Reading rejuvination

I am so glad that I have made it through exam time and come out the other side.  I made it, and I’m 22% a nurse.  I say only 22, seeing as next semester is longer, so it’s not truly 25% of 2 years.  Anyway…I made it through and I’m super happy about.  I’m enjoying time to sleep in, relax, and so on. But what I’m most grateful for is being able to finally pick up a book that doesn’t have to do with nursing.  In fact, if you can believe it, since last Friday I’ve already managed to finished two books.  Granted they have both been relatively short, but they were both amazing stories.

The first book I read was “A Boy Called ‘It'” by David Pelzer.  It’s basically the account of one man’s early childhood as he survived serious abuse by the hands of his mother.  It’s actually one of the most serious child abuse cases in the history of California.  It’s a tough read, but definitely worth it.  I swear I’ve read the book before, probably in high school – but that didn’t take away from reading it this time around.  There are times when reading it you can’t help but cringe, and question how something so awful can happen in this world.  But things turn around, and that why I’m glad I can read this story, because it is also one of hope for life beyond horrible events.  I can’t wait to read the two books that come after that see him through foster care and then on to a must healthier and happier life.

The second book I read is called “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas”.  I got inspired to read it when I saw the commercial for the movie they have made telling the story.  I’m a lover of stories that take place during the second world war, especially when they are a true and honest reflection of people’s thoughts about the Holocaust.  This book it an exceptional one because it doesn’t draw you in to make you feel like a horrible person and it doesn’t preach either.  Rather it takes on the perspective of a naive (-yr old boy who doesn’t quite understand what is going on in his world, especially after he develops a friendship with a Jewish boy on the other side of a fence at his new home of Out-With (ie Auschwitz).  I won’t go in to all the details, I’ll just tell you to read it (or see the movie) because it’s an extraordinary story.

Next up is “A Lion Among Men” – the third book in the Wicked series.  We’ll see how it goes.  I’ll keep you posted.  And by the way, if anyone has a book to recommend, let me know

And sometimes, you feel like a chump!

OK – so, I’ve got to confess.  After all the talk about the book on yesterday’s post, I have to continue the story.

I went to the Toronto Reference Library tonight to use the book and work on my term paper proposal.  I tracked it down, looked at it and thought to myself “Hmmm….this looks familiar”.  So I sit down, take out all my stuff and take out the book I’d brought with me as an extra reference from Athabasca!  Low and behold, they were the same book!  All this time I’ve been complaining I didn’t have the book, when in fact I have had it in my hands the entire time!  I got the title mixed up with one of the 5 I’d requested from Athabasca.  GAH!

There you go folks.  I’d already started reading the correct book before I even knew it.  That explains why it seemed so damned relevant.

I’ve never wanted a book more

The game is afoot!

As mentioned in my post yesterday, I’m having a super hard time tracking down a book for my sociology term paper.  It’s called Abortion and Women’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom by Rosalind Petchesky – just in case anyone has it lying around the house propping up the TV or something…

On my hunt, I’ve done the following:

1. Requested it from Athabasca – but both copies are out.  The one that is now overdue is being requested back because I need it (I hope!)
2. Tracked it down at the Toronto Public Library – but of course it’s in the Reference Library and I cannot check it out
3. Search for it on Amazon/Coles/Chapters online – the only copies of the books available are from Amazon.ca and are associated sellers.  This means it would take 10-15 days to even get shipped!  Not good for my short time frame.
4. Search for it at Ryerson – and located a copy!  But because I’m not full-time at Athabasca, I don’t qualify to borrow it.  I’ll basically have to pay to check it out or I’ll have to use it in the library.  Still not a great option.
5. Placed a plea for aid from friends – this has helped some, but it’s a hard book to track down!

Like I said, the game is afoot!  This book will be mine!  Oh yes, it will be mine!

 

Countdown to Harry Potter

Ok – there are days to go – yes, it’s almost time! Harry Potter is almost here! Twofold! Can you believe it? I can’t! I’m so excited about the book/movie coming out that I’ve re-read all of the past books and I’m working my way through the past films in preparation. I’ve even gone as far as reading just about everything on J.K. Rowling’s official website, searching Wiki for details, and reading up on discussions held on fan sites. I am so prepared and so excited. I can barely contain it all. Really. I’m going to sit and read my book – just that one book – until it’s done. Done. Done.

WOOO!

And so in honour of me being slightly obsessed, check out my new widget.

Like losing a good friend

Ever find that reading a good book is like discovering a new friend? I do. Probably because I’m a true bookworm at heart who bonded more with books than people when I was younger. Just sayin’.

Right now I’m reading the book Tandia the sequel to the very awesome book The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay. Both very enthralling books, mostly because they are set in a very politically charged pre-apartheid and apartheid South Africa. I’m totally into this book and the story is somewhat stressful and disturbing, but very true feeling. I want to find out what happens, but at the same time, I don’t want the book to be finished yet.

It truly is like losing a good friend.

Guess I’ll just have to find something else to read until the next Harry Potter comes out.

I hate myself and want to die…

…is the name of the book my aunt sent to me this Christmas. It’s a very witty book all about the author, Tom Reynolds, voted 52 most depressing songs you’ve ever heard (in fact, that’s the second part of the title). The minute I saw the book, I began to chuckle. It’s got the saddest looking moth eaten bunny on the cover, and well, if anything it’s an interesting title. Then I started reading. Ha!

This book is irresistable when it comes to wanting to read it out loud. Really. I was reading entire chapters to Mum and Wends, and I could barely finish sentences because of laughter. It’s the kinda book where you want to quote whole passages because it’s just that damn funny. For instance:
“…in order for critics to take you seriously, you had to follow a specific formula:
1. write a song with really depressing lyrics.
2. sing it with a shitty voice.”

And that’s just in the intro.

Basically, Reynolds breaks up his songs into categories such as:

• I Hate Myself and Want to Die – “self-pitying songs in which the singer is under the delusion that his or her personal problems are of great interest to everyone”
• She Hates Me, I Hate Her – “a couple’s crumbling relationship is put to music, then dumped on listeners, who are expected to act as unpaid therapists”
• I Mope, Therefore I Am – a hall of fame of “songs by artists who’ve built their entire careers out of bumming the shit out of everyone”
• Perfect Storms – “the absolute most depressing”; songs of “Live Wolverine Shoved Down my Pants proportions”

If you get a chance, pick up a copy. Trust me, it’s worth it.

On Christ the Lord Out of Egypt

I just finished reading an interesting book called Christ the Lord Out of Egypt by Anne Rice. This is her first book since coming back to Christianity and well, it’s a very captivating story. She’s an incredibly smart and well researched author. I liked the book, but I expected to as I am a fan of her writing.

What I wasn’t expecting, however, was the impact that her afterword had on me. Wow. It makes the whole thing worth reading. In fact, it some of the most well written thoughts on faith and the Gospels that I’ve read in a long time. I’ve decided to share some of my favourite parts:

What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments — arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts — lacked coherence. They were not elegant. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were not more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.

In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it — that whole pciture which floated in the liberal circles I frequented for thirty years– that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read.I saw almost no skeptical scholarship that was convincing, and the Gospels, shredded by critics, lost all intensity when reconstructed by various theorists. They were in no way compelling when treated as composites and records of later “communities”.

I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of Enlightenment. And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a helpless failure. Other sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts.

I’d never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling.

The people who go into Elizabethan studies don’t seek out to prove that Queen Elizabeth I was a fool. They don’t personally dislike her. They don’t make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation. They approach her in other ways. They don’t even apply this sort of dislike or suspicion or contempt to other Elizabethan figures. If they do, the person is usually not the focus of the study. Occasionally a scholar studies a villain, yes. But even then, the author generally ends up arguing for the good points of a villain or for his or her place in history, or for some mitigating circumstance, that redeems the study itself. People studying disasters in history may be highly critical of the rulers or the milieu at the time, yes. But in general scholars don’t spend their lives in the company of historical figures whom they openly despise.

But there are New Testament scholars who detest and despise Jesus Christ.

[…]

Now somewhere during my journey through all of this, as I became disillusioned with the skeptics and with the flimsy evidence for their conclusions, I realized something about my book.

It was this. The challenge was to write about the Jesus of the Gospels, of course!

Anybody could write about a liberal Jesus, a married Jesus, a gay Jesus, a Jesus who was a rebel. The “Quest for the Historical Jesus” had become a joke because of all the many definitions it has ascribed to jesus.

The true challenge was to take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Gospels which were becoming ever more coherent to me , the Gospels, which appealed to me as elegant first-person witness, dictated to scribes no doubt, but definately early, the Gospels produced before Jerusalem fell– to take the Jesus of the Gospels, and try to get inside of him and imagine what he felt.

 

 

– written by Anne Rice, February 24, 2005

Anne of Green Gables

I must confess to you all, one of the best perks about staying at my friend Kate’s place is that she is a HUGE Anne of Green Gables fan and I love it. I myself also grew up watching Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie play Anne and Gilbert respectively whenever I could. I also grew up watching Road to Avonlea. I love the world created by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

A little while ago I thought it would be lovely to read these books, the WHOLE series, seeing as I never have. I’ve only had the first one read to me as a child. I figured it was about time. When I was home last month, I wanted to get the books from Mum and Dad, but of course they were still tucked away somewhere in the house, never having been unpacked after the move from Labrador. Oh well. I thought I’ll just buy them. But alas – not entirely to my surprise – my friend Kate has the entire series sitting in her room, and I’ve taken advantage of this. I’ve already read Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea. I’m currently on to reading Anne of the Island. Sigh. I love every word.

Not only is it a great story full of funny little adventures, there is just something magical about Anne that you can’t help but love. She’s romantic and imaginative, yet strong and practical. She’s got drama queenish tendancies and so much love to share. I love how she is described as having glowing eyes and an infectious personality. We could only wish to be such a type of “flame” in this world. Plus, she’s Canadian, and that’s really cool too! Add in a romance with a great man, one that just kinda creeps up and blooms – sigh!

All in all, it’s a very inspiring story. There are elements of hope and love that really just make you want those things. To go from being a girl that no one could love to a girl so valued that she changes the lives of those around her, well, there is little worse in the world. Sigh again.

The Book of Lists

Ok, I swear this books was written for me! hehehe. It’s great. Love it! Where else can you find a compiled bunch of lists of crazy random facts?

You can get your own on Amazon!

The mind of man

So, I just finished reading the book High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (almost like a Bridget Jones for guys), and I can’t help but take a minute to expostulate on the mind of the opposite sex and guy/girl relations.

I don’t by any means believe that I know what it is to think like a man. I’m not wired in the same way, and I’m ok with that. It think if I were exactly the same as everybody else, life wouldn’t be half as interesting. I often wonder though, what it would be like to sit in the shoes of a man for once. Would I find myself more direct and laid-back? Would I find myself apathetic or neurotic? Would I find myself different at all?

Right off the bat, I will admit that there is a clear distinction, for the most part, between the guys I know and the girls I know. I don’t know that there could be a complete interchange between the sexes. It’s an interesting thought – if we are all made in the image of God, shouldn’t we have some ability to be interchanged? Rather, perhaps what we do have are sensibilities that are unique to both sexes. The story of creation makes it very clear that men and women are created to be different, eacha counterpart to the other. This is a beautiful thing, but where do things get messed up? Maybe it’s when we mix the thoughts of gender versus sex, or maybe we don’t know the answer at all. Maybe it’s meant to be part of the mystery of the universe.

Having a lot of guys friends does allow me to get a few guys perspectives from time to time, but are any of these opinions truly what he is thinking when confronted with a woman? Something tells me that the minute communication crosses the gender line, it isn’t quite the same as if it were being told to someone of the same sex. I’ve experienced this in woman to woman conversation. But what is it the prompts us all to retain a certain air of mystery or sense of that we will be misunderstood if we are just direct with someone of the opposite sex? Maybe we’re don’t know how, or maybe we just want to know how.

The funny thing about this whole diatribe is that it all hinges on societal definitions of what is means to be a man or a woman. These gender roles are those roles which are imposed on us due to our outward biology. Most commonly we find these “roles” manifested in the simplest ideas as having girls in pink and boys in blue. How these arbitrary notions came to be associated with who a person is is something I can’t answer. Then suddenly thoughts continue on to the Freudian and Lacanian terms of gender and psychology, and you begin to wonder how wacked out ideas of penis envy being the root of all womanly trouble ever became widely accepted as truth! Somehow society ended up catergorizing individuals in such a way that individuality became impossible, and even redundant, because it is vastly more acceptable to be part of a group, right?

I know what most people are thinking now – society has changed; we no longer have to fit into specific gender roles. Men can be “Stay-at-home-moms” and women can move into the work force. The lines are being blurred. But the fact is, this is still catergorizing based on assigned cultural definitions. We still see actions as either “womanly” or “manly”.

A little while ago, when trying to figure out my position as a woman in theatre, I came across and interesting term: the materialist feminist. Essentially, a materialist feminist is a feminist who believes that gender roles as imposed by society are not only detrimental to women, but are detrimental to men as well. Unlike cultural feminism, which seeks to unify women based on their biology and use this unity to subvert patriarchal tendencies, materialist feminism focuses more on the relationships in society and how they construct a person.

Too often feminism can come across as wanting to eliminate the idea of gender roles, period. Well, it’s really an impossible task. You can never elminate the biological sexes, and you can never eliminate preconceived notions that individuals have based on experience and thousand of years of historical background, so can you can’t radically blot out gender roles. As it stands, we will never be free of the mark and meaning of our sex and how it has been concieved in the cultural hierarchy. (Some of this aspect I believe might relate the another one of God’s plans, but that’s another issue to talk about later). So, what can you do? Consider the societal interactions of any given person.

Anyone can act in a way that can be labelled in a “insert category here”. Working through our tendancies to be so compartmental can definately broaden the scope of individuality seen around us. Being aware of what pre-conceived notions we are holding on to is a first step in looking past the gestures and actions of any given person, and helps us learn to suspend those notions and to focus on relationships. How are these persons actions relating who they really are, rather than who they are meant to be? It’s almost like seeing a Barbie, and rather than immediately associating it will little girls and pink flowers, you take a minute to see the doll and wonder what about it that makes you want to engage with it. That’s the “essence” of what the doll means to you. Suddenly, you begin to see the doll as just a doll that sometimes happens to be with little girls and flowers, but is sometimes just a collector’s item. You’ve begun to seek out a new perspective and means of investigating your world.

Maybe the whole point of me going into this is to get each one of us to start considering what roles we are playing and/or seeing played in front of us when we start to interact with the opposite sex. How many of out expections for a relationship is stem from what we feel our roles should be, or better yet what the role that the relationship itself should mean? I don’t have the answer myself, but I know I’ve got to start unpacking some my own baggage before I can fix any relationships or start new ones. Hmm…the story of everyone’s life, right? Ha!

Clearly then end of this expostulation has ended very far from where I originally intended to go, thanks to all of you who actually chose to pay attention.

Thank you, and goodnight!