The Golden Notebook -- Lessing

Aborted

The Summer of the Bear -- Bella Pollen

The Summer of the Bear is another book rescued from the pile of sun-bleached pool-side "recyclables".  It was the only brick in the pile that seemed to be without a serial killer or military adventures,  with the added bonus of having a bear in the title which sold me before I could read the back flap.  Like To Kill a Mockingbird, the book is divided into chapters that cycle through the characters one by one: the bear (or his wrestler-owner, I can't make out just yet), Letty, the bereaved mother of Georgie, Alba and James, however, it is in the narrator's omnipresent voice, rather than the character's.  It is set during the Cold War, which may explain why, after reading this until 3am last night, I dreamt of war myself.  I remember being told that there was a GPS coordinate where we had to go to defend ourselves.  I didn't want to be involved, but there I was, at the end of a dark street. There was nothing happening there, but we could here gunshots and saw that across a dark body of water there were tall hills where machine gun wielding planes were taking off, headed towards us.  We started to run back the way we came but the planes kicked up a thick fog of dirt and I couldn't breathe. I pulled a scarf over my nose and noticed that it was a red and white Arab headscarf, and was worried that I would be taken for an enemy.  We came out into a plateia where all the young people had similar scarves and I ran through them to a movie theater, where no one was aware that we were at war.  My husband threw 2 euros to the ticket taker who was my unrequited high school love, Duncan, and told him we were going to the bathroom. He said he would show us where it was and led us to a large underground ballroom where the bathrooms led to underground tunnels where we were meant to either protect ourselves or spread the word that we were under attack.  I wondered if Duncan could take better care of me than my husband and felt immediately guilty. In a room with very yellow light i saw my family and my daughter was spraying her whole body with my deoderant.  She was very thin, standing behind a ladder, wearing a peach dress.  I noticed my bag was torn and full of crap in the lining. My dad put it in a bag with paplomata and gave me a needle and sent me to the tailor to have it fixed.  I was surprised that the tailor had other customers during war time and wondered why i had such a large needle for him.  When I woke up it was after noon, I was groggy and still stuck in this dream world for hours afterwards.  

Two Weeks Later

I finished this book slowly, one paragraph at a time.  This is the second book I've read this summer about a father dying.  Life, unfortunately, imitates art.  How I wish the spirit of my father were in a bear who would come to save me from my broken heart.  I have to wonder if that dream of war and tailors that I had the night before my father's stroke, was a precursor to the battle we just fought and lost, if that big needle my dad gave me was to mend what broke?  It's unmendable. 

The Island of Doctor Moreau -- H.G. Wells

I'm a Stranger Here Myself -- Bill Bryson

Last fall I organized the tumbling bookshelves that make up the library at Odyssey. It was raining on Poros and Annette was nearby, editing her food blog, asking for grammar advice.  The Dutch like to use short sentences. Sometimes they do not make sense in English.  Anyhoo, I noticed this book then and found it kind of boring, but this summer I picked it up thinking that Pano might like it (he wouldn't) and found a new appreciation for it. I'm a Stranger Here Myself could have been written by Dave Berry (who Pano detests), but it's not, so the zippy closing one liner is a little less contrived.  He's a little more educated and not quite as silly, so it's a matter of taste as to which one is polio and which one is cholera.  I can definitely identify with anyone trying to make heads or tales out of a return to his birth place, and I like that he uses British colloquialisms without feeling a need to explain himself. Except for his background in economics and penchant for khaki pants, I feel like we have a lot of similarities.  I don't know if the stories are strong enough to have influenced my dreams yet, but there's still time. I'll get back to that.

The Covenant of Genesis -- McDermott

Picked up The Covenant of Genesis from a book exchange on the island for lack of better options and because I am a sticker for Ancient Civilizations. So much so that I will arbitrarily capitalize those words when put together.  The author mentions plot points from previous books and so I realize that this is not the first of his books that I've read and I'm certain that I've attained the previous McDermott missive in exactly the same way.  The writing is mostly violent action sequences that sound like pleas for Hollywood to take notice. Exploding eyeballs, hanging goats used as sheilds, bombed archaeological sites and control centers with flaying electrical wires... These are a few of his favorite things, and so I'm half reading, half skimming and chanting "blah blah blah".  I wish it were a little more Dan Brown and a little less Mario Puzo, but I guess it's OK for a summer read that you can forget until the next installment you find waiting for you at a beach bar somewhere down the line.

The Ultimate Frontier -- Kueshana

Super interesting, but after a few pages raging alarm bells go off.  I picked up this book because it was the only thing in English at the house in Samothraki.  We pulled the beds outside and I feel asleep reading under the stars.  Last year I had a lot of trouble sleeping for some time, until one night when I envisioned my ideal sleeping environment, outside, in a cove of trees with an opening to the night sky. It worked, I felt safe and embraced.  Whenever i feel too crazy to sleep, i envision that cozy cove around me, and I'm alseep in seconds.  The second night I feel asleep in Pano's yard in Samothraki, I realized that I was experiencing the exact thing I had pulled from the ether in my room in Ventura.  Strange that this is the night I would begin reading a book that explains that we are essentially existing in four coexistent, interpenetrating bodies; the physical (our bodies, bound to time and of which we are most aware), the Vital body, which exists on the etheric plane, maintaining the spark of life, responsible for the phenomena ascribed to the genes; the astral body, which is on the third plane of existence, which we use after three death of the physical body; and the mental body, which is our highest form of awareness.  Coincidence/irony that i am reading about the astral body which is not bound by time on the night I realize I've already been where I am at that moment, book in hand.  These concepts are not new or innovative, but interesting to revisit and form a deeper understanding of.  However, in reading reviews of this book, I can see where the alarm bells are coming from... Eklal Kueshana is the nom de plume given to the author and autobiographer, Richard Kieninger, by "the mysterious Dr. White, who tells him that he is The Judge of Israel, responsible for choosing the enlightened and starting a new society with the teachings he will receive from the Masters throughout his life.  Creepers. I was enjoying the story until I realized that he would go on to predict the end of America in 1976, and of the world in may 2001.  Later editions conveniently leave these dates out. Anyways, it's still an interesting read, if you aren't too worried about the people he duped into liquidating everything to move to his society in Stelle Il. I'm kind of looking forward to the chapters on how the world will end 14 years ago.

Pieces -- Maria Kostaki

I loved/lived this book in the 24 hours in which I devoured it.  I have known the author of this book since I was in sixth grade at TASIS.  She was a couple of years older than me and really into A-ha.  I remember telling me they were my favorite band and she asked me when Morten Harket's birthday was and I was so embarrassed, realizing that I wasn't a real fan.  Ever since then I never say anything is my favorite, lest I be asked for obscure information on the subject.  ANYWAY.  As a child I looked up to her, and later, in college I got to know and like her much better, although we were never very close, she's been in the periphery of my life for about 30 years.  I know her family and friends and she knows mine, so I realize that me gushing over her book might be biased just a tinge, but I still thing it's amazing on any level.  She writes with such incredible detail that I can see and smell everything as it's happening in the story. In part, it is because she is writing about Athens and being from there and elsewhere, as we all were at TASIS and ACS.   The time she spends at TASIS in her book brought back memories of things I hadn't visited since they happened in 1989.  She writes the letter as though out were a letter to her unscrupulous father (think Boris' father in The Goldfinch), and had me on the verge of tears, my heart in my throat, throughout.  Reading the book back in Greece with the cicadas screaming in the background imbued the whole experience with an explosive nostalgia for me.  The night after I read it I dreamed that my friends and family had to sacrifice me so that Mary Sexson (a family friend that we met at the same time that Maria entered my life, or I entered hers) could become president of the United States.