Happy May! Having turned in my thesis, and since my spring classes have ended, I spent most of last week doing NOTHING much of anything. It was glorious. The weather is really spectacular here right now, which will definitely not last, so I sat outside in our backyard and got to read and just generally admire the trees, flowers, and birds. I read five books to add to my April list.
Ro is stuck in a rut, with a drinking problem, no direction, and some old family wounds and a big loss. It was a good story about struggle and finding personal fulfillment.
Some days, wandering through the aquarium’s blue halls, I start feeling like maybe I don’t exist, like my body is just this translucent membrane for water and light to rush through, day in and day out, just like all the other creatures here.
Cycles of the Soul by Gina Lake
A friend recommended this to me to learn more about the meaning and purpose of life, how we evolve over many lifetimes, as well as what is wrong with our life on earth. Very interesting!
Like a House on Fire by Lauren McBrayer
The entire time I was reading this, I felt I’d read it before. I’m not sure if I ever have, and it was very good, but it’s either very similar to another book or I’m losing my marbles. It’s about a woman who is questioning her life choices and makes some rather significant changes. She questions everything.
I’d been meaning to read this since it came out last year and it was excellent. A journalist originally from India returns there for a story, and of course finds love as well as healing. This is the story of two very different societies and traditions, as well as two women trying to live with honor and truth.
Everywhere she went, it seemed, it was open season on women. Rape, female genital mutilation, bride burnings, domestic abuse – everywhere, in every country, women were abused, isolated, silenced, imprisoned, controlled, punished, and killed. Sometimes it seemed to Smita that the history of the world was written in female blood. And of course, to go into the far-flung parts of the world to tell these stories required a certain amount of dispassion. But getting used to it – that was another thing altogether.
Faith in the Night by Rivka Wolbe
Wow. This is a Holocaust memoir by the daughter of someone in my thesis. Her husband was Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, a modern Mussar master who only recently passed away in 2005. I enjoyed the personal essays at the back by women who were in the same Swedish rehabilitation house.
