Italia

I'm feeling a little like a child at the moment, as the day progresses I'm getting incresingly excited. I'm heading to Sorrento, Italy tomorrow morning at an unearthly hour. So despite work being busy and me running around trying to make sure all runs smoothly in my absence I have more than a faint urge to skip and sing,,, :)

Love and Timing

Over the last week I’ve had some interesting conversations about love with a variety of people, single, on the brink of a potential, in a relationship that has hit its testing time and another admitting finally that she is in love, unexpectedly and almost unaware. The sheer spectrum of emotion circling this one feeling made me think of how wide and vast love or the concept of love is. Last night I was reading E E Cummings and came across a poem of his I really liked, actually I came across a few but this stood out, its called ‘but if a living dance upon dead minds’

but if a living dance upon dead minds
why,it is love;but at the earliest spear
of sun perfectly should disappear
moon's utmost magic,or stones speak or one
name control more incredible splendor than
our merely universe, love's also there:
and being here imprisoned,tortured here
love everywhere exploding maims and blinds
(but surely does not forget,perish, sleep
cannot be photographed,measured;disdains
the trivial labelling of punctual brains...
-Who wields a poem huger than the grave?
from only Whom shall time no refuge keep
though all the weird worlds must be opened?

Two lines captured my heart and mind, ‘disdains the trivial labelling of punctual brains’ and ‘from only Whom shall time no refuge keep’

The first made me laugh, I used to moan about timing, how it was so essential and how heartbreaking it could be to know something wasn’t going to happen because of timing but I realised that Love will come despite my timing, despite my wanting it to happen now or my wanting it to wait a while.

The second line I liked because it makes me uncomfortable, like most of his poetry he ignores conventional syntax, he shuns punctuation and spelling and every fibre of my being longs to edit and rephrase and yet in my having to reread the line over and over it hit home, from only Whom (his use of capitals denotes its divinity) shall time no refuge keep. My punctual mind puts God in my time box. Why not now? Why do I have to wait? What isn’t this/doesn’t this happen? But time has no refuge from an Almighty God and time has no power or control over an Almighty God and yet again I try to learn the lesson I’m so bad at learning; that its about His timing and His purpose, its about His will and not mine. Chances are, in the seemingly cyclical nature of my mind, I will return to this again and again and eventually will slowly learn to trust the One who is eminently trustworthy and eternally true.

The Book list

Below is the list of books that was my attempt at a complilation from my world. It's a funny mix of genres across quite a wide spectrum of people. Enjoy :)

"The French Lieutenant's Woman" by John Fowles
"Life of Pi" by Yann Martel
"To kill a Mocking bird" by Harper Lee
"Whats so amazing about Grace" by Philip Yancy
"I, Claudius" by Robert Graves
"The kite runner" by Khalid Hosseini
"Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller
"Captain Corelli's mandolin" by Louis De Bernieres
"Like Water for Chocolate" by Laura Esquival
"Tuesdays with Morrie" by Mitch Albom
"The Gathering" by Anne Enright
"City Girl" by Patricia Scanlan
"Madame Bovaire" by Flaubert
"Freakonomics" by Theodore Levitt
"The first circle" by Solzenitzen
"The Book Thief" by Marcus Zusak
"Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell
"1984" by George Orwell
"To The Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf
"Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie
"A Wrinkle in time" by Madeleine L'Engle
"Kamasutra" by Mallanaga Vatsyayana
"Why Men love bitches" by Sheri Argov
"Lord of the Rings" Trilogy
"Slaughterhouse Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
"Chronicles of Narnia"
"Ma, he sold me for a few cigarettes" by Martha Long
"White Oleander" by Janet Fitch
"Atonement" by Ian McEwan
"Fight Club" by Chuck Palahniuk
"Beloved" by Toni Morrison
"Mercy" by Jodi Picoult
"Light in August" by William Faulkner
"A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khalid Hosseini
"Mrs Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf
"Half a Yellow sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"One flew over the cookoo's nest" by Ken Kesey
"A Suitable boy" by Vikram Seth
"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac
"The God of small things" by Arundhati Roy
"Brideshead Revisited" by Evelyn Waugh
"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austin
"The Blind Assasin" by Margaret Atwood
"Les Miserables" by Victor Hugo
"Possession" by A.S. Byatt
"Snow crash" by Neal Stephenson
"A Dance to the music of Time" by Anthony Powell
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S Thompson
"The Catcher in the Rye" by JD Salinger
"The heart of Yoga" by TKV Desikachar
"The Secrets of Jin Shei" by Alma Alexander
"The Jitterbug perfume" by Tom Robbins
"The Time Travellers Wife" by Audrey Heffeneger
"Fathers and sons" by Ivan Turgenev
"Catch 22" by Joseph Heller
"Women in Love" by DH Lawrence
"The Sun also Rises" by Ernest Hemmingway
"Z for Zachariah" by Robert C O'Brien
"Go tell it on the Mountain" by James Baldwin
"The silver sword" by Ian Serelliar
"Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver
"Old Possums book of practical cats" by TS Eliot
"The war of Don Emmanuel's nether parts" by Louis de Bernieres
"Fasting Feasting" by Anita Desai
"Ragtime" by E.L. Doctorow
"The Divine Comedy" by Dante
"Remembrance of things past" by Marcel Proust
"The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexander Dumas
"Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan
"One Hundred years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"Gone with the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell
"The Anatomy of Melancholy" by Robert Burton
"Surprised by Joy" by CS Lewis
"The Tao of Pooh" by Benjamin Hoff
"Dubliners" by James Joyce
"Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier
"Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes
"The Scarlet Pimpernel" by Baroness Orczy
"I know why the caged bird sings" by Maya Angelou
"Peer Gynt" by Ibsen
"Measuring the world" by Daniel Kehlman
"The tell tale heart" by Edgar Allen Poe
"Roll of Thunder hear my cry" by Mildred D Taylor
"The Crucible" by Arthur Miller
"The Prince and the Pauper" by Mark Twain
"Blue like Jazz" by Donald Miller
"The Road less travelled" by M Scott Peck
"Cats cradle" by Karl Vonnegut
"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte
"Under the Duvet" by Marion Keyes
"Confessions of a shopaholic" by Sophie Kinsella
"Chocolat" by Joanne Harris
"These Old Shades" by Georgette Heyer
"Life after God" by Douglas Copeland
"Dirt Music" by Tim Winton
"Love of a Good Woman" by Alice Munro
"Notes from a small island" by Bill Bryson
"The great Railway bazaar" by Paul Theroux
"Hitchikers guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams

Authors Recommended
Tolkien
CS Lewis
Oscar Wilde
James Patterson (crime Fiction)
Michael Connelly (crime fiction)
Jeffrey Deever (crime fiction)
Khalil Gibran
Rabindragth Tagore
David Harvey
F Scott Fitzgerald
Paul Collins
Sarah Vowell
Italo Calvino
Chaim Potek
Herman Wouk
Tolstoy
Dostoevsky
Charles Dickens
Shakespeare

Book lists

Recently, during an unexpected break in work, I browsed Time’s ‘’all time 100,,,,’’ lists for both books and film. Now normally you can find a list to suit your personality, top *insert relevant genre here*, and feel justified but I wanted to pit what I considered to be a fairly weighty cinematic and literary history against what the top dogs thought. Now I was well aware of the gaping holes in my pop cultural CV but honestly, the crushing realisation that I had seen a mere 12 of the 100 films on their list came as a shock. My novel experience was marginally better, 14 out of 100, although I was tempted to not be quite so honest, I mean if its been sitting on my bookshelf in my room for 2 years plus, I must have assimilated it by osmosis by now right??? The film debacle I could salvage by taking a moral high ground but that moral high ground would only be applicable if my novel score had been higher. So, in the manner of all good English grads that have been shown up as not quite the scholars they would have the world believe, I began to justify my shortcomings. First step in this defence is to attack the compilers. In this case they are American; of course they had no Oscar Wilde, no Shakespeare but included a couple of Graham Greene’s. Nothing against Graham Greene, he is a great writer but in a world of such vast choice to put two of his books on there was indulgent. Second step in this defence is to rubbish at least a few of the books on there and wax lyrical on what I, in my o so humble opinion, believe should have been included. I ran into a bit of a sticky problem here, having read so few of the books I could not logically argue against them and if I read them to then dismiss them, my average would improve, negating the need to rubbish them in the first place. Hmmmm, conundrum. Having frustrated myself at both my shortfalls and my time wasting in this whole exercise, I decided to stick to the list of books I compiled earlier this year from friends, colleagues and family which led to a more realistic and slightly less high brow and biased collection. I’ll post it in next post.I may at some stage in the future do a film version as well just for the heck of it. Lists are fun to look at and aim towards.