Books

December 11, 2022

from my reading list in 2022

Continuing with the year in review theme, I’ve done music; I’ve done chess; now here are my top books from 2022. Lurking: How a Person Became a User – Joanne McNeil In her book Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep to find out what people’s main (and sometimes contradictory) worries are...

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July 14, 2022

My favourite Barefoot Doctor books

The Barefoot Doctor aka Stephen Russell was a practitioner and teacher of Taoism, its medicine, philosophy, meditation practices, and martial arts and manifesting system, or wu wei. I first came across his work in a small bookshop tucked away in the Scottish Highlands. It was his informal, wayward writing style and approach...

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April 10, 2018

Is this me?

The madness that is mornings for me. Madness as in the cylinders of mind all fire at once in the wee hours of the morning burning brightly and bringing all sorts of wild and wonderful thoughts. Sometimes the intensity threatens to short-circuit me. And like Kerouac… “[…]the only people for...

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April 26, 2017

Emily Dickinson

I finished reading a selected work of Emily Dickinson’s poems. She wrote over 1800 poems in her lifetime, although only a handful were published while she still breathed. I found it helpful to read about her and then read her poems. The understanding of who she was as a poet...

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September 29, 2016

Understanding other places

“One place comprehended can make us understand other places better.” So wrote Southern novelist Eudora Welty in her essay “Place in Fiction,” and it’s a concept well worth thinking about in an era in which communities and countries feel paradoxically fractured and all-encompassing, in which people feel torn apart and thrown together, all...

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October 10, 2009

is positive thinking undermining us?

I am  in the business of helping people help themselves, or at least guiding them through a journey of self-help.  One of my bones of contention with the self-help, positive psychology industry has been the dumbing-down, over optimistic approach to achieving the good life. Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book...

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