“A book is not just a book…”

“To me a book is not just a book, it is a love affair.”

Osho, From Misery to Enlightenment, Ch 15, Q 1

 

“I have loved reading from my very childhood. My own personal library consisted of one hundred fifty thousand rare books of all the religions, philosophies, poetry, literature. And I have read all of them, but with no purpose; I enjoyed it.”

Osho, The Last Testament, Vol 1, Ch 26

The Book of Stones
Who They Are & What They Teach
by Robert Simmons & Naisha Ahsian

463 pages of lush, absolutely woo-woo (ie esoteric) descriptions of the spiritual properties of perhaps 400 different stones. Each description starts with the geologic properties, and then quickly dives into what the mineral can do for us humans. And, of course, there’s a photo – or two or three – often gorgeous. Many of the stones were new to me.

The authors are connected with a shop and mail-order business called Heaven and Earth (in Vermont, as nearly as I could tell), and Simmons and his wife have also written a book about the tektite Moldavite (a fave stone of mine).

A solid reference book which can give a lot of inspiration. Rituals and affirmations are described for many of the stones. For gem freaks, and esoterica freaks, this book could be quite a treasure. It’s New Age plus indubitable grounding. And the authors are careful to say that your own experience with a stone is what counts; their reading need not be taken as gospel.

A huge and intense undertaking, obviously; the authors really cut loose in the stone-by-stone essays they wrote. It might be difficult to find anything they’d left out!

Drinking Custard
Diary of a Confused Mum
by Lucy Beaumont

This writer and her husband are both comedians ‘off the telly’, and indeed the book is funny! I have never wanted to go through pregnancy, childbirth, and new-motherhood, but I like reading about it! Lucy is funny because she just tells the truth, in a raw and ditzy way; and occasionally her husband adds footnotes – which is actually a very good touch, as they are usually funny. I roared aloud a time or two.

I was amazed when they were looking for a town to move to in the North where they could afford a big house with a big garden for their toddler. They zeroed in on Hebden Bridge, and then fell in love with a house in Mytholmroyd, just up the canal path from my place! She comments, “There’s a price to pay for living near an arty, socialist town that is actually very affluent, which is that the children are all named after planets and everywhere sells out of sourdough bread very quickly.”

Recommended if you need some truthful silliness! And to congratulate yourself for being past childbearing age!

My Cat Saved My Life
by Phillip Schreibman

A breathtakingly beautiful memoir. At 109 pages, it’s very slight in a way, but so honest and clear and rich that it bears the mark of genius.

A composer in Toronto loses both his beloved parents to long, painful illnesses. He sinks into depression – he cannot see what the sense of anything is, if unfair deaths like that take such good people. Life is grey and trudging. And then a filthy little spitting kitten comes along, and over time the author realises that the cat she becomes is much, much better at navigating life – at living – than he is. And so he decides to go to the School of Cat. He studies Alice and goes where she goes (she often invites him). He begins to free up his spine by rolling on the floor. And he learns to be in what he calls Creation instead of Culture.

Excerpts:

“Here, amongst the shadows of the heavy furniture, we were simply two beings in a room. Only that. Then, for the briefest of moments, I was there with her. For a tiny instant, I was no longer living in my mind but in the room.

“I know it was Alice being in the room that brought me there. I felt safe. After all, she was a cat; she sought out only the best places. So if Alice were here, it was all right. Her shape in the darkness was like an amulet.”

“To be in Creation! The freedom of it! To be in the world as a living creature and know nothing but the duty to receive it and appreciate it! A cat’s job!”

This book is Zen through and through; yet it is real and so humble and so unpolluted by rhetoric… it is just one wretched man’s experience, expressed with brevity and wonder – that one feels neither bewildered nor preached at. (He does quote the Kabbalah a couple of times, with reverence.) I wept freely at a certain place… and felt I was in the presence of that simplest thing, something so clear we all must know it really; and yet nobody has said it like this before.

The Sparsholt Affair
by Alan Hollinghurst

The first book I read by this extraordinary writer was The Line of Beauty, and it blew my mind – the thoroughness of observation and description, the courage and honesty in revealing gay life in London in modern-ish times. Hollinghurst is dedicated to fine noticing of layers and layers of human thought, emotion, social constructs, and contradiction; like Tolstoy, he’s not afraid to bring opposites together within the same person, in the same sentence – and to do it surely and gracefully.

In this book we have more gay guys, in Cambridge during the War and then a generation later, in London, and a generation after that – the same guys, plus kids they manage to have along the way. Minute interactions are the order of the day here, and the writer isn’t in a hurry, so the reader can’t be either. There is gay student life, and the alliances formed there that play out in the rest of the book. There is, later, an old scandal continually alluded to, there is a big gay household with comings and goings, there are semi-famous men and their sons, and the plot isn’t really very plotty, but more meandering. Perhaps my favourite bits were descriptions of the working life of a portrait painter – somehow richly entertaining! I got a bit tired of men giving each other the eye in public places – lots of inner machinations in the men as this was going on. And lots and lots of this eyeing. Scenes of long coupledom were more interesting by and by, feeling very real and, again, leisurely in the examination.

Definitely a brilliant writer, doing something quite new: beautifully unveiling gay lives in heart and calm and thoroughness.

The Body
A Guide for Occupants
by Bill Bryson

This is not the funny Bryson we know and love; this is mild-mannered and occasionally-whimsical science-teacher Bryson, educating us about our bodies and the scientific breakthroughs and breakdowns that have informed the search to find out about these bodies. As in A Short History of Nearly Everything, he takes an interest in the lives of the eccentrics, heroes, villains, and everybody else involved in a thing; so we get potted biographies of researchers old and new. It’s all quite mainstream medically, though there is a sense that he thinks for himself and takes the statistics without prejudice – poking fun and not stinting on his consternation at trouble and nonsense in the name of healthcare.

All this with the glancing whimsy we’d expect of him.

A few samples:

“The U.S. has 4 percent of the world’s population but consumes 80 percent of its opioids… Every year opioids (both legal and illegal) claim 45,000 or so, American lives, far more than are killed in car crashes.”

“A typical flu renders its victims infectious for about a day before they get symptoms and for about a week after they recover, which turns every victim into a vector.”

“We still have just three kinds of color receptor (in our eyes) compared with four for birds, fish, and reptiles. It’s a humbling fact, but virtually all non-mammalian creatures live in a visually richer world than we do.”

“…humans can manage to live on only about 12 percent of Earth’s land area and just 4 percent of the total surface area if you include the seas.”

“For each visual input, it takes a tiny but perceptible amount of time – about 200 milliseconds, or 1/5 of a second – for the information to travel along the optic nerves and into the brain to be processed and interpreted… To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like 1/5 of a second from now, and THAT is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction if a moment in the future…”

“More than 80,000 chemicals are produced commercially in the world today… 86 percent of them have never been tested for their effects on humans.”

“Leprosy, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, diphtheria, measles, influenzas – all vaulted from goats and pigs and cows and the like straight into us… Farming led to the rise of commerce and literacy and the fruits of civilisation, but also gave us millennia of rotten teeth, stunted growth and diminished health.”

“A study in New Zealand of diabetic patients in 2016 found that the proportion suffering severe complications was 40 percent lower among patients treated by doctors rather high for compassion.”

“Taste receptors have also been found in the heart, lungs, and even the testicles. No one knows quite what they are doing there…”

“Nearly all advanced nations require helmets for all motorcyclists and passengers. In America, 60 percent of states don’t… They can let the wind, and all too often the pavement, run through their hair.”

“We have reached the decidedly bizarre point in health care… in which pharmaceutical companies are producing drugs that do exactly what they are designed to do but without necessarily doing any good.”

“Children in the U.S. are 70 percent more likely to die in childhood than children in the rest of the wealthy world.”

Pure as the Lily
by Catherine Cookson

I kept thinking of an old Dutch painting while reading this: a rustic scene of peasant life, done by candlelight. And I kept longing to see the book as a film: grainy, earthy, funky, plain and full of authentic period detail. The first 2/3 of the book, set in 1933 and 1943, and seen from the perspectives first of a young girl in Jarrow, northeastern England, and then of her brother, a poetry-writing schoolteacher – were a deft wizardry of time and place, dialect and action. The young girl unknowingly attracts the love of an older man whom her mother wants for herself. The mother, a ‘piece of work’, as the Brits say, curses everyone concerned, and sends her milquetoast husband to exact violent revenge. And so on from there…

This writer specialises in family and neighbourhood drama, and because her writing is so rich and simple and musical all at once, I think that whatever scene she set her stories in would seem compelling. I wondered how it would have been if she’d grown up in California instead of cold grey northern lands. It would have been beautiful, her storytelling, because that was her gift, and because she wrote of what she knew, so that it was utterly authentic. Period dramas are rarely so lucky.

The last third of the book is set in 1972, the year the book was published. This part I did not like. I had been practically in raptures at the language and the plot-turns during the first parts; and particularly of the occasional pieces of poetry thrown in, written by some character or other. But then suddenly the author bumps up against the modern world, and is not at home there. She becomes judgemental and narrow (to my view) as she rejects opportunities presented by higher education for women, and inveigles her two young characters into marrying within the same extended family.

A rare let-down from this classic and hugely prolific novelist.

The Confession
by John Grisham

When Grisham is good he’s really good – no frills, no literary pretensions whatsoever, just a story of right and wrong where he tackles some difficult area of human life – quite fearlessly. My favourites so far: Grey Mountain, about coal mining, and the one about the tobacco industry – I think it was The Runaway Jury.

He’s not always so good though – some recent shorter works, like Camino Island, I found repellent – a bit pompous, and populated by unlikeable characters, and sliding into moral grey areas that take the fun out of a happy ending. His sports stories too I can do without, but only perhaps because I have no interest in ball games.

This book, however, held my interest and touched my heart and my gut-emotion from first to last. A high school cheerleader is abducted and killed by a career scumbag (who of course had a rotten childhood) and the police of that small town coerce a confession from a young Black football player. An all-white jury happily sends him off to death row. And a team of lawyers fight like hell to have him exonerated. And then the scumbag who did it gets in touch…

It is fascinating that the human mind is vulnerable to flagrant lying: the police insist that you did a crime; they tell you how and when, whilst depriving you of sleep. They repeat the story so often that you yourself begin to doubt what you really know. I have had a taste of this: someone recounting an episode from my life and theirs from long ago, whilst insisting I had not been there. Luckily I had a photo, or I might have begun to be sorely troubled: was it really possible I wasn’t there, and had fantasised the whole thing? It’s a very odd feeling. I’m afraid that police and dictators specialise in this sort of thing. It’s good we all have phones full of pics now, so there’s no doubt!

This book is an indictment of the death penalty, of police corruption, or racism. And it’s a celebration of love and supportiveness and fighting for what is right. The prolific author is a force of nature.

Groomed to be a Bride
by Maggie Hartley

In this fostering memoir, a teenage Iraqi girl finds her way to Britain after her family is torn apart by war. Social Services sends her to Maggie to help her accustom herself to her new country, learn English, and begin to heal from her trauma. The girl has horrible nightmares every night, and slowly slowly begins to tell her story. But then she is given a computer, and gets sucked into some scary stuff online. Maggie has to figure out what is going on, whilst keeping the girl safe and helping her look for any scattered family who may have survived.

Compassionate, loving, practical, humanitarian, empathic – Maggie seems to be an ideal foster carer. I’ve read a lot of her books, and often wished she was around when I was a child!

Home Fires
by Elizabeth Day

At 247 pages, this English novel is not so long, but it has the power of a whole saga. This is the gift a writer can give: observing us all, very carefully, and then telling us what she observes. So that, in our own ways, we can see it too.

It’s about war – how humans go on doing it; and how terribly it damages even those who survive, and their extended families too. It is about grief – which it looks at with minute and unsparing attention – so that we have to be present and centred to read it, and willing to look things in the face. And it is about emotional repression – a culture’s choice which becomes a compelling, built-in pressuring; and we know that the author does not approve of this repression, though she doesn’t have to say this in so many words. We find out, too, that she is in favour of counselling, and finds it magical.

The story is set both right after WWI, and in the present day. Four generations of the same family go through their war-related traumas and losses in an incoherent, helpless, visceral way, whilst trying constantly to show a smooth, calm face. This attempt to hide the truth of what you feel is a central theme of the story – and it is an attitude I well remember from my childhood. The grip of it is awful. It took Osho to break this shell wide open and show the interior – our own and others’.

This award-winning author is meticulous and dedicated to her task of showing us the time-wasting dangers of social lying. She also manages to find some redemption there at the end – for love is love, and it’s always trying to come through.

These reviews were first posted on Facebook by the author
Featured image and quotes by Osho credit to Shakura via FB

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