Archive for the ‘Nonfiction’ Category

Cure to Innumeracy:

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006

Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of EverythingFreakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Roughcut) by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
More Information: www.freakanomics.com
      With my head always stuck in the clouds, I have always been a fan of fiction. It was brought about my fear of treading into the territory of real world books and especially the realm of numbers. In addition, it didn’t help that my college text book branded with the disability of innumeracy or being mathematically challenged because I was a marketing communication student. However, one day I lost my way in the bookstore and found my self in the non-fiction section and got suckered in by media savy title “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything”. The title grabbed me right away and I heeded the call of my inner geek rebel. I started browsing the book and was instantly hooked by the premise that numbers can answer social problems such as cheating in high school to trivial ones like “Does my name affect how my life will lead?”.
   After finishing the book, it may sound impossible but those funny shapes called numbers did provide answers through sound theories that were rather entertaining to think about. Moreover, it was told in a literary manner that was easy for me to digest. The authors also impressed me by their humility because they presented their ideas and squashed by the end of the book. Thus, leaving us readers open to either explore our theories or get his ideas and debate them amongst friends. If you are looking for beginner’s book to non-fiction book or a conversation piece, Freakanomics is the best way to dive in and make a splash.

Writing Is A Solitary Job… Or Is It?

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

It may not be if the “Million Author Project” has its way. Their goal is to create various manuscripts contributed to by as many people as possible. Hence, “million authors.” It isn’t difficult; the rules are simple and you can contribute as little as a sentence.

From the site: “The Million Authors Project is an experiment to test the collective minds of several thousand people, all working together to create a written work. The goal of the project is to end up with a written novel, novella or short story for everyone to enjoy, written one page, paragraph, or sentence at a time.”

While you are there visiting the site, check out The Million Authors Projectthe FAQs - that will provide a lot of the information you might need. The documents (in pdf) explain the rest. And click on goodies - you can get wallpapers and buttons for your own blog or Web site.

They say the written word makes the writer immortal. Why not take a slice of that immortality for yourself? Better yet, see how you can work together in the human community to create a truly interesting work of fiction or non-fiction.

Million Author Project

Million Authors FAQs

Million Author Goodies

For Earth Day 2006 - Henry David Thoreau & Walden

Friday, April 21st, 2006

When I realized it was Earth Day (April 22, 2006), my thoughts immediately went to Henry David Thoreau who, “… went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Thoreau understood all about Earth Day before we had to have a “holiday” claimed for it. He understood about simplicity and living deliberately. And now we read about how to do just that which, at one time, came so naturally.

If you have never read Thoreau’s Walden, don’t wait. It is a book that everyone should read and waste no time in doing so.

Walden - Online


NPR - Walden


Walden Woods Project


Walden Pond State Reservation

It’s All About the Translation

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

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

    Dark Night of the Soul
    “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 AvilaThe Interior Castle
    “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

The Elegant Universe or String Theory for Complete Idiots

Sunday, April 2nd, 2006

No, I do not understand string theory. And furthermore, I do not wish to understand the complex mathematics that go into the study of it. But I still found The Elegant Universe,” fascinating, and with the author’s ability to explain physics, and then make it matter to Joe Average, I would have to say string theory is really pretty interesting stuff. I The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Realitythink it will be safe to assume that Dr. Brian Greene’s new book, The Fabric of the Cosmos,” will be just as interesting.

Backtracking a little bit, I have to state that I believe nonfiction is part of our reality of literature. Literature, strictly defined is, “The body of written works of a language, period, or culture.” At least Dictionary.com says it is. I agree. Literature is the written word that reflects a generation. This generation is all about information overload. New discoveries are happening faster than people can possibly document them. Therefore, it is a part of our culture, and a book written about one of these new discoveries, is therefore literature.

We are defined by what we read. (Scary thought, isn’t it?)

At any rate, I found The Elegant Universe, fascinating because I didn’t like the idea of poor Einstein being shoved aside as though his work and brilliance didn’t matter any The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theorymore. The Fabric of the Cosmos, promises even more with theories about time and 11 possible dimensions, or alternate universes. Which means that there may be 10 other me’s, writing 10 other blogs, all with different situations, motivations, and conclusions.

A universe of infinite possibilities. Now if that doesn’t grab you for reading, nothing will!

Sparked by the trademark wit, humor, and brilliant use of analogy that have made The Elegant Universe a modern classic, Brian Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.
Random House

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Random House

String People: Brian Greene

The Official String-Theory Web Site

A Solution For Visually Challenged Readers

Saturday, April 1st, 2006

I know a lot of people who love to read, also have some visual challenges. And audio books aren’t cheap - not by a long shot. There are some options online but some of them are pretty pricey as well. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a library of audio books for a reasonable price each month?

I found the perfect solution. It was a moment of pure serendipity. Picture someone stumbling into a doorway and falling flat on their face in the entry hall. That is, in a cyber-kind-of way what happened to me. The Web site is called JiggerBug. It is to audio books, what Netflix is to films.

There are three plans. One allows you to have one audio book at a time. A second plan allows for two at a time, plus a downloadable audio book every 14 days, and another plan allows for five audio books at a time, plus two free instant downloads every 14 days. These are very reasonably priced plans - you can keep the CDs or tapes as long as you need to and it is all postage paid. And there is a two week trial - what more could you need?

Just like Netflix, they have a queue. So I have selected about a dozen books and they will come to me one after the other, as I return them. I chose the two at a time plan; my plan is to be reading one while the other is in transit.

They have classics, plays, genre fiction, popular fiction, nonfiction… you name it and they have it. And if they don’t, they’ll try to get it for you via a convenient request form.

I am thrilled. I love to knit, which is why I am usually hanging out at Hankering For Yarn, my primary blog. And there are times I want to read but I can’t do both! Movies I can at least listen to, but I have a HUGE stack of books to read. Now I can knit and read simultaneously. I have been doing the happy dance ever since I found JiggerBug.

JiggerBug

The Year of Magical Thinking

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

The Year of Magical Thinking

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

A Wonderful Journey Awaits

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

Hello! My name is Adelle and I am so excited to be here as a part of “Literally Blogging.” I can think of few things I love and enjoy more than books. Classics, contemporary lit, science fiction (hey, we all have our weaknesses), non-fiction… my list of favorites goes on and on. I am really interested in hearing what your favorites are!

Books, books, and more booksI have been writing professionally for about a decade now. In my “previous life,” I was a nurse but fortunately, I also studied journalism and have had an interest in literature, both American and European, since… well, forever. When I left nursing, I decided to just chase my own dream and stepped out on the proverbial limb and began writing for a living. There are days I can’t believe how fortunate I am and there are days I fight for every word. I have written freelance for several publications, a textbook publisher and have one book on the market about autism. I now am blogging about the things that I love the most and wish to share.

I define myself as a woman, a widow who was once a wife (and still is in some sort of spiritual sense), a mother, a daughter, and a friend. I enjoy reading, knitting, my cats, sewing, violin (I’m just a beginner though) and a myriad of other things that I never have enough time to do. I enjoy good music, ice cream, hot summer days, and snowy winter nights, and my favorite time of the year is autumn when the days are crisp and the memories are crisper.

I am looking forward to sharing with you our love for literature; I love the exchange and hearing from readers, and I hope you will comment and/or email me. I am sure this blog will evolve over time; a blog is merely a reflection of the individual writing it and people change, so it stands to reason that our blogs will change with us. I hope to inspire you, tell you about books you may not know about, share a wee bit of literary gossip, and touch your life in some way that makes for enjoyable reading.

Adelle Tilton Biography