Extra Reality This Month: Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon

Posted on November 25, 2015 by Kate

I never felt cool enough to be a Sonic Youth fan. Or, I’m not sure I’ve ever really understood their music and I attributed my lack of understanding to how utterly uncool I am. But, I’ve always respected them as a band (and more than once my lack of understanding because me an opportunity to flirt with a musically inclined cutie.) Plus, Kim Gordon has always been kind of a feminist icon to me. She was a shining example of how a woman could succeed in a profession dominated by men. And, the fact that she succeeded and managed to maintain a relationship with talented hottie Thurston Moore just made her even more iconic. It’s a little unfair to pin so much hope to a relationship but I know a lot of people who looked at their marriage and thought, “If they can do it, we can do it.” and the world seemed surprised and disappointed when they announced they were divorcing. I was also disappointed. It seemed like the end of a era and maybe it was. I don’t know. So, when I heard that Gordon was writing a memoir I knew I had to read it.

The book chronicles her life starting with her childhood in California and takes us all the way to the present day with a kid in college in new projects post-band. Gordon talks a lot about her relationships with her parents and brother and her mentors and how that shaped who she was and how she ended up in a band. Kim Gordon, you may not know, went to art school and studied painting. (I didn’t know that.) So, this memoir is not just a story about a band or a story of how her marriage came together and fell apart. It is also an interesting look into the art world and how the New York of today grew up.

This was a really, really neat book that made me crave 90s music and to wander around Manhattan. It was really interesting to read what Gordon had to say about the music scene and the growing gallery culture of that time period. It was also really interesting to get a perspective from an older feminist on the world then and now. As I mentioned in on periscope, Kim Gordon is the same age is Beth’s and my mother and her feminism and my feminism are not the same. It is nice to be reminded that the movement has moved.

So, if you are interested in the music and art of the 80s and 90s, I definitely recommend it.

This Month in Reality: It’s Just a F*cking Date

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Kate

I picked this up in a bogo audible sale. It’s not my usual fare but Greg and Amiira seem to be doing well together and other people seem to enjoy their books so I figured, why not?

My feelings about this book are ambivalent but not because I didn’t enjoy it. Greg and Amiira are funny, smart and endearing. I think they gave me some great advice. But, some of their advice was off-putting because it meant accepting things about the world that I think need to be changed. So, my ambivalence is less about my feelings toward the book and more about my feelings towards society as a whole.

But, let’s talk about what I liked first. One of the premises of this book was that you set the bar for how people treat you. So, you have to be conscious of what you put out into the world. Potential partners not giving you a second look? Then you need to think about what you’re giving them to look at. They really hit the whole “get a life to have a life” idea hard. And, I really like that (and do that anyway). It makes sense to me to have a life I love and to invest time in making a life a love. And, if it means that I seem cool and mysterious because I’m a complete person who is not willing to drop everything to be with someone then, great. Total win. I liked the advice sections that focused on building you up. And, I liked the advice sections about how to date multiple people and to be explicit about your commitments when you are wanting to make them (and not expecting them in return).

But, all of the advice about deferring to men and letting them chase you and letting them take the lead in a conversation, blech. It’s probably something I need to hear and I probably should listen to it. (Although, that being said, ladles and jelly spoons, “So, that thing you do seems cool, tell me about it” is an imperative, not a interrogative. It’s easier to answer a question than give a speech about cool shit I do. So maybe instead of saying, “tell me about it” or “what’s that about?” say, “How did you get into that?” Just a suggestion.) I’m fine with waiting after a first date and letting the dude take the next move. (I mean, I do have a life and I expect you to have one, too. So, if you text me immediately or call the next day I might wonder about you.) I didn’t take good notes on this one so I feel like I should have better examples but suffice to say that most of my problems weren’t with the book but are with society.

So, that’s it for this one. It was pretty cool, even if society still has weird gender relations.

This Month in Reality…Waking Up

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Kate

I have been continuing my meditative practice and reading more on meditating this month. The good news I’m getting better. The bad news is I’ve gotten to the point where I know I’m getting better because I’m completely aware of how very, very bad I am at it. The author of Waking Up tells me this is a real sign of progress. You feel like you’re getting worse because you were so sure you were great at it before. But, now that you have a little practice of recognizing a thought you realize that you were just telling yourself a story before and you weren’t actually all that awesome.

So, that’s a total bummer if even if it is also a total victory.

Waking Up by Sam Harris is a book about spirituality for the non-religious. The thesis of the book is that spirituality is something human and that if we package it with religion we are missing out on something that we all need. Specifically, religion and spirituality have traditionally been places where we have cultivated consciousness with meditative practices that leave us calmer, more focused, and feeling better about the world, ourselves and others. Compassion, focus, these things can be taught and some traditionally religious practices can help us learn. Meditation, particularly if you think of it as a Buddhist practice, is an excellent example of this. There are other examples, too. Prayer seems to be a meditative practice for many people. But, if you don’t believe in God and/or you don’t want to follow or adhere to a set of guidelines or rules prescribed by a religion, you could still probably benefit from similar practices. The book focuses a lot on meditation practice and how meditation can help us cultivate consciousness.
Harris says throughout the text that he doesn’t want you to take him at his word. He wants you to test out his theories and ideas in the ‘laboratory of your life’. And, I liked that. I liked that a lot. I like being encouraged by someone selling an idea to try the idea on to see what I think about it. I also liked that Harris presented some research on consciousness and how what we think of as consciousness relates to our brains. This is an area of much ongoing research because we don’t know where consciousness is (if there is even one particular where to pinpoint, which there probably isn’t.) Some of the research he presented in this book is on split-brain patients (note: this stuff is *not* for testing in the laboratory of your own life). Split-brain patients have had their Corpus Callosum severed. This is done surgically (as a last-ditch effort to stem the tide of epileptic seizures that are devastating other neurological processes or for other equally serious reasons) and after the procedure the hemispheres are cut off from each other. This leads to some interesting behavior like the right and left hand both reaching for the same object. Or, the right and left hand picking out different outfits to wear. These are really interesting studies and if you’ve never read about split-brain patients before this alone might be worth the price of admission.
I really enjoyed this book and if you are interested in meditation practice or spirituality but can’t handle religion I’d say this isn’t a bad place to start.

I checked this book out from the Buffalo and Erie County Public libraries

This Month in Reality: Sit Still Already

Posted on August 30, 2015 by Kate

I’ve been thinking about starting a meditation practice for awhile now and last month’s Relovution reminded me of that. So, I’ve started one. I’ve been using Stop, Breathe and Think. And, it hasn’t been too bad!

So, for this month I’m going to talk about two books that are of a the Buddhist/meditation perspective. (One that I just listened to and one that I admittedly read awhile ago).

Awhile back I read When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön. I was having a rough time because it was winter and I had sinus infections that I couldn’t shake and I was pretty bummed out. And, the title just caught me. It seemed pretty apt for my situation (because I’m overly dramatic so, of course, my life was falling apart because I never saw the sun and I was on antibiotics). Two things from the book stuck with me: the idea that even terrible situations have something to offer us (other than their terribleness) and that we should practice loving-kindness. Loving-kindness has a particular meaning here and refers to a practice of gentleness, compassion, flexibility and forgiveness. Mostly I remember that this idea of loving-kindness (maitri is the word Chödrön used for it) means being gentle and as someone who can be sharp tongued, being reminded of the importance of gentleness is always something I need. Chödrön talked for a long while about starting this practice with yourself. Yes, you mess up sometimes. Yes, you are uncomfortable. Yes, things hurt and you can’t always fix them or make them better. But, you can be gentle with yourself. You can be gentle with others. You might not be able to make something better, but you can, at the very least, not make it worse by being hard and inflexible. This book is full of discussions of Buddhist practice and how practice is important in difficult times.

The second book for this month isn’t actually a book. Mindful Living is a series of audio recordings of lectures given by Thich Nhat Hahn at a retreat that have been compiled for our listening pleasure. This audio recording is a nice example of what the audio format can do that you don’t see in books. It is really neat to be able to hear the monk’s words in his own voice. I enjoyed the lectures. My favorite of the lectures talked about thinking about what your face was like before you were born. We, none of us, came from nothing so it is an interesting exercise to ponder where we came from and how we have been influenced by things. I liked all of the little reminders of how to be mindful and how to make reminders to be present and to enjoy the experience of being you.
This is was interesting audiobook and I recommend it if you know a little about mindfulness and you are interested in expanding your understanding of it.

So, there you have it. One book and one lecture series both of which are worth a look! Yay!

This Month in Reality: Love and Revolution

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Kate

So, Russell Brand’s third book is about the state of the world and what we can all do to change it. He does his usual comedy schtick but he also presents the views of public figures, past and present, who are advocating for change. I checked this book out from the library to listen to while I cleaned my apartment and but I found myself often just listening. There were many touching and poignant things in the novel. Brand gets personal and talks about painful breakups and relationships and his history of addiction. He gets global and he talks about alternative energy and failures in many governmental systems world wide. One of the things that he keeps coming back to is small groups of people coming together to take care of themselves and effect change.

To be quite honest, I was very touched by this book. I found that it stuck with me long after I had put it down.

When people have to take to the streets because they are being injured or killed by a police service that is not part of the community and not serving the community the system isn’t working. When congress can spend an entire session not passing bills, not appointing people to positions that need to be filled, not taking care of veterans, and not debating or discussing any issues that affect the lives of the people that they actually represent, the system isn’t working. When we expect students to get a college degree to get a good job but that college degree will set them back thousands and thousands of dollars into debt (and when that degree is no guarantee that a good job will ever be available), the system is broken. When apples are shipped to another continent to be processed and then shipped back to be sold (or fish are caught, frozen, shipped to another continent thawed, scaled and boned, refrozen and shipped back) the system isn’t working. Or, maybe it is working and it is just a stupid system.

I think we can all agree that at least some of those things sound crazy. I mean, at least the fish and the apple thing. I hope the other things as well.

So, the question is, if the system isn’t working, how do we as people, come together and fix the system or change the system or make the system work? The big question that we all have ask ourselves is what are the things that are important to us? How do we center those important things in our lives and in our policies? How do we create a government that is on the same page as we are?

Brand has some suggestions but three of the things that he keeps coming back to are meditation, people coming together to change something, and love.

These are things that have been on my mind recently. Meditation because I have become increasingly aware of how some sort of meditation practice could benefit me. People coming together because of all of the movements that are rolling and changing things (#blacklivesmatter, #sayhername, and #lovewins as possible examples). Love for a possibly bizarre reason. I have about one year left on my PhD and I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’m going to do next. All of that thinking about the future has really highlighted what is important to me and it turns out that what’s important to me is a need to be near people I love. One of the things I took from reading this book was that, yes, the world is in an awful state and it can be an awful place. But, it doesn’t have to be. We can work together to make it better. We can be there for each other, we can support each other and we don’t have to take any of this as, “that’s just the way the world works.” Naw. The world works the way we work and if we want to change something, we should.

This book was full of a lot of really quotable things that as a listener I kept coming back to like: “Sometimes you have to realize that the only power you have in a situation is the power to make it worse.” (Or, not.) I could not have heard this quote a better time. Sometimes, you just have to be reminded that your only options are to be a dick or to be a compassionate human being.

In a discussion of suffragette Emily Davison who worked the get women the vote in England, Brand pointed out that were former leaders of past revolutions to be magically transported in time to now that they might not be encouraging people to vote but rather to riot. It is important to remember that even leaders of peaceful movements did not countenance peace in all instances and that we need to be very careful not to take their life’s work out of context. (We especially need to be careful not to take their life’s work out of context in order to silence a vocal minority that is looking to be heard or that is looking for justice.)

But, the best part of this book for me was maybe how personal it was. Brand reminds you over and over again that you don’t need a perfect solution now, that you can start where you are, that you can do something small and that you, right now, are enough and that you do not need to change. You are okay. I was a little surprised at first by how affected I was to hear that. But, I think we get messages every day about how inadequate we are and we are so habituated to seeing and hearing them that we don’t even question them. Having a weirdo comedian who has had many hilarious (possibly unintentionally so) hairstyles remind me to begin where I am was oddly comforting. Knowing that this guy, who is probably a total dick, is trying his best for his community, was moving. Listening to Brand talk about his many fuck ups and shortcomings was oddly empowering.

Brand reminds us that, “This is your planet, you can change it if you want to. You can change it by doing loads of drug or having it off with loads of women or going on a murderous rampage with a licensed weapon. Doesn’t it make more sense though to change it by binding together with your fellow man and working to create a society that is fair and just? Of course it does!”

So, if you’re interested in hearing a comedian discuss the work of forward-thinking people and talk about revolution, meditation, and power structures, I highly recommend this book.

I checked the audio for this book out from the Buffalo and Erie County Public Libraries.

This Month in Reality…. SPACE! SCIENCE! PHYSICS! WAY MORE ABOUT MY PERSONAL LIFE THAN YOU NEED TO KNOW!

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Kate

I’ve been going through a period of Spring Cleaning. Really, it is a period of shucking possessions I no longer use (and, if I’m really, really lucky, also shucking habits that no longer serve me). Basically, it is one big, painful cycle of creating piles of things to go to the trash or to AMVETs followed immediately by the creation of another pile. (It is painful because I am unreasonably attached to my clutter. But, that’s a blog post for another time. Maybe I’ll review that Konmari book everyone seems to be in love with.) While doing all of this I’ve been listening to books on physics, philosophy, and meditation. The meditation and philosophy books are obvious and probably the subject of next month’s This Month in Reality. The physics books seem obvious to me and I hope after you read this post they will be obvious to you, too. I’m a pretty smart person but beyond basic Newtonian physics and some of the basic math of quantum physics, I’m stumped. I don’t get it. Or, I do get it but only after it has been explained to be in a metaphor. And, since you have to use a metaphor for the universe why can’t that just be a metaphor for some aspect of life? We’re already kind of stretching the truth. And, why can’t I contemplate that while I’m trying to decide if I should keep a pair of heels I’ve only ever worn to vacuum in at home?

Anyway, this month I listened to A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking and What if?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions By Randall Munroe.

tl;dr: these are both awesome. I loved them. You should read them.

The best thing about A Brief History is that I got to spend a lot of time giggling like a 12-year old boy when the narrator said, “hot body”. The bigger something is, the hotter it has to burn. Whoa, Mamma! (Yes, I am aware of my incredible immaturity.) But, I also got to marvel at a lot of things about the universe. Like, time began when the universe began. The concept of time, the scientific concept of time, literally has no meaning outside of our universe because it is a dimension of our universe. There is no time before time.

That still gives me shivers.

And, I got to marvel at all of the cool physics stuff. Like quarks come in the following flavors (yes, flavors): up, down, strange, charmed, bottom and top and colors: red, green and blue. It is funny that they have colors because we’re not talking about something that can be visibly perceived. Wait…that’s not how I want to say that. There are colors outside our spectrum of vision. I want to say that this color property doesn’t go beyond the atom. Color is just another metaphor here for how charges interact with one another. There’s an entire theory of quantum physics that deals with chromodynamics. In my mind, this involves an amazing light show. That can’t possibly be the case but please don’t disabuse me of this notion. And, did you know that protons have 2 up and 1 down quark and neutrons have 2 down and 1 up quark? Yes, I was surprised by that, too! There are also gluons in there, too. But, it is now unclear to me what gluons do (except maybe glue things together?)

This book talked a lot about time and how it moves and its place in the universe. It also talked a lot about gravity (which is “always attractive” bada-ching!) Hawking is actually really funny in this book. I found myself laughing that things that I’m sure I was supposed to laugh at (not just at the things my inner 12 year old would laugh at.) For example, he tells an amusing anecdote about a talk that he gave at a conference at the Vatican where he proposed a framework that would do away with the notion of a divine creator. Whoops.

But, my favorite part, and perhaps the most (possibly unintentionally) philosophical part of the book was when Hawking talked about if anything in quantum physics were different, we’d all be different. That is fun to think about.

So, after I listened to this intense text of which I understood about 20%, I decided to move on to something that is meant to funny but is also very smart. What if? by Randall Munroe is a book of hypothetical questions answered using modern science. The audio book is read by Wil Wheaton. This automatically makes it 50% nerdier (and if you’re a nerd about 20% cooler. I am a nerd. And, I like Wil Wheaton. But, I LOVE xkcd, Monroe’s web comic. This is why it’s only 20%). Some of the scenarios are “What would happen if rain came in one gigantic drop” and “What if you built a machine gun jet pack”? and “what if you had a mole of moles?” I think you can see where this is going. Munroe treats each question as if it were not absurd and answers it to the best of his ability. The answers draw on real scientific data (the weight of a mole, gravity, heat, air speed, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, etc) and comes to what are hilarious and often horrifying conclusions. The book itself has great illustrations (I immediately picked it up and re-read a bunch of it after I finished listening to it) and Wheaton’s performance is outstanding.

This month I got lucky: These were two great books that I highly recommend!

This Month in Reality: I joined a gym…

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Kate

…and then, because I think I’m funny, I checked out The First Twenty Minutes from the public library to listen to while I’m on the tread mill. Here are some things I learned:

listen to your body
chocolate milk is the best recovery beverage
listen to your body
you can die from over hydrating
healthy and fit are different things
doing little things like balancing on one leg while you brush your teeth can help you stay healthy and mobile
listen to your body
You can be a gym-going couch potato. That’s a thing! So, Stand up every once in awhile during your mostly sedentary day. It’s good for you
there’s a kind of running training called fartlek
Listen to your body

The book starts and ends with the premise that people should work out and try to get more movement into their days. The people who benefit the most from exercise are those who are new to it. Then, to continue to get better you really have to go harder. Interval training will really help you up your fitness, but you have to do high intensity intervals. Like, really uncomfortable, push you to the max, intervals. You get the most benefits from the first twenty minutes but then you plateau. So, going longer won’t actually make you fitter (but, if you’re training for a race or something else involving endurance you definitely should consider going longer). The best way to avoid injury is listen to what your body is telling you: if it hurts, don’t do it. (But, if you’re just feeling fatigued, like after a first set of lifting weights, you’re doing something right). Motion control shoes might not help you from remaining uninjured (research done by the US Army!). And, working out more won’t really help you lose weight for many of the reasons outlined in this piece on Salon. Finally, I learned, or rather had confirmed for me, the idea that we’re not meant to sit for eight hours a day and that going to the gym doesn’t necessarily cancel out the hours and hours of sitting. Solution? Stand up every now and then. I set an alarm on my phone and I get up every twenty minutes while I’m working now. I just stand, stretch, maybe pace a little and then go back to work. I do actually feel better and am more alert throughout the day, so even if I’m not getting anything else from this new behavior I’m at least getting that. The book also covered some of the benefits of strength training. The headline: It’s a good idea. (I was already sold on the idea of resistance training because I like fitting into smaller pants and lifting weights has helped me achieve that goal in the past.) The other thing that I will take from this book is that I now get a chocolate milk juice box after every work out. My internal child is always thrilled to get that treat after my workout. The subject material was interesting; I did enjoy hearing about all of the research (interval training can really help your 5k time! Start incorporating sprints into your walk/run!). But, I hated both the (metaphorical) voice of the author and the (literal) voice of the woman they hired to read this audiobook. Reynolds inserts herself and her running practice into the narrative probably as a way to humanize all of the science she presents. I found these digressions boring and irritating. They were boring because there wasn’t enough of them to make me care about her and they were irritating because she came off as smug early on and this didn’t make me want to identify with her. Also, the way she presented some of the science, like it was a done deal and this is totally how human bodies work made me wonder how much the author really understood what she was presenting (it was particularly curious when they were rat studies). Although, the author did make sure to point out that many of these studies were only done on men and that health, fitness, and disease literature done in recent years just on women suggest that the take home message from research on men doesn’t actually generalize all that well to women. (No-So-Spoiler-Alert: Men and Women have different bodies! They behave differently and have different needs!) I’m happy Reynolds presented information about some of the studies done on women and pointed out when they studies only involved men. That being said, just because it is true for rat brains doesn’t mean it is true for human brains (even, possibly especially, if it is a positive result) and I expect more from New York Times writers than to present a study and leave it open for the reader to make the leap. (I really do hope that physical activity helps memory and emotions in humans as much as it does in rats. If physical activity can truly be found to help with degenerative brain diseases then that 5K for Alzheimer’s research is apt and doubly beneficial. But, promising research and definitive research are not the same thing. I know, I’m sad that its raining on a parade day, too.) All of these things may have been less bothersome if I had been reading and not listening to this book, though. The voice actor reading it won’t be making my faves list. Karen Saltus, the reader was fine. For most of the book she inoffensive and passable and probably unmemorable. But, she did voices for quotes from scientists and for the female scientists she used intonation patterns that made the scientists sound like airheads. That, my friends, is a sin that will not be forgiven. Scientists, all scientists deserve a hat tip and some respect. It’s a tough business, securing grants, doing research, teaching students. And, doing anything to make it seem like we should question validity of the work because the researcher is a woman will not be tolerated. If you don’t up-talk (rising at the end of sentences) for the dude scientists, don’t do it for the women scientists. Nope. Not okay. So, if you’re going to read this book, actually read it. The audiobook was awful. I give it the worst grade imaginable: A minus minus!. I checked this out from the Buffalo and Erie County Public Libraries.

This Month in Reality…..Travel as a metaphor for personal growth!

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Kate

Let us rejoice in today, March 32nd!

I am indeed back after a lovely vacation hanging out with my sister and our parents! And, let me tell you: not only do I love traveling, but I also love travel memoirs! Since I discovered the genre of travel memoir in college it has been a genre I’ve always been happy to come back to. So, it might surprise you to know that until this month I hadn’t read Eat, Pray, Love. Yes, I saw all the hype when the book came out and then when the book was optioned and made into a movie. I avoided it because it seemed like a travel memoir that was going to make me angry. I thought it was going to make me angry because here’s this woman who is making a good living and has a good job and a husband who loves her and she just throws it away and travels the world. I thought she’d make me angry or worse, that she wouldn’t be sympathetic at all and I’d be reading an entire memoir where I don’t care about the person at the center of the story. (Yes, that’s right, not being relatable is a bigger problem than making me angry.) On top of that, traveling and exploring other cultures while either talking about how cheap everything is or glossing over the problems and idealizing the not-problems really bothers me. I was concerned that Elizabeth Gilbert was going to go to an ashram in India and talk about how deep and spiritual all Indians are and not put this ashram in the context of a country with large populations of people who have different religions which are antagonistic to each other. Or, worse, I was worried her biggest concern would be about the dogs. (Note: I’m happy when people are worried about animal welfare. I’m not happy when they’re so worried about animal welfare that it affects how they feel about seeing poverty-stricken people. This is especially troubling when you also think those poverty-stricken people have the most beautiful culture. Anyway, that’s probably a hypocritical rant for another day.) So, I didn’t read the book when it came out. Or, when it was made into a movie. Plus, I didn’t see the movie. I picked it up hoping that I would hate it and that would make me feel vindicated for avoiding it up until now.

No such luck. (Spoilers behind the cut).
Continue reading →

This Month in Reality…and the Oscar Goes to…

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Kate

When Beth and I talked about what to do for this month, I got really excited about travel memoirs. But, then, everyone in the Northeast is probably dreaming of warm beaches and sunny locales. (Although, it has been sunny this week. I love the look of the sun on clean, white snow. It makes the world so bright and beautiful. Of course, this beauty has also been accompanied by dangerously cold temperatures and wind. Win some, lose some.) But, then we got to talking about something that has always been a fun night for us: The Oscars. It is fun to watch people win, the speculate and to discuss the films that we saw (and didn’t see). We’ve been known in the past to drink a lot of wine, make and eat a lot of food and be pretty irreverent in our cheering and jeering (which, this year, we’ll be doing over FaceTime.)

In honor of this glorious night of fancy dresses and finger food, I give you the low-down on three books that inspired Oscar-nominated films. All of these books I listened to rather than read and all of them came from the Buffalo and Erie County Public libraries. Go, Library Card!

This is the tale of Solomon Northup, a free black man from New York who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Written by Northup after he was rescued and returned home this memoir is a painful inside look into the institution of slavery. It is every bit as harrowing as you expect it to be but that is what makes this such an important piece of history. Slavery was very real and it destroyed many, many lives and we still live with its legacy. The audio book was read by Louis Gossett, Jr. Northup’s strength and courage are inspiring but the situation that he finds himself in is utterly despicable. This book is totally worth the read.

I wasn’t sure I was going to like this when I picked it up because I remember being only a little into the film. This biography follows the life of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a brilliant mathematician who had a promising career ahead of him until he fell ill with schizophrenia. The first part of the book details his early life and schooling. He’s great at math, he gets scholarships and it becomes apparent that he’s good enough that he has a serious shot at a prestigious academic career in mathematics full of groundbreaking research and accolades. He works for the Rand corporation. He fathers a child. He has homosexual encounters that cause some upset in McCarthy era America. He gets married and fathers a second child. He holds a position and almost receives tenure at MIT. He is, like most geniuses, a lot a bit arrogant and kind of a dick. He’s a possible candidate for the Fields medal ( which is like the Nobel of math). And then his illness strikes. Much of the rest of the book chronicles the harrowing struggle that is schizophrenia and how he, and the people around him, worked to manage it, manage him, or sometimes, failed to manage either. This was a terrible tale of losing ground, gaining ground and then losing it again. Towards the end of the book, when Nash’s work in game theory was being considered for a Nobel prize, it was also a tale of how people tried to use his illness as an excuse to not give him the prize. This was a harrowing picture of mental illness and how the mentally ill are perceived. It did have a small light at the end of the tunnel, though. Nash seems to have had a long remission from schizophrenia later in life which allowed him to return to his work and he did receive the Nobel memorial prize for Economics in 1994. This is an important book for how it sheds light on schizophrenia and perceptions of the mentally ill.

This book broke me open put me back together and then broke me again. A memoir of Cheryl Strayed’s 20s in which she gets married, loses her mother, graduates from college, does a lot of drugs, gets a divorce and hikes the Pacific Crest Trail had me laughing and sobbing and laughing again. I spent a lot of time texting and calling my mother after reading this book, so grateful I was to have that opportunity. I like hiking memoirs (and travel books in general) so I enjoyed the descriptions of the hike and her monster backpack. This story was beautiful and poignant and I’m so happy to have read it. Unlike the two previous books, I feel like I can say that I enjoyed this one. (The other two I’m happy to have read but I can’t really say that I enjoyed them.)

We hope that if you have Oscar plans that they are enjoyable and that your favorites win!

This Month in Reality: New Year, New…Resolutions and Goals to Achieve!

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Kate

Beth has started her series highlighting series that she’s enjoyed and that she feels have been neglected by the blogging community. After some discussion we’ve decided that my more or less regular series will be about non-fiction books. The world we live in is just so cool that I love to dip my toe into the realm of non-fiction (it’s a pretty huge realm) and learn all sorts of new things. No thing is safe from me reading!

For my first installment, I’m going to review/discuss a few self-help books. January is the time for resolutions and there are lots of things that you can read that will offer you advice on how to live better or healthier or smarter (whatever any of those things mean). In the past month, I’ve started two books meant to better inform me about how to be happy and healthy. In the past six months, I’ve read an additional book that I’ll be discussing on this list. In general I’m pretty skeptical about the usefulness of these volumes. It isn’t that they don’t offer interesting insight into theories and research about health and well-being. (Some of them do.) It’s more that there are no quick fixes to changing habits and your health. Regardless of the method you use, you still have to commit to a change and make that change work in your life. And, committing and working can be boring, slogging, grueling processes, not matter how exciting of novel your approach to them might be. But, I like the idea of taking stock of where you are and making a plan to move towards where you would like to be so I like the practice of making resolutions or goals. The first two books on this list are self-help designed to help you better manage your time and accomplish your goals. The first one focuses on your feelings and how you can get more desired feelings into your life and the second one focuses on time and how you can change how you think about time and the tasks you have to accomplish in order to get more done. The last book I’ll discuss is an overview of Chinese medicine and women’s health. At this point, I should probably say “spoilers ahead” (although, that’s probably a good thing since I’m panning at least one of these books.)

I borrowed this book from a friend, so I feel pretty bad that I’m about to pan it.

This book was so poorly written. It was like reading someone’s notes or inferring a deeper meaning from a series of pinterest posts. The book is divided into two parts. The first is theory. And, after I got past her opening (it was painful) we got to the epiphany: how do you want to feel? how can you focus on how you feel and meeting the needs revealed those feelings and then use that to reach your goals? I have sympathy for this idea. I can be pretty goal-oriented and fall into patterns of thinking that have me so focused on end results that I miss not only how unhappy I am in the present but I fail to realize how unfulfilled I will feel upon completing the goal. And, I doubt I’m alone in this. So, focusing on my emotional needs and seeing how to meet them more directly so that I’m in a more comfortable place sounded great. It also sounds pretty realistic. Life is about the journey, right? Which brings me to my major problem of the book: I have heard this before. I’ve heard this before and some of the ideas she presents seem, well, appropriative (passing Buddhist philosophy off as a magical part of her system) and like they might be taken out of their context. When we take big ideas out of context like this they often lose some if not all of their depth and resolution. So, passing Buddhist philosophy off as magic made me uncomfortable. And, then failing to engage in a deep and critical discussion of the philosophy (or anything really) made me feel unfulfilled and annoyed. I’m not looking for magic. This is a self-help book! I was looking for a little help!

The rest of my beef with the book was formatting. Books are not power point slides. They are not flash animated videos on the internet. Do not have multiple fonts on the page. Just don’t. After awhile I imagined that this was done to distract from a lack of deep engagement and discussion of the subject matter. I was not fooled. Honestly, I skipped a hundred pages because I couldn’t deal with it and I knew if I kept on I wouldn’t get to the workbook part and I wanted to see if there were useful things there. The worksheets and activities were useful in the workbook portion of the book. But, again, there wasn’t anything novel about it. I’ve seen mindfulness exercises that had similar formats. So, this book could be useful. But, it was not great and it annoyed me way more than it helped me.

This book was so very helpful. The Now Habit was mostly about time management and how to be more mindful of your time. It had you think about where you lose time in your day (where you go off the rails and end up watching TV or facebooking or reading that novel on your phone) and what you’re avoiding (and why). Then, it had you make a calendar and schedule where you were going to be places, when you would be traveling, when you’d be eating or cooking. This created a really nice visual of how much extra time I didn’t which made time-wasting not all that appealing. The author had you include recreational time in your week so that you weren’t all-work-all-the-time and that also was a nice feature. Putting things like knitting and reading on my schedule was like giving myself permission to relax and do those things. There was also an element of mindfulness in this approach but it wasn’t sold as magic but rather practice that can help you achieve your goals. I’ve incorporated a number of elements of this book into my life and it has been working pretty great.

I picked this up at a Half Price Books in its clearance section for two bucks. I think it was two bucks well spent. This book is a very general introduction to Chinese medicine focusing specifically on women’s health written by a doctor trained in both Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). After the opening chapter that discussed the Traditional Chinese system, each chapter takes a look at specific time-frames in a woman’s life. It begins with menarche and goes through menopause. I really liked all of the discussion on prevention. One of the things I learned from this book was that TCM is big on balance and preventative medicine. And, thinking of the body as a whole system where problems in one area can spill over into another area made a lot of sense to me. I also enjoyed the focus on how “healing” isn’t the same as “curing”. The author spent a lot of time highlighting how modern western medicine treats systems and doesn’t support patients. And, I’m sympathetic to that idea. If you’re not meeting your emotional and spiritual needs the physical can go way, way wrong. Striving for balance is a worthwhile goal. There were parts of the book that made me feel like I was being sold snake oil. She told some stories of women treated with Western Medicine who then found healing with TCM throughout the book. Some of these seemed a little over the top but the overall message of balance and trying your best to take care of all of your needs was good. I would have liked a more in-depth discussion of Traditional Chinese Medicine and all of working parts.

Have you read any Self-Help books in a lead up to Goal Setting for the New Year? What do you like (or hate!) about the genre? What are your goals for 2015?

2 Women, So Many Books

Our "to read" stacks way exceed our life expectancy

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