"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).
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!
Wow! I loved this book. I learned about the "Father of Environmentalism"! He was way ahead of his time - late 1700s, early 1800s!
I like to follow journeys in books. Wikipedia was helpful for this.
I knew that there was a county and city in California named Humboldt, and they were named after him!
Quotes:
Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’. This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world. (p. 87)
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
As Andrea Wulf makes clear in this marvelous biography, Alexander von Humboldt’s holistic view of nature “as a network of forces and interrelationships” played a significant role in advancing ecological thinking and thereby gave rise to modern conceptions of the environment. Detailing with verve and erudition Humboldt’s exploits as an explorer in far-flung corners of the world, Wulf also reveals the extraordinary extent of his reputation in his own lifetime. In his day (born in 1769, he died ninety years later), he was the most famous scientist in the world and an international celebrity. This long, rich, information-packed biography repays leisurely attention at the same time as it stimulates one’s thinking about fundamental issues. “Humboldt was not so much interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them,” Wulf writes. A reader can thankfully say the same of the author of this delightful book.
Back to ME (Carol Ann) - I am adding some popular highlights quite a while later (sorry about the narrow margin - I don't know how to fix it!)
Humboldt gave us our concept of nature itself. The irony is that Humboldt’s views have become so self-evident that we have largely forgotten the man behind them. (p. 8).
It was here, at Lake Valencia, that Humboldt developed his idea of human-induced climate change. (p. 57)
Timber was the oil of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and any shortages created similar anxieties about fuel, manufacturing and transport, as threats to oil production do today. (p. 58)
Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’. This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world. (p. 87)
Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. (p. 105)
As long as there were scientists and artists, Haeckel believed, there was no need for priests and cathedrals. (p. 314)
I loved this! Such an edifying thing to listen to as I took late winter walks!
My favorite Teilhard quote from this recording is in the book Hymn of the Universe (p. 31):
[p.31]
Lord Jesus, now that beneath those world-forces you have become truly and physically everything for me, everything about me, I shall gather into a single prayer both my delight in what I have and my thirst for what I lack; and following the lead of your great servant I shall repeat those enflamed words in which, I firmly believe, the christianity of tomorrow will find its increasingly clear portrayal:
‘Lord, lock me up in the deepest depths of your heart; and then, holding me there,
burn me, purify me, set me on fire, sublimate me, until I become utterly what
you would have me be, through the utter annihilation of my ego.’
After reading a sad but good book (From Here to the Great Unknown) and a terrible book (Something Happened), reading a sweet, wholesome, imaginative Children's Classic that I had never heard of before was refreshing!
It reminded me of my brother and me pretending that the weird concrete island at the end of our street was a ship. It also made me think of the adorable 12, 10, 8, and 5-year-olds I did spiritual direction with from August to December! Most of them are the same age as the characters in the book.
Sometimes a light and fun read is just what the doctor ordered!
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Swallows and Amazons is the first in Arthur Ransome’s classic series of books about the children of the Walker family. In their initial appearance, the Walkers—John (the oldest, at twelve), Susan (ten), Titty (eight), and Roger (seven)—are summering with their mother in England’s Lake District, and the lakeland setting seems alive with the anticipation of a holiday. Adventure ensues when their friends' uncle's boat is burgled, but all comes right in the end, setting the stage for ten delightful sequels that similarly celebrate the resourcefulness of young people allowed to get their hands dirty as they master real skills—boating, camping, fishing, and the like—in a delightfully imagined but recognizable natural world.
I think this might be my LEAST favorite book at the end of the year.
YUK! I did not like it. "My wife is unhappy. My daughter is unhappy. My son has difficulties. Now, my son does not talk to me." In the meantime, he is having adulterous affairs with the women in his office, paying for the abortion of one of them. It is the DUMBEST book.
Don't read it.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
The product of thirteen years’ gestation, Something Happened is an anatomy of middle-aged disenchantments that is both wildly funny and suffused with a desperate sorrow. Its narrator, Bob Slocum, is an office worker on the wearying escalator of a senseless though sometimes vicious corporate track; a husband whose marriage resides in a different dimension from his heart; a father terrified by the opacity, vulnerability, and willfulness of his children; an individual whose once eager innocence has been tarnished by the indefinable something that so surely happened to set him in his hopeless ways. Although Slocum’s narration embodies his banal life, Heller’s almost surreal focus on its very banality transforms it, by an astonishing act of literary sleight of hand, into something mesmerizing.
Heartwarming and so heart-breaking too. I loved this book. I remember where I was when I heard Elvis died in 1977. (Working at the Pacifica Hotel in Culver City, CA). My boss was undone and played Elvis songs all day. The nation was in mourning. This book gives the perspective of his little girl.
I read this after seeing a great podcast interview with Riley Keough.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Shirley Jackson’s penultimate novel, The Haunting of Hill House, constitutes a masterpiece of psychosexual anxiety. Her wickedly disturbing passion play, enacted by the four (later, six) individuals gathered at the cursed mansion known as Hill House, perfectly equates the interior state of the spinsterish protagonist, Eleanor Vance, with the confusing, calamitous rooms and the surrounding acreage of the titular dwelling. Besides serving as a quietly horrifying testament to one woman’s disintegration, Jackson’s mordant 1959 book also brings a fresh sophistication to the horror genre through its characters’ recognition of what the plot will demand of them. By their conversation when they first meet, they make clear that they know they’re enacting clichéd roles from myriad films and novels. But their ultra-modern awareness fails to forestall the actual terror, and this is perhaps Jackson’s scariest assertion: The intellect is no real bulwark against the darkness.
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