Literally Blogging

I enjoy books from other languages, other cultures, and in particular, early Christian writings. Unfortunately, if you can’t read the book in its original language (I can’t), it loses some of its flavor. Much of the intensity and power of these books are due to the writer’s use of language - appropriate to that period of time, but as they say, “It’s all Greek to me.” The key in reading and understanding, as well as becoming emotionally involved with such a book is the translator.

I found a wonderful translator, and in doing so, found a wonderful author and warm human being. Her name is Mirabai Starr. I have her translations of:

• Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross

  
  “Souls begin to enter this dark night once God draws them forth from the state of the beginners, who merely muse about the spiritual path, and places them in the state of the adepts, the true contemplatives. This is the start of a journey that will lead to the blessed place of perfection, which is the divine union of the soul with God.”

• The Interior Castle, by St. Teresa of Avila
  “Sometimes, when the soul is in prayer, the Beloved will suddenly suspend her senses and reveal deep secrets to her. These are not visions of his sacred humanity. The soul is seeing into God himself. I use the term “seeing,” but it is not a visual revelation; it is a transcendental vision. What is revealed to the soul is that all things can be seen in God because God has all things inside himself.”

These translations are wonderful. They have brought a freshness into work that is so meaningful for people worldwide. The messages of St. John and St. Teresa are not limited to followers of the Catholic faith - they are intended for all and now, due to Mirabai Starr’s work, are available to all in deeply beautiful translations.

Mirabai Starr - Official Web Site

About three months ago, I found a wonderful book club online. Well, maybe book club isn’t the best description. It is like a giant wish list that… well, that’s not really it either. Let me try again. This book club had resources to help me find books that I might be interested in… but that wasn’t all. The name of this site is Book Browse and it is a great Web site for readers who need a little organization and love to hear about new books.

Let’s face it. When you go to your “Local Bookstore,” whether that be in the mall or online, it is hard to find new things to read. It isn’t that they aren’t there. There are tons of new books all of the time. But in our rushed lives, hitting the bookstore at lunch can be less than fulfilling. This site fills in and helps readers find the treasures we might otherwise overlook.

You can search by genre, by theme, country of setting, or even time period. Each book has information from the jacket, excerpts, reader reviews, author interviews and biographies. Many also have reading guides for those wishing to use a certain book in a monthly reading club. There are also quotes from reading critics, which you can read or disregard totally.

Each book also has a link to a site that compares the prices of the book you are interested in, or you can go directly to Amazon and buy from there.

Book Browse has ways to organize book lists, prioritize reading, organize purchasing of books, and if that didn’t provide enough, each book on your personal book list has a box to make comments. It also has a section to mark to remind you why you want the book - a gift, a must read, a want to read, have read, or if you have rejected it as a possibility.

Book Browse is a great site for the casual reader or the serious reader. There is a free membership as well as a premium membership. The customer service is fantastic, the owner of the site is friendly and I think you will be pleased with your membership.

I just finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking. I was attracted to the book because of the topic of grief and bereavement, but I don’t see it as a book that is only suited for those who have lost a husband or faced a potentially fatal illness in a child. It is a beautiful work of nonfiction - the creative expression of what Ms. Didion experienced during her first year of widowhood is called “taut,” by Publisher’s Weekly, “lacerating yet peculiarly stirring,” by The Washington Post, and “a stunning book of electric honesty and passion,” by Random House. It is that and much more.

The Year of Magical Thinking, winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005, starts immediately with what Ms. Didion must now view as the turning point in her life: Her husband’s, author John Gregory Dunne, heart attack and subsequent death. In her recording of the events of that evening, the reader can’t help but feel the unreal and almost surreal emotions that memories of this nature imprint on our minds.

It was clear during the course of the book that Didion, like most people who lose a loved one (particularly if they are present at the death), was trying to come to terms with what had happened. I felt her attempts at putting the event of heart attack, the paramedics and then being told her husband was dead, into some sort of reality that could make sense, and at first she was unsuccessful. She just could not wrap her brain around the fact that her husband and the man she had worked with for 40 years, was suddenly absent.

To complicate matters in Didion’s life, her daughter became seriously ill, and while the newly widowed woman was trying to trying to cope with moving from wife to widow, she was also trying to save her daughter’s life. Perhaps her grip on reality, as tenuous as it seemed at times, was maintained by the involvement in her daughter’s medical care - it was a touch of reality in an otherwise unreal world.

I was particularly struck by Didion’s realization of “pathological bereavement,” which is something that has just recently been recognized by the medical community. Grief can knock our normal everyday thinking, a few notches to the left, and we are never the same. Didion, like millions of others, did learn to live with the grief but her continual wish that he would return, illustrating by refusing to dispose of her husband’s shoes (he would need them when he came back), so honestly faces the unresolved issues that death brings into our lives.

The remainder of the book deals with the struggle Didion endured as she coped with the loss of her life partner and the fight for her only child’s survival.** The book was written approximately 18 months after John Dunne’s death, and her ability to step outside of the unreality to observe herself and the reaction of our society to grief, is amazing.

As usual, Didion uncanny ability to capture the nature of the human mind and emotions, is paramount in this book. Her investigative abilities show clearly; she seems to ask herself questions that a person can barely even imagine thinking, let alone writing, in such a public forum.

The book has garned some criticism because of the economic bracket that Didion and Dunne lived in, but I did not find that to be a factor in my feelings about the book. Death brings us all to the same level. Whether one lives in a penthouse or a small apartment, the experience of loss is the same. Death is the great equalizer, and has no respect of financial status.

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

**Although the book ends with the impression that Didion’s daughter did survive, as she was improving dramatically, she did pass away in 2005.

New York Times Book Review: The Year of Magical Thinking

Reader’s Guide from Random House

National Book Foundation

Joan Didion on Wikipedia

Reading Guide from Reading Group Guides