A Day to Remember

Happy Birthday, Dad!

What I'm Reading Now -- Overwhelmed

I admit it, I'm not much for self-help books.  But I am trying to turn over a new leaf, broaden my horizons, and all that good stuff.  So recently I picked up Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, by Brigid Schulte.

What I've covered so far seems to blame parenthood for most of the lack of leisure time that adults worldwide are experiencing, and obviously that is not my issue.  But, I can feel some of the pain of what she early on describes as "mental pollution" - that noise that's always in my head, the constantly, the always-updating, rolling to-do list. I expect, to the extent there is useful information to be gleaned by anyone, at least some of it will apply to non-parents as well.

I'll be back with any brilliant insights! 

What I'm Reading Now -- The Snack Thief

Someone gave me a copy of The Snack Thief after I had expressed my overall disappointment with City of Buried Ghosts.  I was told it was a pretty good yarn, so I'm hoping for a quick page-turner.  This one is nice because it's slim, so easy to carry around and pull out when I have a few spare minutes.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest -- Take 2

"Hooee!" What a change of writing styles to go from the elegant prose of The Prospector to the first-person asylum story which is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest! 

I had heard somewhere along the way, but forgotten, that Cuckoo is narrated by Chief Bromden, whose self-described "deaf-and-dumb act" gives him a fly-on-the-wall perspective.  So while technically it's in the first-person, it has a very third-person feel to it.

What it also has, which you may have guessed because it's set in an asylum, is an unreliable narrator.  I very much enjoy a good unreliable narrator, but Chief Bromden was one I found myself needing to take a break from every few chapters.  Trying to untangle what's (for real) going on is a little bit like trying to read Jack Kerouac's Book of Dreams. Sometimes it just hurt my brain, especially near the beginning.

But buried in the Chief's narrative was commentary about life circumstances which extended far beyond the walls of the Day Room, as I suspect is often the case with someone suffering from mental illness.  One of my favorites:

"I thought for a minute there I saw [the Big Nurse] whipped. Maybe I did. But I see now that it don’t make any difference. One by one the patients are sneaking looks at her to see how she’s taking the way McMurphy is dominating the meeting, and they see the same thing. She’s too big to be beaten. She covers one whole side of the room like a Jap statue. There’s no moving her and no help against her. She’s lost a little battle here today, but it’s a minor battle in a big war that she’s been winning and that she’ll go on winning. We mustn’t let McMurphy get our hopes up any different, lure us into making some kind of dumb play. She’ll go on winning, just like the Combine, because she has all the power of the Combine behind her. She don’t lose on her losses, but she wins on ours. To beat her you don’t have to whip her two out of three or three out of five, but every time you meet. As soon as you let down your guard, as soon as you lose once, she’s won for good. And eventually we all got to lose. Nobody can help that."

Who out there hasn't felt completely helpless in the face of someone or something that seemed simply unbeatable? A gem of tragic brilliance, right to the end.

Happy Halloween!

What I'm Reading Now -- Monsoon Seas

S recommended Monsoon Seas: The Story of the Indian Ocean, by Alan Villiers, to me in furtherance of my reading about the world from Indonesia to Mauritius.

As far as I can tell after a foray into the first few pages, it's the Indian Ocean's equivalent to my recent read of A Brief History of Indonesia -- as concise of a history as is reasonable to write about something that has thousands of years of history. 

We'll see what fun new things I can learn!

The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. -- Take 2

The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. was a thoroughly enjoyable read.  Whenever I am surprised by how much I enjoy a book which has sat unread in my collection for so many years, I'm a bit disappointed. It seems sort of silly, but I believe my brain is just wishing that it could have had that reading experience earlier, so that it might have been enjoyed for longer.

Regardless, here I am, finally having finished the first of the Josephine trilogy.  It's a based-on-a-true-story novel told through journal entries of the titular character plus the occasional letter.  I love the format, which so perfectly supports the goal of understanding the "secret sorrows" which Rose (later Josephine) endured.

I don't believe I'm spoiling anything (it's right there in the back cover blurb) to say that Josephine marries Napoleon Bonaparte. But she has a whole other wild, sometimes terrifying, life before she becomes Mrs. B, which is where this book spends its time.  Napoleon makes no appearance at all until the last couple of chapters.

A fun and fascinating read, and one more book to tick off on my way to completing my 2025 Reading Challenge!

What I Read -- The Prospector

I don't know much about Mauritius. I'm certain it has some European colonial history, definitely French and possibly also British.  But I'm going there, so I decided to see what I could pick up from a novel.

I selected The Prospector, by J. M. G. Le Clézio.  I didn't know anything about the author before beginning, and only learned when I got to the "About The Author" page at the end that he's kind of a big deal in his native France.  He lives part time in Mauririus, and it shows in how lovingly he writes about the island.

The Prospector is a tale of sorrow and growth and hope.

We meet our hero as a young boy, running wild through the woods with his childhood friend. We follow him through family tragedy and on his mad crusade to realize his deceased father's dreams.  He finds love, then war, then comes home again.  We follow him as his most important relationships change and are lost to time and circumstance.  We see him cope with those changes, until all that matters to him is gone.

I would not, you might guess from the above description, call this as a happy story.  But it is so beautifully told.  The words and sentences flow effortlessly one after another, expertly conveying the details of place (which, collectively, could rightfully be considered a major character) and the feeling of longing for something which remains just out of reach.

What I'm Reading Now -- The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.

While simultaneously trying to catch up on my 2024 Reading Challenge with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I'm hoping not to fall too far behind on my 2025 list by getting going on The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.

This book is one that has been in my collection for years, ever since I bought it for $1.00 at the big book fair in St. Louis that used to happen every spring in the covered parking at West County Mall one year that K and I went together. (Does that book fair still happen? Looks like yes!)