The story inside my bag
I have been thinking of doing one of these posts for a very long time. I do find them fascinating, and I know I am not the only one. Now that Angie posted her thoughts about her bag and its…
Women and spiritual leadership
Things come up to upset me lately and I have moments when I need to speak against them. I am usually a little coward and prefer to sit in the back, in the dark, in the shadows. Unless I am…
MY BLUE NOTEBOOKS BY LIANE DE POUGY
Liane de Pougy was one of Paris’s most famous courtesans. She was famous and rich. Men were putting at her feet millions of francs worth of jewelry, on a whim. She married Romanian Prince George Ghica when she was fourty-one,…
Zen in the Art of Writing, by Ray Bradbury
I remember the frightening weekend nights from a distant adolescence back in Romania, unable to move from in front of the TV where I watched paralyzed with horror a series of enthralling adaptations from Ray Bradbury’s stories. But apart from that, I cannot say that I am a big fan of the “weird tales” genre. Yet, how could I resist a book called Zen in the Art of Writing?JOURNEY OF SOULS BY MICHAEL NEWTON
I read this book with very conflicting feelings. I started with “I think I read this book before”, went through “Wow, it’s beautiful to have this all confirmed” and through “What the hell, the afterlife is too depressing”, finally settling…
WAITING FOR SPRING BY R.J. KELLER
I read this book, all the way amazed by the vitality of the writing, all the way trying to label it, to encase it in some sort of genre. I have decided to call this idealist realism. No, they are…
The Illustrated World’s Religions, by HUSTON SMITH
This book made a great impact on me. Like a few others before it, this came in my life at exactly the right moment: when I needed it, when I was prepared for the lesson.The Letters, by Fiona Robyn
The moment I encountered Fiona Robyn’s blog, I was enthralled. I go there often for a quick refreshing moment of awareness in front of a small but wisdom-filled detail of daily life.THE RECONNECTION BY ERIC PEARL
I find myself conflicted about this book. I wanted quite badly to “connect” with it and that didn’t happen. There are people who report to experience a physical sensation from the moment they touch this book, which is one aspect…
BRIDA BY PAULO COELHO
This might very well be the last Paulo Coelho book I ever read. How sad is that? Again I have to wonder: is it me or is it Coelho? One of us is definitely not the same. I find it…
STOLEN INNOCENCE BY ELISSA WALL WITH LISA PULITZER
I have been fascinated by this book all throughout the Christmas vacation. The story is what kept me spellbound here and I don’t want to discuss the writing which seemed to me simply all right, professional and without major flaws. I was not expecting anything spectacular. It is not something that one would read line by line. At least not me. It’s a long book with a ton of repetitions. But it is captivating, nonetheless.Kitchen Privileges, by MARY HIGGINS CLARK
So I was in this mood to read writers’ biographies. Women writers, to be more exact. As I was sitting in the children’s section of the library, and my daughter was making a mess of all the toys out there, I grabbed a computer and started to do some research. I filled up five small pieces of paper I had found around (announcing a Halloween movie showing at the library) with titles and when the child was ready to go, we passed through the non-fiction room and picked out two books. One was Pagan Time and the other Kitchen Privileges. I did not achieve much of what I was expecting with none of these books. Pagan Time is a book about a child who grows up in a commune. The fact that the child becomes a writer at some point in her life is irrelevant for the story (if you don’t consider the aspect that the child-now-writer actually wrote this book). Kitchen Privileges is simply not such a great book.