Pictures of Hollis Woods by Patricia Reilly Giff

     "Do it on my drawing," I said.
     "Never," she told me. It's your world, it belongs to you."..... "Drawing is what you see of the world, truly see."....
     "And sometimes what you see is so deep in your head you're not even sure of what you're seeing. But when it's down there on paper, and you look at it, really look, you'll see the way things are."
     I frowned. "Look at a picture one way and you'll see one thing," I said. "Look again and you might see something else. That's what the Old Man..." I shook my head. "A friend of mine said that once."
     ...."But that's the world isn't it? You have to keep looking to find the truth."

"And something else," she said. "You, the artist, can't hide from the world, because you're putting yourself down there too."
".... your soul is right there in front of you." She pointed to the sketch I'd drawn...  (p.45)

"You're going to be something, you and that language you speak on paper." She drew her other hand waving. "I love what you have to say, Hollis Woods." (p.46)

In my mind was a picture of Beatrice brushing her hair off her forehead. "Drawing is a language," she had said. "You have to learn to speak it." (p. 148)

"Sometimes we learn from our own drawings; things are there that we thought we didn't know." (p.150)

Great House by Nicole Krauss

    There is beautiful prose in this book, but I did not enjoy reading it. Check out my review on Goodreads.com. My picks:
When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It's something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be. (p. 134)

Look at him, she used to say to me, a man like any other, coming home laden with groceries. And yet, in his soul all the dreams, the sadness and joy, love and regret, all the bitter loss of the people he passes on the street fight for a place in his words. (p. 145)

No, what I'm speaking of now, or trying to speak of, is something else, the sense that her self-sufficiency - the proof she carried within her that she could withstand unthinkable tragedy on her own, that in fact the extreme solitude she had constructed around herself, reducing herself, folding in on herself, turning a silent scream into the weight of private work, was precisely what enabled her to withstand it - made it impossible for her to ever need me as I needed her. (p.256)

The dead take their secrets with them, or so they say.  But it isn't really true, is it? The secrets of the dead have a viral quality, and find a way to keep themselves alive in another host. No, I was guilty of nothing more than advancing the inevitable. (p. 258)

The Alchemyst: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel by Michael Scott

It's funny how I read this at the same time I was reading These is my Words by Nancy E. Turner and the one quote that stood out to me is similar to one in Turner's book. The quote:

"And once begun, change cannot be reversed."

Maybe it has to do with my own feelings about and resistance to change.

These is my Words by Nancy E. Turner

     This is a beautifully written book. The many, and I know it's a lot, samples I selected here all spoke to me, but the entire book is written with beautiful prose in a first person account that manages to allow the readers to really know the characters in the story. Turner actually captures the dialect, cadence and voice of her main character and through it reflects how her character grows and matures in life and as result of her education. Here are my favorites:

there's never any turning back in life

I watched all that and thought you just never know sometimes what's in a man's heart. When you think he is all tough nails and boards he can be different on the inside. It makes me wonder about the other men I know too.

These books are not trash, I said, as I know they are the opposite. They are the only thing I wanted in my life more than I could name. They are the pearls in my hair and scarlet velvet gowns but I could not say that out loud because they would think I was touched.

the real beauty of a person ... is their spirit and good and simple ways

...children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives.

There is no outrunning fear,...it comes on you and you have to face it.

     Sometimes I feel like a tree on a hill, at the place where all the wind blows and the hail hits the hardest. All the people I love are down the side aways, sheltered under a great rock, and I am out of the fold, standing alone in the sun and the snow. I feel like I am not part of the rest somehow, although they welcome me and are kind. I see my family as they sit together  and it is like they have a certain way between them that is beyond me. I wonder if other folks ever feel included yet alone.

A friendly silence can speak between two who will walk together a long way...

Education doesn't keep a person from being a fool, and the lack of it doesn't keep a person being intelligent.

       We are driving away, and I look back over my shoulder with a strange feeling of parting. It is not a lonely feeling, but just as am I always sad to close the cover on a book, I feel I have finished with this part of my life and will have to begin a new book.

     If tiredness could be measured in buckets I am a deep well of tiredness.

If I'm riding a horse and get thrown, it's just a matter of getting back on. And if I'm fighting for my life, there's only living and dying to choose from. But taking that test, that's like showing other people the inside of your thoughts, and just waiting for them to say wrong, wrong, wrong, and you can have thought that seems right but since you never went to school, maybe it isn't.

     My life feels like a book left out on the porch, and the wind blows the pages faster and faster, turning always toward a new chapter faster than I can stop and read it.

I want them to know that I love you and just how much, too. And that I don't leave you because that feeling's not there, but I stay alive because it is.

Tongue Fu! How to Deflect, Disarm, and Defuse Any Verbal Conflict by Sam Horn

I read this because I'm trying to master the art of positive talk, particularly for my students. Sam Horn uses a lot of quotes from a variety of sources, but I think this one might be hers:

"Commit to using more positive images and you can climb out of those self-made dungeons and see the world as the wonder it is."

Although I don't think this next one is an original thought, because I have seen it on posters, I do think it's worth repeating.

"The word listen contains the same letters as the word silent for good reason."

The Bible Said It First

I believe William Shakespeare paraphrased this passage from the Bible in his play "The Merchant of Venice" and I ran across it in Charles and Mary Lamb's  Tales from Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice".

"...mercy has a double blessing, it blessed him that gave, and him that received it"

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

"Hennie made life come alive - bein with her was like bein with fun."

It's surprising that out of this entire book, which tells the story behind the first human cells to be grown in a culture (and are still being grown today), that was the quote which struck me. It paints such a picture in my mind. Maybe that's why I liked this book so much. The entire book was so well written.

I had no plans to read this book, in spite of all the accolades it received. I just didn't think it would interest me. Then my friend picked it for the book club that I had recently been invited to and I really wanted to be able to participate. As it turned out I really enjoyed this book.

Skloot does an excellent job of telling a human story interwoven with science facts. I felt the heart and soul of the Lacks family while I was reading the book and I learned some science along the way. I highly recommend this book.

Mary Lamb

The Devil Kissed Her: The Story of Mary Lamb by Kathy Watson covers a lot of territory. Not only do you learn about Mary Lamb, co-author of Tales from Shakespeare, but also about how mental illness in the late 1700's to early 1800's was dealt with.

When I was reading this book I also read an article in the Wall Street Journal by Nassir Ghaemi a professor of psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine and the director of the Mood Disorders program at Tufts Medical Center. Ghaemi's article discusses why, in times of crisis, those who are mentally ill may become the greatest leaders. He sites two traits of the mentally ill that may be the reason for this. Mental illnesses, such as depression, have been shown to "encourage traits of both realism and empathy".

In spite of the fact that she murdered her mother, that is exactly what struck me about Mary Lamb. Both empathy and gentleness show in her writing. This was not typical of children's stories during that period of time. In Mary's group of stories titled Mrs. Leicester's School, she has a story titled "The Sailor Uncle" from which this quote is taken:

"let it be a lesson to you to be as kind as possible to those you love; remember, when they are gone from you, you will never think you had been kind enough."

Mary also demonstrated her ability to see the world more realistically. Watson points out that Mary probably wouldn't have considered herself a feminist, but she saw the need for girls to be trained for jobs in which they could support themselves if they did not marry. Mary wrote:

 "The parents of female children, who were known to be destined from their birth to maintain themselves through the whole course of their lives with like certainty as their sons are, would feel it a duty incumbent on themselves to strengthen the minds, and even the bodily constitutions of their girls...by an education which...might enable them to follow some occupation..."

As a young woman, Mary was actually trained to sew the mantua, but she was not well suited to this business. It paid low wages, had long hours and tended to ruin a woman's eyesight. It also appears that Mary was much to intelligent to settle for this. Mary was lucky in that she was able to earn some money through her writing and her brother Charles was devoted to caring for her. As Watson points out:

"What moves us in the lives of Mary and Charles Lamb is the hard work they both put into not being defeated by the painful circumstances of their lives."

Isn't this a good lesson for us all?

Sophie and the Rising Sun

This book was so poignant and poetic and Augusta Trobaugh did an excellent job of capturing the different voices represented in the characters. Here are my picks:

"Because the sky that's over where the river and the ocean come together is very beautiful - very different - in a special way. And I just can't seem to get it right on the paper."
     Mr. Otto wiped his brush and put it away before he responded. "Perhaps," he ventured, "that's why it is so beautiful - because it is beyond capturing."

     Somehow, it was all becoming more than she could think about, so that she felt as if she were dividing into two - like an amoeba - one cell of her wanting nothing more than to be with him forever, the other crying for solitude so that she could taste this most delicious reality. Every wonderful drop of it. Feel every feeling. Taste every joy.

     High above them, the endless heavens, the multitude of stars, some of them so far away that they could only guess their glitterings, and here they stood on the sandy bottom of eternity, and at the last, it was only his firm hand that kept her from soaring like an everlasting meteor into the heavens.    

     "We've all got funny things about us. Places inside us that's specially tender - little sore spots, you might say."

Shakespeare's Spy by Gary Blackwood

While I read all three of Gary Blackwood's Shakespeare Stealer books and thought the first was the best, it was in the third book, Shakespeare's Spy, that I found this passage. It made me think about teaching children, how fragile their psyches are and how teachers need to be supportive and encouraging in their teaching methods.

" I had grown accustomed to being criticized by them-for my acting, for my singing, for my dancing, for my scriming. But those were all external things, mere skills to be mastered. The play was personal, a product not of my muscles or my vocal cords but of my mind. If they found flaws in it, the flaws were mine; if they judged it foolish, I would be the fool."

Don't we all have a little of that fear when we open our thoughts and hearts to others?

The Spirit Catches You and Then You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

I read this book after reading Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in which Ali says that we should not always blindly accept different cultures and we should do more to change them. Of course she was talking about an oppressive culture, but in The Spirit Catches You and Then You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman the opposite thought came to my mind. What makes our western ways the "right" way? This book specifically refers to western medicine. I had so much marked in this book (thank you again, Kindle) I have just written my thoughts here with only a few passages actually quoted.

There are so many things to consider when dealing with a person who has been picked up and set down in a completely different culture, often without any preparation: the way time is kept, the cultural practices of using a person's name, if the names can be pronounced easily,
being uprooted from their own culture, language, foods, and put into a place where nothing really belongs to them. 

Looks can be deceiving. Just because the people of a different culture may look like us, particularly if they have immigrated to our country and have started adopting our look, doesn't mean that they have the same practices. Sometimes we need to ask, before just resorting to our own ways. We should acknowledge all kinds of intelligence. Perhaps cultural intelligences are similar to the multiple intelligences that we recognize in education and these different cultural intelligences should be acknowledged and worked with.

Do we (Americans) coerce people of other cultures to do things our way, thinking it is the only way? (medicine) Do we in our western culture feel we should have control of everything or should we except that "things happen... not everything is in our control, and not everything is in your control." Or perhaps we do this out of our own ignorance, not realizing there are other ways and beliefs.

Fadiman's story illustrates that dealing with a culture so different from our own may put us in a dilemma in which all the choices are discriminatory. What if there is a treatment that can help a patient but the family is unable to comply, through lack of understanding or ability? Do you then tailor the treatment so the family can and will comply, knowing that it is not the optimal treatment?

We should not be afraid to ask questions in order to clarify a situation. We should ask for help in understanding another culture and learn as much as possible so prejudices don't get in the way of our treatment of another person.

"If you can't see that your own culture has its own set of interests, emotions, and biases, how can you expect to deal successfully with someone else's culture?"

The Pioneer Woman Blog

I was listening to an interview with Ree Drummond of the Pioneer Woman Blog and The Pioneer Woman Cooks, when I was struck by this comment:

"You can make all the plans you want in life and then you need to sit back and enjoy the ride."

A Powerful Read

As a Christian raised in typically small southern towns, I came to this book knowing very little about Muslims and their religious beliefs and practices. I learned many things from Infidel by Ayan Hersi Ali, but I was particularly impressed with the way she was able to step outside of her upbringing and reflect on what she was taught as a child. It certainly gave me much to think about. Here are a few of her thoughts that I found particularly worthy:

"some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice."

"words are not something you should waste; they should come out of deep prior reflection"

"Societies that respect the rights of women and their freedom are wealthy and peaceful."

"If girls and women are uneducated, oppressed, and psychologically demeaned, then their children are all stunted by their ignorance. If women are well educated and nurtured, they and their children make up a self-reliant, responsible citizenry and a productive workforce."

I noted a few others passages that I will refrain from recording here, because they are Ali's very strong comments on Islam's role as an oppressive, intolerant culture. She also comments on how western cultures often enable these values to continue. This book gave me so much to think about.

Undaunted: My Struggle for Freedom and Survival in Burma by Zoya Phan

Zoya Phan is Karen, one of the eight ethnic groups of Burma (Myanmar). In this memoir she tells of her childhood in a jungle village of Burma, being a teenage refugee in Thailand and how she found her way to being involved in the struggle for democracy against Burma's military dictatorship. The military dictatorship has been employing ethnic cleansing in Burma, of which the Karen have become a victim.

     "In spite of the odds, in spite of tradition and in spite of power, if I believed something was wrong or right and pushed for the truth, I would eventually get it. If someone is trying to put you down, you just have to redouble your efforts to make things right. No matter how hard or embarrassing or even frightening it might be, you will win in the end if you fight for what is true."

     "I nurtured that spark of hope, telling myself that if I believed in something strongly enough, it had to be possible."

     "freedom won't be given to us: we will have to work for it."

Thank goodness I have a Kindle

The school district I work for received a grant to purchase Kindles which we use to read books about the different cultures represented in our school district. We are presently the most diverse school district in the country. So we have a culture book club which I have really enjoyed. It has introduced me to a lot of books I would have never pick up to read. And the Kindle has a note application, so I can go back and retrieve the passages I liked.

I'm going to start with Mawi Asgedom's Of Beetles and Angels: A Boy's Remarkable Journey from a Refugee Camp to Harvard.  I had the pleasure of meeting Mawi at my school. He is a very inspirational speaker. You can check him out at mawiasgedom.com

I won't always have seven passages (I promise):

      "People always mistreated the angels, my father said, because the angels never looked like angels. They were always disguised as the lowliest of beetles: beggars, vagrants, and misfits.
      But no matter how much the strangers resembled beetles, my father always maintained that they could be angels, given to us by God to test the deepest sentiments of our hearts."

     "What's both beautiful and scary about young children is that they will believe most anything that their parents tell them....
     they told us that we could do anything if we worked hard and treated others with respect. And we believed them."

     "But the good thing about words is that they can also breathe life into our spirits."

     "True power comes from focusing on what we can give, not just what we can take.
     Of the gifts that we can give, the greatest is to see beauty in each other - in essence, to give beauty to each other. When we give that beauty, we prepare our hearts to receive it back.
     So it is that I have been inspired by beetles and angels."

    "Remembering where you come from means holding on to the vision that you are a part of a human community that you can carry with you every day. That community has given us much. Are we not obligated to give it something back?"

     "Any one of us, however small and helpless we may feel, can spark unimagined changes. Today's small act of kindness can become tomorrow's whirlwind of human progress."

     "quite often, it will be the small things that all of us can do that will have the most impact."

The Jewel Trader of Pegu

Let's start with a book I read in July 2010. It's what I currently have on my email as a signature line, so I didn't lose this one to the virus world.

 

“How can you be alive if you don’t live in the present?” from The Jewel Trader of Pegu by Jeffery Hantover

 

It is certainly not a new thought, but it struck me as I was reading the book, particularly in the context of the character's experiences. I enjoyed this book.

Since July 1999, I have kept a list of the books I have read. My reading interests were limited then to popular fiction. As my interests have grown and the genres I read have expanded, I have started to note passages that I feel have special meaning. I am a great admirer of authors who have the ability to put into words powerful messages, so in May 2010 I started noting them in a Word document and using them in the signature line of my emails, noting the book and author. Then one day a nasty virus came to attack my hard drive and I am afraid my list is lost. So this is now my attempt to record passages that speak to me and that I feel need to be shared with others. I may include other thoughts or reviews on books, but that is not the primary purpose of the blog.

If you stumble upon this blog, I hope the passages that speak to me also speak to you.

Do you recognize where I got the title of my blog? It is from one of the few books I have reread and plan to reread again soon - Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.