Gershun Posted April 2019
What are you reading right now?
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If your care giving duties allow you time to read.....................I'm interested in what book you are in the middle of or just finished or have waiting on your bedside table.
I'm reading "Total Control" by David Baldacci
It's a crime/thriller drama. Quite compelling.
If you can't find the time to read, you should try. It helps to escape from it all in a good book.
Now reading After Alice fell. Also, good.
My new books name is "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," a thriller novel by Stieg Larsson
Growing Old
What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forgo her wreath?
—Yes, but not this alone.
Is it to feel our strength—
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more loosely strung?
Yes, this, and more; but not
Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be!
’Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow,
A golden day’s decline.
’Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,
The years that are no more.
It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young;
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.
It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion—none.
It is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
This poem reflects survivors in any situation.
It can certainly work for caregivers who are struggling on a day to day basis. You are stronger than you know.
The Oak Tree
by Johnny Ray Ryder Jr.
A mighty wind blew night and day.
It stole the Oak Tree’s leaves away.
Then snapped it’s boughs and pulled it’s bark
until the Oak was tired and stark.
But still the Oak Tree held it’s ground while other trees fell all around.
The weary wind gave up and spoke,
“How can you still be standing Oak?”
The Oak Tree said, I know that you can break each branch of mine in two,
carry each leaf away, shake my limbs and make me sway.
But I have roots stretched in the earth,
growing stronger since my birth,
You’ll never touch them, for you see
they are the deepest part of me.
Until today, I wasn’t sure
of just how much I could endure.
But now I’ve found with thanks to you,
I’m stronger than I ever knew.
I re-read Pepys Diary every two or three years
Margaret, yes, I keep only what I want to re read and my library is bursting. Next on my read it again list is Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings. I still remember it so fondly.
Want Biblical studies and History and a con man story and a Woman Harvard Professor of Divinity goes rouge? I am mesmerized and underlining like mad in
"Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife" . You think the Da Vinci Code was fun? This one is more fun, and it's real life. Author is Ariel Sabar.
* Shakespeare’s Wife, by Germain Greer, plus comparisons with Shakespeare the Enigma (mostly about Shakespeare’s father), and the sonnets (or some of them). I even read ‘Venus and Adonis’, his first published work, viewed as semi-porn at the time, because I kept seeing references to it.
* Pepys, Savior of the Navy (but I’m getting bored with this, haven’t picked it up since Pepys left Tangier). I think I’ll reread Claire Tomalin on ‘Samuel Pepys', to remind me of much more interesting stuff.
* Great Excavations (archeology to match up with other reads, including Agatha Christie Mallowan’s ‘Come Tell You How You Live’).
* Black Sheep, Georgette Heyer regency romance. I know most of these almost by heart, and recite them to myself in the night when I’m stressed.
* A couple of books including info from Herodotus, like the fall of Masada and the fall of Jerusalem, plus 'Great Excavations' and the Bible for comparison.
The theme that comes next depends on a decent Op Shop! My current reading matter always litters the house in piles. I only keep the books I want to re-read.
Back of book quote 'The heartening story of a mid-February American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease'.
Holy Cow! I am fascinated, appalled, sad & inspired.
I have now started “The Last Sunrise” by Harold Gordon, who is a local holocaust survivor. He was around 10 and a Jew living in Poland during the holocaust. My husband and I met him & his dear wife around a decade ago, maybe longer, at Starbucks and he was kind enough to gift us a copy of his book. We were all regulars at the time and we run in to each other at Starbucks regularly. He & his wife and their friends were so warm and welcoming. So kind. We have not seen them in a few years though.
anyway If you are in to history or like me, just want to learn more about the holocaust, I recommend this book. I am about 1/4 of the way through and am at the part where the Germans have just invaded Poland (Russia had already come in & taken over and I must say, reading what life was like after the Russian army arrived in Poland, I know understand why some Californians call Newson “Hitler with hair spray”. Not that anything he has done to Californians compares to the holocaust. What I mean is, his COVID orders are strikingly similar to how Jews were treated in the beginning-curfews, not allowed to operate certain businesses, not allowed to patronize certain businesses)Anyway....the first 1/4 of the book Mr. Gordon describes his family dynamics, his childhood and what life was like in Poland as the world war was brewing. I really enjoyed his perspective, which is that of a 10 year old boy. I am not sure I am prepared for what is to come in his story though.
I heard that was really good. Aren’t they doing a Netflix special on it?
The World According To Fannie Davis by Bridgett Davis. (Bridgett's mom worked the numbers (gaming) to support her family in pursuit of the American Dream.
I buy a couple magazines each month from the bookstore.
John Banville's mystery "Snow".
Reading two and three books at a time now, but they have to be very different, so as not to confuse characters, story lines, hee hee.
Now I think AC is freezing my kindles. It doesn't happen on other sites.
Could this be AC?
And I have two kindles, both started having the same problem.
Haven't even opened the new one. Guess I will return it, I sure don't need three of them.
I had this on my must read list for a long time but was ambivalent to start because I couldn't envision how a story about someone who is dying could keep from being either hokey and unrealistic or depressingly maudlin. Although it is very culturally Cape Breton I don't think you need to be Canadian to identify with the setting or the characters. I give it ⭐⭐⭐⭐
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