2012 Reading Recommendations

Classmates who attended the Maine reunion started a recommended book list. I don’t think everyone knew about it or got a chance to add their favorites, but here is what we have so far. If you want to make additional suggestions, please do so by emailing Sue or posting it to this blog. So many good books; so little time!


Recommended by Marcia Tammeus:
In the Bleak Mid-Winter by Julia Spencer-Fleming (part of a series)
Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
Faith: A Novel by Jennifer Haigh
The Paris Wife: A Novel by Paula McLain (about Hemingway’s first wife)
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Recommended by Sue Hanifl
Under the Marble Sky: A Novel of the Taj Mahal by John Shors
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu by J. Maarten Troost

Recommended by Karen Wilcock:
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Catherine the Great by Robert Massy
Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

Recommended by Betsy Woodman:
The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai (three novellas; the last is set outside Mussoorie)

Recommended by Esther Jantzen:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon (about autism)
Tales of a Female Nomad by Rita Golden Gelman
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zefon

I (Hank) didn’t attend the reunion, but here are some recommendations from me:

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (described as a “biography” of cancer).

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

In the Garden of Beasts; Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson.

A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin.  (I’ve been listening to this six book series over the past year driving to and from DC.  It’s a huge commitment as each of the six books is close to 1,000 pages, but it’s great fun.)

IQ84 by Haruki Murakami

Recommended by Marilee:  Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese.

(Posted by Esther and Hank)

Betsy’s Super Website is Now Live!

For those of you who missed Betsy’s Facebook post about her website, here’s the link:

http://www.betsywoodman.com/

Good show, Betsy!  Shabash!

Music to Start Your Day

Heart warming story and a wonderful voice of Ani Choying Drolma ; a Nepali/Tibetan “Sound of Music” story.  Click here to see the NPR story and listen to a sound track.

Add These Books to Your Reading List

I highly recommend these two books.  The links, by the way, take you to GoodReads.Com, a good website to share your reading lists with friends.


Little Bee by Chris Cleave

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Marvelous story; happy, sad, insightful look at British treatment of refugees and illegal immigrants.

Book Club choice for January.
View all my reviews




Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Verghese is a super story teller. Do yourself a favor and read this book!



View all my reviews

Some Excellent Christmas Music

 

For those of you, who like me, are totally turned off the the normal Christmas music our media plays constantly from mid-November on, I highly recommend the album “Chanticleer’s Christmas” by a group named Chanticleer.  Excellent sounds and voices and good for contemplation!  It’s available for download on both iTunes and Amazon for those of you who buy music online, or you can buy the CD from Amazon.

Wild Travel Ideas, Anyone?

 

If you still have the travel bug after those years in India, here’s a recommendation: the travel archive of Tim Ferriss’s blog (the guy who wrote the bestselling The 4-Hour Work Week).  To go to his blog, click here.

I just scanned the travel section of the blog quickly. It covers a myriad of topics, especially concerning traveling in simple, inexpensive, conscious ways.
 

One recent article was on how to buy round-the-world tickets most economically. Another was on a guy who took a No Baggage Challenge and traveled for six weeks to 12 countries and 5 continents with no baggage at all. He carried minimal stuff in a vest with lots of pockets and cargo pants. Reminded me of some of the GNID guys in the Natural History Club (or whatever that group called itself).

And there are lots of additional informative, inspiring posts.

The older I get, the more vagabonding (reasonably comfortable vagabonding, that is) appeals to me. Anyone else?

Posted by Esther.

A Documentary Worth Seeing

There’s a new documentary out that we who grew up in India may want to see.

It’s about a man who was the main Muslim proponent of nonviolence—ahimsa—titled “The Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, A Torch for Peace.” He and Gandhi were great friends, together led the resistance movement to the British in India, and both spoke out against the British plan to divide India for they feared that communal enmity would arise and take hold, as indeed it has. But I certainly did not know about him (that I remember (!))

Badshah Khan, or Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890-1988), was from an aristocratic family in the warrior Pashtun community in the North-West Frontier Province, which overlaps between Afghanistan and Pakistan. (It’s now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, to be PC). He was a huge man with a violent temper as an adolescent, but somehow in early adulthood thru his Koranic and Islamic studies, came to ahimsa, to the understanding that violence and warfare solved nothing; the only real strategy for progress or political change is nonviolence. He also was a big advocate for education and women’s rights.

He was a remarkably humble yet charismatic figure. One story that the filmmaker told (it’s not in the movie) was that when Badshah Khan came into a village, he’d ask for a broom and then sweep the village square or streets for hours. (Also, interestingly, he was educated in a mission school—that also wasn’t revealed in the movie.)

In any case, he raised a nonviolent army (Khudai Khidmatgar--Servants of God) of 100,000 men and women—Hindu, Muslim, Parsee, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians—who dressed in bright red, and who came together in nonviolent struggle. In the film there are interviews with some of these warriors, all over 100 years old—and what characters they are.

Badshah Khan spent about 35 years in jail in India with the Gandhi movement and also in Pakistan, after partition in 1947. He was so popular with the people, the government feared him; he also held that the Pashtun area should be autonomous in some way, which of course, was threatening to political figures.

The filmmaker, Teri C. McLuhan, originally from Toronto, now connected with Columbia University and New York City, could have been one of us. She kind of fell into this project of documenting Badshah Khan’s life and then spent 23 years creating the film—interviewing hundreds of people, including the presidents of both Afghanistan and Pakistan; going thru thousands of documents and newsreels and films from the period; making many trips to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India, and so forth. It’s clearly her life work.

And now her challenge is to get it out to the world. Getting distribution is not easy. Not cheap. Perhaps not even safe. (She’s been threatened by people who don’t want the world to know that Islam is also a religion of nonviolence.) One of the reasons I’m writing about this is that you may know of some place in your community where it could be shown—perhaps a college where there’s a department that focuses on international studies or peace studies or such; or a church community that might be interested, or a film festival. The film won the top prize at the Middle East International Film Festival in 2009.

I don’t know for sure, but I think the filmmaker is willing to travel to speak to groups for very little $$. I got to see this documentary and hear her at CalPoly in Pomona, CA; the screening was sponsored by a small group of people who’ve created the Ahimsa Center here. I found out about it through some Indian and Pakistani friends, one of whom is on the WOSA Board.

For more info, check Badshah Khan out in Wikipedia, or just google the film. BTW, the first part of the film is a bit slow, I thought, but the ending is worth waiting for.