Not Oprah's Book Club

Rebirth... of sorts

2010-02-01T20:08:00.000-08:00

With a spark of inspiration I am bringing the book club back. I am doing so as a co-dictator ship, rather than a democracy.
This means that I am the main dictator, but will do what ever I am told, and act on my first suggestions- if you've had a suggestions and I did not act upon it in the last year, I apologize. From this moment forth I am the book club's bitch. Angela (darling vice president), Lacey, Deb, and yes, of course mom. I am at your book club biddings.

We will meet again on Sunday February 28th, 4 pm at the Frontier- very back room if it is open. We will be reading- Down By The River.

http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A108956

Hope y'all can make it.

Next Meeting!!! March 7th 5pm at Yusif's

2009-01-11T19:41:00.000-08:00

We will be reading our new President's book, "The Audacity of Hope."
I hope to see everyone there and am eager to hear your thoughts.

You may want to check out this Charlie Rose Interview of Barack Obama on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCZkZf6TmdE

Looking forward to seeing you all in March.

Bizzare

2009-01-11T19:02:00.000-08:00

First- Let me briefly forgive myself for taking some time away from this blog. I hope all of you out there who will join me.

When I started to post this- the title kept on popping up in Hindi. Yes... my posting on the book "Eat, Pray, Love” popped up in Hindi I fixed the settings and disabled the transliteration and can now proceed in English.

I wasn't sure what I wanted to share about the book- which section I wanted to delve into the most- and since the universe presented me with Hindi- I shall answer back by offering my reflection on the prayer section.

For those of you who couldn't make it- we ended up at the frontier. For those of you who don't know this- I want to be a cow girl in my next life and the decor of the frontier is like a glimpse into heaven for me (particularly the John Wayne room) I digress.

I, like the author have traveled to Bali, I like the author, am interested in reaching the divine (isn't everyone- in their own way) Also , like the author, I have had a failed first marriage. I also lost everything- and then gained about 20 lbs.

I don't pray much. I teach. I work hard, I swim and I guess have an over active and distressingly urgent sense of compassion that I resolve into action when I get the wild hair to do so. I think I would benefit from a visit to an ashram or anywhere quiet to sort things out.

When Liz faced up to all of her shame from her past and her divorce and felt completely humbled- I knew exactly what she felt like. When the group commented on how they could only imagine... I kept on thinking about the first 9 months after my Ex Husband left me- and how the only way to sort through the mess I was left with was to accept with great humility what had happened. To feel the shame of the mistake that I made by entering the marriage in the first place- to draw from and drain my closest friends - to accept that I had made a mistake and had not taken care of myself nor honored that little voice inside me that kept saying "no, no, no" as I walked through each day of my first marriage. I had betrayed myself and was brought to my knees. I understood.

I think perhaps all of you at the table have had moments of loss in your lives where perhaps you felt regret- or longing- I do not know if the type of shame she writes of is really unique to women who like Liz Gilbert and I happen to be high strung perfectionists… I don't know. I think not. I was not able to speak of this at our meeting as I was too tired to open this up- and too scattered to articulate it well.

To really heal from points in my life where I felt like I had been thrown on to a train track, struck by a ton of bricks and then stumbled into a pile of cacti, only to reach up and grab an electric fence.. I had to wholly embrace how I arrived there. That included the choices I made that were not good for me. I was ashamed that I had betrayed my instinct. It has taken more time than I would have liked to bounce back from my short but disastrous marriage- but I've done it- and to learn from it I had to accept my choices- embrace my feelings of shame and then let them go..Really- I think facing shame is forgiving the past and moving on.

2008-07-18T13:51:00.000-07:00

Only Sam read the book all the way through. I was a bit disappointed in myself, but I, Madame President of Not Oprah's Book Club, could not get through it. I just kept dozing off or having to re read the same page over and over again- and still it went right past me.

Let's hope our next selection is more engaging.

See you all on August 2nd at Yusifs at 5pm for Three Cups of Tea

Infidel

2008-06-11T20:02:00.001-07:00

Please check out the recent article from the New York Times:

In Europe, Debate Over Islam and Virginity

We came together to discuss Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali The book opened our eyes to the lives of Muslim women around the globe- far away on the other side of the Atlantic ocean- in Africa and in Europe. One thing I learned from Infidel is that Islam like other faiths is evangelical- The world crept in on us as a group of men ( tall.. strong-powerful) walked in and in the room next to us began to talk about their faith: Islam, and their rewards for spreading their faith. As the men continued in the other room- I got nervous- I didn't want to speak to0 loudly that I disagreed with many of the aspects of how Islam defined women, I kept thinking- should we invite them to our discussion- we didn't it was awkward, it brought up in me my own discomfort with what was foreign to me. I sensed that speaking would get me nowhere- and perhaps more than anything I was afraid of them.
I have lived and worked in some of the toughest parts of New York, I have traveled on my own in Malaysia an Islamic country, and here I was in a coffee shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico- and despite my desire to be brave and to learn more- my deepest instinct told me that these men where to be feared. I took Women's Studies classes in the late 90's- I knew about the state of women under the Taliban before the towers fell ( I spent a year living right next to ground zero- I felt what happened each day as I walked past it to get to the subway) I knew about female circumcision- so the topics were not new to me, the suffering that occurred in Somalia was within my frame of knowledge - reading Infidel brought all of this out of my brain and into my emotions.

I encourage all of you to add your reflections on our discussion of Infidel by adding your comments to this blog

May 10th! Good People of New York

2008-05-03T11:56:00.000-07:00

Greetings all!

Heck.

Anybody ever read Are you there God, It's me Margaret By Judy Blume? I've read it about three thousand times and after reading Good People I am tempted to be a big nerd and think out a comparative analysis of the two texts.

Obviously The Tempest is significant to this book. I saw the play when I was 8 with my grandma and Aunt Norma at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. I remember nothing. I have it on my netflix cue- and hope to either watch it or at least read the cliff notes before or next meeting. Is there something with the parent/child relationships that parallels?

Finally - can one read a coming of age novel set in New York without thinking about Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye?

Read on and keep clever!

m

Better (April Meeting)

2008-04-07T19:24:00.001-07:00

I gathered the following points from our discussion:

1) Patients need to advocate for themselves
2) Patients need to know how to advocate for themselves
(What questions are we supposed to ask?) Angela and Heather had good ideas. I encourage you to post the advice you gave us
3) Gawande's chapter on Birth was problematic with its empathises on Cesarean births.
4) We all have different expectations from our health care providers, for example- I love that my nurse practitioner also treats my parents so that she is aware of all of the health issues in my family. I also like that I can rat out my parents when they aren't following their instructions. Other people would hate this. It really depends on the individual Dr./Paitient relationship.
5) I noted that Gawande's explanation of positive deviance because it failed to mention that besides finding solutions from the front lines- there has to be valid comparisons to derive the deviance from.

I encourage all to post comments- I also would be willing to coordinate a second meeting to discuss Better with anyone who is interested.

Please vote for your preferred time for our May meeting above. Several people will be out of town for the May meeting. So let us know by voting below what works for you. Vote for any of the times you can make it and we will go with what ever dates has the most votes.

The May Slection, The Good People of New York, is already in at Bookworks.

Stay clever-
Keep reading

Monique

April Meeting

2008-03-02T09:30:00.000-08:00

Thank you all who came out to Yusif's last night for our first official book group meeting. Everyone offered brilliant discussion and great insight into the "Chinese/English".

And thanks to Yusif's for having us! It's a great location for a book group to meet. Yea Angela for recommending it.

I look forward to seeing you all at 5pm on Saturday April 5th at Yusif's. We will be discussing Better by Atul Gawande.

I will be stopping at book works today and give them our updated reading list. I will post what I learn regarding price and when books will be in.

A note on The Good People of New York- Awesome suggestion- it looks really good. There are a few different covers out there- so don't worry if you pick up a copy that looks different from the picture on this blog.

Infidel, our June selection will be out in paperback on April 1st, according to Amazon.

Stay clever and keep reading.

Concise Chinese English...:Thoughts in the 2nd half..

2008-02-25T19:31:00.000-08:00

Two questions

What does one gain from independent travel?

What is my reaction to the changes in Z from one who values the collective to one who values individualism?

Mo's Reflections on the first half of "Concise Dictionary"

2008-02-20T12:05:00.000-08:00

First things first. I majored in English. I was a huge nerd, I spoke too much in class, I was clever, wrote pretty good papers, despite my spelling and grammar mishaps. Perhaps I was a smarty-pants sycophant- but I loved a good story- and I loved the theoretical aspect to how I approached the story. Technical terms, names, arguments, psychoanalytical, psycholinguistic, Marxist, Dereidian deconstruction, feminist, historical, reader response, all of that is a fog to me now- (might have been a fog ten years ago while sitting in a class learning these things for the first time as well) What has remained is my obsession with how the author uses the narrative structure to convey a story to his or her audience. How the author establishes a relationship between the plot and the reader. This is why I will read and re read Heart of Darkness-- all those layers of story telling, why I thought Paradise Lost was so good. Milton hit you with Paradise Lost from different points in time, Conrad as well- but he also adds different levels or what I call "frames" of narration. If you haven't read Heart of Darkness- ask me I'll tell you what you need to know.

I sat down with the book for the first time last night. I had been forcing myself to wait on it until more people had their copies, and I am glad I waited. I made it halfway through the book in one sitting- I certainly don't want to give anything away about the book- but thought I would use that Degree I earned in Literature and put some things out there that I'm mulling over.

1) Paratext What?? This is a term (I think) for text outside the direct narrative- so in this book we see paratext in the definitions she lists, the prologue- the bits in Italics that appear on their own , These are elements that the author include in her work- but not in the story. Why? I am such a nerd that I have books on this sort of thing- I started, but dropped a class on this exact subject at Queens College. I bet I'll have notes on this for the March 1 meeting.

2) Every now and again we have shifts in time- we are reading a diary- but she has some moments of retrospective commentary- I'll check the page number- this commentary is also paratextual.

3) Natural metaphors used in sex scenes- cave, garden, etc... Using metaphors across cultures and language.. Is there some sort of archetype going on?

March Book Meeting

2008-02-17T11:46:00.000-08:00

As promised a date, time and place have been set for the first Not Oprah's Book Club meeting.

Book: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo.
(you will need to order it from your preferred book seller. Book Works on Rio Grande will offer you a 10 % discount if you tell them you are part of "not oprahs book club" [www.bkwrks.com] if you chose to order from them do so soon as it takes about a week to get the book in)

Date: Saturday, March 1
Time: 5:00 pm
Location: Yusif's Cafe, 216 Yale Blvd SE (north of Lead on Yale) (www.yusifs.com)

Please forward on to anyone who is interested. All are welcome.

Please bring with you ideas for future books, thoughts on the "Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers" and your calendar so we can set the next meeting date.

Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions- notoprahsbookclub@yahoo.com

Read on!

Monique and Angela