Life and Things
I watched Amazon’s Lore series this week. Dude, so awesome! I also watched the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery, and while I enjoy it as a sci-fi show in and of itself, nothing of it feels like ‘Star Trek’ to me. I think I’ve enjoyed The Orville more, if I’m going to be honest.
Health has been iffy this past week, leading to nothing beyond reviews being written, and only two books read. Lots and lots of pain. It did end up leaving me two poems and half of another though. There is a poetry contest I am going to enter this month.
Books read, reviewed, and posted/scheduled this past week
Ocean’s Fire by Stacey Tucker, 3*
Writing as a Path to Awakening by Albert Flynn deSilver, 5*
Favourite read of the week
Writing as a Path to Awakening by Albert Flynn deSilver
“The best writers say their work seems to come from a source beyond the thinking mind. But how do we access that source? “We must first look inside ourselves and be willing to touch that raw emotional core at the heart of a deeper creativity,” writes Albert Flynn DeSilver. In Writing as a Path to Awakening, this renowned poet, writer, and teacher shows you how to use meditation to cultivate true depth in your own writing—so your words reveal layers of profound insight that inspire and move your readers.
Constructed as a year-long exploration with a new focus for each month and season, Writing as a Path to Awakening includes:
• How to approach writing and reading with a greater level of presence and immersion
• Engaging curiosity, playfulness, and spontaneity to keep your regular practice fresh
• % with poetry to deeply embody the power of language
• How you can spark your imagination by connecting to the groundless source of creation
• The meditative approach to storytelling—how not being trapped in your story liberates your capacity to create
• Editing, rewriting, and the path of spiritual transformation
“Writing and meditation practice are a powerful pair, a dynamic duo,” Albert Flynn DeSilver teaches. “Together they nourish and push, trigger and define, inform and inspire, enable, and energize. To engage in both practices fully is to activate a more complete, creative, and spiritual self.” With a mixture of engaging storytelling and practical exercises, Writing as a Path to Awakening invites you on a yearlong journey of growth and discovery—to enhance your writing through the practice of meditation while using the creative process to accelerate your spiritual evolution.”
Current Read
Education of a Coroner by John Bateson
“Marin County, California throughout his four decades on the job—from high-profile deaths to serial killers, to Golden Gate Bridge suicides.
Marin County, California is a study in contradictions. Its natural beauty attracts thousands of visitors every year, yet the county also is home to San Quentin Prison, one of the oldest and largest penitentiaries in the country. Marin ranks in the top one percent of counties nationwide in terms of affluence and overall health, yet it is far above the norm in drug overdoses and alcoholism, and comprises a large percentage of suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge.
Ken Holmes worked in the Marin County Coroner’s Office for thirty-six years, starting as a death investigator and ending as the three-term, elected coroner. As he grew into the job—which is different from what is depicted on television—Holmes learned a variety of skills, from finding hidden clues at death scenes, interviewing witnesses effectively, managing bystanders and reporters, preparing testimony for court to notifying families of a death with sensitivity and compassion. He also learned about different kinds of firearms, all types of drugs—prescription and illegal—and about certain unexpected and potentially fatal phenomena such as autoeroticism.
Complete with poignant anecdotes, The Education of a Coroner provides a firsthand and fascinating glimpse into the daily life of a public servant whose work is dark and mysterious yet necessary for society to function.
Next Up (maybe)
Damn Fine Story by Chuck Wendig, NG
Gauntlet Fall by Maddy Edwards, Oct 20, Xpresso
The Everett Exorcism by Lincoln Cole, Oct 24, Independent
Your Crossroads, Your Choice by EP Apicello. ASAP
The Cottingley Secret by Hazel Gaynor CBR
Besieged by Kevin Hearne CBR
Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton. CBR
Book Haul
Several hardcopies- B&N run the other day netted me Damn Fine Story, which I hope to have signed by Wendig on Tuesday. He, Kevin Hearne, and Fran Wilde will be at Borderlands in San Francisco. SQEE Also netted Loki from Ragnarok, and a copy of The Mountain Between Us by . I saw it earlier in the day and decided I wanted to read the book. The movie was an excellent ‘man Vs nature’ flick. It’s a theme I enjoy. Hope to have a film review up, if I can manage it.
Also got my Page Habit quarterly YA box because I am a dork and thought I did a one-shot purchase of the last box. Turns out I subscribed XD
Favs among the egalleys:
Batman & The Shadow by Steve Orlando
“From the incredible minds of iconic authors Scott Snyder and Steve Orlando comes the resurgence of a classic noir character. The Shadow was a major influence of the Batman himself and now appears in this incredible six issue crossover event.
While investigating the murde of a Gothamite, Batman identifies his prime suspect as Lamont Cranston… but there are two problems with that. One, Batman is not aware Lamont’s alter ego is the master detective known as the Shadow. Two, and more importantly, Cranston seems to have died over half a century ago!
Collects BATMAN/THE SHADOW #1-6 and stories from BATMAN ANNUAL #1.“
Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
“Now a Netflix original movie, releasing 17 November 2017, starring Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund & Mary J. Blige
When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Henry’s love of rural life is not shared by Laura, who struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud.
As the Second World War shudders to an end, two young men return from Europe to help work the farm. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not and is sensitive to Laura’s plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the farm, comes home from war with the shine of a hero, only to face far more dangerous battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. These two unlikely friends become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.”
The Butchering Art by Lindsey FitzHarris
“The gripping story of how Joseph Lister’s antiseptic method changed medicine forever.
In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters—no place for the squeamish—and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. These pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than patients’ afflictions, and they were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. At a time when surgery couldn’t have been more hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the riddle and change the course of history.
Fitzharris dramatically reconstructs Lister’s career path to his audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection and could be countered by a sterilizing agent applied to wounds. She introduces us to Lister’s contemporaries—some of them brilliant, some outright criminal—and leads us through the grimy schools and squalid hospitals where they learned their art, the dead houses where they studied, and the cemeteries they ransacked for cadavers.
Eerie and illuminating, The Butchering Art celebrates the triumph of a visionary surgeon whose quest to unite science and medicine delivered us into the modern world.”
