Please Look After Mom

I honestly cannot remember how I came to find Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin, but I am really glad that I did. This book won the Man Asian Prize in 2011 and has been an international best seller.

Please Look After Mom is told in five different parts with four different points of view, all members of the same family. The elderly Mom goes missing in Seoul and her children and husband begin searching for her. Chi-hon is one of the daughters, a writer who had an education that Mom could not have dreamed of. While searching for mom, Chi-hon, and the others, reflect on how they treated Mom over the course of a lifetime and what Mom's life meant to her. There are so many things that struck me about this book.

"You were caught off guard. You had never thought of Mom as separate from the kitchen. Mom was the kitchen and the kitchen was Mom. You never wondered, Did Mom like being in the Kitchen?"

We get Mom's life story over the course of the book, told from her children and husband. It is heartbreaking and seems so true. My heart ached for all of the characters in the book, even the ones who had clearly mistreated Mom before she went missing.

"After your children's mother went missing, you realized that it was your wife who was missing. Your wife, whom you'd forgotten about for fifty years, was present in your heart. Only after she disappeared did she come to you tangibly, as if you could reach out and touch her."

This book reminded me a lot of Big Breasts and Wide Hips. While Please Look After Mom is much shorter in length, it is a similar richly dense family story centered on the mother who does anything to keep her family intact. However, Mother from Big Breasts and Wide Hips was more admirable to me in some ways than Mom. But, I really enjoyed Please Look After Mom and highly recommend.

How to be a Woman (again)

This is a reread from last year! How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran was previously blogged about here, so this will be short and sweet. I reread this book for a book club meeting and was really excited about hearing other's thoughts on it. How to be a Woman remained a great read the second time through. But the day of the meeting I had a pretty bad anxiety day and elected to stay at home watching tv. Not to happy that but it happens. I'm hoping to redeem myself and get to book club next month when we are talking about Bachelor Girl by Betty Isreal.

The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is another book that is part of the big 1001 books to read before you die list that I am plodding my way through. I have never read Pynchon before and my only impression of his writing was that Gravity's Rainbow seemed like a very difficult book. But The Crying of Lot 49 is a slim paperback so I thought I could handle it.

Oedipa Maas is our main character, a young married woman who finds herself in charge of executing the estate of a deceased friend, Pierce Inverarity. Unsure about what exactly to do, Oedipa meets up with Metzger, Inverarity's lawyer. Oedipa begins to see a strange symbol everywhere and thinks it has something to do with Inverarity and an underground postal system.

"each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous."

The plot is difficult for me to describe because it was difficult for me to follow at times. There is a very long detailed retelling of a play that Oedipa and Metzger see. At times it seems like Oedipa is going crazy over all of these clues without any end in sight. And once I read this:

 "Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself."

I had a feeling that Pynchon had summed up the book for me so I just buckled in and enjoyed the ride. For a small book it was very dense but really interesting. Oedipa is constantly picking up on communication patterns and draws them into a web that gets bigger and bigger without getting anywhere. We never get the "central truth itself" but that isn't what this book or life in general is about. It's just the patterns we find in an attempt to make sense of things.

"This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl."

While trying to describe this book to my husband, all I could come back to was this scene from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

The Secret Power of Yoga

After reading Yoga Bitch, I thought I might want to read a more serious book on yoga. My local library doesn't have a whole lot of yoga books readily available and so I ended up picking The Secret Power of Yoga: A Woman's Guide to the Heart and Spirit of the Yoga Sutras by Nischala Joy Devi.

The book seemed very accessible to someone who has not read the yoga sutras before. Chapters ended with suggested exercises and meditation guides to reinforce the general message.

What I took away from it was two interesting thoughts. One, the idea that emotions are like weather that goes over our mental landscape, and, like clouds and storms, they will pass on and return in cycles. Two, I have often been taught breathing exercises for my anxiety and usually think about breathing in good energy and breathing out bad energy. Devi encourages complete focus on the positive; that by focusing on releasing negative energy you are giving more power to the negative force in your mind. Instead she suggests both breathing in a positive thought and exhaling positivity out into the world. I found this to be extremely helpful and use it all of the time.

Some of the exercises felt really silly. It's a little hard to explain to your partner why you are staring into a mirror chanting "I am divine" without feeling a bit ridiculous. And all it made me think of was Divine, which I don't think was the intention.

My big issues with the book were that it is clearly, clearly written for upper-middle class women who don't work. The examples were all about how to balance your motherhood and personal space or how to tell a friend that you don't like her dress (Devi says lie about it. Seriously.). None of the examples had to do with what I think of as actual life, at least as I know it. Not one example I can remember had to do with a woman working.

In the end I would not really recommend this book. I'm sure there are better books out there about connecting yoga to your life. Any suggestions?

Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings

I'm forever drawn to Tolkien related things, either for myself or any of the guys in my family, I have a bunch of the old paperbacks and this one was a recent addition to the shelf. My father read all of the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) and the Hobbit out loud to my brothers and I when we were small kids. Also fewer kids. So these characters have been with me pretty much as long as I can remember. Which means that my level of being weird over them is pretty high, and I can understand that not everyone cares that much about whether the LOTR is allegorical.¹

Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings by Lin Carter reads like an academic essay from the days where you couldn't write an essay on Twilight for college.² It is a delightful piece of nerd nostalgia that I really enjoyed, even if a great deal of it doesn't seem to be about LOTR.

Some history of Tolkien's writing years are given, but mostly the focus here is the LOTR. The book covers several chapters of summary of the trilogy, and it actually makes for interesting reading, if only to see what Carter chooses to leave out or talk about too much. Also you can cringe when he says that Eowyn is Theoden's daughter and not his niece.³ There is also a lot of speculation about the Simarillion and what that would further explain, since the book had not been published yet.

The later half of the book seems to be a history of the Epic Tale.⁴ There are many descriptions of ancient epic heroes fighting the gods to save the world that Carter puts forward as the stories that made possible LOTR. While I enjoyed learning about many of them, I'm not certain that Carter is putting forward anything too radical. It mostly seems like he is just giddy over finding so many things that seemed to inspire Tolkien. And I admit that seeing a list of names that includes my favorite dwarves is from a copy of the Poetic Edda is pretty damn cool.

I say read this if you both really like Tolkien and reading about writer inspiration. A good read, but not a must read.

Another reason why I read this book is because my husband, brothers, and my father are all rereading the LOTR together and meeting up after each book to talk about them. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes!⁵



1. No.
2. Don't look at me, I wrote about Harry Potter.
3. I guess Carter probably didn't have LOTRwiki to help him out. But come on!
4. Eurocentric Epic Tale.
5. Who else is excited that I learned how to make footnotes?

Yoga Bitch

During the past few months I have been doing a lot of yoga. By myself, using a book from the library that has series of sequences to go through. One of my big goals this year is to actually go to a yoga class regularly. I grabbed Yoga Bitch by Suzanne Morrison because it seemed like a fun memoir written by someone who wasn't too caught up in the spiritual aspects of yoga.

I really enjoyed this book. Morrison is easily relatable to me, a little confused about what to do with love and life and a bit too attached to her family. She goes to yoga and is won over by her quest for spiritualistic rituals and awe of her teacher. Morrison travels to India on a yoga retreat to learn to teach yoga as well.

What I love most about Morrison's journey is that she is never completely sold into everything she's being sold. Especially when they start off by strongly suggesting drinking your own urine as a cure-all for everything.

"My awakening of my kundalini shakti, I mean, my God, is there anything more embarrassing than saying, "I've awakened by kundalini shakti?" It sounds like next I'm going to invite you to join me in a wheatgrass enema."

Yoga Bitch really worked for me much more than I expect Eat, Pray, Love would. If you like yoga or just good memoirs about looking for meaning in your 20's. 

Grassroots

Part of my reading goal for this year is to read more non-fiction books. I have a feeling most of them will have to do with feminism so be prepared. Grassroots, a Field Guide for Feminist Activism by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards was mentioned in a few magazines and other books I have read in the past few months so I thought I better check it out.

I have felt a little stuck with my personal activism lately and thought that Grassroots might kick me in the pants a little bit. It can be overwhelming to see problems in the world and have no idea how to do anything about them.  While not providing a clear one-two-three to-do list for activism, Grassroots does give a plethora of examples for the different ways women around America bring feminism to the world. Baumbardner and Richards end the book with a sum up of what their activism looks like and provide a 46-page appendix that points out great ways to get involved or just get more information.

Reading this book I found comfort in the fact that little acts are given almost more importance that big huge actions. It is really important to just do what you can as often as you can, weather that is going door-to-door for a cause you care about, sharing a good book with a friend, watching a movie with your mom, or any number of things. Grassroots did a great job of reminding me that the little actions I do mean something. And it gave me a huge list of people, organizations, and books to look up.

I really wish that I had had this book in high school and should I ever get a niece, she better expect to receive Grassroots (or some updated version of it) from me.

In other news, happy February! Is everyone ready for Galentine's Day?