Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Reconnecting With Books

In recent years the calendar has been dominated by personal projects, some of which have all too completely absorbed the number of hours which pass for the waking interval of my attention span. Indulging in the pleasure of reading for purely it's own sake is also a luxury I have for the most part denied myself during this same period as a middle-aged woman dealing with ADHD, as not to break the all important and precious focus which I've been able to apply for the first time in certain cases to successfully bring to a number of these projects to a marvelously delightful and miraculous fruition!

If fairly recent events in my family life had not developed along the lines of the ambiguous script which is slowly playing out as this is being written, my reunion with the concept of unwinding with a book at the end of the day might have continued to be a stillborn infant for another quite unknown slate of a few more years. I am today to recognize a small list of books old and new which have as they say "hit the spot", launched me off happily to embrace their comfort and enveloping embrace and whom to the last author and tome I can fully and heartily recommend.

Depending upon your own reading preferences the list of books which have caught my eye may appear to be less than electric. To this I will answer with this confession, there has been a deliberate choice to counter the heady and circuitous chaos to which I now find myself, and my choice of escape is less of an adventure and more of a cocoon! Most prominent is the lack of any single novel on the entire list. And while every writer has in their time been included on some sort of listing of authors or celebrities of popular note, only two of them Sarah Ban Breathnach and Nora Ephron, might possibly qualify for membership on the rolls of current bestselling authors.

A) A Hotel Is A Place, Shelley Berman, copyright 1972 Shelley Berman, published by Price/Stern/Sloan Publishers. 108 pages.

B) The It-Doesn't Matter Suit, Sylvia Plath, copyright 1976 Frieda and Nicholas Hughes,
published by Farber and Farber Limited. 41 pages.

C) Moving On, Sarah Ban Breathnach, copyright 2006 Sarah Ban Breathnach, published by Meredith Books. 284 pages.

D) My Life As A Small Boy, Wally Cox, copyright 1961 Wally Cox, published by Simon and Schuster, Inc. 128 pages.

E) I Feel Bad About My Neck And Other Thoughts About Being A Woman, Nora Ephron, copyright 2006 Heartburn Enterprises, Inc., published by Alfred A. Knopf. 137 pages.

4 comments:

  1. I've been looking at the Kurt Vonnegut collection lately...just haven't had the energy. I have a tendency to want to read things from cover to cover, once I've started, in one sitting.

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  2. It's rare to find someone who remembers Wally Cox. We also share a mutual interest in Vonnegut. His writings embodied in so many ways a genuine love of humanity which would be so wonderfully more transformational in the world that exists today if more people shared, honored and practiced it.

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  3. Hi Mizu,

    Over tea yesterday Loraine told me about your new blog! Aren't we the three Oldskateers? I remember Wally Cox, too.

    Like you, Mizu, finding time to read is hard and I love it so much. I like your list of current reads. As you know Sarah Breathnach is one of my favorites. I hope you'll keep sharing your list with us.

    Blog on!

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