This book, subtitled "Freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness", is a not-too-thick, no-nonsense volume that bridges the gap between talking about meditation and actually doing it. Being a cat, I knew most of this stuff already; but Mindful Way explains it really, really well.
Better yet, it explains without religion, without strange languages and secret handshakes, without a whole bunch of Seventh Level Yoga Hopping Trances or other such woo-woo. There is a yoga exercise in here, but if you want to call it "Paying attention to my arms and legs while I move them around", go right ahead.
The authors (Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn) do an excellent job of staying in the same room with the reader: Each chapter is a good, balanced mixture of anecdote, theory, exercises, and things to consider while you're trying the exercises. It's also an easy read.
Despite its title, Mindful Way isn't just about depression. I think that you could use it to deal with just about any problem of People Who Think Way Too Much... Stress at work; procrastination; chronic multitasking.
Quite possibly one of the best beginner-level books on meditation ever written.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Review: Warm Worlds and Otherwise
James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen name of science fiction writer Alice Sheldon (1915-1987). This collection of short stories and novellas dates back to the late 60's and early '70s and translates fairly well to the '00s.
(Except, perhaps, for that carful of stoned anarchic hippy xenophiles driving around Washington, DC. But I enjoyed that story, too.)
This is not, repeat, is not a book for very young or sensitive readers. My People informs me that she would have been too embarrassed to read many of these tales when they first came out.
Tiptree/Sheldon spins a fast-paced and rollicking good yarn, but expect to be titillated, horrified and challenged.
Challenged, especially. So much so that I feel like I've grown a second head --
(pauses and looks around)
-- Mea culpa. The second head belongs to my brother Walter. (yanks WW&O out from under a quietly snoring silver tabby) Hey! Get your own blog.
Warm Worlds and Otherwise by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon):
(Except, perhaps, for that carful of stoned anarchic hippy xenophiles driving around Washington, DC. But I enjoyed that story, too.)
This is not, repeat, is not a book for very young or sensitive readers. My People informs me that she would have been too embarrassed to read many of these tales when they first came out.
Tiptree/Sheldon spins a fast-paced and rollicking good yarn, but expect to be titillated, horrified and challenged.
Challenged, especially. So much so that I feel like I've grown a second head --
(pauses and looks around)
-- Mea culpa. The second head belongs to my brother Walter. (yanks WW&O out from under a quietly snoring silver tabby) Hey! Get your own blog.
Warm Worlds and Otherwise by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon):
- "All the Kinds of Yes"
- "The Milk of Paradise"
- "And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways"
- "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain"
- "Amberjack"
- "Through a Lass Darkly"
- "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"
- "The Night-Blooming Saurian"
- "The Women Men Don't See"
- "Fault"
- "Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death"
- "On the Last Afternoon"
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Review: Dragons of Spring Dawning (Part 2)
Dragons of Spring Dawning, Part 2 completes the Devil's Due Publishing serialization of Weis and Hickman's Dragonlance Chronicles. Part 1 was reviewed here back in April 2008.
Most of my comments about Part 1 still hold true: The slower pacing of Spring Dawning works much better than the mad dash through the first two novels in the trilogy. The art is good, and also stable -- The characters look like themselves and stay looking like themselves. And, for the most part, the dialogue is spot-on.
Astreja K., who has several gazillion Dragonlance books lying around the house, has spotted one typo, one missing mini-subplot involving a door lock, and one green dragon who must've been on his coffee break when the pencil artists came by to rough out the scene. She also found the artists' rendition of Raistlin a bit jarring (being accustomed to the Larry Elmore and Matt Stawicki portraits), but admits that this version much better explains the average Krynnish person's reaction to Mr. Majere.
The included collection of comic book covers, particularly those by Jeremy Roberts, are a nice touch.
But I may need a bit of help trying to calm my People down -- Apparently DDP is going to do Dragonlance Legends next. (grabs Astreja K. by the ankle and hangs on for dear life)
Most of my comments about Part 1 still hold true: The slower pacing of Spring Dawning works much better than the mad dash through the first two novels in the trilogy. The art is good, and also stable -- The characters look like themselves and stay looking like themselves. And, for the most part, the dialogue is spot-on.
Astreja K., who has several gazillion Dragonlance books lying around the house, has spotted one typo, one missing mini-subplot involving a door lock, and one green dragon who must've been on his coffee break when the pencil artists came by to rough out the scene. She also found the artists' rendition of Raistlin a bit jarring (being accustomed to the Larry Elmore and Matt Stawicki portraits), but admits that this version much better explains the average Krynnish person's reaction to Mr. Majere.
The included collection of comic book covers, particularly those by Jeremy Roberts, are a nice touch.
But I may need a bit of help trying to calm my People down -- Apparently DDP is going to do Dragonlance Legends next. (grabs Astreja K. by the ankle and hangs on for dear life)
Review: The Blind Watchmaker
This book is a slow, slow read. If I had a bag of cat treats for every time my People rubbed Her eyes and put the bookmark back in place (and Her head down on the desk)... Well, let's just say I would no longer have my svelte and girlish figure.
But oh! the information in here. And not just the big words, either. Professor Dawkins has taken a lot of time and an extraordinary amount of effort to explain exactly how complex stuff comes from simple stuff.
My feline understanding of the whole thing:
If you have enough time...
...And very, very small changes are taking place as a result of chemicals and biology and physics... (pushes Cartoon Guide to Physics off bookshelf and opens it with a few nudges of her nose) ...Like these 'gamma ray' things, here...
...And you only keep stuff that works better than other stuff...
...You will eventually end up with a cat who writes book reviews.
I *yawn* rest my case. Good night.
But oh! the information in here. And not just the big words, either. Professor Dawkins has taken a lot of time and an extraordinary amount of effort to explain exactly how complex stuff comes from simple stuff.
My feline understanding of the whole thing:
If you have enough time...
...And very, very small changes are taking place as a result of chemicals and biology and physics... (pushes Cartoon Guide to Physics off bookshelf and opens it with a few nudges of her nose) ...Like these 'gamma ray' things, here...
...And you only keep stuff that works better than other stuff...
...You will eventually end up with a cat who writes book reviews.
I *yawn* rest my case. Good night.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Review: Sidney's Comet
Brian Herbert's book Sidney's Comet is a very odd little story, a cotton candy apocalypse done up as dystopian fantasy.
(flips through a few more pages of her thesaurus and curls up on it, tucking her tail underneath her and primly folding her paws)
No, seriously. I really don't know what to make of this one. I mostly enjoyed it, but hated, hated, hated the setting. A cardboard cutout of a friendly evil empire, really. A parody of North American consumer culture that doesn't quite ring true... Despite being set hundreds of years in the future, it's a future that's oddly dry and stale.
Like that catfood on the plate downstairs. *ahem* I said, like that catfood...
(RJ's People exits stage right to remedy situation)
Where was I? Oh, yes. This book has it all: A nobody who wants to be a Somebody (Sidney Malloy, the eponymouse of the title). A Threat to All Life As We Know It, namely the comet co-star. Love. Bureaucracy. Aliens. Plots and counter-plots. Jargon. Acronyms. Dogs and cats, living toget... Oops, wrong story.
When the book observes the characters directly, the result is generally funny and mostly succeeds. When it falls back on slogans and other futurebabble, it just plain gets in the way of the storytelling.
The framework is clunky, too... Telling the story as history? Too distracting. Getting rid of the "Sayerhood" mystics altogether, or integrating them into the main time line, would have produced a much tighter story. As it was, I kept imagining the cast of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy as school patrol kids on a field trip to the roller rink.
And that can't be good.
(watches in horror as Astreja K. dashes back into the room and scribbles down 'Foundation Trilogy, roller rink, NaNoWriMo')
Um... If you'll excuse me... (jumps off thesaurus and runs for dear life)
(flips through a few more pages of her thesaurus and curls up on it, tucking her tail underneath her and primly folding her paws)
No, seriously. I really don't know what to make of this one. I mostly enjoyed it, but hated, hated, hated the setting. A cardboard cutout of a friendly evil empire, really. A parody of North American consumer culture that doesn't quite ring true... Despite being set hundreds of years in the future, it's a future that's oddly dry and stale.
Like that catfood on the plate downstairs. *ahem* I said, like that catfood...
(RJ's People exits stage right to remedy situation)
Where was I? Oh, yes. This book has it all: A nobody who wants to be a Somebody (Sidney Malloy, the eponymouse of the title). A Threat to All Life As We Know It, namely the comet co-star. Love. Bureaucracy. Aliens. Plots and counter-plots. Jargon. Acronyms. Dogs and cats, living toget... Oops, wrong story.
When the book observes the characters directly, the result is generally funny and mostly succeeds. When it falls back on slogans and other futurebabble, it just plain gets in the way of the storytelling.
The framework is clunky, too... Telling the story as history? Too distracting. Getting rid of the "Sayerhood" mystics altogether, or integrating them into the main time line, would have produced a much tighter story. As it was, I kept imagining the cast of Asimov's Foundation Trilogy as school patrol kids on a field trip to the roller rink.
And that can't be good.
(watches in horror as Astreja K. dashes back into the room and scribbles down 'Foundation Trilogy, roller rink, NaNoWriMo')
Um... If you'll excuse me... (jumps off thesaurus and runs for dear life)
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Review: The Cartoon Guide to Physics
Being a feline bibliophile in a house full of books is rather edifying. Especially when my People buys books with lots and lots of pictures.
The Cartoon Guide to Physics, by Larry Gonick and Art Huffman, is a really good read for cats like me who don't know the first thing about science.
The helpful cartoons, in a "George Herriman meets Patrick McDonnell" style, helped me calculate the acceleration on that mouse-on-a-string toy that's hanging from the bathroom door. (At least until Greyscale sat on it.) Explained those bright shiny things called 'photons' that happen when a People throws a light switch. Oh, and quantum physics. Gotta have quantum physics.
(pushes scientific calculator off desk) Gravity is a lot of fun, too.
The Cartoon Guide to Physics, by Larry Gonick and Art Huffman, is a really good read for cats like me who don't know the first thing about science.
The helpful cartoons, in a "George Herriman meets Patrick McDonnell" style, helped me calculate the acceleration on that mouse-on-a-string toy that's hanging from the bathroom door. (At least until Greyscale sat on it.) Explained those bright shiny things called 'photons' that happen when a People throws a light switch. Oh, and quantum physics. Gotta have quantum physics.
(pushes scientific calculator off desk) Gravity is a lot of fun, too.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Review: A Game of Thrones
A story lives or dies by its characters. It's trivial to write about dastardly villains and brave heroes; not so easy to give the characters depth and make them into real people that we actually care about.
In A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin accomplishes this difficult task and makes it look easy. Dealing with a veritable army of leading characters from several noble families, Martin uses the simple but entirely appropriate technique of devoting each chapter to a single character's point of view.
Most of the vignettes in Game feature the Stark family, a clan with their home at Winterfell in the northland. The Stark motto is "Winter is Coming", and as the story opens, a summer many years in duration is quickly fading towards a time of cold and darkness. North of Winterfell lies the Wall, a massive ice structure that protects the kingdom from attack, but inauspicious signs suggest that the kingdom is not safe.
To the south, other battles rage: Intrigues among noble houses, rival claims for the throne of the realm, alliances and betrayals, cunning and idiocy.
Game is illuminated by the theme of being true to oneself, of trusting one's instincts and acting upon them. Some characters succeed in doing this; others do not. Internal conflict and difficult decisions make this a mesmerizing story, with startling reversals of fortune coming out of seemingly isolated events.
Highly recommended.
In A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin accomplishes this difficult task and makes it look easy. Dealing with a veritable army of leading characters from several noble families, Martin uses the simple but entirely appropriate technique of devoting each chapter to a single character's point of view.
Most of the vignettes in Game feature the Stark family, a clan with their home at Winterfell in the northland. The Stark motto is "Winter is Coming", and as the story opens, a summer many years in duration is quickly fading towards a time of cold and darkness. North of Winterfell lies the Wall, a massive ice structure that protects the kingdom from attack, but inauspicious signs suggest that the kingdom is not safe.
To the south, other battles rage: Intrigues among noble houses, rival claims for the throne of the realm, alliances and betrayals, cunning and idiocy.
Game is illuminated by the theme of being true to oneself, of trusting one's instincts and acting upon them. Some characters succeed in doing this; others do not. Internal conflict and difficult decisions make this a mesmerizing story, with startling reversals of fortune coming out of seemingly isolated events.
Highly recommended.
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