I went. I listened. I chatted rather ineptly. I bought my copy. Review coming sometime.
But buy it now anyway..
Caspar’s launch review? “Grown-ups are too noisy.”
Miscellaneous Voices Book Launch
April 14th, 2010 § 3
Books for the road…
November 8th, 2007 § 1
Who can prepare for this journey? My rational, rational mind has a grip on me so I did. I wrote my warning post. I talked to Big Sis. And I ripped open a few boxes of books to grab what I could without creating a god awful mess.
They may not be the best, and they may not be my usual reading material (but what use is Camus right now?), they may even be “dumb”, but they are a start on getting my brain to use another mode of thinking.
And they are what I have.
Books For The Road
Andrews, Ted – Animal-speak: The spiritual and magical powers of creatures great and small, Llewellyn, 1993
Bolen, Jean Shinoda – Goddesses in everywoman: a new psychology of women, HarperPerennial, 1984
Johnston, Robert A. – The fisher king and the handless maiden: understanding the wounded feeling function in masculine and feminine psychology, HarperCollins, 1993
Mazza, Joan – Dream back your life: a practical guide to dreams, daydreams and fantasies, Perigee, 2000
Murdoch, Maureen – The heroine’s journey: woman’s quest for wholeness, Shambala Publications, Inc, Massachussetts, 1990
Nichols, Sallie – Jung and the tarot: an archetypal journey, Samuel Weiser, Maine, 1984
Raff, Jeffrey – Jung and the alchemical imagination, Nicholas-Hays, Maine, 2000
(Eve, thank you for your book suggestions. I will have a look for them and get them if I can.)
Related Posts
Life without books…
August 23rd, 2007 § 1
I’m in the middle of moving house and it’s not an out- of-here into-there kind of deal. The house I own is already empty (of people, at least) and Cas and I are living in my sister’s spare room until it is renovated and sold. My things currently have no home so I have to pack everything away for what may continue to be months (renovating is a slow process with a ten month old) and scale down my three-bedroom, double-garage, outdoor-entertaining contents to suit a city-size apartment.
No problem there. I can’t wait to be living close to the people who know how to make coffee again. The problem is that when I said three-bedroom, it was slightly misleading. My master bedroom hasn’t been a master bedroom since I moved in. The first thing I did was rip out the built-in robes to make room for The Library.
I have books. I’m not sure how many. I stopped counting a while ago.
Now, there is no chance on this green earth that my (partially Dewey Decimal catalogued) book collections will be scaled down but I can’t keep them with me while I’m in the in-between. They have to be boxed up and put into storage. I’m not a particularly dependent person but this process seems to engender a great deal of anxiety in me. What if I need one of them?
I have the capacity to be a very efficient person (Yes, Mum. I do.) but this particular part of packing up my life has been trying.
Yesterday I packed three boxes. Three boxes should take, say, ten or fifteen minutes all up? Unless of course you’re me and each one takes over an hour. Surely I could justify holding on to just this one? And that one… And that one…
There were a few I had no problems boxing. The red velvet covered book of love potions someone gave me? Nope. Don’t need that. The Complete Family Guide to Natural Healing? A quick flick through it, just in case. Herbs for anorexia and and go smell a flower, it will make you feel better? Nope. Don’t need that. Thomas Shelton’s 1612 translation of Don Quixote de la Mancha? No, thank you. As a mum I get more than my fair share of scatological humour daily. Into the box with you.
But then there were the more obscure things like Back to Basics and the time it took me to convince myself I didn’t need to know how to pasteurise my own milk or build a self-composting dunny if I was moving back to the inner city.
Or there was my Asana Dialogue which, when abridged, went something like this:
Hatha Yoga?
=> No. You just joined a gym.
But it doesn’t have yoga classes.
=> You have a DVD.
But…
=> No.
I could feature a posture each week on my blog…
=> Your blog is not about yoga.
I could use the symbolism of each asana to discuss different aspects of…
=> No. No. No.
Pausing to consider the fat Genet biography I’ve yet to get around to reading was perhaps more reasonable. It didn’t smack quite so much of desperation. But why does not having all my books on hand or, at least, just around the corner, make me feel so desperate?
Well you see, right here is where I would mention a passage from a novel. The narrator grew up in a house where the all the walls were lined with books, as I did, and she remembers wondering as a child, when she visited bookless homes, what it was that held the walls up. And that is symbolism which resonates with me.
But I can’t share that passage (which I think is in Joanna Murray-Smith’s Truce) because the book is locked away in a cage made of cardboard and packaging tape.
You never know which book you might need.
There is a happy ending though. I kept aside three books while packing my three boxes. The Penguin Opera Guide and Prima Donna: A History, which I need as reference materials for my own novel, and Wallace Stevens: The Collected Poems, a book I will be using to write a weekly feature on my blog, unlike the awful asana disaster.
I think three books for three boxes is fair. So I’ve made a deal with myself and tomorrow when I’m packing I get to hold on to fifteen extra books to make up for the boxes already lining the hallway.
The Camus doesn’t count of course. There can never be a cardboard cage for him.