Book of the Month – 29 Gifts by Cami Walker

Life sure is good at throwing you curve balls!

Cami Walker surely must have thought so when, just one month after marrying the love of her life, she was diagnosed with MS. She went from feeling on top of the world, to wondering “what the hell happened”?

Suddenly, she became a frequent visitor of the emergency room as she struggled with pain, numbness, and paralysis. Her new marriage experienced financial and emotional strain as she and her husband struggled to pay hospital bills and manage her condition. She wondered if it would be possible for her to ever walk again, or to find gainful employment.

It was during this time of upheaval that her friend and neighbour, an African healer named Mbali Creazzo, suggested that she try the 29 Day Giving Challenge. A healing ritual from Africa, the 29 Day Giving Challenge requires that you give away one gift every day for 29 days. If you miss a day, you have to start all over again at Day 1.

A key component: the gifts have to be given whole-heartedly. You must look your recipient in the eye, and be fully present as you give your gift. You also can’t expect anything in return.

You may wonder how a system of daily giving could possibly be a good prescription for someone whose life has just been taken away from them. Wasn’t Cami Walker already going through enough? How could she possibly give to others when she was already feeling so empty and useless?

But Mbali Creazzo explained that giving to others enlarges your view of yourself. Instead of living from a place of scarcity, you begin to see your intrinsic value, regardless of the amount of money in your bank account. You also begin to feel greater dignity. You realize that, no matter what your troubles may be, you still have something special to offer the world: yourself, your creativity, and your beautiful heart.

Keep in mind, the gifts in the 29 Day Giving Challenge do not have to be large. They can be something as little as spare change to a homeless person, or a free back rub to your spouse. You can give a card to your neighbour, or help a friend move. Your gift can even be something as simple as a smile and a kind word.

At first, Cami Walker was skeptical. She felt so empty, she didn’t think she had anything left to give. But she was willing to try anything to start feeling better, so she gave it a shot.

As she explains in her book, at first she struggled to give her daily gifts. She felt they were worthless, and the whole exercise was pointless. But despite her doubts, she persevered. By the end of the first week, she was already beginning to feel a little lighter and more open.

As her mood improved, so did her health. She began to feel a greater capacity to heal and to endure. Surprisingly, she began to walk more easily, and her energy level rose. As her mood lifted, so did her confidence. Then, almost magically, her personal business began to attract more clients. And it all started by giving away some simple gifts.

The 29 Day Giving Challenge did not heal Cami Walker of her MS. But it did make her feel more whole. It restored to her a greater sense of self, and reminded her of the riches she already had.

The experience was so transformational, that Walker not only wrote the book 29 Gifts, she also created the website www.29gifts.org where she explains the 29 Day Giving Challenge, and invites others to join her. Visit, and become inspired.

Full disclosure: I have not yet tried the 29 Day Giving Challenge myself, but I really love the idea.

Are you curious? Do you have questions? Grab a copy of Cami Walker’s book 29 Gifts, or go to her website. There, you’ll find all the information you need. And if you decide to try the challenge yourself, let me know how it goes. Inspire me with your stories.

The world only changes when we change ourselves. By giving to others whole-heartedly, maybe we can shift the energy around us and make it less angry and confrontational. Your gift can be as little as your smile. What do you think?

Book of the Month – Molecules of Emotion, by Candace Pert, Ph.D.

Photo by Matthew Wong

Back in high school, one of my favourite classes was “Anatomy and Physiology”. I think this was partly because our teacher clearly loved his subject. At every class, he would present the day’s material with energy and enthusiasm. He even loved the questions we asked, always finding a way to infuse them with wonder.

It must have been in this class that I first learned about neurotransmitters. In case you have forgotten, these are the chemical messengers within our brains that transmit information between neurons, or from neurons to muscles. They include substances like serotonin, dopamine, and acetylcholine, and they help regulate our appetite, sleep-wake cycle, and moods, among other things.

This system, as it was taught to us, was very brain focused. We were told that neurotransmitters were manufactured in our brains, and once excited, they started a process of change within our bodies. This change could be conscious or unconscious, but could only be stopped, or remedied, within the brain itself. Along with this thinking came a boom in the pharmacological industry, whereby drugs were used to either excite or inhibit naturally occurring neurotransmitters in our brains to better balance our moods.

What we students didn’t realize at the time, was that this framework was far too simplistic and was about to be turned on its head. The author of my book pick this month, Candace Pert, was one of the people who solidified this change in thought, when she discovered the opiate receptor for her Ph. D. thesis in 1973.

Finding the opiate receptor was just the beginning. For, once the opiate receptor was found, Pert and other scientists then began to map all the places in the body where opiate receptors were located. And to their surprise, they weren’t found only in the brain. They were also clustered, in large concentrations, in the immune system, the endocrine system, and the digestive system too.

What this means, is that the feelings of pleasure we get when we take opiate drugs, like heroin, don’t necessarily come from our brains. Cells all over our body can also activate the pleasure response. The top-down, brain-focused model of emotional regulation that I had learned in high school, and which had been taught to doctors throughout the world, turned out to be wrong, or at very least, incomplete.

After the opiate receptor was found, the race was on to find the natural substance within our bodies that attached to it. Because we always knew that opium was just a hack. There had to be something within our bodies that used the opium receptor and could also trigger those feelings of euphoria. And this magic substance turned out to be a simple chain of amino acids called peptides, which Pert began to call “molecules of emotion”. Molecules of Emotion also is the title of her book.

Personally, I found Molecules of Emotion to be a riveting read. And considering the number of weeks I had to wait to receive my copy from the local library, I’m not the only one. Pert is a great writer. Interspersed with her scientific findings, she tells us the story of her own life, relaying her struggle for recognition as one of the few women practising science in the 1970’s and 1980’s, her years as a young wife and mother, and the stress of staying relevant in a competitve, male-dominated world.

With humour, she also describes her reluctant evolution from strident research-based scientist into someone who could see the science within alternative medicine, and explain it to us without using all the “woo-woo” terms that can be a turn-off for many. By the time of her death in 2013, she was a regular and valued speaker at MindBody conferences around the world, and is still considered one of the founding leaders of MindBody medicine.

Fundamentally, what Candace Pert’s research taught us is that, yes, our brain does control our body, but our body also influences our brain. Those gut feelings, the tightness in your heart, those panic attacks – these are all signals your body is using to alert your brain that something is wrong. Using a top-down approach to the problem, by taking mood-altering drugs, may help. But you should also consider the environment in which your body is currently living. It may hold a greater key to your return to health than you previously thought.

The Waayyy Behind Book Club – June 2023

Hello, fellow readers! My book choices this month have left me thoughtful and reflective. It will be a deep dive, as we consider the nature of evil, profound hurt, and whether it’s possible to heal. For instance, what makes someone evil? And if we have suffered under its harms, particularly for long periods of time, is it even possible to be happy and whole? Most importantly, can we avoid passing on our hurt to others as we seek to heal ourselves?

Photo by Matthew Wong

Let’s dive in! The first book I read this month is called Eichmann In Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt. Eichmann was a prominent Nazi in Germany during WWII. In particular, it was his job to handle “the Jewish problem”, by removing Jews of their German citizenship (and hence, their rights), forcing them to emigrate, and eventually, managing the trains by which Jews were removed from their homes and taken to concentration camps to be exterminated. This book is the story of his trial after he was abducted by Mossad agents and brought to Jerusalem.

Early on in the trial, it was established that the idea of the killing the Jews – The Final Solution – was not his. He was merely following orders. The trial, and the book, explores Eichmann’s culpability. Is it possible he didn’t understand what he was doing? That he was killing people? Well, it turns out he knew, but didn’t realize it was wrong. How could he not know this was wrong? Well, people far more educated and important than him had assured him that this was the “moral” thing to do. ‘Scientific’ thinking in Germany at the time had declared Jews (and gypsies, and Slovaks, and the disabled and the mentally weak) were genetically inferior. Therefore, for the sake of the human species, and the German Volk in particular, they were better off gone.

But then, he also went along with Hitler’s orders because he didn’t want to face the consequences of disobeying. And it certainly didn’t hurt that his obedience greatly furthered his career – 3 promotions in only 18 months! Eichmann was granted upward mobility and greater social respect by following Hitler’s orders without question. As an uneducated, blue collar worker, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams when he became a part of the Nazi machinery. Who among us could resist that heady mix of power, esteem and respect? Who among us does not wish to belong? In a society where people like Hitler are revered, thoughtlessness and casual cruelty are an asset. So, was Eichmann at fault? Or was it the entire country who validated Hitler’s ideas by electing him in the first place?

Hannah Arendt, the author of this book, is the person who coined the term “the banality of evil”, for in Eichmann, we see a man eerily like ourselves. He wanted to be promoted, so he did his job well. He had no particular antipathy towards the Jews (in fact, some of his good friends were Jews); it was just a job that needed to be done and he happened to be the cog in the wheel that smoothed that path. During the trial, it became clear that he could never have lead, conceived, nor implemented such a complex solution on his own. So how evil was he exactly? And how should he be punished? (Spoiler alert: he was hanged).

We come to the ineluctable conclusion that ‘evil’ can be perpetrated very simply. For, it is nothing more than a lack of thought or consideration. A lack of empathy. How often have any of us hurt someone without thought? I know I have. In the moment, usually under stress, I just didn’t consider how someone else was being impacted because I was more concerned with myself. I didn’t learn of their pain until much later. By then, much harm had been done. Was that evil?

Yes, I know, Eichmann’s life presents us with a much more extreme situation. People weren’t just hurt. They suffered and died. Horribly. I’d like to think that if I had found myself in his exact position, I would have made a different choice. But Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiments from the 1960’s definitely cloud things. The results of these experiments showed that the vast majority of us are disturbingly obedient to authority, even when we know someone is being hurt. (Look them up if you haven’t read about them yet. They’re fascinating – along with Zimbardo’s famous Stanford prison experiments). Arendt’s book leaves you with the thought that empathy is everything. Without it, we’re just animals. The most cruel and heinous actions can be perpetrated, and justified, whenever we fail to show it.

Photo by Matthew Wong

In last week’s blog, I already mentioned my second book this month. It’s called What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, and it’s the story of her journey from a scarred, traumatized child, to a healing, more self-aware adult. Her mother abused her as a child, and her father neglected and then later abandoned her. As many Asians do, she succeeded spectacularly despite this harrowing past, but not without hurting many people along the way.

This book is the story of how she tried to heal herself, and resolve generations of family trauma, through conventional talk therapy, EDMR, restorative yoga, meditation, IFS, and the help and support of friends. She tried everything. ‘Hurt people hurt people’ was her mantra. She just wanted to stop all the hurting. I can’t recommend this book highly enough, particularly for those who are also struggling to recover from difficult pasts. Her perseverance and determination to improve herself, despite the odds, is incredibly inspiring.

Photo by Mike Wong

Finally, I rounded out the month with another tremendously helpful book, Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson. Hanson is a psychologist, and I’ve read a couple of his books, and also attended some of his free Wednesday night talks. He never fails to show kindness and compassion through both his words and his writing. The concept of Hardwiring Happiness is pretty simple: as Hanson says, “our brains are velcro for difficult experiences, and Teflon for good ones”, meaning that we tend to hold on to our negative experiences much more tightly than the positive ones, which causes us no end of emotional problems.

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. We need to know where the dangers are if we want to survive. No doubt, this tendency to place more emphasis on negative experiences than positive ones helped humans to band together, avoid death, and thrive. But in our modern lives, holding on to these negative experiences long after their usefulness has only made us more anxious and depressed.

Hanson reminds us that our brains have plasticity – meaning they can grow and change under the right influences. We aren’t static. We have choice, and we can use that choice to ‘hardwire’ our happiness by remembering our positive experiences, savouring them, and then blending them in with all of our negative experiences to create a more complete picture of our lives. We tend to forget that, mixed in with our faults and failings, each of us also has many good traits, good times, and happy memories. Times when we felt safe, and loved, and connected. We just need to remember them, and emphasize them instead of only remembering the negative ones.

I did all the exercises at the back of the book, and found them really helpful. The concept of Hardwiring Happiness is pretty simple, and the book can get repetitive – the whole idea can be summarized in a paragraph! But the implications of the practice are profound. I really believe that these exercises can help a lot of people who struggle with depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, hopelessness, and feelings of loneliness. You just have to be consistent with it.

So, there you have it! The books I read this month. I hope you didn’t mind the deep dive today. I really enjoy complexity, and books that give me food for thought. Until next month, keep reading. 🙂

The Waayyy Behind Book Club – May 2023

Giovanni Ussi, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Hello everyone! I hope you have all been enjoying the emergence of spring. In Toronto, where I am, the weather has been just lovely. So lovely that I have been enjoying reading out of doors on my front porch, where I have planted some pretty geraniums and impatiens in pots.

I finished reading just three books this month, but two of them really blew me away and generated a lot of inspiration. I hope you find them helpful too.

The first book this month is The Great Work of your Life by Stephen Cope. I’ve read a couple of books by Stephen Cope in the past. In particular, I really enjoyed Yoga and the Quest for the True Self. But this book was a whole other level of awesome. It is based on the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu spiritual book that is required reading for many yoga teacher trainings.

Before you distance yourself from this book thinking it sounds too foreign or weird, just listen for a minute. The book is focused on finding your dharma, calling it your most holy purpose in life. In essence, your dharma is your calling. It’s that thing you were born to do. That thing you find most enjoyable in life, that lifts your spirit and is your gift to the world. There’s nothing outrageous about that.

The book is filled with inspirational examples of people who followed their dharma, like the poets Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, and the naturalist Henry David Thoreau. He follows Susan B. Anthony in her quest for equal political representation for women, and psychologist Marion Woodman through her battle with cancer. Harriet Tubman and Mahatma Gandhi exemplify selflessness, and the courage required to buck popular thinking and go your own way. In between the famous examples, Cope also inserts people from his own life who struggled for a time and then managed to distill greater meaning and purpose from their own lives.

It may not sound like it, but it’s actually a page-turner, and an invigorating one at that. It is guaranteed to get you thinking about the meaning and purpose of your own life and how and where to find your dharma.

Photo by Matthew Wong

The second book I read this month is The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. I actually didn’t like this book very much. This surprised me, because it’s a historical novel, which I normally love. It’s set during that often ignored, turbulent period just after the end of the US Civil War. President Lincoln has just been assassinated, the streets are awash in wounded soldiers, and now a string of grisly murders are being perpetrated in the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The murders just happen to mimic the deaths described in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is confusing, because the book had not yet been translated into the English language, so only an intellectual would know about it. The list of suspects is small.

After finishing this book, I looked back at the plot and the characters, trying to figure out why I found it so unsatisfying. I had no problems with the writing. The characters were distinctive and memorably drawn. If I had to make a criticism, I think maybe Pearl spent more time describing the mood of the time than he did advancing the plot, which caused the book to drag a little. But that’s just me. If you also enjoy historical fiction, you can give the book a whirl and let me know what you think. It’s possible it just caught me in an off mood. The book is a national best-seller, so it definitely has its fans.

Photo by Matthew Wong

The third book I read this month was Widen the Window: Training your Brain and Body to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma by Elizabeth Stanley. I found this book absolutely fascinating! If you are an adult and have been alive on this earth for the past few decades, you need to read it. It’s all about trauma, stress tolerance and resilience.

In the first part of the book, Stanley describes the physical signs of unhealed stress and trauma. You will recognize plenty of them. The more periods of stress you have undergone in your life, without managing to heal, the narrower your window of tolerance for further stress. And who hasn’t been under a lot of stress over the last few years? Common signs of unhealed stress include greater emotional reactivity, poor decision-making, and the sudden surfacing of inexplicable health problems, to name just a few.

Stanley rose to the level of captain in the US Army before having something of a nervous breakdown. As she tried to recover, she did a lot of research on stress and trauma. She discovered scientifically proven methods for widening your window of tolerance and eventually created a program that the US Army now uses to prepare its soldiers for the stress and rigour of war. The exercises she outlines in the book can be used for everybody, not just soldiers. Anyone who is trying to heal from the cumulative stress and trauma of living in the 21st century on planet Earth would benefit from this book.

I hope you enjoyed reading my impressions of these books. Maybe you were even inspired to check one of them out! Until next month, enjoy the sun, and happy reading. 🙂

The Waayyy Behind Book Club – March 2023

Hello fellow Waayyy Behinders! In this book club, we take our time and choose books that call to us. These books may not necessarily be current, or make a big splash in the wider culture but they do bring meaning to our own lives. What have you been reading this month?

Photo by Mike Wong

The first book I read this month is called Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam. I don’t recall where I heard about this book, but it was popular enough that Netflix is creating an adaptation that will be released this December, starring no less than Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke. (So much for my vow not to review current titles!)

Initially, I was not too intrigued by this book. It’s dystopian, and describes our world suddenly falling into chaos. After the events of the last few years, I wasn’t sure I really wanted to dive into something so dark. However, as I kept reading, I got pulled in. I started to feel its profundity.

It’s about a family that goes on vacation, and while they’re away from home, something big happens. I mean big. The world changes. The power goes out. Cell phones no longer work. There’s no TV or radio. Large herds of deer run by for no apparent reason. Strange booming sounds can be heard outside. Is it a war? No one knows. The lack of information is what makes it so unsettling. The modern world bombards us with news at every available moment, so the sudden silence is frightening.

Essentially, it’s a book about how people handle uncertainty. Who can you rely on? How do you know? And then, there’s also the sadness of knowing that the world you once knew and relied on no longer exists. The thoughtfulness of this book really resonated with me.

The next book I read this month is called Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by James Hollis. It seems I have reached that particular age in life where I am at a crossroads. I can see where I’ve been up until now. I’ve learned some things, and am now clear on where I don’t want to go. Yet I am also unclear of how I want to move forward. There are not too many productive years left to me. How do I want to spend them?

Of the books I have been reading recently about mid-life crises, I would say this one is middle of the pack. There is a lot of rich wisdom here, and I needed some time to reflect on each chapter. He talks about the ghosts of our childhood, about daring to be ourselves, about the value of suffering. There are not many myths or stories about how to navigate life, and he bemoans this fact. While I found this book kind and reassuring, I think my favourite so far, and the one I found most helpful, is Falling Upwards by Richard Rohr. If you are interested, I talked about that book in more detail in January.

Photo by Mike Wong

First Impressions by Charlie Lovett, was a cute book. It divides its time between a love triangle in the present, and a segment of Jane Austen’s life in the past. The two plots intersect with the search for an old book that just happens to include a unfinished version of Pride and Prejudice at the end. We are led to wonder if Jane Austen really wrote Pride and Prejudice, or if she stole the plot from someone else. If you like Jane Austen, it’s a fun little romp. Otherwise, I found the writing a bit contrived.

Photo by Matthew Wong

This month, I also read Altruism by Matthieu Ricard. This was a large book that took me months to finish. In it, Ricard makes the case for creating a society based on empathy and compassion, rather than on capitalist greed. There is a big section in the middle where he dissects our worst qualities as humans – our ego-centrism, narcissism, selfishness, violence, and hatred. In the final chapters, he is more positive, and finds reason to hope that we can change and create a better world. I so want to believe this, but I am losing faith. In the end, I think all we can do is work on ourselves and try to widen our own perspective. Maybe then the world will follow.

Photo by Matthew Wong

Finally, I read The Groundbreaking: the Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City’s Search for Justice by Scott Ellsworth. I have heard a lot about the Tulsa Race Riot in recent years. 2021 marked its 100th anniversary, so there’s been a lot of publicity about it.

Ellsworth starts the book with a brief chronology of the events of May 31 – June 1st, 1921 in Tulsa, OK. I originally thought that the massacre was more planned than it actually was. In fact, what happened was far more chaotic, more human, and, in many ways, far sadder. However, the bulk of the book is not about the riots at all, but about Tulsa and its attempts to heal. He describes the formation of a commission, which sought an official apology to the black community and discussed the possibility of reparations. There is long section about the search for mass graves, and the difficulty in finding them.

Ellsworth is a good writer, so the plot flows along well enough. But I think if you want to gain a deeper knowledge about the Tulsa Race Riot, his landmark book Death in a Promised Land is probably a better choice.

So, there you have it! My reads for the past month. If I had to name a favourite for this month, I would say it’s Leave the World Behind. I welcome any comments or suggestions. Until next time, keep reading. 🙂

Waayyy Behind Book Club – February 2023

Welcome to the February 2023 edition of The Waayyy Behind Book Club, where I talk about the books I’ve read this month. Hello, fellow readers! Come along and see if any of these books pique your interest.

Photo by Mike Wong

The first book I read this month was Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment. Those in the know may already be familiar with Elena Ferrante from her celebrated Neopolitan series of books, now dramatized on HBO. The TV show is named My Brilliant Friend, after the first book in the series, and has been described as “a modern masterpiece” and also “what Jane Austen would write if she got angry”. Both the books and the TV show are fantastic.

The Days of Abandonment was written years before that, and is searing reading. It’s about a woman whose husband leaves her for another woman after 15 years of marriage. We watch as she goes through all the stages of grief, from denial, to anger, to hysteria, to numbness, until finally she finds acceptance and is able to move on with her life. It’s so raw and honest, you’ll swear she must be writing from her own personal experience. That’s what Ferrante’s writing is like. She knows your heart and is unafraid of speaking exactly what it feels.

Photo by Mike Wong

The next book I read this month was just as gripping. Memorial Drive is poet Natasha Trethewey’s gut wrenching attempt to come to terms with the murder of her mother thirty years before. Trethewey was only 19 years old when her stepfather shot her mother in the head and killed her. This is devastating reading. You can feel Trethewey’s pain as she memorializes her beautiful mother, but you can also sense the relief as she unburdens herself. You can tell that this is a story that needed to be told.

I also read The Dude and the Zen Master this month. In it, Jeff Bridges and reknowned Zen teacher Bernie Glassman sit down and talk about life. If you love the movie The Big Lebowski, as I do, you can get drawn in by chapter titles like, “Sometimes You Eat the Bear, and Sometimes, Well, He Eats You”, and “Yeah, Well, You Know, That’s Just Like, Uh, Your Opinion, Man”, but I actually didn’t find much of substance here. You learn about some of Jeff Bridges’ experiences on movie sets, but other than that, nothing really revelatory. Unless you’re a big Jeff Bridges fan, I’d give this book a pass.

Photo by Mike Wong

When Montezuma Met Cortes: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History by Matthew Restall was an intriguing read. Essentially, it’s a book about history and how it’s recorded. We all know that the victor gets to tell the tale, while the loser’s story gets left on the editor’s floor. Well, Montezuma was definitely the loser in this sad piece of history. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Cortes’ story is mostly self-aggrandising and is littered with plot holes. For 500 years, no one thought much to question it. But after Restall sifts through all the old documents and letters, we find a tale that’s far more interesting and compelling than the one you were told in school. Personally, I love this kind of stuff and couldn’t put the book down.

Photo by Mike Wong

The final book for this month is The Road Less Traveled by M Scott Peck. It’s a famous book. I had to wait months before I could get a copy through the library. Yet, when I first began to read it, I could not understand why it has remained so popular. The book was written 45 years ago, and while the advice Peck gives may have been instructive back then, it’s mostly old news. I kept wanting to put the book down and walk away, but I was determined to give it a chance. I’m glad I did. The last third of the book was a masterful blending of psychology, religion and spirituality that could only come from someone really knowledgeable and wise. If you’re a searcher trying to find your path in life, this book still has a lot to offer. I know I learned a few things.

So, that’s it for this month. Until next time, keep on reading. 🙂

The Waayyy Behind Book Club – January 2023

It’s a brand new year! Welcome to the January 2023 edition of The Waayyy Behind Book Club, where I talk about the books I’ve read this month.

There were no entries in The Waayyy Behind Book Club for the last couple of months because my mother died, and I found it difficult to post anything during that time. I didn’t stop reading though! Reading was the way that I coped.

Here are the five books I read this past month. The first being Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize back in the year 2000 for her book, The Interpreter of Maladies. I remember reading that book many years ago, but I no longer remember what it was about! More recently, I read The Namesake, which was about a child of immigrants trying to assimilate into a new culture, while still holding true to himself.

Photo by Mike Wong

Whereabouts is a bit different. Here, Lahiri is still exploring the themes of loneliness and belonging, but this time as a single, older woman. Childless and husband-less in middle age, she is beginning to question her life choices. Ultimately, she is happy with where she is, as an immigrant living on the periphery of a culture and a country. She gets along well with her neighbours and colleagues, but she also knows full well that she is at odds with the stereotype of what a woman should be. Her parents feel let down and her neighbours don’t know quite what to make of her, even as she follows her own heart. It’s a thoughtful book.

The second book I read this month was Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women by Kate Manne. I have never really considered myself a feminist. That doesn’t mean I disagree with the idea that women should be treated equally to men, or that they shouldn’t be able to make their own life choices. But, perhaps because my own choices have tended to line up with societal norms, I have never been able to work up much of a passion for their mission.

Photo by Mike Wong

Manne helped me to see how much work is yet to be done. Statistics show that women still don’t earn as much as men (even when doing the same job), they still don’t advance into the top positions in their line of work (even with equal or superior qualifications), they don’t receive equal justice when facing the law (particularly those of racial minority), or equal medical care (most scientific studies still exclude women), and they still do more than their fair share of domestic, non-paid work (even though male participation has ticked up in recent decades).

Manne perceives that the problem is less that women are thought of as inferior to men, as might have been the case in the past. Rather, it’s more that men have learned to expect superior treatment, or superior consideration, and then get upset if they don’t receive it. If this comment has raised your hackles, I suggest you give Manne’s book a read. It’s well well-written and she’s quite persuasive. I guarantee you won’t be able to put it down.

Photo by Mike Wong

The third book I read this month was The Plague by Albert Camus. This book was on my reading list because of the recent pandemic, but it’s really not about a pandemic at all. It was written in the aftermath of World War Two, and here the plague is used as a metaphor for feverish idealism, or dogmatic thinking. When enough people think they have the right to enforce their opinions onto others, even to subject people to cruelty in order to get their way, the world has gone horribly wrong. Camus speaks through the voice of the doctor here, and he appears to be saying that our only true goal in life should be to help others survive and endure. It’s not about forcing others into our own point of view. And if killing is involved, we’ve definitely lost our way. I found it a profound read.

Photo by Mike Wong

The fourth book I read this month was Watership Down by Richard Adams. It’s a classic book that has been on my reading list for years, and I have to say, I absolutely loved it! This is a wonderful book! The premise seems a bit silly: a group of rabbits leave their home warren and, after surviving many trials and hardships, aspires to set up a new one. Why should we care about a group of rabbits? It’s why I put off reading this book for so long. However, it turns out to be a novel that is not so much about rabbits as it is a thoughtful story about good leaders, and bad ones. And about how each of us has our own special skill, and when we find the courage to use that skill for the benefit of the entire community, we all become stronger. What’s not to love about that?

Photo by Mike Wong

The final book for this month is Falling Upwards by Richard Rohr. It’s another book I would highly recommend, particularly for the middle-aged and older. Do you ever wonder about how you’ve lived your life? Could you have done it better? How can you even tell? Well, Rohr has some pointers for you, and I found them both thought-provoking and reassuring. ( Hint: if you’ve failed a lot, you’re doing better than you think!) It turns out that success in the second half of life requires turning the first half of life completely on its head. Rohr uses stories from ancient Rome, the Middle East, and the Bible to make his points, and he is persuasive – and encouraging.

So, there you have it! My list of books for this month. If you are interested in any of them, check them out at your local library. Until next month, happy reading!

The Waayyy Behind Book Club – October 2022

Welcome to the October 2022 edition of The Waayyy Behind Book Club, where I talk about the books I’ve read this month. These books will generally not be current reads. I tend to fall way behind what is new and popular (hence the name of the book club!), so these books will typically have been around for awhile. If any of them sound intriguing to you, you can check them out at your local library or book store.

I read only three books this month, which, oddly enough, may be a good thing. I tend to bury myself in a book when I feel scared, upset or overwhelmed, so fewer books means I’ve generally felt more grounded this month.

Photo by Mike Wong

The first book I read this month is called Barkskins by Annie Proulx. I have been a fan of Annie Proulx ever since I read her Pulitzer prize-winning book The Shipping News, which was heartfelt and wonderful! If you haven’t read it yet, you should give it a try. At some point in the book, you’re going to decide you want to move to Newfoundland. I guarantee it! Proulx also wrote Brokeback Mountain, so that is another place where you may have heard her name before.

Barkskins is a long book, covering several centuries of time. The timeline follows two different families: the Sel family of French woodsmen, and the Duke family who own forest land. Along the way, we skip through many different characters, following the course of their entire lives. Once they die, the story line is picked up once again by one of their descendants.

Because these characters are skimmed through relatively quickly, the main character is actually the North American forest. I enjoyed reading about the thick, dense woodlands in 1700’s French-Canadian Upper Canada. I could feel the darkness of the tree cover, see the dense waves of migrating birds overhead, and feel the coldness of the streams, so rich with fish that you barely needed to use a net. The risk-filled lives of the early pioneers were also well-documented. Few women survived the harshness. Gradually, the dense woodlands from the beginning of the book are cleared away, until virtually nothing is left in the 2000’s. Proulx conveys this loss beautifully. The final character is a woman whose genes come from both the Sel and Duke families, and it is her personal mission to save the forest.

CBC made a TV series based on the book, and that’s how it caught my attention. I haven’t seen the TV series yet, but I am intrigued. Did I like the book? Yes, with qualifications. I thought some of the characters were skimmed over too quickly, so I didn’t get to know them as well as I would’ve liked. There were also parts of the story where I lost interest. I guess that’s one of the dangers of a book this long, with a scope this wide.

The second book I read this month also has an environmental bent. It is called Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I kept hearing reference of this book, over and over again, from herbal friends, and environmentalist friends. I can see why; it is beautifully written. Robin Wall Kimmerer is of Native American heritage and also happens to be a professor of environmental biology, so she is able to weave both cultures together in a very poetic way.

Her aim is to get us to love and respect the land again, as Native Americans did, and to help us understand how our lives are interwoven with those of the plants and animals around us. In the book, we learn (one of) the Native American stories of creation, the ecological reasons why the ‘three sisters’ (corn, beans and squash) grow so well together, watch as she attempts to teach the value of the earth to doctoral students while camping in the Smoky Mountains, and laugh with her as she attempts to reclaim the pond behind her house so her daughters can swim in it. She made me wish I knew more about biology and ecology. She made me wish I could have her as a teacher.

The final book I read this month is called Where’d You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple. Personally, I loved it! I loved it so much, I even watched the movie adaptation on Netflix, and liked that even better. (It stars Cate Blanchett. How could you not love it!) The book is a bit of a quirky read, with the story being told through the eyes of Bernadette’s daughter, who is desperately searching for her mother. She has assembled a time-line of letters and emails, and through these third-party documents, we see what poor Bernadette has been going through, and why she might have tried to escape. It’s funny and heartwarming, while also gently skewering North American upper middle class culture. Any mom would find it hilarious. Those who aren’t parents probably won’t get half the jokes, but it may help you to realize how hard it can be to stay mentally stable while raising kids.

While I liked Barkskins and swooned over Braiding Sweetgrass, I think it’s safe to say that Where’d You Go, Bernadette? was my personal favourite this month. It captured too well the feelings that I’ve been struggling with these last number of years.

So, there you have it! The list of books I’ve read this month. Feel free to comment on any of them. While you’re at it, let me know what you’re currently reading. I’m always looking for my next favourite book. Until next month, read on!

The WaaYYY Behind Book Club – September 2022

Roman Eisele, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to the September 2022 edition of the Waayyy Behind Book Club! Here’s what I’ve been reading this month. Let me know if any of these books appeal to you and I can tell you more. If you’ve already read one of them, let me know your opinion. I’d love to hear it. And if you’re currently reading a book that you just can’t put down, I want to know about it! I’m always looking for my next great read.

The first book I read this month is called Empire of Things by Frank Trentmann. To be honest, I didn’t finish it. I couldn’t finish it. I thought I would like to read a history of the world, as viewed through the things we owned and purchased. But I didn’t. The book became a chore, and I just didn’t care. So, I dropped it. To be clear, I don’t think it’s a bad book. I just couldn’t interest myself in the subject matter long enough to complete it.

The second book I read this month is called Group by Christie Tate. This book was fascinating and I couldn’t put it down. I pretty much swallowed it whole, finishing it in just two days. It’s about a woman who attends group therapy to heal her emotional issues. She is very open about her struggles with an eating disorder, and discloses all in her quest to find a stable and fulfilling relationship with a man. The crux of group therapy is to learn to open up to others and share all of your inner feelings, and Tate is honest about her difficulty in doing this at first. By the end of the book, she is a pro and conquers many of her inner demons. We get to watch along the way, and it makes for an incredible read.

The third book I read this month is called Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. He is a Swedish author with a string of popular books, among them are Bear Town and A Man Called Ove,. In Anxious People, the focus is on a small group of people who happen to be viewing an apartment when a bank robbery takes place nearby. The robber holds them hostage in his attempt to get away. The set-up may sound tense, but there’s plenty of humour, and as the hours tick by everyone learns the value of compassion and kindness, in true Fredrik Backman style.

The third book I read this month is really short, and is called The Silence by Don DeLillo. It was written before the pandemic, but it is eerily similar to what we all just went through, which is why it piqued my interest. In this story, all electronic devices suddenly no longer work, so there is no TV, no cell phone service, no radio, and even planes can’t fly. Everyone is grounded, with nothing to do but talk, and the book explores each character’s discomfort with this lack of distraction. Having just been through a similar situation during the last two years, where we’ve been forced to stay in our homes for an indefinite period of time, it’s incredible how much the author gets right.

Photo by Mike Wong

I also read The Bluest Eye this month, by Toni Morrison. It is a book that has been on my reading list for a long time, and it’s brilliantly written. A poor black girl from a dysfunctional family fervently wishes she had blue eyes. It’s a sad story about a girl who loses herself to others’ expectations. All but the most well-balanced teen-aged girls will understand her feelings keenly, so it really resonates.

Finally, I read The Invisible Girl by Lisa Jewell. This was a page turner about a young, teen-aged girl who has gone missing in a neighbourhood where there has been a string of sexual assaults. Cate Fours and her family just moved into the area, and she has her suspicions, but is she right? The plot twists and turns as the police follow all the clues, but their investigation hampered by a rush to judgment. And then there are all the secrets.

So, there you have it! All the books I happened to read this month. I welcome any questions or comments. And if you’ve been reading a book that you just love and want to talk about it, leave me a message. I love to talk about books. 🙂

The Waayyy Behind Book Club – August 2022

chuttersnap chuttersnap, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Welcome back to the third edition of the Waayyy Behind Book Club. Here’s what I’ve been reading this month. Let me know if any of these books appeal to you and I can tell you more. If you’ve already read one of them, let me know your opinion. I’d love to hear it. And if you’re currently reading a book that you just can’t put down, I want to know more! I’m always looking for my next great read.

Photo by Mike Wong

The first book I read this month is Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Many years ago, I read his book Black Swan Green, and really loved it. It was about a boy in a small UK town who was struggling to make sense of, and overcome a bout of bullying. I don’t remember many of the details, but I remember thinking it was sensitively and intelligently written.

Fast forward a few more years, and I saw a trailer for the film Cloud Atlas, based on another book written by David Mitchell. It starred Tom Hanks, one of my favourite actors, so I immediately wanted to know more! I saw the film, but was mightily confused. There seemed to be a lot going on that I didn’t quite understand. I was still moved by the film, as it has a rewarding ending, but thought perhaps it had been adapted poorly.

Well, having now read the book, I would say the book is also confusing! There are questions that are never answered. It’s a bit mysterious – just like life, I guess. The ending still moved me to tears, but I don’t know if the confusion in the middle makes it entirely worth it. In short, although I like the final message of the book and the film, I’d give it a pass.

Photo by Mike Wong

The second book I read this month is Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker. I read his previous book, The Better Angels of our Nature a number of years ago, and was compelled by all the graphs and data he provided. He makes a strong argument that, contrary to popular belief, life is getting better, safer, and less violent for the majority of us humans. Whenever I talk about this book, I am bombarded with blank looks, disbelief, or outright hostility. But the numbers speak for themselves.

Think about the days of, say, the Irish famine in the 1850’s. Poor Irish farmers were dying in the streets and the rest of the world simply shrugged its shoulders and went on with their lives. Could that even happen today? No! It would be reported all over the news. People would be sending in donations to help the Irish poor. The British government that decided not to help would be declared monstrous. That’s the difference! That’s what’s changed. Does this mean we now live in some kind of utopia? No. Does it mean that something like this will never happen again in some other country? No. But it does mean that, over the decades and centuries, we’ve gradually become better people. We’ve learned to care more about others. We may not be perfect, but deaths like this now weigh more heavily on our consciences. They are now cause for outrage, not indifference.

In Enlightenment Now, Stephen Pinker provides more graphs and more data. He refutes some arguments about the research in his previous book. And again, he holds out hope, this time showcasing the Enlightenment ideas of reason, science and humanism. Once again, he shows far we’ve come as a species. He does not deny that there are problems ahead – global warming that threatens to make our planet unlivable, the rise of authoritarian leaders like Putin and Trump, who threaten democratic principles, the rise of misinformation that threatens the very idea of truth itself.

Maybe he is too optimistic, but he believes that we can overcome these problems just as we’ve overcome all our problems before. We just need to stick to the data and follow where it leads. He insists that ensuring everyone has a democratic voice is essential, no matter how messy decision-making becomes. He shows that we need to continue to provide opportunities for the less fortunate, even if that means greater use of fossil fuels in Third World countries. He holds up nuclear power as the solution to all our energy woes. If any of this doesn’t make sense to you, I challenge you to read the book for and then get back to me. We can talk. 🙂

Photo by Mike Wong

The third book I read this month was The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton. I found it an intriguing title, and the book description also called to me. It is essentially a book about place and time. Using a single home as a backdrop, it explores all the lives that filtered into and out of it over the decades and centuries, their lives connecting and overlapping in mysterious ways. The clockmaker’s daughter is the main character, and her story is also the most intriguing. I liked the book and enjoyed the dreamy dip into the waters of time, but wouldn’t say I loved it.

The fourth book this month is Thieves of State, by Sarah Chayes. Chayes started out as a reporter for NPR. After the initial invasion of Afghanistan in the early 2000’s, she decided to move there and help support the country as best she could by setting up a soap-making business. She learned how the country works, as well as how to speak the local language, and ended up as a policy advisor to several US administrations as the years went on. Her thesis is that government corruption is the main issue whenever you are trying to support a fledgling democracy. If you don’t tackle corruption, then fighting and terrorism will never cease, because that is how people seek justice. If justice cannot be found through a government system, people will take revenge in their own way, typically through violence. I found it an interesting hypothesis and, based on her supporting data, I’m inclined to believe her.

Finally, I read Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. I had heard good things about this book for years, and have always thought Patchett was a fantastic author. The book did not disappoint. It’s about a terrorist attack in Peru that went awry, and it’s based on true events. The idea is: what happens when a group of terrorists and their hostages are holed up together for too long? Patchett supposes that they become friends. They start to empathize with one another. The threat of death can no longer be carried out because the terrorists no longer want to kill anyone. This is a beautiful book about barriers and how they slowly break down with enough exposure. Barriers of language, barriers of race, barriers of class – once you remove those barriers, people are just people. Anyone who lives together for long enough can become a family. It’s an inspiring look at our potential to be kind, and to love one another.

And with that, I’ll end this month’s book discussion. If you’ve read any of these books and would like to comment, please do. Until next time, happy reading!