Recent Book Read

Inside Dickens' London by Michael Paterson.

I have just started this book and it does not disappoint. It accumulates many written descriptions of London in Dickens' time, a time I am fascinated with.








Cannery Row by John Steinbeck.

A classic I just read for my bookclub. Short, sweet and entertaining.

Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman.

This book was nominated for the 2011 Man Booker Prize. The top 5 nominations are always worth a read every year. This one deals with a young immigrant boy who is caught in a harrowing and rough part of London. It is based on a real person.






Mapp & Lucia by E. F. Benson.

This was a book club choice and I found it hard to get into but managed to find it entertaining once in. It is about catty English women in early 20th century. I was astounded to find there is a whole series of books on the characters. I will not be reading them.

Mr. Chartwell by Rebecca Hunt.

It turns out the artist in the studio next to mine spent a year writing this fictional account of Churchhill and his depression which was published by Penguin. It is a great short and sweet read.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.

This was the Man Booker 2011 winner and well worth the read. Very introspective, philosophical and surprising.








The Hand that First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell.

I thought this book had such a nice flow to it. It was a book club choice and because I didn't manage to finish it in time I learned the surprise ending before I read it. That didn't seem to take away from the book at all though.

I will post books as I read them on the side bar under My Library.

Quote: George Alagiah

"I remember a piece of advice given to me by an ex-military instructor on one of the survival courses BBC foreign correspondents were sent on. 'When you're hurt, when you're wounded, there is nothing more you can do. You'll only make matters worse - for you and everyone else - if you try to charge around. Find somewhere quiet, somewhere dark and lie down. Stay awake but stay calm. Get your pulse rate right down. It's for your buddies to do the worrying.'" George Alagiah - A Home from Home: From Immigrant Boy to English Man

Quote: George Alagiah

Nigel and I are big fans of George Alagiah, reporter and newsreader for BBC. For years he was their foreign news correspondent. We are reading his second book now which deals with immigration, in particular to the UK. It is also an autobiography of his own experience coming to England as an 11 year old boy for boarding school. "Migration is rarely about severing one's links with the old country. It's not about burning your bridges once you've got across, it's about building the bridge in the first place. The whole point is that others might follow, or at the very least you'll be able to send something back. Sending out a migrant is like making an investment, it's like putting money away for a pension. Everyone who chips in to help fund the journey can expect to make a return." "As a system of shifting money from the rich world to the poor world it works. Indeed, it does so far more efficiently than most official aid programmes. According to the World Bank, in 2002, for the first time, remittances sent home by migrants exceeded the amount of cash that went to the poor world in the form of official aid or private bank loans. Petrol station attendants, pizza delivery boys, nurses and doctors - together they transferred some US$80 billion in that year. And this only accounts for the money that statisticians can keep track of; billions of dollars more find their way to every nook and corner of the world through informal distribution networks. In its report for 2005 the bank estimated that if you include unrecorded transfers, the amount of money that went to poor countries was more like $250 billion. When British politicians boast about their plans to increase the country's aid budget, it's worth remembering that they will have some catching up to do if they are to match the amount sent back by immigrants, most of them at the bottom of the social pile." "Unlike the official aid programmes, there are no expatriate staff on tax-free salaries, no local bureaucrats to be paid off. Governments are not deciding who should get the money, people are. And there is a far smaller risk that the money will be end up paying for some grandiose project to feed the vanity of a tinpot politician. The money transfers end up in new roofs for old houses, in school fees and medical bills, and every now and then in an airline ticket so the migrant son or daughter can return in triumph."

French Women Don't Get Fat

Someone recommended the book "French Women Don't Get Fat" to me describing it as a cultural eating comparison between France and the United States. It is written by a French woman who describes gaining 10 kilograms on a school exchange to the States when she was a teenager and how it made her look closely at the differences in both cultures' approach food. Previously I had thought it was a diet book and avoided it. But really the subtitle is what sums up the book: "The Secret of Eating for Pleasure". The book can be divided into three: an anthropological comparison between France and the States, a cookbook, and as an ideology for real foodies. It is also a "diet" book, but only in the sense that it preaches less vast amounts of crap on the run and more savouring of smaller portions of quality cuisine. I really love the book. It is the ultimate "diet" for people who love their food and can't bare to give up good food at the cost of being thin. Yet it works at getting you into a healthy body as well!

On Learning

"Emotions and motivations are also fundamental to learning. Strong emotion connected with an experience helps the brain store information in a way that is more accessible and more easily retrieved. Too much stress, on the other hand, can result in reduced blood flow to the frontal lobes, impairing the ability to think and remember clearly. Taking pleasure in a task is an especially good way to learn well. Our brains release a neuro-transmitter called dopamine in anticipation of the pleasure we expect to derive from a particular activity. The dopamine motivates us, increasing our energy and drive and encouraging us to engage in the activity. If our brain's expectations of pleasure in a certain activity is met, dopamine levels remain elevated. If the pleasure enjoyed is even greater that predicted, dopamine levels are increased and we engage even more persistently in the activity. Conversely, if the activity is less pleasurable than anticipated, dopamine levels drop sharply." Daniel Tammet, Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Human Mind

Getting Sucked In

I recently finished "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini and cried my eyes out throughout the entire thing. I was warned it was sad (but good), but that did not prepare Nigel for a quiet evening on his computer and me curled up on a couch reading and weeping. He looked at me and in his usual dry humour told me to "stop it!" Of course I couldn't which fueled his next question, "why do you do this to yourself?" It brought back a funny story we often tell when we were on a plane between Canada and the UK. I was watching a light Disney movie and Nigel was busy reading or listening to his iPod. The movie's plot had been about a young family whose father had died, but had come back to help his grieving child through a last task. I again, was crying my eyes out, but desperately trying to be as silent as possible, knowing I was on a packed plane. Nigel at one point must have glanced over or heard a sniff and, nudging me, gave me a look that said, "why are you crying?" In my not-realizing-how-loud-my-voice-is-with-earphones-on I sobbed loudly, "the dad died and now his ghost has come back to help." Nigel rolled his eyes, "isn't this a Disney movie?"

The Other Non-Fiction I Would Like to Read

Spent by Frank Lipman, M.D. I came across an article in a magazine for this book and it sounded fascinating. I hear he is on YouTube too. It is a book inspired by noticing a trend among his female patients of feeling tired after 8 hours sleep, craving sugar after meals, feeling exhausted, struggling to lose weight and concentrate: in short, spent. He noticed that his poorer patients when he had worked in South Africa had more energy than the affluent "sushi-eating, treadmill-pounding Manhattanities". He points out some reasons why. His old patients lived in accordance with nature and their DNA. They woke when it got dark and ate foods that were in season. He has some interesting eating suggestions, which I won't get into here, but what I liked was his "electronic sundown". He says, "electricity is burning us out. Dalily exposure to computers and mobiles overstimulates us and ruins our sleep. I tell my clients to have an electronic sundown at 10pm, and turn off everything electrical." This includes emailing, TV, texting and exposure to electromagnetic fields (which too close to bedtime stops melatonin, the sleep hormone). "And don't charge your mobile on your bedside table - the signal it gives off also interferes with restorative sleep." -Article by Maria Lally, Grazia Magazine

A Non-Fiction I would like to Read

Resilience by Boris Cyrulnik. "A household name [and psychoanalyst] in France, Cyrulnik is revered for his work on over-coming childhood trauma and helping heal the wounds left on the country by the second world war." [He himself is Jewish and is the only surviving member of his family during the Holocaust.] "'When I became a doctor, I was very personally hurt when I would hear people say of a child: 'No point in bothering with him. He is lost.' Knowing what I had gone through,' he taps his chest passionately, 'it felt like a condemnation.'" "He is fascinated by the paradox of wealth, especially in the consumerist west: the richer a society becomes, the more unhappy its people. 'It is not easy to have a family life in a rich country. Wealth fragments family life because people can travel in a way they can't in poor countries. Poverty is a barrier to many things, but it gives solidarity to family life. In modern life, the personality can flower, but we hold our families less dear.'" Viv Groskop, "Escape from the Past", The Guardian, April 18, 2009

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

"I will admit there were details which annoyed me. The ease with which they parted with money, for example, thinking nothing of the occasional - but not altogether infrequent - meal costing perhaps fifty dollars a head. Or their self-righteousness in dealing with those whom they had paid for a service. "But you told us, " they would say to Greeks twice their age, before insisting things be done their way. I, with my finite and depleting reserve of cash and my traditional sense of deference to one's seniors, found myself wondering by what quirk of human history my companions - many of whom I would have regarded as upstarts in my own country, so devoid of refinement were they - were in a position to conduct themselves in the world as though they were its ruling class." The Reluctant Fundamentalist - by Mohsin Hamid (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2007)

Getting Things Done

This is the newest book I am reading. Nigel laughs and tells me he can't believe I am reading any book with that business guy in his full suit on the front. Hey, give me some credit! Actually it came out of a weekend camping getaway hosted by two collaborative London artists, FrenchMottershead, who offered a workshop on marketing your art and getting where you want to in your career. It was excellent as is their exhibition history and their overall enthusiasm and friendliness. They reiterated the years they spent working themselves in circles and failing to move closer to their goals before taking on a new approach. This was the book they recommended. Apparently it is the hot book in London artist circles at the moment. It outlines effective ways to stop spending 90% of your time on administration while increasing time spent on productivity, as anyone running a small business can relate to.

Quote: George Alagiah

"[International schools] still prosper wherever there is a large concentration of expatriates. They are aimed at the foreign parents who like the idea of living somewhere exotic but draw the line at enrolling their children at a school where, heaven forbid, local kids might actually be in the majority. These are the same people who will tell you glibly how they love Africa. What they mean is that they love what Africa stands for in their imaginations, rather than the reality. Like the chattering classes in Western capitals who are right behind the idea of multiculturalism but make sure they live as far away as possible from those parts of the city where the cultures actually mix and, sometimes, clash.

International schools usually make a point of advertising the fact that most of their teachers are trained abroad - a not-so-subtle way of implying that local teachers can't be any good. They are stuffed to the brim with the children of ambassadors, multi-national executives and so-called development experts. And always there is a smattering of pupils from the local elite, who end up developing views and accents that are utterly at odds with the nation they are being groomed to run. These are the people Frantz Fanon wrote about, so tellingly, in Black Skins, White Masks*, his book about the false dawn of decolonisation.

The products of these schools are a part of a new world class - not an upper or lower class, not even middle, but what I like to call the global class. They inhabit a new space outside national boundaries and conventional measures of social standing. Though they may carry the passport of a particular country, their allegiance is more to a way of life, a standard of living. These people are not to be confused with the international jet set, which is made up of those fortunate enough to have come into some serious money. Though comparatively well off, the global class is not necessarily cash-rich."
-George Alagiah, A Passage to Africa, 2001

*Black Skins, White Masks can be read in its entirety on GOOGLE BOOKS.

J.K.Rowling Commencement Speech

A friend sent me this link:
"I don't know if you saw this, but I thought it was amusing, and also worth reading. JK Rowling's speech at the 2008 commencement for Harvard students."

PARTS OF THE SPEECH:

On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

Portrait of J.K. Rowling by Stuart Pearson Wright
National Portrait Gallery in London, UK

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

FOR THE WHOLE SPEECH CLICK HERE.

Quote: George Alagiah

"In Ghana we began that great ritual of the rich world, the weekly shopping trip. You know those United Nations tables that compare countries according to gross national product per capita or hospital beds per thousand people? Well, I'd like to offer a new, and just as meaningful, category: the number of shopping trips per family per year. Only relatively rich people can be sure enough of their income next week to blow a whole load of cash this week on food. Only people wealthy enough to have their own transport or to pay for a taxi can manage to get all these goodies back home. And only those with money will have fridges and freezers to keep what they've bought fresh enough to be consumed days later."

"In global terms, if you have a roof over your head, food on the table, a doctor who will not charge you when you're ill and a school place that does not depend on your ability to pay, then, my friend, you are rich. That is what every British citizen has of right. So many of the civil wars and conflicts I have reported could be solved if the states concerned could deliver anything like the kind of life we in Europe take for granted. People who have the opportunity to make a living and to pass on the benefits to their children are unlikely to be seduced by the blandishments of class warriors or the peddlers of ethnic solutions to economic inequality."

-George Alagiah, A Passage to Africa, 2001

Quote: George Alagiah

"Outside, our driver, Al Hassan, would be polishing the paint off [our Peugeot 404]. I used to watch as the little beads of sweat formed on his brow. He'd mop them off with the cloth he was using to clean the vehicle.

The only thing he allowed to interrupt him was his morning prayer. He would take his mat, which he kept rolled up in the boot, and lay it out under our mango tree. Collecting some water in the empty Cow & Gate milk tin he kept specifically for the purpose, he would perform the ablutions set out in the Koran. Then he would kneel and touch his head on the mat, whispering something I could never understand.

'What are you saying?' I would ask.

'I'm talking to God,' he replied simply.

Yes, but what are you saying to Him?'

'I'm not saying anything. I'm not telling him anything. Just that I am here to serve him.'

'Don't you ask him for anything? I asked God for a new bike. Maybe you can ask him for a new car.'

'No. I just want him to keep us safe.'

Years later, as I travelled through the Muslim Sahel, I would see this ritual in progress a thousand times, perhaps at the ancient mosque in Timbuktu or in the shadow of a petrol tanker on the road to the north of Nigeria. I still cannot watch this simple act of Muslim worship without being aware of a wonderful sense of continuity. It's the absence of any ceremonial props that has always fascinated me. One man in communion with his God; no fuss, no bother. It was like that in 1966 for AlHassan; it is the same for hundreds of millions of others today.
This early and close-range familiarity with Islam is, I think, one of the reasons why I have never been tempted to accept the fanatical adherents of the religion as truly representative of the whole. In my mind Islam has always been a religion of quiet purpose and private worship; a religion that aims to help in the pursuit of personal fulfilment and communal advancement. Indeed, a religion that tries to balance the ambition required for the former with the restraint necessary to achieve the latter. Al Hassan's Islam never seemed threatening when I was a child and I refuse to feel threatened by it now."

-George Alagiah, A Passage to Africa, 2001

For Women Only

I saw the ad on the ship for a female get together to go through a book entitled “For Women Only: What You Need to Know About the Inner Lives of Men” by Shaunti Feldhahn . I was intrigued as I had come across circles where men were considered the head of a marriage. I decided to view it as a study in cultural anthropology.

Feldhahn wrote the book after taking a survey in which she asked both sexes whether they would rather be alone and unloved or disrespected and inadequate. 75% of women said they would prefer to be disrespected and inadequate rather than alone and unloved while 75% of men said the opposite (much to the shock of the polled women). This highlighted for her how few women have a clue how men’s minds work. This book was designed to enlighten any female who cared to unlock the mystery of males in her life whether it be family, workers, or friends.

It seemed that the jist rested on a certain biblical description of husbands being told to love their wives and wives being told to respect their husbands. We were asked why wives were not asked to love, but men were. I spouted something about the cultural context of the time and women being merely possessions of males. Marriage merely signified the exchange of goods from father to son and the interlinking of families groups and so the request to love this person was actually a significant shift in perspective from one of function to one of emotion. Later it dawned on me that these suggestions made for husbands and wives fit into the 75% inadequacy holes that each sex felt according to the original survey.

After the 1st session I was surprised at how relatively even-keeled it began. It was actually a good source on how to be a decent human being to others. It was applicable to anyone at any time. It focused on how to value, respect, affirm, and appreciate another human being. It looks at how we can have a double standard when it comes to how we want to be treated versus how we treat others.

ASSIGNMENT 1: DO NOT SAY ANYTHING NEGATIVE TO ANYONE OF THE OPPOSITE SEX. I thought, hey, why torture your own sex too? I tried not being negative to anyone. What did I find? There is a lot of grey area!

Quote: George Alagiah

"When I joined the BBC, arguably the Western world's most influential broadcaster, I told myself I would avoid the clichés. If I took pictures of the starving, I would try to preserve their dignity; if I showed footage of conflict I would try to explain where all the anger and hatred came from. I wanted to challenge the image of Africa as a place of tribal savagery and greedy, callous leaders.

But Africa didn't help me. All too often it was difficult to make sense of what I saw. That's the way it has been since the BBC sent me back to Africa for the first time. Liberia was a bad place from which to attempt to rebuild the continent's tarnished reputation. Two and a half decades after I had left for boarding school in England, Africa was in worse shape than I could ever have imagined."

-George Alagiah, A Passage to Africa, 2001

The State of the World

"One illusion has been shattered on 11 September - that we can have the good life of the West irrespective of the state of the rest of the world. Once chaos and strife have got a grip on a region or a country, trouble will soon be exported...The dragon's teeth are planted in the fertile soil of wrongs unrighted, of disputes left to fester for years or even decades, of failed states, of poverty and deprivation."
-Tony Blair at the 2001 Lord Mayor's banquet.

"Widespread poverty and chaos lead to a collapse of existing political and social structures, which would inevitably invite the advance of totalitarianism into every weak and unstable area. Thus our own security would be endangered and our prosperity imperilled."
-John F. Kennedy arguing in 1961 for a big increase in America's aid budget.

"In the aftermath of September 11 people were fond of saying that 'the world had changed'; that life would never be the same again. What they meant, of course, was that life in the rich world, and especially in America, had changed. In the poor world nothing much had changed at all - except that many more countries would be regarded with suspicion and many more of their citizens seen as potential terrorists."

"If leaders like Tony Blair (and those that follow him) remain true to their words, then over the next forty years Africa might well look very different from the way I have had to portray it during the last forty years."
-George Alagiah, A Passage to Africa, 2001

Quote: C.S. Lewis

"Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of pre-conceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?"

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

A Long Way Gone

A LONG WAY GONE: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah

New York City, 1998

My high school friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life.

“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?”

“Because there is a war.”

“Did you witness some of the fighting?”

“Everyone in the country did.”

“You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?”

“Yes, all the time.”

“Cool.”

I smile a little.

“You should tell us about it sometime.”

“Yes, sometime.”

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life. The rebel army, known as the Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F.), attacked my town in the southern part of the country. I ran away, along paths and roads that were littered with dead bodies, some mutilated in ways so horrible that looking at them left a permanent scar on my memory. I ran for days, weeks and months, and I couldn’t believe that the simple and precious world I had known, where nights were celebrated with storytelling and dancing and mornings greeted with the singing of birds and cock crows, was now a place where only guns spoke and sometimes it seemed even the sun hesitated to shine. After I discovered that my parents and two brothers had been killed, I felt even more lost and worthless in a world that had become pregnant with fear and suspicion as neighbor turned against neighbor and child against parent. Surviving each passing minute was nothing short of a miracle. After almost a year of running, I, along with some friends I met along the way, arrived at an army base in the southeastern region. We thought we were now safe; little did we know what lay ahead.

This is how wars are fought now: by children, traumatized, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become the soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.

Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a powerfully gripping story: At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. At sixteen, he was removed from fighting by UNICEF, and through the help of the staff at his rehabilitation center, he learned how to forgive himself, to regain his humanity, and, finally, to heal.

Quote from Recent Book

"Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolation of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed