Finding a Treasure

This past summer, I read The Witch of Portobello, by Paulo Coelho.  On the cover, it said "from the best selling author of The Alchemist."  By chance, I found a 25 cent copy of this best seller at a thrift shop not too long afterwards.  However, I did not read it at the time because I started reading A Song of Ice and Fire.  

Yesterday I finally started reading The Alchemist.

Today I finished it at lunch time. 

What a WONDERFUL little story.

A shepherd starts out on a journey to fulfill his "Personal Legend" after a gypsy interprets a reoccurring dream.  Along the way, he learns to understand the Language of the World to interpret omens which lead him to his treasure. 

A few things I love about the book:

In the story, none of the characters are named, save one.  They are referred to as "the boy," "the englishman," and "the alchemist," etc.  Fatima is the only character who is named.  This makes her name very special and it makes her very special.

I could not choose any one phrase in the story that stood out from the others.  I don't say this because the whole story was unremarkable, I say this because each phrase was so beautiful and meaningful, that they should not be taken out of context.  However, I did choose ooone....

This story was written with a beautiful innocence and simplicity.  It is easy to read, easy to understand, and easy to love.  Open the book, open your mind and open your heart.

What is your Personal Legend?  What dream are you chasing?  What do you want but are afraid to go after?  What is holding you back? 

Remember:

"When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it."

I Love Loving Books

I found this 30-day book challenge, but I decided to answer all of the questions at once because I never post anything consecutively for 30 days, but I do love to talk about books!

1. Best book you read last year: The Cure for the Modern Life by Lisa Tucker
2. A book that you've read more than 3 times: Harry Potter.  All of them.  
3. Your favorite series: Harry Potter and A Song of Ice and Fire
4. Favorite book of your favourite series: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; All of them except A Feast for Crows in A Song of Ice and Fire
5. A book that makes you happy: Alice in Wonderland
6. A book that makes you sad: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.  Such a tragic story.  I'm like my mother.  I hate when bad things happen to children in stories.
7. Most underrated book: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Beautiful story that most people have never heard of.
8. Most overrated book: The Great Gatsby.  I HATE that book and every character in it!
9. A book you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving: Pretty Little Mistakes.  The cover (and title) were trite, but it was a really neat idea.  A choose your own ending book (like my old favorite Goosebump books) for adults!
10. Favorite classic book: Jane Eyre.
11. A book you hated: Lolita. I have never before HATED a book so much.  I could not even finish it.  The characters are disgusting and I couldn't handle it.
12. A book you used to love but don’t anymore:  Twilight.  I read the first 3 books, then realized they were moronic and had bad moral lessons that I didn't want to learn and I don't want other young girls to learn.
13. Your favorite writer:  Jane Austen, Lisa Tucker, John Steinbeck
14. Favorite book of your favorite writer: Persuasion, Jane Austen
15. Favorite male character:  Jon Snow and Tyrion Lannister, A Song of Ice and Fire
16. Favorite female character: Hermione Granger, Harry Potter; Lizzie Bennett, Pride and Prejudice
17. Favorite quote from your favorite book: "Reading is the magic key, it takes you where you want to be." from the Allice in Bibleland stories that my mother used to read with me when I was little.
18. A book that disappointed you: The Notebook.  The movie was So much more engaging. The book was written for 5th graders.
19. Favorite book turned into a movie: Pride and Prejudice.  The Keira Kightly version is my absolute favorite movie of all time.
20. Favorite romance book:  Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson.  It is so sweet and sappy.  I loved it.
21. Favorite book from your childhood: Can't You Sleep Little Bear? by Martin Waddell
22. Favorite book you own:  I own all of my favorite books!  I hoard books.
23. A book you wanted to read for a long time but still haven’t: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.
24. A book that you wish more people would've read:  Catch-22.  I mean, I know that TONS of people have read this book.  But it never seems to be on anyone's reading list.  So few of my friends have read it.
25. A character who you can relate to the most: Athena from The Witch of Portobello
26. A book that changed your opinion about something: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
27. The most surprising plot twist or ending:  A Game of Thrones.  The whole series is full of twists and turns, but after the first book you aren't quite as shocked when something shocking happens.
28. Favorite title: A Game of Thrones.  Its a clever little phrase.
29. A book everyone hated but you liked: I haven't really read any books that other people say they hated....
30. Your favorite book of all time:  I will never answer this question.  My favorite book of all time is always the one I'm reading right now.

Some questions I've added:

1. The book you recommend to others the most: The Red Tent by Anita Diament
2. Favorite genre to read:  Fantasy or Classic Romance
3. Last book you read:  A Dance with Dragons, the more recent book in A Song of Ice and Fire series.
4. Book you are reading now: Love's Labor's Lost.  Every once in a while I need a bit o' Shakespeare back in my life. 

A Reader....

I just finished A Dance with Dragons, by George R.R. Martin.  I will be writing a whole post about A Song of Ice and Fire, but for now, I just want to leave you with a quotation.


“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies," said Jojen. "The man who never reads lives only one.” 


And that is why I love to read!  I have lived many lives thus far, hopefully I will have lived a thousand before I die.


Maybe I'll get "A reader lives a thousand lives" as a tattoo someday...

Life Lessons from a Sappy Romance Novel

More than a year ago now, my aunt suggested that I read Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson.  I read it.  I cried.  I passed it on to my mother.

The thing that struck me the most was not necessarily the story, but a phrase that kept coming up.  Suzanne would often say something like "Aren't we lucky that we have your daddy?" or "Aren't we lucky we get to have this experience?" or "Aren't we lucky it's such a beautiful day?"  

I realized that "Aren't we lucky" is something that I say in my own life, and something that I believe every day.  I was lucky to be born in to a wonderful, loving, and FUN family.  I am lucky to have my physical and mental health.  I am lucky to live in a country such as this one that (at one time) allowed my family to advance and create the very comfortable life I live.  I am lucky to have gone to college and I am lucky to have been intelligent enough to take advantage of it.  Basically, I'm lucky.

My mom and I started saying it to each other.  A few weekends ago, my momma came to visit me and we got matching tattoos that say "Aren't we Lucky" around our wrists.  I would post a picture, but pictures of wrists look funny.

This morning my mother also reminded me that The Lesson of the Five Balls.

“Imagine life is a game in which you are juggling five balls. The balls are called work, family, health, friends, and integrity, and you are keeping all of them in the air. But one day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls, family, health, friends and integrity, are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered. And once you truly understand the lesson of the five balls, you will have the beginnings of balance in your life”

I don't have much of a comment for this because it is pretty self explanatory!

What I Read = How I Feel

Goodness knows I can't get enough politics.  I watch Rachel Maddow religiously.  I read news stories online and whenever I get a hold of one, I'll read a newspaper -- a real live newspaper!  I picked up Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman at the library and a friend gave me What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank.  I didn't finish either of them before deciding I MUST put them down.

I agree with many things that they are saying, yes.  However, I get the most reading done in bed.  This means I wake up cranky from having fallen asleep to Thomas Frank's blatant sarcasm and disdain. Or I would wake up worried, yet optimistic from dreaming of our Hot, Crowded world and all of the work it would take to change the trajectory our nation and our planet is on. 

Of course, I can't always read Winnie-the-Pooh before bed.  ALTHOUGH the next book on my reading list IS The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff.  Just having read the first 4 pages of the introduction, I can already tell this book will leave me feeling relaxed and happy in the morning.

Side Note:  While searching for a picture for The Tao of Pooh, I ran in to this delightful blog: The Broke and the Bookish.  I shall visit again.  I also like the concept and maybe, considering how much I love to read, I will add a bit of this to my blog.  I also hope to turn this blog in to a crafter's blog too, but I haven't been reading or crafting fast enough to do either!

Although I should not be spending my free time reading, blogging, crafting and puzzling, but instead I should be studying diligently for the GRE.  However, I just started reading A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin.  I needed a new series to get in to now that Harry Potter is completely over and done.  These books are pretty dang long, so they better deliver.  I should guess that, at the rate I usually read books, it will take me 3-8 months to read A Game of Thrones, depending on its level of awesomeness, the number of books I read on the side, and the amount of studying I actually end up doing.  Also, I think "level of awesomeness" will be my rating system from now on.

A Witch Worth Reading About

I thought when I graduated, I would have unlimited time to read books and do crafts.  This was true for a month or two.  But life moves quickly and once I started making friends and getting involved in the community, it has been difficult to find time to immerse myself in someone else's fictional life.


Last week I started readin The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho.  Unfortunately, I kept having to put it down, but not by choice.  This was one of the most engrossing stories I've read since graduation (another is The Red Tent by Anita Diamant).  This book touched on many themes that I am struggling with in my own life.

The story of Sherine Khalil, who calls herself Athena, is told through the eyes of those who knew her best and were a significant part of her journey.  On her search for meaning, Athena learns to connect with "The Great Mother" (Mother Earth) through ritual dance.  Athena struggles against traditions in her attempt to bring knowledge to the world.


One of the themes I connected with immediately was this struggle against tradition.  In my work and my life, I have questioned "the way its done."  The message Athena brings is embraced by many she touches, but she also sees a brutal backlash which threatens her work, her life and the safety of her family.  The institutions and powers that be (i.e. the Church), feeling threatened, use the media to bring her down.  They distort her message and tell blatant lies about her intentions and rituals.

So many wise, intelligent, forward-thinking would-be leaders are brought down before they are able to achieve their "mission," as Athena refers to it.  The world is stuck in the traditions of capitalism and an idealized 1950s mentality which threatens to destroy the very planet which sustains us.  In June 2010, I attended the US Social Forum where I was part of a movement to advance progressive ideas here in the United States and abroad.  Thousands of people flooded the streets of Detroit, Michigan in a peaceful march and attended workshops for one week.  There was no national media coverage of the event.  Missing white children, Tea Party bloggers and the latest political sex scandal filled the airwaves instead.  The winds of change may be blowing, but we are locked up inside our air-conditioned suburban homes and cannot feel the refreshing breeze.  Athena is called "a woman of the twenty-second century living in the twenty-first."  I can relate to this feeling, but I believe that I am a woman of the twenty-first century.  I believe we live when we are meant to live.  There is a purpose for me to be here at this time.  I hope that purpose is to bring people out from their ivory towers and their glass houses and in to their communities.  That is my "mission" and I know I will not survive to see it fulfilled.  But I, with like-minded friends and strangers, will continue.

US Social Forum Opening March 2010, Detroit, MI.

Another theme in The Witch of Portobello is Love.  Coelho's depiction of love is quite different than our usual vision of love.  In Athena's final interaction with another central character, she explains that "Love is not a habit, a commitment, or a debt.  It isn't what romantic songs tell us it is-- love simply is." I tried to analyze this quote to show that I understand, but this is not an academic paper.  I understand this quote because I have suffered through a habit believing it to be love, I've tried to force a commitment from someone I love and I have loved purely because I was loved.  I understand because I've lived our incorrect perceptions of what love is supposed to be.

But I will admit, I love love.  I drop "I love you" like its "pass the salt."   Love is one of the driving forces of my life.  I don't need to look for love because I am surrounded by it.  Love flows like a river from my lips and my hands and my heart -- sometimes the water is high and the current is strong, sometimes a dry spell slows the waters, but the water always flows.  One thing I'VE LEARNED is that there is always more love.  Love is not a sum-zero game.  You do not replace those who you used to love with those who you love now.  The river may change directions, a new tributary flows in, a new stream may branch off from the main river, but my river, hopefully, will continue to flow.

 ALLLL RIGHT!  Enough with the sap and the metaphors.  Time to start a new book.  I will pass this one on to as many people as I can find to read it because its lessons should be shared with all those willing to listen.