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The healing power of books
There’s no question that a good book transports the reader, and can uplift one’s mood, or leave one devastated. Such a lovely idea, then, to set up a bookseller as a literary apothecary, with the insight and knowledge to know precisely which books would heal the ills of customers strolling in among the shelves. And,…
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The Black Lagoon
What a great image – the Black Lagoon. Maybe something like this image? It communicates darkness, the foreboding, the potential danger. It also signals the idea of Isolation, which the agoraphobic mother in the book If I Fall, If I Die suffers from. When I and my sister were growing up, our years followed the…
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What informs your reading?
It’s book club day at From Left To Write, and I’ve been scrambling to get far enough into this book, J, to write something informed about it (full disclosure, I haven’t finished reading it, but it’s definitely grabbed my attention!). And, as I read, I find that my reading is being informed by podcasts that…
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The cats of my life…
the first cat I remember is Moppet, rest her soul, who we owned when I remember living briefly with my grandparents briefly on Cowper Road in Palo Alto. That was the year I was in fourth grade, and our teacher taught us to bake a pie crust. I came home excited about my new knowledge,…
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Letting go of Christmas
I was never a very good Christian. The main problem was that I was always asking for logic and internal consistency. I couldn’t understand why a monotheistic faith had divided God into a Trinity, for one thing. And the Virgin birth? The Resurrection? The answer was always “You have to have Faith” and “It’s God’s…
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I have OKCupid to thank…
For my daughter finding and marrying the man who suits her to a T. and apparently, the data of the OKCupid algorithms predicted their compatibility and bliss pretty well, as they scored around 95%, according to her. It’s a funny thing to see your daughter get married, and then to see her happily interacting with…
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Missing out on reading with FL2W…
I missed the deadline to read this month’s books, and I feel so left out!! The first book is The Underground Girls of Kabul by Jenny Nordberg. It sounds like a fascinating story, and I have gone ahead and pre-ordered it for my Kindle app, but I’m wishing I could read it, and join in the discussion…
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Jazz – it’s all about balancing on the edge
I have played music, or sung (same thing, just using the voice as one’s instrument), from the time I was about 6 years old, maybe earlier. I remember hearing music from my earliest memories. Both my parents played music, in very different ways, and music was never always something to listen to only, but something…
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Feeling out of place
When I left high school for college, I boarded a train in Oakland, CA, bound for Kalamazoo, MI. Looking up the AMTRAK schedules listed now, I think it must have been the California Zephyr route, which ends in Chicago, and then there is a connecting train to Kalamazoo. Why was I headed for Kalamazoo? I…
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Mental illness … and the Nature of Evil
The past fifty years have seen a huge change in society’s understanding and attitude toward mental illness, but stigma still remains. Just this past week, the news that caught my ear (since most of my news comes to me via NPR) was that lawmakers are attempting to make it easier to force people with mental illness…