Book Review: "The Uncommon Reader" by Alan Bennett

What a fantastic book! The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett was published in 2007, but I never heard anything about it until I stumbled upon a recommendation on my library's website. Tightly written and only 120 pages long, Bennett proves that brevity really is the soul of wit.

The title makes it sound like some sort of academic anthology, but it is the fictional account of how the current Queen of England discovers a love of reading late in life. It's full of political and literary satire and great insight into why people read and write...I've never read anything like it! It was definitely 'unputdownable' and extremely fun.

(I must warn gentle readers that the book has one extremly crass line in it, spoken by an advisor to the Prime Minister at the bottom of page 86, if you'd like to avoid it, as well as one bad curse word.)

Gone again...

I took Scott to the airport this morning to fly off to Boston. Although July would not be my preferred month to visit New England, I am more than a little bit jealous. Tonight he'll be at the Red Sox game courtesy of a software vendor, tomorrow he'll drive up the coast in his free time after meetings...maybe see a lighthouse. I'm picturing him at a restaurant wearing one of those ridiculous white plastic bibs eating a lobster. Ah, the life...

But life is good here, too. It's all attitude.

Which reminds me of a quote from Jeffrey R. Holland:NO MISFORTUNE IS SO BAD THAT WHINING ABOUT IT WON'T MAKE IT WORSE.

Isn't that the truth!

I caught myself just this morning complaining aloud about the heat while we were rushing around packing Scott for his trip. (STRESS + HEAT = COMPLAINING) I hate the heat! If I could live in a cave this time of year I really, truly would. Central air conditioning doesn't even cut it, though I'd be miserable without it. July and August make me yearn for Alaska. I am hot and fussy one sixth of the year!

But whining about it doesn't help. It really does make it worse.

I've been doing what I can to keep cool, like wearing my hair up off my neck. I've made gallons of fresh-squeezed lemonade, the official taste of summertime. It makes me feel Southern and reminds me to slow down and conserve energy. I've also been swimming a lot, alternately freezing and baking at the community pool. I close my blinds in the afternoon. I avoid going anywhere at all during the heat of the day.

Now to reduce half the irritation I need to stop complaining about it.

More Sunday thoughts...

Our lesson in Relief Society today was about adversity. We looked at it from every angle, discussing what it is and why it happens, what we get from it and how we deal with it, etc. At one point the teacher asked, "Why does Heavenly Father allow us to suffer adversity?" (And some adversity involves actual suffering!)

For some reason, the board game Chutes and Ladders popped into my head. I played the game only a handful of times when I was babysitting in my neighborhood as a kid, so I had no idea I had actually 'learned' something from it. I didn't know it was stored away in my memory somewhere.

In the game Chutes and Ladders when you land on a square with a ladder on it, you can skip a whole bunch of other squares and climb the ladder to the next row, closer to the object of the game, which is called Home. On the other hand, when you come to a square with a chute on it, you slide backward and have to start over from the square you eventually land on.

Adversity can be like a ladder, providing a shortcut to learning true principles and developing important attributes. Growth happens almost exclusively when we are outside of our comfort zones, enduring things we would rather not have to endure. When we overcome any adversarial situation in our lives, our understanding increases and our empathy expands. We emerge from the trial with greater compassion and strength.

Adversity can also be like a chute, causing us to slide backward, making it difficult for us to find our footing.

Usually I think adversity is a little of both -- we slide backward initially, then we catch ourselves and remember.

Remember, remember - that word keeps surfacing in my study of spiritual things. It's difficult to hold all of the many divine attributes we want to emulate in our heads at one time. It's hard to remember all of the commandments, let alone live them. Thank goodness our lives are sufficiently long if we just keep making incremental progress...and avoid falling into slippery chutes.

Quotes on Beauty

Never miss an opportunity to see anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting....a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The perception of beauty if a moral test. - Henry David Thoreau

That which we feel as beauty we will one day know as truth. - Johann Schiller

The average woman would rather have beauty than brains because the average man can see better than he can think. - Unknown

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. - Emerson

As we grow old, the beauty steals inward. - Emerson

More Pix of Sea Turtles

This is where I'd like to go conduct further research on sea turtles. I'll just need some sort of a grant...(It's actually the hotel on Maui where our friends stayed. Isn't it gorgeous?)


While they were there, they visited a marine biology center, where they were able to touch baby sea turtles on their first birthday. I liked this pictures because it shows their amazing eyes, which have three lenses or lids. Also it shows their amazing flippers and how they can't retract into their shells like land turtles can.

This is just a free swimming baby sea turtle. Martha said they can move really fast, but what I liked about the sea turtles in the Albuquerque Aquarium was how they just seemed to glide through the water without a care in the world.

Sea Turtle Sighting in Maui

A few months ago I blogged about sea turtles and how much I enjoyed watching them at the Albuquerque Aquarium. A friend of mine (who didn't know about my fascination with sea turtles and had not visited my blog) visited Hawaii in June and took this picture of a sea turtle, so I asked her if I could post it.

It's an amazng picture because sea turtles don't really have to stick their heads out of the water like that -- their nostrils are on top of their heads. It really does look like this turtle wanted Martha to take her picture. And isn't the water blue!

She may be forwarding other pictures of sea turtles to me, so I've made it a sub topic on the side bar of my blog for all of the sea turtle enthusiasts out there.

A Poem for Sunday

My aunt's comment (on my last entry) about another Gerard Manley Hopkins poem prompted me to go read that one, called "Spring and Fall," again. It's very beautiful and very, very profound (like Aunt Cathy herself). Then I Googled and read a few other Hopkins poems, some of which I had not read before. (He burned most of his poetry -- maybe even all of his poetry -- when he became a priest, fearing that it was too vain, so his total body of work is not very large. He started writing poetry again at the request of his fellow clergy.)

Then I read this one for the first time in many years, and I thought today being Sunday it would be very appropriate to post it. It's called "God's Grandeur" and it's full of 'sprung rhythm' like "Pied Beauty." Hopkins' poetry is really very modern considering how long ago it was written.

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.
Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade;
Bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell:
The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods
With warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hide the Paper Clips

It occurred to me today that I have not written on this blog about some of my favorite things: office supplies.

Only a few people on the planet know that a trip to Office Max for me is like a day at the mall for most other women. I could go crazy there, or at any office supply store, and I often have.

I think it goes back to my childhood when I sometimes visited my parents' workplaces and marveled at the depth and breadth of their supply cabinets, which I often organized as a surreptitious way of taking inventory while staying out of trouble.

I couldn't believe they had all of these supplies at their fingertips -- boxes and boxes of pencils, pens, rubber bands and paper clips, with letterhead, staple removers, triplicate forms, and, in my mother's case, working at the airport, luggage tags and hand cancellation stamps. It was heaven! I could be entertained for hours in the room behind the ticket counter or at my father's secretary's desk rolling pages of paper into IBM Selectric typewriters or adding columns of numbers on a 10-key machine for the sheer fun of it.

It's still a thrill. When I go into my husband's office, I'm surrounded by temptations: bulldog clips and Post-It notes and manilla envelopes and colored cardstock...

I can't explain it -- I just have a weakness for office supplies.

But of course there is a quote behind all of this, and it's in French because it was originally coined by Napoleon when he established a post-revolutionary meritocracy:

"La carriere ouverte aux talents"

(The tools to him who can use them.)

(The literal translation is 'the job is open to the talented ones.' Thomas Carlyle

changed it to the above translation.)

An English teacher of mine introduced me to this phrase when we were studying a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, Pied Beauty, which he wrote in 1877. We were discussing line 6 at the time. In my opinion, it's one of the greatest poems ever written:

Glory be to God for dappled things -
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow ;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

My Take on Sarah Palin, Part II

Last fall when John McCain, the maverick, announced his selection of running mate Sarah Palin, another maverick, I wrote a blog about it almost immediately, which captured my first blush reaction to his choice. She was fresh and interesting. I went on to enjoy her hard-hitting speech at the Republican convention and some of her interactions with the press, who were relentless in their attacks against her.

They attacked her for:

- being a mother of five children ranging in age from 19 to newborn.

- being a religious woman.

- living in a small town.

- giving her children unusual names.

- having graduated from Idaho State instead of Harvard.

- not having enough ink in her passport.

- being from Alaska.

- having an accent.

- knowing how to field dress a moose.

- having a 'sexy librarian' look.

- not aborting her child born with Downs Syndrome.

- having a promiscuous teenaged daughter.

- not having enough executive experience (though she had more than Obama).

- wearing clothes that were paid for by the GOP (Democrat candidates like Hillary Clinton, and even their wives, like Michelle Obama, receive free designer clothes. Who among normal women, even governors, has a wardrobe suitable for a Vice Presidential run?)

Maybe the attacks worked. Sarah Palin disappointed. She wasn't as prepared as I had hoped. She wasn't as steeped in issues as I would expect a candidate to be. Though fundamentally she had the intangible 'right stuff,' she wasn't quite poised enough. (Think: Margaret Thatcher.) She wasn't quite serious enough. Faced with the most hateful media barrage I have witnessed in my lifetime, she allowed herself to become offended. She was easily distracted.

But who could blame her? If a bully were picking on just one of my children at school, I would create a stir. If grown up media moguls and pundits were hurling insults at my entire family, I would have to speak up in their defense.

She was never my first choice, not even for V.P. - I am a self-confessed Mitt-en. But I still like Sarah Palin and I still hope for her future, which I think is a lot brighter than her recent past.

'Big Bad Bill Day'

Yesterday was 'Big Bad Bill Day,' as my sister-in-law calls it. It always seems to take longer than it should. I remember years ago watching a woman balance her checkbook at a stoplight, and I was impressed. For me it's a ritual and all of the conditions have to be just right. I chalk it up to PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) from our 'lean' years.



It's always a tremendous relief to be done!



Here are a few quotes I've found on the subject:



My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn't pay the bill he gave me six months more. - Walter Matthau



When I die, my epitaph should read: She Paid the Bills. That's the story of my private life. - Gloria Swanson



Probably the very best thing my earnings have given me is absense of worry. I have not forgotten what it feels like to worry whether you'll have enough to pay the bills. Not to have to think about that any more is the biggest luxury in the world. - J. K. Rowling