And because you probably can’t read the titles, here’s the list (in order of when i finished them, from the most recent on down):

1. Marley and Me by John Grogan
2. Water For Elephants by Sara Gruen
3. The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
4. I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage by Susan Squire
5. Lying by Sam Harris
6. French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano
7. Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It by Gary Taubes
8. Bossypants by Tina Fey
9. Naked by David Sedaris
10. Letters To A Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens (may he rest in peace)
11. Remaking Eden by Lee M. Silver
12. The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and some other guy

I grabbed Marley and Me at a used bookstore in California when i finished Water For Elephants too quickly. I thought the former was a little too much of a writer-writing-about-being-a-writer type of memoir (you remember how i hate those, don’t you?) but i was suffering a pretty bad bout of puppy fever when i picked it up, so it entertained me. Water For Elephants was a really good piece of fiction—and by “good” i mean “entertaining.” DO NOT watch the movie until you’ve read the book! The movie will ruin the book for you, much moreso than other movies ruin other books. I can’t tell you anything more than that without giving too much away. Also, the movie is pretty much just bad all around, whether you read the book or not.

I Don’t was very dull. Lying was very intriguing and very short. Naked started off quite funny and quickly turned very weird. Remaking Eden was interesting if a little slow and sometimes far-fetched. It makes some really good points about why the “life begins at conception” argument is scientifically incorrect. I wish i could remember them.

Letters to a Young Contrarian was a little over my head, but it deepend my admiration for Hitchens. The book really made me feel like he was a champion of truth, and that that’s a very worthy thing to be even if it means ruffling a lot of feathers. He was still alive when i read it, and now that i’m reading his memoir, he is gone.

I expected Bossypants to go one of two ways: very funny, or very intimate. It was neither. It leaned more to the funny side, but i kind of felt like she was just addressing the major questions that she gets asked all the time (Why do you have that scar? How did you get a job writing for SNL?) rather than trying to communicate an original idea. I still liked it and i’m still a huge fan of hers, i just think her talent for writing is put to better use on scripts.

So, for 2012 i’ve made it my goal to read 13 books (although 15 would make for a nicer layout in that goodreads screenshot, hm?). I think i’ll try not to read more than one memoir this year, and this time i mean it. I want to read more about UI and other sciency things. And in keeping with last year, i probably won’t read more than one novel.

Any recommendations? Come be my friend on Goodreads so i can see what you’re reading!

I expected this book to be primarily about consumer culture and how the overwhelming array of choices in any given retail environment actually scares off customers. I thought it was a book about UX, but it actually only touched on the consumer aspects of overwhelming choice. It focused more on people and how too many choices tend to make many of us miserable; it turned out to be more like what i wanted Blink and How We Decide to be. It explained how there are two types of people when it comes to making decisions: maximizers, who agonize over choosing the best thing and often keep looking once they’ve made a decision, and satisficers, who start a search with a set of criteria and stop searching once they’ve found something that meets those criteria. I’m definitely a maximizer. And as it turns out, maximizers are more prone to depression, regret, and dissatisfaction with their decisions.

Schwartz’s central argument in the book is that the increased number of choices that modern people face for just about every aspect of life actually leads us to be less satisfied in life—even though we have it better in almost every objective way than any previous generation of humans ever has—because most of us tend to be maximizers. I saw so much of myself in this book; this is why planning the wedding was so difficult for me, this is why i constantly compare my physical appearance to others, this is why i still don’t know what i want to be when i grow up. The world is too wide-open; i have too much freedom, i’ve been encouraged to want perfection and i blame myself when i don’t think i’ve achieved it. If i were a satisficer, life would be so much more—well, satisfying. Which is not to say that i don’t feel extremely privileged and grateful for the wonderful life that i do have. I just don’t focus on that gratitude as much as i should.

I thought this was a really insightful, useful book. My only criticism is that it almost felt more like a self-help than a science book. I think it could’ve been backed up by more research. I do think i was in need of the help it offered, though. I need to go shopping for boots soon, and when i do i now know to get my expectations sorted out beforehand, not set them too high, and only look at a couple of different shops. Wish me luck.

I recently read a couple of books about—well, fat. And they were both good, to different degrees and for different reasons. The first was Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It by Gary Taubes, and the second was French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano. While the former was well-researched, well-argued and smart, i thought the latter was anecdotal, nonscientific and a little bit boastful, but still for the most part worth reading. And, in fact, i felt i was able to glean the best advice from Guiliano’s book having read Taubes first and knowing where the text was probably flat-out incorrect.

I really think everyone ought to read Why We Get Fat. Everyone in America, especially, including the dietitians, personal trainers and doctors out there (hear me, family? ). If you disagree with Taubes, that’s perfectly fine. But you might want to do some research of your own to decide whether you disagree because you’ve been told otherwise, or because you can find evidence that contradicts the stuff he’s found.

Basically, Taubes argues that what we all know about weight management—that you must balance calories in/calories out, that saturated fat causes heart disease, etc.—is almost certainly wrong. I first heard about Taubes when i read his article for the New York Times entitled Is Sugar Toxic?, and i realized that he wasn’t just restating the obvious nutritional advice that we’ve all heard a thousand times, but was actually doing real research on the subject. So i sat up and paid attention, and i wasn’t too happy to learn what i did from his book. Meat is one of the best foods for us. Carbs, especially highly-processed ones like sugar and white flour, are almost certainly the worst. And while the book is very focused and sticks nearly exclusively to explaining the question raised by its title, it is quickly mentioned toward the end of the book (with no less convincing evidence) that carbs are probably also what cause many cancers, heart disease and diabetes. So even though i’m not a fat person, i feel like i should cut that crap out of my diet as much as possible for the rest of my life.

Have i started to do so? Absolutely not. Nathan and i have probably consumed more doughnuts since i read that book than ever before in our lives. But we’re thinking really hard about it.

French Women Don’t Get Fat was a different animal entirely. Guiliano cites nary a source nor study in her text, though she does refer to a whopping three individuals for whom her method has made a little bit of difference, in addition to her own fat-to-skinny tale. The basics of her philosophy are: enjoy what you eat as much as possible but eat moderate portions, especially of treats like bread (carbs), chocolate (carbs), desserts (carbs), fruit juices (carbs) and alcohol (carbs); walk a lot; and drink a lot of water.

Interestingly, there’s a lot of overlap between her approach to staying in shape and Taubes’s, despite the fact that Guiliano dismisses the low-carb approach to food as “ridiculous” and thinks that to practice that way of eating is to “risk heart disease” (not true). Everything that she says to eat in especially small amounts is a high-carb food (with the exception of meat). She and Taubes both advocate drinking a lot of water and eating plenty of greens. Both authors recommend eating plenty of soup as well, and limiting the intake of alcohol (especially beer, *sniff*) to a very low amount. Both advocate eating large meals and disdain snacking, and neither of them sees the point of intensive exercise as a method for weight loss when the result of it is almost always an increased appetite and calorie intake.

But from reading Why We Get Fat i can tell Guiliano that walking twenty minutes each day is not going to help anyone lose weight, either. It’s certainly not a bad idea and nothing ill is going to result from it, but it’s the diet that’s going to reduce a person’s waistline, not the evening stroll. She claims that those few extra burned calories “really add up,” but as Taubes points out, that can’t possibly be true unless everyone whose weight doesn’t fluctuate at all is consuming a very perfect number of calories every single day. Consider that if a person ate just twenty extra calories each day, it would take only a couple of decades for those calories to add up to an extra fifty pounds if the calorie balance imperative is true. Conversely, if a person were undereating by just twenty calories each day, she would steadily waste away over the years.

The body handles different types of calories in different ways. I’m not going to attempt to re-hash the science in Taubes’s book, because i didn’t take notes and i’d probably get it slightly wrong. But it made perfect sense to me. You should read the book, especially if you think what i’m saying is a bunch of bull.

And i think there’s a lot of truth, too, to the French idea that while Americans enjoy gorging on huge portions of food, we might actually enjoy it more if we stopped thinking of it as “sinful” and took the time to really think about and taste what we’re eating. I also thought Guiliano’s advice to cook a lot, avoid processed foods and try to eat a lot of local, seasonal produce was sage advice that would do a lot for our country. If only it were as cheap and easy to shop a farmer’s market as it is to hit up Subway, eh?

The first book i finished this year was Stephen Hawking’s new collaborative work The Grand Design. Hawking piqued a lot of people’s interest by ending his bestseller A Brief History of Time with the poetic assertion that a unifying theory of physics would allow us to “know the mind of God.” In his new book, it is revealed that Hawking, as a scientist, actually sees no place for God in the creation of the universe.

The book was interesting by default, but it was a little bit hard to follow. For the most part i understood it, thanks to all the YouTube videos i’ve watched about quantum physics and the multiverse theory. There were just a couple of brief points in the book at which i felt that i was in totally over my head, and this is coming from someone who, admittedly, never even took high school physics. It seemed, though, that the argument against a creator wasn’t all that clearly spelled out. The book was more of a discussion of the current state of physics and how it’s trying to find a unifying theory, possibly to no avail. It’s the idea that time began when our universe—which may be one of an infinite number of universes—began, at the big bang, that shoves God out of the picture; but that point is only lightly touched upon in the book.

So i wouldn’t call this another atheist text by any means. It’s really more of an overview of quantum physics; it doesn’t seem to be meant as an argument for the nonexistence of God, and i think it was just played up by the publisher in that respect as a way of selling more copies. I’ve found that people of faith don’t base their belief in God on what scientists have discovered about the nature of the universe, anyway, no matter how famous or intelligent those scientists may be. I recommend this book to people like me who have watched those YouTube vids and would like to know a little more about the physics behind all the crazy-sounding findings in physics without getting too deep into the nitty-gritty science. And if you have faith, i doubt this book will shake it much.

I wrote about several of the books i read this year, but a few of the ones that i neglected share a common theme so i’ll write about them now. The theme is the human brain; two can be categorized as “psychology” but the third is more of a neuroanatomy sort of book. I picked up Why We Love as part of the “research” i did this year on love & marriage. Helen Fisher is the leading expert on attraction and love in terms of the human mind. I should have written down what i took away from the book when it was fresh in my mind, but i think it boils down to this: opposites similar people attract; love is a real thing with measurable effects on the brain, much like a drug; and love can last but it changes from passionate to companionate love after a time, due to the possibility that humans evolved the ability to love in order to want to raise babies together and once those babies are independent enough, the parents’ connection is no longer really needed. Why We Love is definitely worth a read. Here’s a TED talk by Helen Fisher that i highly recommend:

The second brain book that i read this year was The Pursuit of Happiness by David G. Myers. I picked the book up partly because i really enjoyed Myers’ Psychology textbook back in college, and partly because a friend had recommended it to me. Or so i thought—i think i may have actually gotten it confused with Stumbling on Happiness or some other book by a similar name. It’s an interesting look at the things that correspond to happiness in people, but any good psychologist knows that correlation does not equal causation. Myers emphasized the fact that people of faith are in general happier without exploring the possibility that there may be another factor involved. It turns out that Myers is a big advocate of faith, but personally i’m less interested in whether faith is good for me than what the truth actually is about God. It did make me think twice about trying to convince people of God’s nonexistence though, which is part of why i’ve written—and said—a lot less about atheism this year.

The last brain book that i read this year was My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Taylor is a neuroanatomist who just happened to suffer a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain, and of course recognized acutely as it was happening what exactly was going in inside her head. I had been eyeing this book for quite a while but hesitated to pick it up after watching her TED talk about the experience, due to the fact that her perspective of it waned queerly nonscientific. The book reflects the TED talk pretty closely, but it was fascinating to get the play-by-play of the events of the day of the stroke and the days that followed. It’s amazing how delicate yet resilient the human brain is, and how compartmentalized it actually is. I did find it odd that Taylor knew for a fact that her euphoric post-stroke feelings were due to the incapacitation of the left hemisphere of her brain and yet she believes that she was in fact having a metaphysical experience; as though her brain had to be severely damaged in order that she might experience the true nature of the universe. Of course you’re going to have a pretty different experience of reality when half your brain is practically destroyed, right? Isn’t that a given…?

Anyway, it was a really interesting book and worth a read. I can’t say that the books i selected to read this year were very entertaining ones, but i can’t decide if that’s really a quality i want to seek out in my reading material. I tend to go for the “things that make you go ‘hmmm,’” if you know what i mean. Movies, on the other hand, i expect to thrill me, and i’m always a little disappointed when they don’t.

EDIT 12/30: Damn it, i totally forgot to include What Shamu Taught Me About Love And Marriage in this post; another book about psychology and relationships. That one was pretty delightful.

I didn’t.

I hope to never again read a book about being a writer. Every writer has to write about being a writer and i find it terribly boring. People who make documentaries rarely pepper their films with coverage of what it’s like to be a filmmaker – hell, people don’t often make films about their own lives at all. But the Memoir is this genre of books where writers write about their ordinary writer lives and try to paint them as being interesting somehow and it’s just… boring.

Anyway. About the book. It’s mercifully short and padded with recipes, which i thought was a nice touch since most of the book is a description of cooking this or that meal. Maisto attempts to use these meals as an illustration of a transformation she undergoes while being engaged, but there is absolutely no soul to the book. She describes starting to resent cooking when it becomes her “job” in the house. Her mother – mercilessly – always told Michelle that marrying her father and becoming a housewife was a mistake, and Maisto seems to be deathly afraid of repeating her mother’s mistakes (just like every other feminist i’ve been reading lately). But in the end she realizes that she has always loved cooking and still does and is not in fact being oppressed because she finds herself in the kitchen on a daily basis. Duh.

There’s just no passion in the writing. And her fiance sounds like a royal pain in the ass, by the way. Not that Maisto complains about him, ever. She doesn’t seem to actually realize that he is, in fact, a pain in the ass. There’s no humor in the book, nothing really sentimental or moving is said, and i took nothing away from it except for a reinforced notion that young women are actually afraid of doing more than fifty percent of the housework now for any reason, even if they enjoy it. She doesn’t have a meal planned. She throws out a few ideas. Her fiance whines. They finally settle on something. She cooks. They eat and are satisfied. This happens repeatedly, and this is pretty much all that happens. And the story ends days before the wedding. I DIDN’T EVEN GET TO HEAR ABOUT THE WEDDING. The only aspect of wedding planning she seems to enjoy is choosing the food; even her description of dress shopping is excruciatingly dull. I mean, come on – this is your wedding. Have a little fun, for God’s sake.

What it refers to, perhaps obviously, is a wedding dress. When Gilman and her fiancé become engaged, they decide to buck tradition and do things their own way. By and by they find that even if all you want is a DJ and a few guests you still have to have a place to put them and something to feed them, and in spite of themselves they become absorbed in the process of planning the whole affair. But the one thing Susan absolutely won’t have is the traditional wedding dress. As a feminist, she protested Fashion Week in college and wore clothes of a unique punk/vintage style, avoiding conformity to gender roles and societal expectations. Why dress up like some sort of storybook fantasy character to begin a life with a man who has to love you for who you are at your least glamorous? Marriage is a very real, quotidian thing and shouldn’t be treated as though it were some fairy tale. “Let’s face it. I’m neither royalty nor a virgin,” Gilman writes. “In a traditional wedding gown, I’d just be a hypocrite in a pouffy white dress.”

But at her friends’ urging, Gilman goes to a bridal shop and tries on a few dresses just in case. What she finds is a dress that makes her feel gorgeous and a whole new perspective on fashion’s role in feminism. She writes:

Every woman should have this experience – and not only if or when she gets married. Every woman should see herself looking uniquely breathtaking in something tailored to celebrate her body, so that she is better able to appreciate her own beauty and better equipped to withstand the ideals of our narrow-waisted, narrow-minded culture.

At the beginning of the chapter i felt like a bad feminist for not sharing her total aversion to all things traditional in the realm of marriage, but by this paragraph i felt vindicated.

I noticed that Gilman had the same sort of attitude toward marriage that Elizabeth Gilbert expressed in Committed, which is this general feeling of disgust with the idea of becoming legally married despite her devotion to her partner. Both women are feminists and feel that marriage is in many ways not good for a woman, partly because she has to sacrifice her ambitions in order to play the role of “wife.”

I’m not really sure what to think of this. My first reaction was to think that these women, along with a lot of other young people i’ve heard express this same view lately, are perhaps just making excuses to cover up the fact that they really aren’t willing to commit 100%. The way i see it, if you’ve already pledged loyalty to your partner, then you stand to lose nothing and gain a few pretty important benefits by getting married. So why do these women feel the need to reason with themselves that marriage is really some sort of rebellion in order to make peace with walking down the aisle? Are they really just that concerned about filling trite, stereotypical gender roles that they let their lives be governed by that fear? Or is a writing career truly hindered somehow by the duties of being a wife? Personally, i think it’s raising children that’s the huge sacrifice, not getting married.

Your thoughts? I’ve re-written the latter half of this post several times now, and i’ve decided to just end it here with a couple of questions and one unsupported statement rather than try to explain myself. The topic is just too vast; i could do a lot of research and write a very large paper on the topic of Whether Marriage is Good For Women. I suppose i shouldn’t criticize anyone for stepping back and really asking themselves if getting married is the right thing for them to do. But i think when the time is right, the answer has to be a very clear and confident YES. Single ladies: do your deliberating now.

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.