Monthly Archives: March 2010

My latest stash of bookstore loot including Cutting For Stone

Posted on March 31, 2010 by unfinishedperson | 8 Comments

As I mentioned two Sundays ago, two friends recommended Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, his first novel and how that morning Beastmomma in her Sunday Salon post mentioned how she was reading it also. Since then, I ordered the book from From My Shelf Books in our hometown and yesterday, while out and about, I stopped by the store and found it had arrived. However, I couldn’t just pick up one book, so I searched for about five minutes (okay, half an hour) until I found the other three pictured above:

I had come across the latter two in the course of my shelf-reading in my job at our local library, but I decided that I might as well purchase these two since they were so cheap. I already have a list of almost 80 books I’ve “found” while shelf-reading, so it’s not like I won’t have plenty of other books from which to choose — not to mention a couple of other books I’ve already taken out of the library and too many books to count on my shelves here at home.

Unfortunately I just got the Verghese book yesterday and so didn’t have time to read it for tonight’s Twitter discussion sponsored by Fountain Books Inc. of Richmond, Va. about which I learned from Rebecca at The Book Lady’s Blog. However, if you have read the book and would like to join the discussion, Kelly (@RVABookChik), owner of Fountain (@FountainBkstore), will be the facilitator with the hashtag, #fountainreads. The Book Lady meanwhile can be found @bookladysblog. I purposely will not be following the discussion, and probably won’t be on Twitter between 7 and 8:30 p.m., so I don’t get any spoilers. Sorry, ladies.

Instead, last night and this morning, I was finishing up Smoke by Donald E. Westlake for which I will have a review later today here. I can’t promise that the Verghese book will be next as I have another Westlake, Memory (his last book), out from the library, to which I’d really like to get and a book written by an online friend that has been sitting on my shelf too long. Rest assured, though, I will be getting to the Verghese here soon, and when I do, y’all will be the first ones to know.

→ 8 Comments

Posted in Books, Midweek Review, Mind

Tagged Abraham Verghese, Books, Cutting for Stone, Donald E. Westlake

Pericles would

Posted on March 30, 2010 by unfinishedperson | 10 Comments

So who is this Pericles?

Well, none other than this dude:

Photo taken by Bobak Ha’Eri, on November 23, 2007

According to Wikipedia, Pericles “was a prominent and influential statesman, orator, and general of Athens during the city’s Golden Age—specifically, the time between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars.”

So there, take that.

Next time, you’re wondering if you should be doing what you’re doing or about to do, ask yourself if “the first Citizen of Athens” would do it. If you think he would, then you can answer: “Hey, Pericles would!”

Sort of like a “What would Jesus do?” or “What would Brian Boitano do?” but without the Jesus or the Brian Boitano.

Posted via email from The Collective

→ 10 Comments

Posted in Unfinished rambling

Tagged Captcha, Facebook, humor, Pericles

Pausing before I reverse direction again

Posted on March 30, 2010 by unfinishedrambler | 7 Comments

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us…

Hebrews 12:1

When runners reach the turning point on a racecourse, they have to pause briefly before they can go back in the opposite direction. So also when we wish to reverse the direction of our lives there must be a pause, or a death, to mark the end of one life and the beginning of another.

From the book On The Holy Spirit by Saint Basil, bishop

In today’s Scripture and reading in The Office of the Readings in The Liturgy of the Hours, these two sections spoke to me once again on the subject of running and life as it did when I wrote on these two sections last year.

In fact, what I said in that post then:

As a runner, I have not been persevering in running the race that lies before me. In fact, I haven’t been even running and barely walking. I’ve been ignoring that first part: “let us rid ourselves of every burden…” My burden: being a night owl and not getting up early in the morning to run. I get addicted to Facebook and Twitter, which I gave up for Lent, but then substitute them with another application called blip.fm (I will not provide the link lest you get trapped too, I say half-jokingly) and am up until all hours of the night…

still applies now, to some degree. Even though I didn’t give up Facebook and Twitter for Lent this year, I still am burdened by my proclivity toward being a night owl and letting myself get distracted by games on Facebook. I’ve just traded Mafia Wars for Bejeweled Blitz and still surf on blip, to no end.

So two seconds ago, I just deleted my blip account, and as of this moment, I also have removed the Bejeweled Blitz application and another game, which I just have started to play. Last week, I wrote about Increasing The Time I Am Living My Own Life and mentioned a couple of quotes from the late George Sheehan in that regards, including this:

“We cannot add a new activity to our life without taking something else out.”

He also went on to explain that it isn’t easy to decide what is to be thrown out, because often we have to decide between good things, not good and bad. Such is the case here. It’s not as I’ve mentioned in the past that I think Facebook games (or applications like blip for that matter) are intrinsically evil. It’s that I need to make room for running, for writing (both for myself personally and also for my job as a freelance writer) and for reading.

I will end this post as I ended last year’s post:

At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it. So strengthen your drooping hands and your weak knees. Make straight paths for your feet, that what is lame may not be dislocated but healed.

Hebrews 12:11-13

It’s time to pause, then keep on moving and keep the faith.

→ 7 Comments

Posted in Body, Mind, Running, Soul

Tagged Body, Mind, Running, Soul, time management

Oooh, oooh, that smell, the smell of…perfume?!?

Posted on March 29, 2010 by unfinishedrambler | 11 Comments

I stopped by our local library to take photos of a few articles in newspapers from 1913 for a series I’m continuing called “Old Newspapers Don’t Just Make Good Cat Litter Liner” today. While there, a woman approached the director of the library and I couldn’t help but eavesdrop as the woman asked her a question.

The question was if the director could ask the companies who send the magazines to make sure their employees didn’t wear perfume when sending the magazines, because the woman said she couldn’t stand the smell. The director politely told the woman she could make the request, but with no promises.

After the woman stepped out of the library, I couldn’t help but comment that the director as well as the other librarians hear all kinds of requests there. Another librarian commented that the woman often sniffed at the pages of magazines and books, and that one time she even ripped pages out of a magazine because she said they smelled.

Before I was leaving, the librarian also confided in me:

“She used to see people.”

I thought she meant that she used to see dead people, like in The Sixth Sense, and when I told the librarian, she just laughed and said that no, the woman used to be a psychiatrist and saw people in town.

When I told my wife later this afternoon about the woman, she said that one of her jobs when she worked at her high school library was to tear out the perfume samples from Vogue magazine. She said that the place behind the counter where the magazines were collected had smelled like “a whorehouse” before she started doing that.

I’ll end this post with a video from the Japanese pop/techno group Perfume, who else? See how much you can stomach before it becomes cloying (surprisingly, I made it 45 seconds, see if you can beat that):

This is Part X of an intermittent series called “Things You Didn’t Know About Your Local Library” that began on my previous blog, Unfinished Rambler, and that is still continuing here. Here are links to the first nine parts:

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX