Despite all the buzz that’s been filling the media of all sorts for years about Eat, Pray, Love, i never had any interest in the book solely because of that ominous middle word, pray. A book like this is meant for entertainment and when you see the world one way and the author sees it another, it’s just hard to get anything out of it. However, having read and enjoyed the sequel Committed (which contained very little mention of religion or spirituality) and seeing that the movie was set to come out on my birthday, i decided to give Eat, Pray, Love a shot anyway.

First of all, i was hoping to learn more about why Elizabeth Gilbert decided to leave her marriage. The book does a good job of illustrating how completely incapacitated she was by the unhappiness she felt with her marriage and suggests that there was definitely a very good reason for all that misery, but fails to actually disclose what exactly the problem was. Gilbert says the reasons are “too sad and too personal” to write about, and so she doesn’t. And so i still can’t feel for her at all.

Here’s my problem with this: she chose to write this book. She disclosed a lot of personal stuff in the book (like the page about masturbation that made me want to go bury my head deep in a sand dune). She didn’t want to tell her ex-husband’s secrets, but he hates her anyway so why not go ahead and write about it and maybe help someone else’s marriage in so doing? Her divorce made her miserable, which made her have to go on a spiritual journey, which ended when she forgave herself for destroying her marriage. I see some sort of animal eating its own tail here. And the weirdest part is that she ends up getting married again. I’m sure that all of this is more complicated than i’m making it out to be and i definitely agree that marriages just need to end sometimes, but Elizabeth Gilbert has told me everything about these five years of her life except for what sparked it all and i’m left just wishing to know WHY.

Whatever it was that happened, it made her decide to pursue pleasure, spirituality, and a balance between the two. So she goes to Italy and that’s all fun and good. And then she goes to India and subjects herself to little sleep, little social interaction, a lot of hard work and a ton of chanting and meditation. This is the part i couldn’t relate to at all. Except maybe the beginning of it when she’s all whiny about the whole thing, ’cause that’s what i would feel like, too, in a place like that. But then it gets pretty mystical and i couldn’t help thinking “of course you’re going to start seeing electric snakes and stuff when you do that sort of thing to your brain.”

By the way – i’m going to excuse myself if i’ve used tenses incorrectly here because this is a blog and nobody is paying me for it, but Elizabeth Gilbert bounces from one tense to another in this book with a truly distracting frequency that to me just makes no sense. I think someone needs to go back and edit it one more time.

In Bali she meets a lot of interesting people and falls in love and seems to be a normal person again. Elizabeth Gilbert certainly is good at making friends with people, and i can imagine that traveling the world eating delicious food and talking to interesting people would be pretty great. I didn’t get the whole spiritual bit though, and i think the book was hyped way beyond its actual value. Overall, i’d say it was an okay book.

I did go see the movie on my birthday, and i thought the beginning where she just up and leaves her husband was even sadder on screen than in the book. I felt really sorry for her ex-husband. The spirituality was down-played and some plot elements were added for effect, but i think for the most part the movie was true to the story and, much like the book, all-in-all it was pretty alright. Save your $5.50-9 and get it at the Red Box some day.

I waited on that list for at least four months, and i tore through the book in a week and a half once it finally became available to me (about a week and a half ago). Although the citations of her resources are vague at best, Gilbert provides a wealth of information about marriage, so the book reads more like a non-fiction than a memoir (YES, i know memoirs are included in non-fiction, but you know what i mean). I told Nathan that if i were ever to write a book, it might be like this one; a lot of vaguely-cited facts, some probably-less-than-accurate yet educated conclusions drawn from those facts, a few not-too-detailed anecdotes, and a lot of musing.

I loved the book. I’m not a huge fan of modern-day memoirs because frankly i don’t find other people’s lives to be as interesting as they do, generally speaking. But this book is different; it’s more like looking inside Gilbert’s mind as she researches and ponders the topic of marriage and gradually finds a way of looking at it that makes her feel comfortable with getting married again. She isn’t a psychologist or an anthropologist or an expert on (or at) marriage, but she apologizes for all that and the book is what it is. One thing she is certainly good at is getting people of very interesting walks of life to talk about any given topic, and the conversations she has with people in far-away places about marriage are fascinating. She also includes a section about not having babies, and i was particularly interested in what her mommy friends had to say both for and against having children. Some were surprised by how much happiness having children brought them while others told Gilbert that it wasn’t really worth it even though they love their children dearly. And then there are the facts: that even though people think the childless will die alone and miserable, the happiness of people polled at the end of life is not dependent upon whether or not they have children. I found that fact encouraging, and i enjoyed Gilbert’s praises for “The Auntie Brigade.” There are a lot of us childless aunties out there, and we’re important.

The one thing i thought was lacking in this book was a little more intimacy. Gilbert doesn’t go into a lot of detail about her relationships, particularly the one that ended in a nasty, devastating, ugly divorce. What went wrong there, one wonders? One would think that a person who is so skeptical of marriage on account of having been the victim of divorce would analyze that failure thoroughly in her search for peace. The only concrete thing she says about it is that he wanted babies and she didn’t, and that she was twenty-five when they got married. She says that last bit as though it were explanation enough for why the marriage failed. Uh, excuse me?! You really need to clear that one up for me, Elizabeth!

The book is supposed to be a memoir, and it’s ultimately about Elizabeth Gilbert’s search for reassurance that getting married is the right thing for her to do. Personally, i was left biting my lip for her a little bit, because the conclusion she reaches is wobbly at best. She hasn’t analyzed her first marriage and deep down she seems to still hate the whole idea of marriage. It seems to me that in the end she just put a fresh coat of paint on a rotten attitude. But – that’s her problem, i suppose. Maybe this book just doesn’t quite convey the full extent of her mindset. Either way, i really enjoyed the majority of what she had to say.

I don’t think the book really changed my mind about marriage at all – i was already a cautious fan, by which i mean i don’t think marriage is for everyone but i’m pretty sure it’s for me – but it certainly made me think about a few things and informed me of some cool tidbits. Like, for instance, the fact that (statistically speaking) age 25 is the dividing line between marriages that are pretty likely to fail and those that endure. I’ll be 25 and Nathan will be 26 when we get married, so we’re sort of squeaking past that line. We’ve also got the advantages of: being of the same age, ethnicity, economic class and education level; not wanting babies; and having similar jobs. Our disadvantages are: not being strongly religious and not having a huge network of friends.

So, let’s hang out more, okay?

This is not a militant atheist manifesto like The End of Faith or God is not Great. If you’ve ever watched The Cosmos, it reads more like a few episodes of that. In fact, it contains some of the same content. If you have not watched The Cosmos, you really ought to. You can stream it on Netflix or Hulu and it’s educational (if occasionally outdated) and fantastic. It’s not about God, it’s about – you guessed it. If you’re unfamiliar with Carl Sagan entirely, he’s also the guy who wrote Contact. I didn’t understand the flick as a kid but man, do i appreciate it now. Ok – watch this, this is a sweet song composed of auto-tuned clips of Carl Sagan:

He was a brilliant scientist who was extremely passionate about astrophysics and the possibility of life beyond Earth. This particular book was published by his widow Ann Druyan after his death, and it’s actually a transcription of a lecture series he gave on how the idea of God fits in with the scientific perspective. It’s really thought-provoking, and it makes you feel like you’re auditing a fascinating course at an Ivy League school for free. There are even visuals and Q&A sessions included. Almost makes me want to go back to school…

Reading this book, i saw a lot of the same ideas that Dawkins likes to talk about, but i think here they’re presented in a more approachable and open-minded manner. I don’t know why they decided to make The God Delusion blindingly shiny-metallic/day-glo orange considering that nobody wants to be seen reading it in the first place. But if you’re even the least bit curious about how anyone could be passionate about the fact that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God, nobody will sneer at you if they see you with your nose buried in this one.

(Mom has become a recurring theme in my end-of-year posts. Maybe i should continue referring to what i think she thinks of me in the two to follow.)

Early this year i became sort of fascinated with pregnancy. Since my latter two years of college, i’ve had quite a few dreams in which i am pregnant or have a very tiny baby, so that’s probably what got me interested. That and reading dooce and subsequently watching videos on momversation, and also just being at that age where a lot of people i know are starting their adventures in procreation.

So i read a couple of tales of pregnancy; Accidentally On Purpose and It Sucked and then I Cried (dooce’s book). I learned all kinds of things, like what an episiotomy is and what post-partum depression is like and how very, very little sleep new parents get – and good stuff, like that giving birth can be an almost spiritual experience that may make you feel even more deeply connected to your husband. And guess what? I’m never, ever having a baby. EVER. I got really tired of hearing about the whole thing, especially what’s coming out of either end of a baby at any given moment. I’m definitely over it.

The other topic that my reading this year covered was, of course, atheism. For a while there i was really passionate about it and i enjoyed writing about it until my writings garnered what i maintain were some really unfair accusations. And i noticed that i was really pissing off some of my close friends and relatives, and i was forced to realize that i don’t have the power to change the way people think about things. I decided that it just isn’t worth damaging personal relationships to keep trying. Religion is a topic i really wish people could discuss and talk freely about, but the world isn’t ready yet. I’ve given up on being passionate about this, just like i gave up on being passionate about liberalism and vegetarianism and environmentalism in the past because i realized that it was not making me happy, it was making me miserable. Wanting to change the world is a miserable thing, so this year i want to focus on what i love about it, and read more on that.

Two weeks after purchasing the book, i found myself unenthusiastically getting through the last forty pages of The Lost Symbol. Up until that point it was a regular Dan Brown page-turner; formulaic but entertaining with a nice little twist toward the end that i didn’t see coming. The one thing that really bothered me was the usual heroine scientist’s discussions of her research in the field of Noetic Science which would, once published, prove beyond a doubt that people are more than just flesh and blood. People have souls and can use their mind-power to alter matter outside of the body, and God most definitely exists. I asked myself why that pissed me off, and i decided that if such research was actually published, i would learn about it and grant it whatever it did in fact prove, but at this point i can’t conceive of any science that could do any such thing. The mere idea is a little aggravating.

The last forty pages of The Lost Symbol really drove the metaphysical point home, though. Apparently the thesis of this action-packed work of fiction is that God is within all of us, and our belief in him is what has always unified people and will bring peace to the world (never mind the fact that there are very peaceful people – and whole cultures, in fact – who don’t believe in any god).

My first thought was, okay, whatever, this little fiction book, like many other things, was not created with people like me in mind. Perhaps Dan Brown is trying to smooth the ruffled feathers of believers with this book by emphasizing the importance of religious belief in general and no particular church (especially not the Catholic church) in particular. But, then again, i know a lot of religious people who might be put off by the idea, maniacally pursued by several of the book’s main characters, that God is literally in us; that we people are all gods or can become gods. Not that i think anyone will ban the book from their libraries for that reason, nor that atheists, who are perhaps the latest victims of Brown’s feather-ruffling novels, ought to. I’ve come to realize that there’s nothing Dan Brown could have written about religion or God without rubbing somebody out there the wrong way. And after all, it’s only a novel.

As far as the book goes, i wasn’t as enamored with it as i was with Angels and Demons, partly because i’m not familiar with Washington, D.C., whereas i had enjoyed the memory-lane tour of Rome in the latter book. The Lost Symbol seemed to drag a little at first. Robert Langdon was tricked into solving the puzzles this time, and dragged his feet for half the plot line accordingly. Once things got cooking, it was fun to read. I’d say it’s definitely worth a week of your time, especially if you’re patriotic and have your own particular brand of faith.

At the risk of igniting a new string of impassioned comments, i’d like to just point out a couple of things i saw in the text:

1. Albert Einstein called belief in a personal god “childish”.

2. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychology, called people who believe in a god “illusioned”, and suggested that they could also be referred to as delusional.

When we were at Powell’s in Portland at the beginning of the month, i saw that How We Decide was on the bestseller list. I read the blurb and thought the book sounded like what i had hoped Blink would be. I picked it up from the library last week, and i’ve only read fifty pages and jumped around to a couple of interesting-looking bits of the book, but i’m pretty sure i know where it’s going.

Both books start each point with a dramatic story about a person who had to make a tough decision, then describe what was really going on in his or her brain at the time of decision-making, and finally illustrate the phenomenon with quotes from scientists who have done studies on it. Each book has a story about a decision-maker in the armed forces, a sports enthusiast who just knows what to look for, and a homicide that shouldn’t have happened. The moral of the story? Trust your emotions! No, wait – don’t trust your emotions!

Although i don’t plan to finish How We Decide, i do think it may be more insightful than Blink. My attention was caught by one part in particular which describes how Christians and Republicans have been shown in studies to willfully ignore information that contradicts their point of view. In the study cited, Christians actually chose not to turn off static that was garbling a message debunking their faith, for example, while the atheist test subjects quickly pushed the button that turned the static off. In another study, Republicans failed to recall positive changes that took place under the Clinton administration. There might have been a bit about Democrats doing the same sort of thing, but um, if there was i honestly can’t remember.

For the most part, though, it seems to me that Jonah Lehrer just read Blink and thought, “Wow, this book stinks and Gladwell is getting filthy rich off it! I think i’ll just re-write it and cash in on his idea!”

I didn’t get anything out of either book, really, except for a few accounts of interesting psychological studies shrouded in a lot of journalistic fluff. This CNN article, 10 Ways to Be a Better Thinker, succinctly sums up the scraps of advice in Blink and How We Decide and adds a couple of insights of its own. I have come away from these books with a brilliant idea, though – i think i’ll read The Tipping Point and just re-write it, and voila! I’ll be a New York Times bestseller.

Prior to that, Nathan and i picked up “The Giver” by Lois Lowry, since i was probably the only American public school student in the nineties who for whatever reason never read it. He read it to me over the course of a few weeks (yes, you read that correctly. We’re that cute). The story about a futuristic society that is willingly void of both pain and love was thought-provoking and entertaining, but had an ending that i found to be rather depressing, even if it’s meant to be vague and possibly hopeful.

I never would have imagined that these two books had anything in common, but when i finished Villette last night i was amazed to find that their endings are quite similar.

Lois Lowry ends “The Giver” with a scene that can be interpreted as either the last hallucination of a dying person or the actual attainment of a very unlikely dream. Lowry herself says that she “doesn’t think” that the protagonist just dies, but it’s pretty difficult to convince oneself otherwise. Being a realist, i assumed the worst, and felt a little disappointed by it. It’s fitting though, and i accepted it as a sort of Orwellian cautionary tale.

Villette is the story of the mostly un-charmed and lonely life of Lucy Snowe. One can’t help but hope that she’ll end up being loved by someone, and finally toward the end of the book her friend M. Emmanuel gives her his love and promises to marry her – but he is about to embark for Guadeloupe and won’t return for three years. And so she waits for three years, and declares to the reader that they were actually the happiest three years of her life. Then, on the very last page, she describes the terrible storm that struck on the day her lover was to return to her at last. She keeps the outcome hidden though, and encourages us to imagine that she lived happily ever after. As if that were possible! There was no lesson in this book, no poetic reason for life to have completely crapped on Lucy Snowe once and for all, destroying whatever little happiness she had finally managed to attain. After reading 580 pages of her struggles, i wanted a happy ending, damn it! Why did it have to be another “probably this is not a happy ending, but go ahead and imagine that it actually was” sort of thing?!

I’m going back to non-fiction!

In all honesty, i enjoyed reading Villette if only for the language. The English is flowery and passionate, and the smattering of French was a nice refresher-course for me. Still, i’m having second thoughts about picking up where i left off in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” I already know that the ending of that one is rather less than uplifting.

I’m curious as to why you have [been reading so many books about religion] and what you’ve come up with.

Well, i guess it started because i began reading the atheist blog Unreasonable Faith, which led me to watch some YouTube videos featuring Richard Dawkins, and the stuff he had to say gave me a lot of hope that maybe other people see things the way i do. So i read The God Delusion, and i got a lot of flack for it, since Dawkins is apparently “arrogant” and his ideas are “illogical.” Thus, i’ve picked up other Atheist books in order to broaden my knowledge on the subject, though i’m still getting through the big NY Times bestsellers, and some might argue that they’re more sensational then sensible.

I think they’re brilliant. But at the same time i’m getting tired of hearing the parts about how the Bible features all sorts of cruelty and contradicts itself anyway. I’m not really interested in the Bible. I’m interested in God and why people cling to the idea of his existence despite a complete lack of evidence.

People will look at some little coincidence in their own life as “evidence” for God’s existence, and overlook all the times they’ve prayed for stuff that didn’t happen or – what i think is the biggest point of all – the question of why God would have made us at all, just to jump through his little hoops and heap praise upon him and join him in the playground of Heaven after our trial-run on Earth. People just want existence to have meaning and death not to be final. But they don’t consider that life might be just as stunningly beautiful without a divine plan, and that death might be just as easy to deal with if we realize that we’ll be only as aware of our state after death as we were before we were born.

Also, people think that without God there’s no reason to be good. But first of all, there are millions of people who have committed atrocities in the name of God throughout history, and millions who continue to do so to this day; bombing abortion clinics, toppling the Twin Towers, genitally mutilating girls and baby boys, burning women alive for the crimes of their brothers. Teaching their children to feel guilt and shame. And those who choose to be more like Jesus have done just that – made a choice. If you can choose to follow Jesus rather than the God of the Old Testament, you can figure out for yourself that it’s not okay to cheat and steal and kill.

I’ve gotten pretty passionate about all this, because 1. i’ve been judged negatively and held at arm’s length by certain people just for standing up and owning up to being an atheist. I agree with Dawkins that atheists need to speak up and come out of the closet so that people can put their stigmas to rest, as we’ve all made strides toward doing with respect to gays. There’s something wrong with the fact that atheists pretty much cannot get elected to the highest offices in this nation. And 2. i really think that people are missing out on some important stuff in life by deluding themselves with the idea of the importance of God. We can be good people and stop fearing death and enjoy life to the fullest and connect deeply with one another without attributing everything to some imaginary entity watching over us like Santa Claus. We’re not children anymore, so why cling to such a juvenile point of view?

Hanging out at the cemetery

It started storming that night and didn’t really stop until last night sometime. Saturday Nathan took me shopping and then to his Mom’s place to have dinner and watch a movie. Yesterday i started to feel a little under the weather, so we took the papisan out on the terrace and had tea and watched the rain for a long time, which i couldn’t have enjoyed more. Nathan made me wild rice & mushroom soup and we watched Milk, which we both enjoyed.

Today i feel a bit sicker, with a sore throat. I finished The God Delusion and am now reading The End of Faith. It’s interesting to me how these two “New Atheists” have such different ideas about spirituality. So far Sam Harris seems to think mysticism is cool, as long as people’s lives aren’t dictated by ancient scriptures.

I highly recommend The God Delusion, but i’m told that Dawkins is really just a narcissist and a propagandist and that his positions are illogical and make no sense, so i guess i still have some research to do. I suspect that people just don’t want to believe what he has to say, because it all made perfect sense to me, and didn’t strike me as being the least bit corrupted by greed or self-love. To each his own, i suppose.

Whatever you believe, Spring is truly awe-inspiring, and i hope all of you are enjoying it as much as i am.