Sally Poulsen
Tommy Douglas by Vincent Lam. From Penguin Publishing’s Extraordinary Canadians series.
A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews
“Things shouldn’t hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you’re highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you’re an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that’s kind of relaxing.”
Found a copy of “A Complicated Kindness” released through bookcrossing.com at the now closed Second Cup on 124 St. Re-releasing it tomorrow on the LRT. SO good, Miriam Toews is my new favorite Canadian fiction writer.
Happy Accidents by Jane Lynch.
“If I could go back in time and talk to my twenty-year-old self, the first thing I would say is: “Lose the perm.” Secondly I would say: “Relax. Really. Just relax. Don’t sweat it.”
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t anxious and fearful that the parade would pass me by. And I was sure there was someone or something outside of myself with all the answers. I had a driving, anxiety-filled ambition. I wanted to be a working actor so badly. I wanted to belong and feel like I was valued and seen. Well, now I am a working actor, and I guarantee you it’s not because I suffered or worried over it.
As I look back, the road to where I am today has been a series of happy accidents I was either smart or stupid enough to take advantage of. I thought I had to have a plan, a strategy. Turns out I just had to be ready and willing to take chances, look at what’s right in front of me, and put my heart into everything I do. All that anxiety and fear didn’t help, nor did it fuel anything useful. My final piece of advice to twenty-year-old me: Be easy on your sweet self. And don’t drink Miller Lite tall boys in the morning.”
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (and Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling.
My favorite part was the list of alternate titles for the book:
“The Girl with No Tattoo
When Your Boyfriend Fits into Your Jeans and Other Atrocities The Book That Was Never a Blog Always Wear Flats and Have your Friends Sleep Over: A Step-by-Step How-To Guide for Avoiding Getting Murdered Harry Potter Secret Book #8 Sometimes You Just Have to Put on Lip Gloss and Pretend to Be Psyched I Want Dirk Nowitzki to Host Saturday Night Live So Much That I’m Making It the Title of My Book Barf Me to Death and Other Things I’ve Been Known to Say The Last Mango in Paris (this would work best if “Mango” were the cheeky nickname for an Indian woman, and if I’d spent any time in Paris) So You’ve Finished Chelsea Handler’s Book, Now What? Deep-Dish Pizza in Kabul (a touching novel about a brave girl enjoying Chicago-style pizza in secret Taliban-ruled Afghanistan) There Has Ceased to Be a Difference Between My Awake Clothes and My Asleep Clothes I Don’t Know How She Does It, But I Suspect She Gets Help from Illegal Immigrants”
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chodron. Amazing, but has concepts that are hard to accept. However, now I can be one of those insufferable people who walks around like the Dalai Lama, except I’m using tibetan words I only 8% understand.
Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Tim Harford. Four chapters in and I can still follow it. Somebody give this economist a Pulitzer.
Finished Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior
…and it reinforced that I am a small, petty, awful person of no vision. Great, wonderful, brilliant, mind blowing book. Highlighted and underlined like 90% of it.
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior by Chogyam Trungpa. Chogyam Trungpa was awesome, because he just talks like he talks. Who wouldn’t love a spiritual leader who says stuff like “Everyone loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.”
A moment of silence for my Kobo eReader, and all the books that died with it. Well, they didn’t die, per se, but they are now accessible only on my desktop and let’s be honest, I’m totally not sitting at my computer to read an entire book.
Anyway, the untimely demise of Kobo is particularly disappointing because I was just getting into the Raindance Writers’ Lab screenplay writing book by Elliot Grove , which was fantastic. Oh well. At least I now have the chops to write the first 4 pages of a compelling screenplay.
“I now realize that lives fall apart when they need to be rebuilt. Lives fall apart when the foundation upon which they were built needs to be relaid. Lives fall apart, not because God is punishing us for what we have or have not done. Lives fall apart because they need to. They need to because they weren’t built the right way in the first place.”
Peace from Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You’re Going Through by Iyanla Vanzant. Iyanla was the first self-helpy writer to really crush my mind grapes when I was younger. I lived for the days when she’d be on Oprah, and I read many of her books (I remember being sincerely worried that I was racist for reading The Value in the Valley: A Black Woman’s Guide Through Life’s Dilemmas, a book that was clearly not intended for me.
