Genoa

Messina

Tunis, Africa

Eat, Pray, Love

I began reading Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert and fell in love with it instantly. 


I had to go away to Austin for a few days, but did not want to part with the book, so I bought another version of it, on CDs and listened to it on the road. The audio is narrated by the author herself, whose gentle, wise and silky voice envelopes my ears with love and tenderness as it proclaims simple truths. As she slowly reveals the details of her life, her travels and  her life experiences echo my own so closely that tears inadvertently drop from my already tired eyes. 

The author's trip to Italy especially wakes many memories in my heart. Yet, it is not the story of pleasure seeking in Italy that speaks to me most at this moment.  Instead, I am most happy to hear the author reaching India, where she begins to practice yoga, sheds the shreds of her past, and finds her inner self. Here is what she has to say about finding one's secret self:

"The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists called it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that the unhappiness in the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs. 

The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere in us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.

Yoga is the effort to experience one's divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from the endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of the world (and yourself) be revealed to you."

And listening to her, I decide that it is also time for me to return to the practice of yoga. 
On that thought, I smile. And now, I shall leave writing to another day for I must get back to my journey and  head for yet another delightful adventure.

Reading habbits or 100 books selected by BCC

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books listed below. Lets prove them wrong!

How do your reading habits stack up?

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Instructions:
Copy this into your blog, notes, email, etc. Look at the list and put an 'v' after those you have read. 
Tag "Book Nerds", plus me so I can see what you've read!


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - v
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien-v (one of many favorites)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - v
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee- v ( one of top favorite)
6 The Bible- v
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - v
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullmanv
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - v

Total: 6

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - v
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - v
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Helle - v
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - not cover to cover, but most – v ( a must read)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -v
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -v
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total: 6

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - v
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald – v ( one of 5 top favorites)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - v
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams – v (funny)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky – v ( a necessary classic)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck – v (wonderful)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - v
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Total: 7

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - v
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - v
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - v
34 Emma - Jane Austen - v
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - v
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein - v
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - v
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne – v ( everyone must read it. One of the wises books written for children)

Total: 8

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - v
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -v
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – v ( a must read)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving – v (love this book and everything by Irving)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - v
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - v
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - v
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan – v (I thought it overrated)

Total: 8

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel – v
52 Dune - Frank Herbert – v (had a hard time getting thought it in high school due to language barrier)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - v
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - v
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon – v (wonderful)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens – v
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - v
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – v (top 10 favorites)

Total: 8

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck – v (classic)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov – v (disturbing but very well written, prefer other books by Nabokov)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas – v (a must read)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - v (a must read)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding – v (amusing)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville – v (classic)

Total: 5

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - v
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - v
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - v
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce – v (difficult but a required reading for any intellectual)
76 The Inferno – Dante – v ( classic)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - v
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - v

Total: 7

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - v
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -v
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro – v ( enjoyed the film as well)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - v
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - v
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – v (favorite as a kid)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total: 6

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery – v (a top 5 favorite)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole – v (hilarious)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas – v (classic)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare – v (does not this fall into the earlier Shakespeare category?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl – v (very wise)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo –v (top 10 favorites)

Total: 6
Grand total: 67

The culture of narcissism

With the rise of social networking and online dating, the epidemic of narcissism is climbing.  Online dating sites like match.com and networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Myspace feed the egos of young people altering the increasing display of their narcissistic traits. The message is simple: “I am as awesome as it gets, and you better be just as great to date me or to be my friend.”

Virtual resumes and bragging seem to be the norm in the 21st century. Exaggerative personal internet marketing (manifested via boastful online profile descriptions and dazzling picture displays) give certain creative individuals a seeming edge on their competition by dramatically increasing their online exposure. Pretty packaging is easy on the eyes, but is not as important as the consistency of internal values, yet its easy to fall for the outward appearance and overlook the things that really matter. 

The narcissistic tendencies in our society have caused a rise of disposable relationships that do not require much attention or emotional investment. Hence, the recent trend of focusing on oneself, instead of establishing a meaningful relationship with others. Texts, chats, and one-night stands have become the norm. Young people often do not bother picking up the phone to have a meaningful conversation because texting is easier. Hence, the rise of open relationships. Everything that does not fulfill one’s version of personal happiness becomes disposable.

When it comes to serious romantic relationships, humility is frequently replaced by cockiness and self obsession, changing the road map of a courtship ritual. Young women still not only want to be dined and covered in jewelry, but they also expect their partners to have high paying jobs and executive positions. Men, on the other hand, are looking for young, fit, successful models. People seem to care less about virtues than they do about cosmetically altered appearance. No one wants the second best anymore, when crème of the crop seems to be one click away.

 Social networking and blogging become vehicles for those who wish to project their importance through attending glamorous events. Having one’s picture taken for a glitzy magazine sometimes seems more important than work ethic, demonstrating a shift in focus towards individualistic traits vs responsibilities.The real danger of narcissism is that it is taking over our lives, replacing what is real with what seems “cool”.  I love Facebook as much as anyone, but I think it's time we  applied ourselves towards building a society of caring individuals who are subtle in their online messages. 

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