at the gorgeous and vivid photography of cupcakes and quilts.

The Gentle Art of Domseticity is a beautiful book by Jane Brocket, author of the bog yarnstorm (check it out!).  In it she discusses the gentle arts of homemaking--baking, knitting, quilting, embroidery, crochet, gardening--and how they are uplifting, fulfilling, and essential to making a house a home.  She gives her readers permission to not have to create perfection (handmade things are rarely perfect), not to become overwhelmed with the rigors of housekeeping (though it is essential to get our hands dirty with the business of straightening and clenaing), and most importantly to do things that make you and your family feel comfortable in your own home.  The gentle arts are for everybody, stay at home and working moms alike, children and even (shockingly ;) ) boys and men.  Brocket's son, for example, is her quilting partner.  She appreciates his sense of color and design as he helps her lay out her quilts. Of course, Brocket doesn't say that you have to knit or quilt or crochet or embroider or participate in any of the domestic arts that she does.  The domestic arts are personal and should be beautiful and not guilt inducing.  I think the message if this book is to find the domestic activites that appeal to you most and get creative with them.

I especially loved her discussion of the recognition of the gentle arts in literature, film and art.  Her section on domestic films has added some Cary Grant movies that I've never seen to my Netflix queue. Her section on domestic books has led me to Persephone Books, a publisher that specializes in reprinting books written by and for women in the between war years in England.  They have some real gems!  My first is coming in the mail later this month.

Most importantly, this book has added to the list of countries I would consider expatriating to if I had the chance or inclination. And FYI--my other counties are France and Sweden, just in case you were wondering.  Oh, and maybe Italy, if it's the Italian Alps, or Sienna.  OK,maybe that's not the most important, but The Gentle Art of Domesticity got me dreaming, and that is never a bad thing, is it?  

Lets Talk Books

Enough of the travel posts!  There is more I could write.  But I'm bored of talking travel for now. Right now I want to tell you about a few books I've read lately.

After having been bogged down in Egdon Heath, the fictional setting for Hardy's Return of the Native, and the drama of Clym Yeobright, Eustacia Vye, Thomasin Yoebright and Damon Wildeve (I only write these entire names out because I love the character names in 19th century British literature!) I have been fortunate to have chosen some really good books to read next.  Not that I don't like Hardy.  I just think I've decided that he needs to be read in the wintertime.

The first book I read was The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  Good, good book, a real page turner.  This book probably isn't for everyone, there is quite a bit of swearing, and some sexual situations, but if you like mystery, tortured love, old European cities (in this case Barcelona) and most importantly, literature, you will probably enjoy this book.  There is something so appealing about books about Spanish-language literature.  Perhaps it's the worldview of Spanish speaking people and the Old World that seems to be infused in every work that I have ever read.  Perhaps it's that these works seem to transcend time. Time is usually unimportant in works by Spanish-language authors.  The stories that they write could have taken place at any time.  And so it's easy to lose oneself in the story. Perhaps it's the magical realism that also seems to find itself in every Spanish author's work.  All I can do is urge you to read this book and see if you feel as drawn to it as I do.  And then fervently hope that more of Zafon's works are translated to English so we can enjoy more.  

The second book I read was A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.  Jeremy and I are taking the kids to Paris this year during Thanksgiving.  Since my trip to Italy was enhanced so much by reading about Italy before I went, I decided to read several books about or set in Paris before we go. A Moveable Feast is Hemingway's memoir about the years he lived in Paris when he was still a struggling writer, married to his first wife, Hadley, and hanging out with the likes of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and other literary and artistic luminaries of the day.  Hemingway and I have not had the best relationship.  In high school I read The Old Man and the Sea--not a fan, though I should reread it now that I'm older.  Then years ago I picked up A Farewell To Arms, still not a big fan.  So I picked up A Moveable Feast with a little trepidation, wondering why I was subjecting myself to another Hemingway when I have several other books about Paris on my bookshelves.  I was, to put it mildly, pleasantly surprised with how much I loved this book.  It drew me in, kept me reading, and had me laughing.  After reading this book, I've decided to give Hemingway's novels another chance.  I'm going to be reading The Sun Also Rises soon.  He wrote this book in Paris during the years depicted in A Moveable Feast.  I'm hoping my affection for that book, help me to enjoy his first major work.  I'll report back and let you know.

Finally, I read a book called A Writer's Paris by Eric Maisel.  The only writing I do is on this blog, but it's fun to dream, and that's where this book comes in.  The idea behind this book is to give up your everyday life for a period of time to go live and write in Paris.  Maisel contends that even if it's only for a month, every writer should go to Paris to write.  He sets down a rigorous writing schedule (you are there, after all, to write), a tells the best places to write in the city, and most importantly, he makes the reader believe that it's an easily obtainable goal.  For me, who will be saddled with a husband and two children when I visit next ;), it just evokes a sense of the beauty and artistry of that city that reminds me of what I saw and thought and felt while I was there.  Incidentally, Maisel wrote another book called A Writer's San Francisco, in which he states, "Paris and San Francisco are sister cities. . . .They are connected by being two of the world's very few bohemian meccas.  Each is an important stop on the bohemian international highway."  No wonder why I loved Paris the minute I stepped of the plane! Though hardly bohemian myself, I love the bohemian nature of San Francisco.

So there you have it.  The three books that captured my attention in August.  Now I'm reading The Woman in White by Wikie Collins.  I'm enjoying it tremendously, and even if I wasn't I would still have to read it just to see what a writer who goes by "Wilkie" would come up with.  Happy reading in September!

Finished!!!

And it was so, so GOOD!

Back from Italy

Yes, I'm back from Italy. We arrived home a week ago after one very grueling day of travel, which I will write more about later. Now I'm just playing catch up. The laundry's done, I have one more little pile of things to put away and I'm working up the courage to tackle the dirt and mess that two weeks (well three now) of no deep cleaning can leave. On top of it all I have a tonsil infection and absolutely no voice, and Jeremy's leaving for India tomorrow. Also, I'm trying to sort through all of the pictures and pick out some good ones for a nice Italian travel post. Maybe by Friday I'll be able to post. We'll see.

But, my presence in the Blogosphere has been too long. So I thought I'd do a little review of a book I read while in Italy. It's called, Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. It's about a woman, recently divorced, recently broken up with her latest love, who is depressed and broken. She decides to take a year off to travel. She decided to go to three different places, Italy, India and Indonesia. She chose Italy to learn how to appreciate beauty, India to learn devotion or deeper spirituality, and Indonesia to learn how to fuse the two together. I loved this book, but it may not be for everyone. There is some (not too much) coarse language, and one sexual encounter that gets kind of descriptive. And although I don't necessarily agree with her philosophically, and my journey would be very different from hers, I think there are some realy nuggets of wisdom that can be found. In true Jill style, here are a few of my favorite quotes. In my mind there is no possible way to do this book justice.

ITALY
Page 23: For years I'd wished that I could speak Italian--a language I find more beautiful than roses--but I could never make the practical justification for studying it. Why not just bone up on the French or Russian I'd already studied years ago? Or learn to speak Spanish, the better to help me communicate with millions of my fellow Americans? What was I going to do with Italian? It's not like I was going to move there. It would be more practical to learn to play the accordion.
But why must everything always have a practical application? I'd been such a diligent soldier for years--working, producing, never missing a deadline, taking care of my loved ones, my gums and my credit record, voting, etc. Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty?

Page 44: Everybody, even the uptight German engineer, shares what I thought was my own personal motive: we all want to speak Italian because we love the way it makes us feel. A sad-faced Russian woman tells us she's treating herself to Italian lessons because "I think I deserve something beautiful." The German engineer says, "I want Italian because I love the dolce vita"--the sweet life.

Page 90: A family in my sister's neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three0year old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, "Dear God, that family needs grace." She replied firmly, "That family needs casseroles," and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I don't know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace.

Page 113: "No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws," Plato wrote, "when its citizens. . .do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love."
But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel thorough time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then do it again the next day?

Page 114: To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business--not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking into. . .rhetoric and plot.

Page 115: . . .and when you sense a faint potentially for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt--this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.

INDIA
Page 122: The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. . .The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think that were individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentment and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper diving character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.

Page 176-177: Casting yourself at God's feet in helpless desperation is all well and good--heaven knows, I've done it myself plenty of times--but ultimately you're likely to get more out of the experience if you can take some action on your end. There's a wonderful old Italian joke about a poor man who goes to church every day and prays before the statue of a great saint, begging, "Dear saint--please, please, please. . .give me the grace to win the lottery." This lament goes on for months. Finally the exasperated statue comes to life, looks down at the begging man and says in weary disgust, "My son--please, please, please. . .buy a ticket."
Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm aiming for, how will it ever occur? Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention.

Page 177: Prayers can become stale and drone into the boring and familiar if you let your attention stagnate. In making an effort to stay alert, I am assuming custodial responsibility for the maintenance of my own soul.

Page 177: There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction. There are certain lottery tickets I can buy thereby increasing my odds of finding contentment. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I eat and read and study. I can choose how I'm going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life--whether I will see them as curses of opportunities (and on the occasions when I can't rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I'm feeling too sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook). I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all I can choose my thoughts.

Page 196: Most of us, even if only for two minutes in our lives, have experienced at some time or another an inexplicable and random sense of complete bliss, unrelated to anything that was happening in the outside world. One instant you're just a regular Joe, schlepping through your mundane life, and then suddenly--what is this?--nothing has changed, yet you feel stirred by grace, swollen with wonder, overflowing with bliss. Everything--for no reason whatever--is perfect.

INDONESIA
Page 260: Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don't, you will leak away your contentment. It's easy enough to pray when you're in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to it's good attainments.

Page 260: I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey told me once--that all the sorrow in the world is caused by unhappy people. Not only in the big global Hilter-'n'-Stalin picture, but also on the smallest personal level. Even in my own life, I can see exactly where my episodes of unhappiness have brought suffering or distress or (at very least) inconvenience to those around me. The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease to be an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.

Son of a Witch by Gregory Maguire

Dear Author of the wonderful Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, et al,

Oh, Gregory Maguire, I love you, but why did you have to write Son of a Witch? It's not that I hated it. I found it quite entertaining in some places. Very crude in others. What I didn't enjoy was the feeling that I'd been preached to for some 330 pages about your views on everything from the War of Terror to gay marriage. I hate mixing politics with entertainment. Hate it. But I don't mind, in fact I love when political topics are dealt with subtly and in a thought provoking manner. You accomplished neither for me. You said nothing new, nothing creative. You simply echoed the voice of the media, the voice of the gay community, the voice of war dissenters. All I have to say in response is "yawn". And the most disapointing thing is about it is that you used the success of Wicked, one of my all time favorite books, to write such drivel. I've read everything you've written, and I've rarely been as let down as I was with this book. Please, please, redeem yourself with your next. I'll only give you one more chance. There are too many good authors out there to waste my time on somedody who has so little to say.

Sincerely,

A Disappointed Fan, Who Expected More