Tag: Inspirational

by C.S. Lewis

I read Lewis\’ Narnia books over and over when I was young. It was years before I realized the stories were based on Christian theology, and I didn\’t read any of his nonfiction works until I was in college. This was the first one I opened. The Screwtape Letters is a collection of imagined epistles that a senior devil writes to his younger nephew, Wormwood. The letters include lots and lots of advice, but not from the usual perspective- in this case, Screwtape is coaching his nephew in the craft of tempting human souls into evil. Lewis has plenty to say about good and evil, flaws in human nature, and various moral issues. What makes it all so interesting is to examine this from such a backwards perspective, one that in encouraging evil, proposes to show the reader how to guard against it. There\’s also a sort of portrait of one ordinary man that Wormwood is focusing his efforts on. Through the young devil\’s appeals for advice and Screwtape\’s criticism of his technique, an vague picture is formed of this one man\’s life- how his soul alternately wavers and progresses in his journey through life. There really isn\’t much plot in this book, although I was surprised at how humorous it could be, and the two devils do develop a certain amount of character. I would say its main interest is in the theology, and the wry examination of human nature.

Rating: 3/5                       209 pages, 1942

More opinions at:
It\’s All About Books
Black Sheep Books
The Wardrobe
The Church of No People
Music of the Night(engale)

by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
translated by Katherine Woods

When I was a teen I loved The Little Prince. It was one of my comfort reads, and I turned its pages many, many times. Now it rests on the shelf of \”big-kid books\” my daughter is always anxious to peruse, and she chose it for bedtime stories through the past week.

And I\’m sorry to say I was disappointed. I don\’t know if my memories are nostalgically rosy, or I\’ve become more cynical, or it\’s just not really a suitable book for kids. But I found reading it aloud tedious. The sentences are not smooth, or at least they didn\’t feel so coming off my tongue. It might be the translation, I\’m sure it\’s more lyrical in the original. The story jumps back and forth with little explanation, and it was quite confusing for my four-year-old. (Reading it in very short segments became easier, because she would forget what came before and not expect it to follow a linear time-line). It begins with the author (who is a pilot) describing how as a child he made drawings which grown-ups could not understand, then jumps to an incident when as an adult he crashed his airplane in the desert and met a child wandering there alone. This little boy he called \”the Little Prince,\” and their first meeting is a conversation about a drawing of a sheep the Little Prince wants. The author tries to find out what the Little Prince is doing in the desert, where he came from, why he wants a sheep, etc. but he never gets a straight answer and has to piece it all together, slowly.

It turns out the Little Prince is a visitor from a star, a little planet far away. Rebuked by a vain, proud rose he cares for (yes, the flower talks) he runs away to visit other planets. He meets grown-ups obsessed with singular occupations whose purpose make little sense to the Little Prince. He applies a child\’s logic and perspective to everything and shows the reader how foolish grown-up concerns can be. He learns some wisdom about friendship from a fox, and teaches the pilot his pearls of wisdom. The shining message I glean from The Little Prince is about the importance of friendship, about the value of things you love. My favorite quote from the book sums it up very well: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Rating: 3/5                       92 pages, 1943

More opinions at:
Overdue Books
Giving Reading a Chance
Uniquely Priya

Fifty Americans Share Lessons in Living
edited by Erica Goode

A collection of letters from adults written to children offering insight, advice, moral guidance and encouragement, often sharing their own experiences. These are not only from parent to child but also directed at grandchildren, nieces and nephews, or kids that the adults have mentored in some way. Written by celebrities as well as ordinary everyday people, the authors of these Letters to Our Children come from all walks of life, but their counsel all has a common thread. They care deeply about and feel responsible for these children, and want to pass on values and integrity learned in their own lives. Many of the letters discuss issues the authors found difficult to address in face-to-face conversation, which made them more interesting to me. Some I found very inspiring, others not so much. This is a book I picked up at random when visiting someone\’s home and looking for reading material. I wasn\’t expecting much, and was pleasantly surprised.

Rating: 3/5                        256 pages, 1996

by Betty Eadie

I read this book out of pure curiosity after being told not to. Now I can\’t recall who warned me against reading it, or why they did so. In Embraced by the Light, Betty Eadie recounts a near-death experience she had when dying on a operating table, then being revived. Most of the book is about her experience visiting \”heaven\” and all the questions she had answered there, told in lots of details. I was rather surprised to find that a lot of concepts were very close to those taught in the LDS church, is she Mormon? The book is written in a very simplistic style, so it\’s a pretty quick read. There\’s a lot of internal contradictions, and although the main message seems to be one of acceptance and unconditional love, overall it came across as being rather cheesy and unbelievable. I rate it a \”2\” because at least I finished it, and at the time it made me think about some religious ideas. I remember discussing it some with A. But now I can\’t remember most of the details. It was pretty forgettable. I categorize it here under \”Inspirational\” books because well, that\’s the topic and I know lots of people have found it inspiring. But I didn\’t. Oh, and I really dislike the cover image. Something about it just makes me cringe.

Rating: 2/5               147 pages, 1992

An Inquiry into Values
by Robert M. Pirsig

This is one book I know I didn\’t understand well. On the surface it is two things: the story of a father and son\’s road trip across the USA on a motorcycle, and a philosophical exploration of how we think and experience the world. One of the most curious things about it is something I haven\’t seen mentioned in other reviews, but I do want to speak of it.

***** S P O I L E R * A L E R T *****
Throughout the book, the father is chasing the ghost of his own past. Apparently when he was teaching rhetoric at a university he became so involved in the philosophical question \”what is QUALITY?\” that it literally drove him insane. He was committed to a hospital, where he received electromagnetic shock that literally \”erased his personality\” so that his memory is full of holes, his son recognizes that dad is not the same person anymore, and he calls the self he was before the incident by another name, Phaedrus. During the journey he visits the old university and runs into people who remember him as the professor and don\’t realize he\’s a stranger now. It\’s kind of weird. And the son is apparently showing signs of pending mental instability himself. All this is revealed in a few brief sentences that I totally missed the first time I read this book!

I liked reading the parts where Phaedrus tested his theories on his students, where quality is described as being a pervasive force that can permeate everything in one\’s life, where methods of problem-solving (illustrated via the motorcycle) were outlined. But most of these things didn\’t come until the second half or near end of the book. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the kind of book that made my head hurt, and I had to put it aside after every chapter or so. Let it absorb. Try and understand it. As you might have noticed, I\’ve read five other books simultaneously because I had to keep getting away from Zen. But it was intriguing enough that I kept going back until I actually finished it.

Rating: 4/5                     436 pages, 1974

by Shel Silverstein

My three year old has just discovered the Shel Silverstein books on our bookshelf, so I have read The Giving Tree to her about ten times in the last six days, and its been on my mind. It is a simple story about the friendship between a tree and a boy. At first the boy comes to the tree to play and eat her apples. As he gets older, he has different desires and takes her fruit, branches, etc to use for things. In the end, the boy is old and the tree is just a stump. When I was younger, I thought this was a beautiful story about selfless, unconditional love like that of the Christ story or a mother for her child, always giving and never needing anything more than love in return. Now I\’m not so sure; reading it again as an adult it makes me pause. It could also be seen as a one-sided, almost abusive relationship; the boy takes everything and what does he do for the tree? Why does she have to say she\’s sorry she has no more apples or branches? He took them all away! It makes me feel kind of sad; but I guess that\’s how life is sometimes. Love isn\’t always evenly reciprocated; sometimes it\’s sad, and sometimes there\’s peace in the end anyways.

Rating: 3/5                64 pages, 1964

by W. G. Ilefeldt

This inspirational memoir is a quick and comfortable read; from the perspective of a retired man looking back on his life. The author discusses his many life challenges, describing how he overcame obstacles and grew from a frustrated dyslexic child, barely able to read and write, into the published author he is today. Living in California with his wife and a border collie named Maxie, Ilefeldt is now occupied in raising sheep. He describes helping the sheep give birth, treating them for disease, protecting them from predators and parting with them at market time. Among the descriptions of daily chores with the sheep, he reflects on the beauty of the countryside, muses on life lessons the animals teach him and shares his insights on the wandering paths our lives take, tying a lot of it into God. I liked this book a lot the first time I read it, but at the second reading it did not hold as much interest for me.

Rating: 3/5                229 pages, 1988

Over the Edge and Back with My Dad, My Cat and Me
by Geneen Roth

Okay, did the title have to be so long? And wasn\’t it long enough without a subtitle attached, too? I felt it wasn\’t really an apt title for the book, either. After reading the first lines: When my friend Sally called to tell me that I needed a kitten, her cat Pumpkin was pregnant, I said no, absolutely not. I didn\’t want a pet, I didn\’t like cats, and I didn\’t want to love anything that could die before me… I was looking forward to at least something about how Roth went from disliking cats to being so deeply attached to her \”Mister Blanche\”. But there was none of that. After the first descriptions of how cute Blanche was as a fluffy kitten, the book suddenly skips ten years and launches into an exploration of the author\’s struggle to overcome years of eating disorders and emotional instability. The cat was the key to her turning point. He was the first being she could love unconditionally, without reservations. He enabled her to let down her defenses. Soon after letting Blanche into her heart, she met her boyfriend (now husband), Matt: \”for continuing to beam his living light on me day after day, I thank Matt Weinstein. Blanche opened the door to my heart, and you walked through it.\”

Not long after that, Roth had to face the possibility of her father\’s death; and went through a difficult spiritual and emotional journey to finally understand the true nature of her relationship with him (it wasn\’t as rosy as she\’d always thought). Through the heart-wrenching passage of her loss, Roth finally came to an emotional freedom she had never been able to reach with all her therapists, gurus and spiritual retreats. As if that wasn\’t enough, then she had to face the loss of her beloved cat. Finally, he comes back into the story at the end!

I found it particularly sad that it was love that ruined Blanche\’s health. He was grossly overweight because she showered him with so much luxury. He even got carried all over the house, never had to walk! All the acupuncture and holistic healers couldn\’t do much for his failing kidneys… if you read between the lines, this book says a lot about a spoiled rich lifestyle. But mostly it is about love, trust and parent-child relationships. The chapters are short, and written with a witty self-deprecating humor. Overall, The Craggy Hole in My Heart is a very engaging book and an easy read.

Rating: 3/5                        Published 2004, 238 pgs

by Richard Bach

I picked this book up from a secondhand store in Seattle many years ago, and was pretty dubious about it. In the first place, I\’m not much into romances or love stories. In the second, the out of body experiences, astral projections and dreams in which the author visits the future seemed a little far-fetched to me. I questioned whether those things really happened the way he stated. This book was written as a nonfictional account, but now some people have been finding it in the fiction section of bookstores.

That said, I really did enjoy reading The Bridge Across Forever. I found it an engrossing story, partly because it described a life so different from mine: a writer finds himself a sudden success, and goes through a bunch of ups and downs as he alternately spends his money on airplanes and looses it again. The descriptions of what it feels like to fly an airplane enthralled me. But the heart of the story is about a man seeking a perfect relationship. The problem is that he isn\’t perfect, and the woman he finally finds is portrayed as being so. He comes across as rather immature, self-centered and rude, whereas his soul-mate is full of phrases of wisdom and philosophical advice on life and love. The dialog between them is very frank and realistic, and made me laugh quite a number of times.

The sad thing is that recently I discovered that Bach left the soul-mate he wrote about in this book, after being married for twenty years, and returned to being the womanizer he was before he met her. Apparently he had left a wife and six kids before he ever met her, too! Children are never mentioned in the book at all, not as part of his past or plans for his future. It was quite disappointing to realize that he never followed all the beautiful-sounding advice he made in his book.

Rating: 3/5
           Published 1984, 316 pgs

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All books reviewed on this site are owned by me, or borrowed from the public library. Exceptions are a very occasional review copy sent to me by a publisher or author, as noted. Receiving a book does not influence my opinion or evaluation of it

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