Daily prompt: The Great Divide

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books, fiction, postaday2014, Reading

When reading for fun, do you usually choose fiction or non-fiction? Do you have an idea why you prefer one over the other?

I don’t have a preference for either one because I love both. When I want to escape this world I choose fantasy/science fiction in the genre of Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, The Dragon Lance series and other wonderful series. One of my favorite things about science fiction is the very fact that these stories exist in serial form, making for enduring and lasting friendships between myself the reader and the characters. The Wheel of Time series gave me a group of young men and women who grew into their heroism and courage through much trial, loss and tribulation to at last emerge victorious over the ever present great evil plaguing their world; the boys who grew into men were Rand, Perrin and Matt and the girls who developed into such strong women were Egwene, Nynaeve and Elayne. In a series as dense and intricate as The Wheel of Time there are hundreds of vibrant secondary actors, but each was painted as vividly as the core six, my dear friends.

However my love for science fiction doesn’t make me love non-fiction any less, sometimes I find myself juggling several books at once which can make for some confused reading at times. I love Jared Diamond as an author; he penned two fantastic books; “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse” ; both of these books will strip away any bigotry or prejudice one might have of the “other”, trust me. I also adore reading historical biographies and Edmund Morris is one of my favorite biographers. His series on Theodore Roosevelt is beyond fascinating; he brings Teddy to life in all of his assets and deficits and you can tell how much Edmund Morris admires and loves Teddy and I fell in love with Teddy as well. Then there is the other Roosevelt, Franklin, his biography “Traitor to his Class” written by H.W Brands gave me a whole new appreciation for how truly great Franklin D. Roosevelt was and that is even after knowing all about what he did for us during and after the Great Depression.

These few examples of the type of non-fiction that I gravitate to and love seems to be a continuation of my political science classes, a field that called to me from a young age. History was my favorite subject of all time and by extension political science; this isn’t a love that just goes away when schooling is over.

That is why I adore books, they open up worlds and philosophies to everyone, all it takes to enter that other world is to flip a book open and read.

Daily prompt: Just another day

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breakfast, postaday2014, Reading, rituals, sleeping

Our days our organized around numerous small actions we repeat over and over. What’s your favorite daily ritual?

My favorite meal and time of day is breakfast time and of course the morning hours; that doesn’t mean that I worship the dawn, I much prefer the more civilized mid to late morning hours; but regardless, breakfast time is my favorite meal of the day. The best mornings are those where I don’t have to go anywhere early; I can sleep until I wake up, I have the luxury of making my oatmeal the way I like it, over the stove top with milk and milled flaxseed and I get to check Facebook while I eat my oatmeal and afterwards I have my pot of coffee leisurely while I read all of my e-mails and then move over to the online journals and the Huffington Post where I comment on an article and cross-post it to my political blog. All of this takes up to around two and half hours, that is what I consider to be the perfect morning and my perfect ritual.

Ahab’s Wife the book; just getting better and better

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Ahab's Wife, fiction, novels, postaday2013, Reading

The gift that my cousin Nancy gave me, the book Ahab’s Wife, is revealing itself to be one of the better written books that I have read in a long while. The author’s ease with descriptive language is pretty incredible and it is giving me inspiration for my own novel. The descriptive language that the authoress employs is used towards nature, thoughts, relationships and the physical persons in the heroine’s, Una is her name, world whereas I use descriptive language to describe food, cooking, eating and tasting. I think that I will try to incorporate more descriptive language to further communicate the sense of what Paris or now the lack of Paris means to my own heroine, now that she is ready to travel overseas to the new world.

I have often heard that to be a good writer, one needs to read a lot. Now that I have been at Ahab’s Wife for a while; reading a writing style that really has drawn me in and impressed me in a way that I haven’t been since I don’t know when, I feel moved to better my own writing. I know that I could seriously use improvement in my writing style. I think that for my novel, my style may be a little to matter of fact, not descriptive enough. I need to learn how to paint a scene with my words, I know that I paint scenes surrounding food and eating, I would like to try and branch out to my characters surroundings, feelings and physical persons.

It will always be a work progress just the way I am a work in progress as a person. That’s fine, I hope that I will get better as I continue writing, only time will tell.

My newest read these days

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Ahab's Wife, blogging, books, Captain Ahab, postaday2013, Reading, writing

The latest book that I am reading was a gift from my cousin Nancy, she passed it along to me when we went to see her on Mother’s Day weekend. It’s written by Sena Jeter Naslund who also authored Four Spirits, the title of her latest book is Ahab’s Wife or, The Star Gazer.

I just started it and I really like the writing style, I love the concept of exploring the wife’s story, the character off the pages of Moby Dick, who stayed on shore tending the home fires while the husband is traipsing throughout the seas on a crazy quest. The book’s first chapter is called Extracts and it is a few pages of extract after extract from Herman Melville’s classic showing the existence of Captain Ahab’s wife.

Once the fact that Captain Ahab did indeed have a wife is well established, we then get to meet her and follow her through her own story. I am curious to see how getting to know Captain Ahab’s wife, her name is Una by the way, will impact my appreciation of Moby Dick after all these years.

So far I have learned that Una is very close to her mother and has a difficult time of it with her father. This in and of itself isn’t so uncommon, girls and their fathers can often clash but I am waiting to see if this will affect her later in life when men enter her life.

I am very intrigued as to what type of woman would be attracted to a personality such as Captain Ahab’s and I suspect that I will see how huge the transformation of Ahab’s psyche must have been after his encounter with the beast and the impact on their relationship. Quite interesting if you ask me.

Starting on the The Life of Pi

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books, French name, postaday2013, Reading

I am on book two of my Christmas presents which is The Life of Pi. My hubby and I haven’t seen it at the movies yet and I’m pretty sure that we won’t get to before it is taken out of the theaters. I’m fine with reading the book because as far as I see, I am enjoying painting the scenery within my own mind. When I first heard the title, I wondered why someone would name their child Pi and if was related to the mathematical entity Pi. Imagine my surprise when I find out that his name is actually a French name but not in the way we think of names, it is a name of a thing; a swimming pool. The boy who is Pi cleverly gets his comrades at his new school to accept his nickname as Pi, the mathematical entity, instead of endearing the painful nickname he was given by his elementary school classmates. The word swimming pool in French is piscine, I guess that in India piscine easily becomes pissing and that degenerates further until it becomes too much for a young boy.

I suppose that I feel comfortable revealing some details because the book has been out for a while and with the movie I am fairly confident that I am not spoiling the book for many people. I respect the young boy’s fascination with the three religions and how intelligent he is in his outlook about complete acceptance of the fact that it is perfectly fine to believe and worship in all three. Because as he says, Why Not? They all love God, they are all religions based on Abraham as the patriarch, Jesus is a key figure and Hindu doesn’t interfere with any of them. For me, this was completely refreshing and I got a kick at his parents reactions as well as the reactions of the cleric, the priest and the rabbi. In my mind Pi’s logic is infallible.

So far I am in the lifeboat with Pi, the dead Zebra, the poor Orangutan, the just killed Hyena and Richard Parker, the Tiger, coping with the overwhelming stress of being in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean with, I forgot to mention sharks swirling around, and a Tiger named Richard Parker.

I don’t mind the occasional glimpses into the future of grownup Pi, it helps to know that he survives this immense ordeal, and I’m glad to know that he found a way to reclaim his place in life and in the world. So far so good in this adaventure.

Reading and research

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bootlegging, New York City, postaday2013, prohibition, Reading, research

I am now at the point in my book where my two characters have crossed the Atlantic and enter prohibition era New York City, specifically the year is 1926. I am getting ready to switch gears because New York City of any era is different than Paris and I want to try to be faithful to the New York City flavor and also try to describe it through the eyes of a newcomer. I think that I have my work cut out for me but I have already taken steps to try to make it easier to recreate what life was like back then in New York. My local library here in Blandford did me the wonderful service of ordering me a few books all related to New York during the prohibition era. One is a beautiful pictography called “New York Then and Now” and it shows gorgeous pictures of all the great neighborhoods way back in the late 1800’s and how they look now. It is so fascinating to see how industrious the early New Yorkers were, it definitely has always been the city that never sleeps.
One book in particular that has me very excited is “Dry NewYork” I have already gotten into a few chapters and it is a fascinating look into the sociological, economic and political dynamic of prohibition in New York and every single impact that you can think of throughout the fabric of its society. There are two others, “Taxi cabs and its Culture” and “Criminology of the Prohibition Era”, these two will surely be helpful in giving me insight into what universe my character Madeleine will be walking into with her lover Jack who she will come to see is knee deep in the criminal activity of prohibition.

I have my research in front of me and the only thing that is worrying me is that once I start writing, I’ll be involved in another book before I am done. Which by the way is all good and fine, but I am kind of chomping at the bit to get this book finished and out into the world of rejection. Joking. This book will be done when it is done. I vaguely remember the legendary actor Orson Welles shilling for an American wine maker Paul Mason and he used to say “No good wine shall be opened before its time” or something to that effect; I am merely extending the sentiment to my book, no good book shall be finished before its time.

The books that bite and sting

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books, Jared Diamond, postaday2012, racism, reactions, Reading, writing

The last book that I read that really moved me on many levels is "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond. His fundamental argument is that human civilization and its development can be traced to the availability of resources or lack thereof. We humans globally owe our success' and/or failures, primarily on the bounty of our primordial environment, not primarily on our "racial" superiority. This is very well explained when you examine why the New World was conquered by the Old World and not vice a versa, the Old World was host to the Fertile Crescent, a bountiful oasis that gave rise to food production and then specialized trades, the New World on the other hand was lacking in many of the nutritional staples and thus were unable to succeed in complex food production hence hindering their access to specialized trades of any kind. In their world there simply was no time beyond hunting and gathering to allocate men or talents to other ventures. Building on my vastly over-simplified synopsis throughout the entire book,there are examples and theories built upon evidence that led me to find that Diamond's thesis crushes any justification for imperialism whatsoever. It made me very happy to read this book because despite the fact that the U.S elected its first African-American President, there resides a racism that is both overt and latent and both forms derive their justification in inaccurate "theories" that Mr. Diamond brilliantly tramples and dismisses. I highly recommend the book.

What have you been reading lately?

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books, postaday2012, Reading, traveling

I am not reading anything at the moment since I am on vacation. I’m spending most of my time walking, visiting, learning and talking with my baby girl. However I did upload two books to read when I get some downtime, Paris Forever and Lunch in Paris. Essentially they are about women who decided to stop everything in their native countries and move to France. I am interested to see what things in particular drove them to simply quit their comfort zone and take the plunge in a foreign country, and why France. I know why it would be France for me, it’s because I equate France with strong family ties, I’m curious what pulled them here, if not for family.

What is my favorite way to procrastinate?

Tags

postaday2011, Reading, Science fiction

At this stage in my life, I don’t procrastinate the way I used to during my college years and even up until my mid thirties. I have finally understood that no amount of procrastination will make any difference in how unpleasant a task will be. It took quite a long time in coming, I have always been pushed to procrastinate because of fear. Fear of dealing with bill collectors, fear of dealing with unpleasant things, fear of doing things that I might fail at. I have written fairly often that a lot of my decisions, to do things or not to do things, were for the most part motivated by fear. It is amazing that fear can have had such a hold on me. It’s only in the last four years that I have been able to realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. I now understand that I had given fear too much power in my life and gradually I have become more confident in myself and slowly fear has lost its grip on me. I realize what the phrase “what’s the worst thing that can happen, I’ll die?” really means since as some of you know, four years ago I almost died in the hospital due to some very poor choices that I had made with my life. Tropical virus, eating disorder, drinking beer all the time and smoking way too much will do that to you. Four years later after a lot of thinking, healing, therapy and writing, I am learning more about myself and how much courage I actually have, it helps to learn good things about yourself. It reinforces all the positive things that you do for yourself, you see that it is worth it when you treat yourself with the respect and the love that you deserve. How did I get on this tangent? Oh yes, I was speaking about fear and the damage it can do when you give it too much power in your life.

And now that I got all that off my chest, when I do find myself wanting to procrastinate because I’m really not feeling it, doing whatever dreary task is at hand. I jump into my latest science fiction/fantasy book and lose myself for a while until the nagging voice gets the best of me and I put the book down and jump into the task to do it and get it over with.