"What makes the desert beautiful is that
somewhere it hides a well"
(The Little Prince by de Saint-Exupéry).
My journey to a WELL-adjusted heart, WELL-watered soul, WELL-educated mind, and WELL-tuned body. "Love the Lord your God with all your HEART, and with all your SOUL, and with all your MIND, and with all your STRENGTH" (Mark 12:30-31).
This was really engaging writing, but it was so creepy! I am glad I know Jesus, and He protects me from all evil. (I don't believe there are vampires, but I do believe there is evil in the world!)
I also kept thinking how any parent could allow their 11 year old child to even ACT in such a creepy movie. I would really like to know how Kristen Dunst feels about all of that now. Ewww! (But I don't think I could ever watch the movie to find out how it played out on screen!)
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Anne Rice has been wildly prolific in the decades since Interview with the Vampire, her 1976 debut novel, catapulted her to fame, but her first book is still her most intriguing. Subverting convention in many ways, notably by making the vampire in question fallibly human and by presenting his story in his own words, Rice’s tale also embraces the genre’s Gothic-erotic roots with relish. The result is one of the best vampire novels ever written.
This is my favorite book of the year. I am a mother of two sons who are individuals in their own right. It spoke to me about motherhood and the love we have for our children.
I was also delighted because I spent a summer not far from the setting of the book, the wilderness in the Canadian Coastal Range. It is a wonderful read.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
The author’s son left home at sixteen and, by the time Feenie Ziner’s chronicle begins seven years later, he had settled into a solitary life in the untracked Canadian wilderness, three thousand miles from home. “Ben was on perfectly safe ground when he asked me to come out to British Columbia to see where he was living. Any kid who had gone to the trouble of putting a whole continent between himself and his family could count on their never showing up at his doorstep.” Any mother who would make the trip—a transcontinental flight, a six-hour bus ride to the end of the line, then a journey by bush plane into a densely forested nowhere—is clearly a force to be reckoned with, and the reckoning between parent and child that Within This Wilderness witnesses takes on, because of its remote setting, an archetypal resonance. Indeed, both the awesome natural charms of the surroundings and the hard manner of living that isolation dictates engage and even relax our attention, protecting us for a time from the climate of deep emotion in which the protagonists dwell. Ziner’s deft portrayal of the elaborate, often comic diplomacy of the relations between parents and grown children, her sensitivity to the alarming innocence of the toughest youth, and her splendid writing reward the reader throughout, and her unstinting appraisal of her own noble confusion—a spell of love, worry, wonder, guilt, loss, pride, anxiety, anger, obligation, yearning—is both moving and magnanimous.
What a delightful read! It follows a Vermeer painting backward in time from the Present Day to 1672, when Vermeer painted it (it's not really one of his paintings, though). Vermeer is one of my favorite painters, so to say I was excited that the book was about one of his paintings is an understatement. It is very well-written, and I am excited to watch the movie, Brush with Fate, based on the book.
I found this timeline was really helpful at the end of the book (don't want to spoil it by reading it before):
In this lovely and absorbing book, Susan Vreeland traces a putative Vermeer creation—Girl in Hyacinth Blue—backward in time through three centuries, from its theft by a Nazi officer through the hands of several owners to the studio of the artist himself. In a series of linked stories, Vreeland conveys the private lives and inscrutable emotions for which the mysterious, evocative figure of the painting stands as an emblem. Each story details a domestic drama in which “the momentous ordinary,” in the author’s phrase, is honored and ennobled, even as its characters—a family of Dutch Jews celebrating Passover the year before their deportation; a devoted couple consoled by the embrace of their long marriage; Vermeer’s daughter Magdalena, the model for the girl in the portrait—fall under the sway of history’s calamities and time’s indifference. Like the real paintings that are its inspirations, Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a quietly astonishing articulation of the evanescent emotions that convey enduring human truths.
I listened to this by a fabulous narrator! Why are literary people so sad? It is comic writing, but there was such sadness behind the words. There is also an upper-class snobbishness that she pokes fun at, but it is so obvious that she was a part of that world. I got a bit bored by the end...and sad! (Apparently, Hemingway did not like her, but he did not like many people.)
It is another book this year where I read about life in New York in the 1920s.
Not everyone is so unhappy, Dorothy. I think she died alone. I haven't watched the documentary on her on YouTube yet. Let me watch it and see if that is the case. Yep, the YouTube documentary says it all. It is interesting. She was an alcoholic. :(
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Mrs. Parker, as she liked to be called, became one of the most quoted writers of her time because of her singular gift for sharpening truths into well-honed words; her barbed ability was unparalleled in her day and hasn’t been equaled since. In 1944, she selected and arranged this collection of her stories and poems for presentation in a single volume. It has since been expanded to include some of her later stories, as well as theater reviews and essays, and the complete archive of her terrific Constant Reader book column from The New Yorker. Spanning her career and containing the bulk of her work, this is truly a treasure trove.
This was so fascinating. I loved it. I learned about the first simple microscope by Anton Van Leeuwenhoek and the exploits of Pasteur and Walter Reed (yes, the military hospital is named after him). This is a great book! (Many animals die in the writing of this book, but their sacrifices have saved millions of people.)
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Few books convey the romance of science—the intense excitement of close observation, the intuitive leaps that link phenomena, the disappointment of failed hypotheses, the triumphant clarity of successful experiment—better than this one. The enduring 1926 bestseller by bacteriologist-turned-writer Paul de Kruif is a colorful account of the careers and discoveries of the pioneers of the microscopic world. Presenting these scientific trailblazers as the “hunters,” “explorers,” and “fighters of death” that they truly were—including some “done to death by the immensely small assassins they were studying”—de Kruif infuses his profiles with an extra dose of drama that brings a page-turning pleasure to the real scientific history he imparts.
Ha! Ha! I thought this book was on the 1000 Books to Read List. But it is NOT! Why was it in my tagged group of audiobooks for 1000 Books? Oh well.
That said, this book is often on lists of books to read and is very well-written. I am goal-oriented and have been on this quest since May 2019. I don't know if I will ever get to all 1000 books, but my intermediate goal this year is to get to the top of the List Challenge List, and this book will not get me there. Again, oh well.
I am also so tired of reading books where women are abused by vile people. Why does AI say that Geishas are not prostitutes? Maybe they are not now (outlawed in 1956), but they were during the time this was written, and it was heartbreaking to see the abuse. They were high-class prostitutes taken advantage of by rich and powerful people. It broke my heart in places.
He assumed a lot about what Noah was thinking and feeling. He nails how Noah might have felt as he built the ark, knowing that the people around him (minus his family) would perish in a big flood.
The whole drunkenness thing was pretty weird. But it did cause me to think about some things.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
In his lifetime, Mario Brelich published only three books, each a distinctive, imaginative exploration of a biblical theme, and each a discovery of the first order. In Navigator of the Flood, Brelich’s ingenuity is set to the task of explaining the drunkenness of Noah, the episode that concludes the ninth chapter of Genesis and stands as a peculiar coda to the story of the great flood. The result is a playful, trenchant, inspired, and funny meditation—a philosophical essay in the form of a novel—on the deep meanings we can still find hidden in the dusty folds of a familiar tale
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Goncharov’s novel, originally published serially, had such an effect in its time that it inspired a new Russian word: oblomovshchina, or “Oblomov-itis,” a fake clinical diagnosis of the paralysis of privilege. Although the book’s satire of Russian nobility is trenchant and funny, the author knows that his protagonist suffers from something more insidious than mere laziness, for Oblomov isn’t empty or corrupt: He’s intelligent, perceptive, and capable of deep friendship and passionate attachments. Indeed, the psychological inertia that Goncharov depicts, which seems to be strangely fostered by the very talents and advantages Oblomov possesses, retains its relevance today, and not just in terms of “couch potatoes.”
This had everything that I love: adventure, mystery, even romance! I loved this quick read. I am going to watch the movie that is on Amazon Prime. It has Jenny Agutter who is on Call the Midwife.
The only disadvantage is that I did not have the maps with me while I was listening to the audiobook on a walk. I came home and followed it on Google Maps for the last half of the book. I wish I had the illustrated version of this book!
While it did not initiate naval preparedness for Great Britain, it did help propel it. Germany did end up being a problem a few years later in World War I!
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
“A yachting story, with a purpose,” Erskine Childers wrote to a correspondent while he was composing The Riddle of the Sands at the beginning of the twentieth century. The purpose was political: to alert an unprepared England to the threat posed by German ambitions. It was by no means the only example of “invasion fiction” created by British writers at the time to stir their sleepy country to naval investment, but it was the most influential in promoting the cause of military readiness, and—more important for later generations of readers—it has proven the most enduring, for the simple reason that it is a rip-roaring good yarn.
The story is very engaging and deep. I can totally understand why it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008. The Wikipedia article contains a thorough analysis of this book and made me appreciate it even more! If you can get through the foul language, it is a worthy read.
I loved learning about the Dominican Republic's history, but I think many of my friends would not like this because of the language and sexuality. It was a bit much for me, also.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
The first thing that strikes you is the prose: It’s fast and agile, unafraid to mix ingredients. English and Spanish and Spanglish combine to energize the sentences, which move easily between different modes of discourse—expository, conversational, professorial, confidential, ribald, tender, rambunctious—but never stray for long from speech rhythms. Now shouting, now murmuring, now explaining or exhorting, the voice of the narrator—a man named Yunior, as we will eventually discover—relates the life of his friend Oscar de Leon, an overweight, nerdy, sensitive boy possessed of—or more exactly by—what Díaz has called “outré interests.” Yunior’s narration also encompasses the times of Oscar’s family (including his sister, Lola, Yunior’s former love), immigrants to New Jersey from the Dominican Republic. The book’s style is powerful, and it needs to be, because it must treat several spheres of action and dimensions of experience, diverse in register and implication. Along the way, the story bounces back and forth between yearning and nostalgia, tenderness and violence, nerdiness and nobility, anguish and—not least, and almost inexplicably—joy.
I have not had a freewrite on here in a while. I have been reading many short books and posting my reviews here. So, I have not been freewriting as much.
Today is the last day with the last group doing the Spiritual Exercises. I ended my other group yesterday at 10:30, and I cried. I loved the 34-week journey with them (Easter was later this year. So we had two extra weeks where they had an extra week to do a Yearly Examen and an entire week to compose a Beloved Charter. That was special. Next year's group will not have those two extra weeks.) I will continue to meet one-on-one with two of the three people. That will be great.
The same is true for the other group I lead. This group has only been 14 weeks, but I will continue to meet with the two left. The other person was only able to make it three times out of the ten times because of health and family things. I bless her. This group has been great. This is the third time leading people through the shorter 18th annotation. I highly recommend the 19th though. It gives you time to settle in and linger longer by doing repetitions and looking at your "Blessed History" for an extra week. I like that.
I am going to go into my Zoom room early this morning to pray for one of the people in my 19th Annotation group who is speaking at 5:45 am Pacific time for 150 people at a school. I know she will do great, but I want to give extra prayer support.
I have enjoyed the reading that I have been doing. I have three more books until I pass up the person who is second in line on the List Challenge (they took off the person who said they had read all the books on the 1000 Books to Read Before You Die list - how could it be possible to read ALL of them unless you were the author of the book? They signed in as a guest. So, they took all the "guests" off the list.) The list is incomplete though. They have left off quite a few books, have the wrong books linked to it, and count a whole series as one book. All the people who made the list had to do was do the list in James Mustich's book, but I digress.)
I am about halfway through my time. I have this 18th annotation group and a woman from another country. Then I have an hour break, and I have two friends coming from Seattle who are driving through on their way somewhere. We are going out for an early lunch. That will be so fun. I need to remind George that they are coming.
After that, I am free. I think I might read. It is always harder for me to read print books in the afternoon. My eyesight is not what it used to be, and some of these books have very small print, but I went to the eye doctor and am getting new lenses, not new frames, because I love these lightweight frames. So, I will be without my better corrected lenses for about a week. So, I think it will be audiobooks for the foreseeable future!
I am also doing great with my eating. I am on day 11 of recording. It has come easier than earlier in the year. I think I did about three weeks earlier in the year, but I am going for three months this time. We will see!
I have to decide on when I am taking my 12-hour walk, if I should teach Pilates this summer, and where our family is going on vacation this year.
I have the Boller Cohort next Tuesday and Wednesday, and my last Campfire for the 2HC on May 28th. Then I will be done with all the groups I lead. I will just have my final Pilates class and the final retreat for the 2HC, and everything will be done.
I wonder what will be around the corner. I am embracing uncertainty. I love this.
I agree with James Mustich's assessment of this beautiful book.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Only 120 pages long, Memorial is a small book about a small life. Yet the reader who opens it will discover a story that is unforgettably moving in its sympathy, dignity, and desire to articulate the deepest human needs. Written by one of the most notable of Italy’s post-World War II writers, this enchanted autobiographical novel is steeped in the peasant culture of Camon’s native Veneto, an ageless and all-but-vanished way of life the author has left behind for the city and the twentieth century.
This was very interesting. It is a work of satire and criticizes the Catholic Church. It is notoriously difficult to analyze. So I chose to simply enjoy it. Some have said it led to the Protestant Reformation.
I like that he was a dear friend of Sir Thomas More. There is much I liked about this book, and there is more I didn't really understand!
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Waspish, subversive, bitingly ironic, and endlessly entertaining, Praise of Folly has endured for five hundred years as a masterpiece of humanistic inquiry and opposition to dogmatism. The book begins as a straight satire. Folly, in the guise of a jester, speaks for herself in a parodic declamation, insisting she is the world’s greatest benefactor—desire, flattery, youth, and vitality all follow her lead, and Jupiter himself has to fall in behind her when he wants to father a child. When someone observes that no humans have ever built a house of worship for her, Folly first responds with a droll observation: “I cannot but wonder at the ingratitude.” Yet Praise of Folly soon pivots from this cheeky beginning, and the goddess becomes a mouthpiece through which the author propounds more serious themes. Half a millennium on, the power of Erasmus’s masterpiece has not waned; in fact, it’s both disturbingly and providentially relevant in our contemporary moment, when religious belief and humanistic scrutiny are often violently opposed.
It was philosophical in nature. I liked looking at the life of the doctor from his perspective.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
A Fortunate Man is one of several volumes Berger made in collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr. An assemblage of narrative episodes, passages of biographical profile, and both poetic and philosophical speculation on the labors of an English country doctor named John Sassall, its quiet power is amplified by Mohr’s black-and-white images of Sassall, his patients, and the landscape in which they dwell. A carefully observed attempt to take the measure of the doctor’s influence on an impoverished community’s experience, A Fortunate Man is a probing meditation on medicine and meaning, conscience and commitment, and other matters of life and death.
It took me a while to get into this book, but once I was in, I was hooked! It helped that one of my favorite reality shows, The Amazing Race, was in Naples when I was attempting to "get into" the book. It helped me visualize the novel!
It is a coming-of-age story following two friends from childhood to adolescence in post-World War II Naples, Italy. I plan on reading the whole trilogy. I want to follow these women. Of course, there is mistreatment by men. Is spousal abuse common and accepted in this culture or just in certain segments of society? I am curious.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
“We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.” So Elena Greco, called Lenù by those who know her, describes the adventure that cements her friendship with Raffaella Cerullo, known familiarly as Lina or Lila, a friendship that Lenù will narrate across six decades in the novels of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. The first novel in the series, My Brilliant Friend, is devoted to the girls’ school days and teenage years. It begins with them playing with their dolls and ends—in cliff-hanging form—in the middle of Lila’s tumultuous wedding. The apprehensiveness of childhood—the uncanny allure of dark cellars, the liberating mischief of stone throwing or shouting in a tunnel—is perfectly drawn, as are the classroom rivalries of girls and boys that foreshadow relationships between them that will develop and transform as elementary learning is outweighed by the lure and luck of circumstance.
Surprisingly, I really liked this quirky little book! The whole time I was reading, I thought, "Those French and their food!" It is SO important to them, and if you ever get to go to France, you will be GLAD they take such care with their food. It is a delightful experience to eat there, and the most amazing meal I have ever had was eaten there at this restaurant:
Bayeux, France
So I was delighted as I read with warm memories of our time in France in June 2018 and November 2019 in the Alsace region. Both delightful gastronomical adventures!
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Composed in aphorisms, anecdotes, and brief topical essays, The Physiology of Taste can be picked up at any time and opened to any page; it is a browser’s delight, best sampled serendipitously. The thirty “meditations” that make up the meat of the book cover a wide range of gustatory subjects, from underlying matters such as taste, the senses, and the pleasures of the table to overriding concerns such as the end of the world, sleep, dreams, death, and digestion. Brillat-Savarin’s appetite is catholic; he tackles turkeys, truffles, chocolate, and coffee with equal gusto. His penchant for theorizing is as French as his fondness for food, and he applies it to subjects as diverse as frying, gourmandism, obesity, and restaurants. Imagine a postprandial conversation, fueled by fine wine and cognac, with a worldly and loquacious uncle whose store of anecdote and eloquence seems endless, and you’ll approach the pleasures that await you in this quirky masterpiece. It is unrivaled to this day as a compendium of food lore, culinary observations, and philosophical ruminations on the art of eating and the art of living. Fortunately, because of the labors and inspirations of M. F. K. Fisher, Anglophone readers lose nothing in translation [Note from Carol: I read the free translation] for Fisher’s version of Brillat-Savarin’s chef d’oeuvre is not only exquisitely translated, but made immeasurably richer by her amplification of the text in her own notes and glosses. It is guaranteed to bring hours of diversion and delight—and perhaps even a few minutes of the promised transcendence—to any food-loving reader.
Wow! I was three years old when the book came out. I was nine years old when the movie came out. I just remember hearing about it at that age and being scared of the movie. I never watched it. I will now. Man, what a page-turner! And I listened to Mia Farrow (Rosemary in the movie) narrate the book! It was so great. I was shocked when I read the reviews of one star on Goodreads. It is such a classic.
I will say that weird things like this DO GO ON! I cannot say I have heard of a baby being born of an intimate relationship with Satan, but many children are subject to Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA). I work with many survivors. It is sick. It goes on in surprising circles.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
The book begins with the most innocent of premises: A young Manhattan couple moves into a larger apartment as they get ready to start a family. Rosemary becomes pregnant just as her husband, a struggling actor, finally lands a Broadway role while becoming devoted to the eccentric elderly couple next door, who take Rosemary under their wing. Initial uneasiness at their ministrations turns into a growing suspicion of their motives, and Rosemary begins to imagine all sorts of dark doings. Or is she imagining them? The suspense ratchets up as what she expects while she’s expecting takes a diabolical turn—proving, of course, that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. The devil is in the details.
I forgot to add this book to my 2025 books, and I read it back in January! How did I ever do that? It was interesting. It gave me more backstory to the movie we saw. It is definitely a PG-13 book and not for kids. It is a strange take on The Wizard of Oz. Some people do not like that someone would take this classic and write something like this. It was OK, but I won't continue to read the whole series.
Love the songs in the musical though, especially "Defying Gravity."
I was 10 years old when this book became a bestseller, and a movie was made about it. It is well-written and a page-turner. It was worth reading, and I understand why it would be on the 1000 Books to Read List. I have the movie on hold from the library. I will say that some might get a little bored with all the technical and medical jargon.
I did make some connections to COVID-19.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Although physician Michael Crichton previously published several pseudonymous novels, The Andromeda Strain was his first bestseller, and the storytelling élan it displayed would inform nearly four decades of inventive, often medically or scientifically minded thrillers. The combination of cutting-edge science and sheer narrative bravado breeds a kind of terror of discovery that puts his best efforts firmly in the lineage of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine or Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (a title Crichton would borrow for his prequel to Jurassic Park). In a word, they’re unputdownable.
I am tired this morning. I know I have had too much time with people when I just want to crawl in a hole. It was all really wonderful time, but I am a true introvert, and it is time for me to recharge. I canceled a 4 pm appointment with someone yesterday. I had three early morning meetings in a row. Two out of three were group meetings. Then I had two other group meetings. One I was facilitating. The other I was participating in.
All very good things, but I want so silence where I am not around others for a while.
Enter in my postponed trip to the Trappist Abbey in Lafayette (McMinnville), Oregon. It is 1300 acres of natural Oregon land. It has never been farmed. It is steep ascent to the top - I think it is 1200 feet, but I always love it. The weather is to be in the mid 60s, and that is superb hiking conditions. It also has housed comfortably situated on a man-made lake. I was to go the end of March, but the OSU Women's Basketball team made it into the NCAA play-offs. So, I decided to go ahead and postpone it, and the weather was cold and rainy that weekend. So I am grateful.
I am so tired. I really am so tired. I am better after hearing some very disturbing news about the state of one of my directee's coworkers. I think I have worked through it and am leaving it in the Lord's hands and praying that all that is in darkness will be exposed to the CLEANSING light of God's presence and mercy from the cross. Thank you, Jesus.
So, I am supposed to go to a meeting in 5 minutes, but that will mean I will have to rush to pack my bags when I get home after I teach my Pilates class, and I am not into rushing this morning, and the Lord knows that I am full-up on going to meetings. I am not sure what the purpose of the meetings are either.
This Trappist abbey holds many memories for me - my first time with a 20 minute prayer sit 11 1/2 years ago. My time with Brother Mark (RIP) where I decided that spiritual direction was God's nudging direction.
I think this time, I will write a lot. Last time, I drew and meditated on my Belovedness, and that was so fun, and this was the result:
I am done with my projects on YouTube now other than Pilates and Praise videos this summer.
Summer - I am going to have so much more time because I will not have
1) Sustainable Faith Boller Cohort Interning
2) Renovare Book Club Leading
3) 19th Annotation of the Exercises Spiritual Direction
4) 18th Annotation of the Exercises Spiritual Direction
5) 2HC Campfire and Retreats and Direction
6) OSU Pilates
I am going to have so much more time!! I am not doing 2HC, Sustainable Faith, or Renovare next year, but I hope to have at least one 19th Annotation group! YAY!
Lord, I heard you say to "Cast my net on the other side of the boat" regarding Body and Soul Companion Spiritual Direction training. OK, I have three people that are on my heart. Would you please bring them to me? Two of them already responded positively when I reached out to them, not for director training but for spiritual direction. Now the third one is more difficult for me to reach out to. Please give me clarity. Hmm, P from the current one was interested in what I did. I will pray into that.
The tangled web we weave. This was a compelling page-turner.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
A Rage in Harlem is the first in Chester Himes’s cycle of eight Harlem detective novels (nine if you count Plan B, unfinished at the time of his death), and it introduces the two cops—Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson—whose presence ties the books together, even if the duo plays a somewhat peripheral role here. The action of A Rage in Harlem centers on counterfeiting, theft, and confidence games, with all three types of deception applied equally to both love and money by characters hapless and savvy, seductive and scheming, helpless and swindling.
I will watch this YouTube video to try to understand this absurd novel. I did not like it. Thankfully, it was shorter than many of the novels on the 1000 Books to Read List.
Here is why James Mustich think you should read it:
Beckett's novel Molloy is a diptych of two long interior monologues that are part existential rumination, all shaggy dog story. By anatomizing thought and syncopating the progress of sentences with obsessive attention, Beckett creates a kind of awkward poise—an anomalous grace—on the stage of narrative. It is both precise and riveting, reveling in the humors and movements of language as it explores, with comic impulse and tragic obstinacy, “the crass tenacity of life and its diligent pains.”
Wow! This book was a compelling page turner. There are so many people living lives of "quiet desperation." I love how real-life people were woven throughout the book: J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, and Emma Goldman. It was a great read. It brings America in the early 1900s to life.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Ragtime is first and foremost a good read, animated with complex characters, real and invented, and several absorbing plotlines that intersect in the narrative’s ingenious design. The layering of fiction and fact, ephemera and history, headline news and private heartache is alluring, giving the book a surface glamour that is at once entertaining and compelling. Equally captivating are the juxtapositions of poverty and wealth, leisure and labor, sex and politics, idea and emotion. And although it is lucidly declarative, it is peculiarly told: There is a matter-of-factness to Doctorow’s prose, no matter how outlandish its content, that keeps the telling—appropriately enough given the book’s title—a little offbeat. The narrative itself is syncopated, playing off our expectations of history to present an entirely new music, one that holds us in thrall and creates no little sense of wonder.
(I love this cover because it represents so clearly what the whole book is about - opening your hands to God and letting him have it all in each moment.)
I loved that I could finally see the quote I have heard from Richard Foster for YEARS in its written context. Here is the quote:
I also have one that is more balloon as no water:
This book repeated itself a lot, but it is so infused with Ignatian principles (Caussade was a French Jesuit priest) that I loved the repetition (and I know how much Ignatius LOVED repetition).
I am so glad I read it. It is all about abandoning oneself to God's presence in the present moment because that is all there is to do! I love that, and it has been the journey I have been on for 46 years, ever since what happened to me on the OSU campus at sunset. Here is the video:
God is so good to answer this prayer. I am more and more able to "be where my feet are"!
It's hard to believe that I started trying to read this book in October of 2024, but it took me until April of 2025 to really concentrate on it, and I ended up really loving it! I would say it is brilliant. I read the whole thing and thought, "I wonder if this was his reaction to Fascism." Apparently, it was.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Imagine a game in which the player is called upon to use all the insights, noble thoughts, works of art, and products of scientific and scholarly inquiry that have shaped civilization. In his last novel, Hermann Hesse conceived of just such a pastime, an elaborative imaginative enterprise whose rules “constitute a kind of highly developed secret language” that allows a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game) to manipulate “the total contents and values of our culture.” Hesse’s novel, set a few centuries into the future, purports to be the biography of the great Magister Ludi Joseph Knecht. Knecht's story—as well as the history of Castalia and its famous game—is related by a narrator whose solemn pedantry is at humorous odds with the high spirits of Hesse’s invention of a land that is the ultimate ivory tower.
It may look like I have not been doing Freewrites, but I have not been doing as many on here lately. I tried another online journaling site. I liked it, but I have done it here for so long. I liked the privacy of it, but I am pretty much an open book, and I can always write it out and not post it if I feel like it has too much sensitive information. So, I am back to BlogSpot, my old friend for 20 years. I had a blog before this one that I lost and then found again after I started this one. I think I started it in 2004.
It is Good Friday. I have been going through the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatiuswith two groups. So I always meditate ahead of the people I am doing it with (6 people over the two groups). So, I have meditated on Jesus' resurrection and appearances and Ignatius' charge to become a "Contemplative in Action" and "Light the World on Fire." I even went back and repeated previous meditations. And in the meantime, I made slides for each of the posts. There are 242 posts in all. So, I had so much fun creating a visual that would go along with the meditation/contemplation.
Now, I am done with that fun prayer "project" (even though it was a project, I was with Jesus creating and less "doing" and more "being").
Yesterday ended up being a really free day because I had caught up on all that. So, I decided to do things around the house like LAUNDRY and had such a great time with that too. I even made dinner for George, who was at helping his 96 year old mom all day.
Now, today, I am going to walk three miles to class, teach, and then George will pick me up to go to the Good Friday Stations of the Cross at our church. I have a casual morning, and I have a TON of papers to sort through after many months of ministry, but I don't want to start on anything since I will start walking in the mid-morning.
I have prayed for sadness for this week, as Ignatius suggests. I am always surprised when I am sad, and I forget that I have prayed this! I had some disturbing news about something going on. So, that made me very sad. I am sure I can talk more with God about this when I walk to class. I think I will do a Bands class - good stretching with the latex band and strengthening because they offer resistance.
Now that I have finished all those slides. There are a couple of things I would love to do on this channel:
1) Walk people through charting their "Blessed History" as a practice before starting the Spiritual Exercises.
2) Make "Prayer and Pilates" videos this summer out on my deck. :) I have a bunch from when I taught at OSU, but I have only posted a couple that have to do with the Body AND Soul.
So, my bell went off. That is my short freewrite. I will try to do more as the year goes on. I am going to be amazed at how much more time I have when I conclude facilitating these two groups, AND the Sustainable Faith Cohort they come out of. It will all be completed on May 14th at 1 pm. Less than one month from now! WOOHOO!
This book was hard for me to get into, but between when I checked it out in February on a Kindle and today, the library purchased an audiobook (I think I requested it). It was so much easier for me to get through in an audiobook. The concept was initially confusing, but I eventually understood it.
"Write your own story"....That is the personal message I derived from it, as I am embarking on a "write your own story" kind of change starting in June.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
We first meet Sylvie, the princess heroine of the book-within-this-book, as she is rushing back to page three, summoned by the attention of the first reader to crack the covers of her fairy tale in a very long time. Didn’t you know that the life of storybook characters goes on even once their books are closed? Well, as we learn in this ingenious novel, such characters are just as surprised to find out that readers have a life apart from their reading. “You mean you don’t know how your own story turns out?” Sylvie asks Claire, the young girl who becomes entranced by Sylvie’s tale, then rescues the princess and her fellow characters when the volume they have inhabited for eight decades—since Claire’s grandmother possessed it as a child—is threatened by fire. As the resourceful Sylvie escapes the borders of her book to enter Claire’s dreams and take up sometimes perilous residence in the girl’s imagination, real young readers—and their parents, if they’re lucky—are bound to become lost in one of the most inventive and exhilarating narratives they’ll ever discover. Filled with surprise and magnanimous wisdom, The Great Good Thing is a marvelous invocation of the power of books to transcend time and pass enchantments across generations.
I started reading this book last year! I got it on long-term loan last year from the OSU library, but I never got around to reading it. I also had it on my Kindle several times and could never get into it!
Finally, I just FORCED myself to read it. I had read her other book, The Second Sex. I wish I had read this before. It is her life story.
She had a 50 year relationship with Sartre. She doesn't even get to know him until the last 20 pages of the book! Here are her first thoughts and final thoughts on Sartre in the book:
Page 309 · Only Sartre’s little band , which included Nizan and Herbaud , remained closed to me ;
Page 310 · Sartre wasn’t bad to look at , but it was rumoured that he was the worst of the lot , and he was even accused of drinking .
Page 345 - Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream - companion I had longed for since I was fifteen : he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence . I should always be able to share everything with him . When I left him at the beginning of August , I knew that he would never go out of my life again.
More quotes are below:
Page 103 · Location 2146
I didn’t know a single grown - up who appeared to enjoy life on earth very much :
Page 104 · Location 2158
often declared , ‘ you have no dowries ; you’ll have to work for a living . ’
Page 107 · Location 2207
As long as he approved of me , I could be sure of myself .
Book Three
Page 260 · Location 4946
His tranquillity offended me .
Page 275 · Location 5220
out what was underneath that rebarbative
Book Four
Page 307 · Location 5805
‘ There is within me I know not what yearning – maybe a monstrous lust – ever - present , for noise , fighting , savage violence , and above all for the gutter . .
Page 307 · Location 5810
I feel an avid curiosity ; I desperately want to burn myself away , more brightly than any other person , and no matter with what kind of a flame . ’
Page 308 · Location 5817
never for a moment did I contemplate sexual indulgence .
She was a smart, unhappy person who discarded God in her youth. She was quite the intellectual, and she influenced the modern feminist movement. Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
“The ability to pass over in silence events which I felt so keenly is one of the things which strike me most when I remember my childhood,” writes Beauvoir early in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; the length and density of her four volumes of autobiography make it clear that this youthful ability is one she would later abandon with a vengeance. Her affections and friendships, uncertainties and confidences, infatuations and intense attachments to ideas as well as people—including her nascent relationship with her brilliant fellow student Sartre—are lushly remembered and related with a decidedly literary complexion. Just as her most famous novel, The Mandarins, a roman à clef of her and Sartre’s postwar circle, is fiction laced with reality, so her autobiography is fact that leverages the ways and means of fiction, a deliberate construction that allows her—with true existentialist agency—to create a portrait of the person she has chosen to be.
What a brave young woman! She tells this story so beautifully and with such conviction. I could not put it down.
Her mother and the brainwasher of her mother were horrible. I hope these kids get good therapy and the rest of the family can heal after such a horrible ordeal.
I knew very little about but watched a long podcast interview that made me more curious about her life. I had never heard of this podcaster, but he was suggested to me by YouTube. So I watched the whole interview and was enlightened. She spoke of her book. So, I read it.
Here is the podcast:
The book was interesting. I don't want to make any political statements on this blog, but many people are bailing on the democrat party, and she was someone who ran for president on their ticket. So, I wanted to learn more about her switch, and I got an earful!
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