Jar City
Posted: 2018/06/19 Filed under: Book Reviews, Fiction, Lust To Go | Tags: 2018, Arnaldur Indridason, audio book, book lust iii, book review, Fiction, Iceland, june, murder, mystery Leave a commentIndridason, Arnaldur. Jar City. Read by George Guidall. Prince Frederick, MD: Recorded Books, 2011.
Reason read: Icelandic National Day is in June.
Arnaldur Indridason doesn’t sugarcoat his protagonists with sweet personalities. They aren’t perfect people with mundane lives. Inspector Erlender is a divorced father with a drug addicted daughter living on the fringe of society. She occasionally scrounges Erlender’s flat for money or a meal. And like any parent who loves his child to the brink of insanity, Erlender takes whatever attention he can get from her. In the meantime, he has a murder to solve. An elderly man has been bashed in the head with an ashtray. It wasn’t a robbery so who would want to kill a frail and quiet man in his 70s? As Erlender digs into the victim’s past he uncovers horrible truths about the dead man. An unsolved cold case suddenly heats up and Erlender discovers just how complicated blood ties can be.
Author fact: Arnaldur won the Glass Key award in 2002.
Narrator fact: Guidall also narrated A Widow For One Year by John Irving. I knew his voice sounded familiar.
Book trivia: Jar City is not the first in a series of Reykjavik thrillers. Sons of Dust is the first to feature Erlender.
Nancy said: “The mysteries of Arnaldur Indridason are fine examples of police procedurals” (Book Lust To Go p 99). She also mentioned reading them in order which I really appreciated since she doesn’t often do that.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called simply “Iceland” (p 99).
Mindfulness Meditation
Posted: 2018/06/18 Filed under: Book Reviews, BookLust I, NonFiction | Tags: 2018, audio book, book lust i, book review, jon kabat zinn, june, meditation, NonFiction, self help Leave a commentKabat-Zinn, Jon. Mindfulness Meditation: Cultivating the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind. Read by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Prince Frederick, MD: Recorded Books, 1995
Reason read: Jon Kabat-Zinn was born in the month of June. Read in his honor.
Maybe this doesn’t come out when reading Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work. Maybe one needs to listen to his books on audio because before now I never realized Jon Kabat-Zinn is really funny. Everything he talks about in Mindfulness Meditation makes perfect sense but it’s laced with humor I hadn’t noticed before. The other benefit to listening to Mindfulness Meditation is being able to hear the bells he rings during the practice.
Mindfulness Meditation is all about playing attention to world around you in minute detail. His prime example is to focus on eating just one raisin but don’t just throw it into your mouth. Really look at it. Get all five senses involved in looking at it, feeling it, smelling it, and even putting it in your ear to hear it crackle (I kid you not). Finally, when you put it in your mouth to taste it you savor it slowly, again paying attention to how it feels while you chew. Kabat-Zinn goes beyond the raisin and explains that meditation is not about emptying your mind to alleviate stress. It’s all about focusing the mind to transform the way you think and deal with life.
So, time for some truth. I listened to this in the car on the way up to Maine. It is only two cds long so it took me no time at all.
Author fact: Maybe I have already mentioned this, but JKZ is associated with the University of Massachusetts.
Nancy said: Nancy includes Kabat-Zinn because “he advocates the techniques of Vipnassana meditation to help lower stress, reduce anxiety, and deal less frantically with the everyday world” (Book Lust p 110).
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Help Yourself” (p 109).
Thousand Hills
Posted: 2018/05/03 Filed under: Book Reviews, Lust To Go, NonFiction | Tags: 2018, africa, april, audio book, book lust iii, book review, murder, NonFiction, Paul Boehmer, Paul Kagame, Rwanda, Stephen Kinzer Leave a commentKinzer, Stephen. A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It. Read by Paul Boehmer. Tantor Audio, 2008.
Kinzer, Stephen. A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2008.
Reason read: April 22, 2000 Paul Kagame became President of Rwanada. He is credited for bringing an end to the Rwanda genocide in 1994.
Kinzer had one simple motive for writing Thousand Hills. It is an amazing untold story that needed to be shared. One the one hand, it is the condense biography of a remarkable man who, born into poverty and nearly killed when he was only two years old, rose in military rank to single-handedly lead a rebel force that ended the largest genocide in Rwanda. On the other hand, it is the telling of a nation struggling with a metamorphosis of epic proportions. After the holocaust, Paul Kagame insisted on bringing Tutsi and Hutu together, demanding that murderer and victim work as one to repair relations.
Author fact: In 2008 Kinzer went on C-Span BookTV to talk about Thousand Hills. The video is over an hour long and still available for viewing on the C-Span site.
Nancy said: nothing.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Africa: the Greenest Continent” (p 8).
February Progress
Posted: 2018/02/02 Filed under: audio book, BookLust I, BookLust II, E-Books, Early Review, Fiction, Lust To Go, NonFiction | Tags: audio book, autobiography, e-book, Ernest Cline, Fiction, Freya Stark, italy, John Berendt, movie, mystery, NonFiction, Rhoda Blumberg, science fiction, series, Sicily, Simon Brett, Simonetta Agnello, theater, trains, travel, Venice, Walter Tevis Leave a commentI have been seeing a chiropractor for over a month and have all but stopped running. At first, I admit, this bothered me to no end. Now, I’m okay with it for all the books I have been reading. And speaking of books, here is February’s plan for The Books:
Fiction:
- The Almond Picker by Simonetta Agnello ~ in honor of Almond Blossom festival in Sicily.
- The Color of Money by Walter Tevis ~ in honor of Tevis’s birth month.
- Dead Room Farce by Simon Brett ~ in honor of February being Theater month.
Nonfiction:
- City of Falling Angels by John Berendt~ in honor of February being the month of the Venice Carnival (AB/print).
- Full Steam Ahead: the Race to Build a Transcontinental Railroad by Rhoda Blumberg~ in honor of February being Train Month.
Series continuations:
- Beyond Euphrates by Freya Stark ~ in honor of Freya’s birthday in January.
For fun:
- Ready, Player One by Ernest Cline ~ because a friend recommended it (E-book).
There might be room for more titles, considering Dead Room Farce and Full Steam Ahead are barely 200 pages apiece. We’ll see…
