Just Add Love

A friend was visiting this past weekend and spent some time perusing my bookshelves and noticing how they look (he's a talented visual artist) and how they were arranged (he's very organized). I gave him the tour: poetry, drama, screenwriting, fiction, non-fiction and the like. He also wanted to know what I was actually reading (he's a good reader) (and he tells entire plots of movies with more feeling than the screenwriter, director and actors combined). (I love that).

Here in order of appearance are the books I am supposedly reading with little twitter-like reviews:

A Moveable Feast by Hemingway: surprisingly, not grabbing me. Essays on the writing life usually glue themselves to my eyeballs even if I'm just walking along minding my own business, but I like his short stories better. However, a novel, The Sun Also Rises, is my all-time favorite Hemingway. I don't like bull-fighting or tales of twenty-four hours a day drinking and debauchery or a female character that you just know is really a guy, but hey, the writing is beautiful and it seared my soul, so there you go.

The Hounds of Winter by James Magnuson. Good story, well-told (high praise). The two others of his I have read strike me the same way, Windfall and Ghost Dancing. In addition to the writing being as clear and plain and luminous as that of Anne Tyler or Hemingway himself, I loved Windfall for the protagonist who thinks in terms of how little money he has and exactly to the dollar where it all goes. Ya know, real life. Not since eleventh grade when I discovered Henry Thoreau listing stuff and how much it costs--the beans being worth more because they heated him up twice, once when he planted them and again when he ate them--have I run across a character so broke and frugal and pristine as the guy in Windfall. Plus, Windfall takes place on UT campus (where I studied under "The Ten Year Plan") and Parlin Hall (English Department!) (such a sneaky suspenseful building). And South Congress, Sixth Street, West Lake Hills and Burnet Road Self Storage for goodness' sake, which is right down the street from my house. A novel about a broke English teacher/literature-loving fool finding tons of money. From this blog to God's ears.

The Book of Secrets: Keys to Love and Meditation by Osho (Bagwan Shree Rajneesh for all you old hippies) explains Tantra. 112 meditations to cover the needs of all humanity past, present and future. Pick one; try for three days; if you don't dig it, dump it. I like the one where you let your joy take over when you see an old friend for the first time in a while. My kind of meditation. Oh, and he says if you are in love you don't need any other meditation. Or if you are big into prayer, nuff said. If you're scientific, there are meditations for you folks, too. If you're the love-at-first-sight type, you can basically do the scientific ones and just add a feeling of love. Whatever works. Plus, Osho is hilarious, and laughing is good meditation. The section on sexual meditations is the only thing Westerners seem to remember about Tantra. The upshot is you can make anything a meditation, including sex, if you get in the right frame of no-mind. Other groovy methods: showering, eating, staring into space. That last one is one of my faves.

A couple of little shorties:

Words in Air: the Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Two friends. Two great poets' letters. Luscious.

Consumer Reports Buying Guide 2009. See comments about frugality above.

These are only a few of the books I am supposedly reading. I'll regale you later.