Category: Books

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Books Julia

A good book

I just finished reading a book about a young girl whose grandmother dies and leaves the girl to find out about her life before she was a grandmother; and to learn the lesson of how this girl and her mother and grandmother are connected to the people who live in their 6 flat building. The way this kid (she’s 7) who’s a wise “old soul” does this is through realizing that the fairy tales her grandmother told her growing up had elements of truth to them. Left for her to decode on her own. It was reminiscent of the movie Big Fish, if you’ve seen that, where the dad tells fantastical stories that don’t turn out to be totally untrue. This kid is hilarious and way smarter than other kids her age and she gets picked on for it. Her grandmother used their stories so she’d have an escape and took her to imaginary lands where she could be the hero.

This book about the little girl and her grandma was about loss and love, how people are rooting for you when you don’t even know it, and it even tied in some magic and love for Harry Potter. When the dog dies, who from the girl’s vantage point is as big as a human, I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe. Not because I’m an animal lover but because it was the moment in the book when the girl realizes how much people (and not people) are trying to protect her despite their own lives they are trying to live. She learns that she isn’t the only one reeling from the loss of her grandmother, that other people knew her grandmother from another time and grieve her too. Like how my mom’s college roommate walks in a 5k for breast cancer every year with her daughter in memory of my mom, but from a time before my mom was a mom, and when she meant so much to this woman as a roommate and a friend. This book reminded you you of the power of a good story – both through the tales the grandmother created for her granddaughter and through the story of the girl finding truth in them.

go read: My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry.

 

Categories
Books Twenty Somethings Uncategorized

Contradictory enlightenment

A very good friend that has known me since I was five years old recently sent me a book in the mail that she said I would love. It’s entire premise was to fly in the face of common lore, that your twenties are a mess and fun and to be taken on with the spirit of adventure and little planning. It said your twenties are your “Defining Decade” and they really do matter. That kind of drew me in. Maybe all my freaking out and feeling like my lack of ambition at a job I don’t love and my mess of a personal/dating life would be validated in this book…that it is a process and it’s right to panic and soul search.

Mostly, though, this book just pissed me off. **Note to self – if a friend is having a little bit of a quarter-life reflection and isn’t sure about some crucial next steps; don’t give her a book that describes how at 27, she’s only got 2 more years to make a life before it’s over**. I sat in the airport reading this book and laughed out loud at some of the absurd undertones I was picking up on – dating casually is horrible, settling is worse, getting married young is not only needed it’s the better route to take, etc. the author has a PhD so she wasn’t overtly stating such nonsense but it was in there somehow, in between the lines and behind the research.

Maybe this book pissed me off so much because it was taking my worst fears and throwing them in my face. That I was seeing myself  in the composite of clients this author (also therapist) presented – that I was lazy and underachieving and settling when I want more, but feel frozen by indecision. The point the author was trying to make- I think -is that  we need to make decisions now and not wait until tomorrow. However her delivery was all kinds of wrong.

The therapist side of me got all worked up about what she claims she said to clients in session. Statements were apparently made to men and women in their mid-twenties, who were confused and sometimes/often crying, like,  “I can’t sit here and talk about your past when I can see your future is in trouble.” If my therapist said that to me I would walk out. Hello?!?! I am obviously here because I have some shit to work on and I am not happy in my current situation. It’s your job as the therapist to listen, to WHATEVER the client wants to talk about and use your skills to get them to come to conclusions about their own life and the next steps they need to take. FYI, telling a client something like that is just a no go in ordinary therapy – unless the clients have asked you to be harsh and judgmental.

To complete my book review/rant I will say that I do appreciate the author’s desire to light a fire under people. I just wish though she would have appeased the masses and masses who may, say pick this book up at 27 and think “Cool, what can this tell me about making the last few years in my 20’s great”. She should have written her point of view perhaps with less pressure on the deadline of 30 (!!!) and more pressure on the call to action. Inspire the people instead of freak them the fuck out.

Categories
Books Samuel

Book Of The Month

My book of the Month to read was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell:
download

General Thoughts:
I went into this book pretty excited because I have herd a lot of “hype” and good things about it. For the most part it did not disappoint. Gladwell has filled the book with tons of interesting insites. My favorite portion of the book was the chapter on professional ice hockey. I think this struck me as the most interesting chapter simply because of my love of Hockey. It was very eye-opening to see that such an arbitrary thing like your date of birth could have such a profound effect on your likelihood of playing hockey in the NHL.

There were portions of the book where I thought Gladwell stretched or was reaching a bit. Specifically in the portion he wrote about intelligence. However he does very well to back most things in the book up with concrete examples, and research. The most interesting part in the entire book for me was the discussion of underprivileged kids school performance. Specifically that they statistically actually “out performed” rich kids if you looked at just the school year, then when rich kids spent their summers doing as Gladwell so aptly phrased it “rich kid things” like summer camps and continuing their education, they started to leave the poor kids behind. Additionally the fact that we even have such a long summer break for kids, and how that is directly tied to our cultures way of farming I found very fascinating. I really love learning about things like that. Once Gladwell presented the question I realized I had no idea why we took the whole summer off from school growing up. I remember loving it at the time. Seeing how this formed over 100 years ago so that kids could help farming activities makes total since, and also his proposal of removing this antiquated summer vacation to allow for underprivileged kids to keep pace with “rich kids” made perfect sense to me. It is really interesting that something as simple as basing our school schedule off of how our ancestors farmed over 100 years ago could be the leading cause in education and income inequalities in this country (assuming you subscribe to the notion that the more education someone has, the more income they will earn over their lifetime).

Would I recommend it:
Definite Yes in the recommendation column.