BOOKS A MILLION

Crouched on the floor next to my bed in a small yellow pool of illumination cast by the plastic night light meant to keep the boogie man away, I was reading long past bed time and my mother's last call for lights out. Reading has always been a passion.  The luxury of so much free time has unleashed the thirst to indulge, no really gorge on books. Internet downloads, paperbacks, dusty hardcovers scrounged in the antique shops of downtown Ankara ...an endless supply of information, stories, and crafty word smithing  keeping the wolves at bay.  Somehow reading seems purposeful, even when there is no end game. It is the one activity in which I can indulge without judging or evaluating its worthiness or connection to a larger purpose.  And so I am....

BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE TO FLY, by Stephen Davis is a free internet download from the I-tunes library that starts off with a bang.  It makes wonderful use of  internet technology, allowing you to click back and forth on links connecting you to Davis' experts, inspiration and references as they are introduced.  It was my first experience with an interactive book, a construct ideally suited to an impulsive curious mind that often forgets to follow up on the many "I want to know more about that" thoughts that pass through my Swiss cheese brain. In any case Davis weaves his case for a new age spirituality based on quantum physics, consciousness, eastern mysticism and a few edgy gurus, including Robert Scheinfeld, Jed McKenna and UG Krishnamurti. Much of this is  extremely interesting, especially the sections that delve in quantum consciousness. However, in his attempt to tie it all up and present a spiritual path to freedom and self realization, he turned me off.  It becomes a little too trite, a little to certain and in the end, merely brings us back to old ideas slightly repackaged in paper that is a little too flimsy for my taste.  Still, much of the  book was worthwhile and because of it my " must read" list is even longer. Reading has always been a passion.

WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL, by Jeanette Winterson is an autobiographical account of this well regarded British authors childhood as the adopted daughter of a malcontent and possibly crazy mother and a father who didn't have the balls to take a stand.  The writing is at once hilarious and poignant.  Jeanette is no pushover.  Stubborn, often defiant and unlikeable, she is is brutally honest in both her retelling and in dissecting the complex emotions that swim in the undercurrents of her life.  She writes like I think....in run on sentences, with choppy thoughts strung together i in unexpected chunks.  Lots of hyphens, dashes, parentheses and .....!

Early on, she lassoed me in with this:

"I know that she adopted me because she wanted a friend (she had none), and because I was like a flare sent out into the world - a way of saying that she was here- a kind of X marks the spot.
She hated being a nobody, and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her un-lived life.  We do that for our parents--we really don't have a choice."


This is book that makes you look at the shame of being both a parent and a child, and the harm we do to one another in setting unreasonable expectations for each other in those confining roles. She also reminds you that life  is a gift, the blessing that we can't really fuck up, as long as we accept ourselves with all of our warts and scars. It is a testament to survival and the weedy nature of the creative drive to find meaning in a random world.

When I read this book, I thought of all the young mothers ( myself included) who feel that instinctual pull to give birth and who nurture not only the growing fetus inside, but the burning desire to feel unconditional love and validation.  Yes, mothers matter.  They matter because they are  life giving.  But we also steal  life away.  We bury the ugly parts of ourselves in  our children, burdening them with the responsibility to erase our past . We ask them to be what we could not be.  Sadly, the love we seek and the love we meter out is seldom unconditional. And while we may matter for a short time, we never matter in a way that shelters us  from loneliness.  In the end, mothering cannot  protect us from that. And neither can love.

Read it.  You will laugh, cry, ponder and wonder. You will realize that normal is really crazy and crazy is normal, and happiness is just a punctuation mark in the long paragraphs of a life lived in the moment.

LITTLE GIANT OF ABERDEEN COUNTY, by Tiffany Baker was a $3.99 discount offering in the I-tunes book store, that packs a premium punch. Afflicted  with acromegaly, Truly  lives in rural upstate NY in a small town where her freakish size and unattractiveness are  only exacerbated by the beauty of her diminutive sister, Serena Jane.   In a voice that captures the plain spoken observations of small town living, Truly lays her trap deftly, luring you deep inside her story of family secrets, death, abandonment, deception and rescue. Language perfectly pitched with descriptions that drill deep into the dirt of rural communities.  Baker' voice is full of hard-edges softened by the drone of flies and late summer sun.  Her characters are just that; some pinched and skinny, barely holding their ground, and others full-bodied and spilling over the pages.  A book that gently rocks your soul, slowly exploring family ties bound with white lies and purposeful deceit, its wisdom slowly leaching from its pages.  Nearly tied up in bow at the end, I wanted to spread a blanket and picnic with Truly, Marcus and Bobbie and drink in a little bit of the hard won happiness.