Wicked – Gregory Maguire

wicked2.jpg

How did the Wicked Witch of the West, from Frank Baum’s Oz stories, get to be so wicked? Gregory Maguire tells her story, in Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Author of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Maguire seems to revel in turning our beloved fairy tales upside down, and having us rethink our cherished notions of absolute good and evil. The Wicked Witch wasn’t born a witch, nor wicked. In Maguire’s delightful telling, we learn of Glinda’s obsession with status and fashion, the Wizard’s inhumanity, and the friendships, loves, and lost loves of little green Elphalba, the story’s moral center, who is ultimately destroyed by innocent Dorothy. This tale is more real, and more like life as we know and experience it, than the original. There’s always a different side to a story, and in the case of Oz, this is it. A great read from start to finish. I could not put it down.

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections – Carl Gustav Jung

In the late 1950s, while in his eighties, Carl Jung sat down to write his autobiography, his story of how he evolved and developed insight into the pysche that now forms the basis of so much of modern pyscholgy. One cannot help but share the awe with which he holds the inner world as it unfolds before him. He writes,

“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections is a classic, first published in 1961 and every bit as modern and relevant today as then.

Learning to Fall – Philip Simmons

Philip Simmons at age 35 was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a terminal disease in which you gradually lose all motor capability. In Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life, Philip presents a series of essays – thoughtful, gentle observations on being human. Philip reminds us that life is terminal and that it never turns out as we expect it to. Loved ones die, careers crash, health fails. We are always falling down. And it is in the very falling that we discover the preciousness of life.

Given that in the last two years my company went bankrupt, my roommate and dear friend passed away from brain cancer, I got sick and wasn’t able to work for a year, I can relate to things falling down. Sometimes it’s overwhelming, but the flip side is that priorities become pretty clear – living life with a loving and open heart, staying healthy, being available to those I love.

This is a good book, especially if you are facing fundamental life uncertainty. It is reassuring to see that the uncertainty is what really underlies everything and that one can learn to live fully and well with it.

The Mind and the Brain – Schwartz and Begley

In The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force brain researcher Jeffrey Schwartz and Wall St. Journal reporter Sharon Begley explore the extraordinary discoveries in brain research over the last 20 years. When we were growing up we were taught that the brain pretty much is fixed by age 10, and after that no new neurons are made. For a 100 years it was believed that if you had a stroke and lost functioning over one part of your body as a result of damage to the brain, you just had to live with it. New imaging techiniques in the last quarter century have enabled researchers to precisely map functioning of different parts of the brain, down to the millimeter. What has been discovered is that new neural pathways are being forged in the brain throughout our whole lives, depending on how we use our mind. Wherever we focus our attention is where new neural connections will be made.

Continue reading

Life of Pi – Yann Martel

life_of_pi2.gif

Yann Martel spins a magical story with Life of Pi. In this book, he recounts the boyhood of Piscine Patel whose parents were zoo keepers in India. Pi is fascinated both with God (simultaneously practicing Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism) and zoo animals. When the ship he is taking with his family and some of the animals sinks in the Pacific, Pi finds himself castaway on a 26 ft life boat with an injured zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a 450 lb bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Soon only the tiger and Pi are left on the boat and Pi is left to use his wits to survive the elements and keep from being eaten by the tiger. Pi realizes that he can’t kill the tiger and must learn to become his master in order to survive the ordeal. The interactions with the animals and Pi’s journey are all metaphors for living a spiritual life. The underlying current of the book is that Pi must master his own dark-side, his fear and despair with vigilance and compassion. Much like the Buddhist saint Milarepa who finally mastered the demons who were torturing him by accepting them and befriending them, Pi masters himself and the tiger Richard Parker. There’s much more too it, but telling more would give away the story. Simply, the book left me with sense of wonder and sadness from how one man survived the tragedy of losing his family and the 7 month ordeal of being lost at sea.

The Perfect Heresy – Stephen O’Shea

perfect_heresy.jpg
The Cathars were a sect of renegade Christians in the late 12th century in what is now Southern France. They were pacifist vegetarians who shunned materialism, believed in the equality of women, thought the Catholic church had no God-given authority, and believed Jesus was more mythological than historical. Their popular and growing belief system was such a threat to the Catholic church that the church launched an all out assault for a hundred years to stamp them out, thus giving birth to the inquisition. Pope Innocent III, the same pope that granted legitimacy to St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic, paves the way for hundreds of years of future brutal repression by endowing Simon de Montfort with the task to make war on the cities who harbor Cathars. Stephen O’Shea’s recounts this history in The Perfect Heresy, a compelling story filled with medieval warfare, atrocities, courage and ultimate despair as the last Cathar leader is burned. This was a great read. I could not put it down.

Thank you to Mark Vestrich for this recommendation!