Archive for the 'Books, T.V. & Movies' Category

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These are a few of my books

Published on January 30, 2009 by Corinna Carlson | 0 Comments

A-C

So basically I love books you need only be reading here for a day, maybe even only a minute to figure that one out.  Although I wish I owned every book I have ever read I don’t, I’d also like my shelves to run straight up and down the wall but this place was not painted when we moved in [2004] so if we move the shelves someone has to come in here and so where would I go while the paint smell clears because most people I know have real jobs, plus it would be headache city up in here.  I think the saving grace here is because of how my books are set up at present even if they did run straight up and down the wall at this point they wouldn’t fit anyway, because they would have to be perfectly aliened and perfectly spaced so this asymmetrical set up I have now is I GUESS for the best. If Adam was not extremely good at his job there’s just no way these shelves would be holding.

C-H

I like to keep my books in alphabetical order by release date. In or around 2003 I started to put my finish date on the inside cover page but have yet to go through them all to catalogue.  Although Adam knows what to do with me when I kick the bucket some day, he does not know my wishes for my books because I don’t either, I do have a lot of first edition first printings those would likely be the only ones I’d assign to specific people.  Oddly with all the time I spend thinking of death I can’t think of even one book I’ve thought of to pass on yet they all hold major emotional attachment for me.

K-R

I re-arranged my books as a way to try and help myself keep moving even if it is only in the apartment and get myself out of what I will now simply refer to as a re-lapse, thank you Capegirl.  And even though yesterday I was done [again], the shrink is still right the down times are not for as long. [I have to keep reminding myself of that even if it's EVERY DAY that I happen to feel good] Yes the intensity is there but when I wake up like say today and can hardly remember the last two days but I know I feel decent I have to stop looking at it as riding it out till the next crash, I know that is part of my problem and I know it is common, it is technically easier to be in the depths of despair and not care than put one foot in front of the other some days. I often wonder if my shrink watched me on hidden camera for two weeks like on What Not to Wear if he’d change my diagnosis but he is insistent that I am not bi-polar.  But yes oh yes do I ever have manic tendencies.

R-W

If you can’t read the book titles the photos are set up so that if you click the photo you can view it bigger.  Even I click to view all sizes and all I need do is look up at the bloody wall.

rando 2 - middle shelf, selfhelp, love, some books i hated and stuff.

Great Books, Great Women

Published on January 21, 2009 by Corinna Carlson | 0 Comments

Around the end of last year I was invited to join a new book club, after the debacle that was the last book club I was in and how negative of a feeling it left me with, a feeling that followed and haunted me for too long, mainly because I loved being in a book club but I now recognize that particular one was simply not the right fit for me.

book club december.

When I read back over the post I wrote on being kicked out of the previous club I’m rather disgusted with myself due to my negativity, anger and hostility.  It is comforting to know that I was a completely different person back then, I’m also glad the comments are gone, from my botched move to WordPress because it had some very true comments about my attitude although I’m not embarrassed to say I still agree with most of what I wrote it just could have been written a hell of a lot better.  This also brings me back to my work on changes in perspective and myself in general, I’m not proud that I used to be THAT big a of a bitch, unfortunately I was then mind you, but I’m content that I can read it over and see the sadness, the hurt, the place I was coming from and as I did and am continuing to do, I’m learning from it.

The new club is great although there is still structure, we all read the same book, we all bring food related to the book when possible and wine for some, this book club is so much more laid back, I don’t feel like I’m in some classroom.  In my last book club there was a test on every book and prizes NO talking about the book in any way shape or form until book club which I personally still stick to but I don’t care if others don’t, to each their own but believe it or not I can actually keep my lips sealed for six weeks waiting for the next book club meeting.

my side.

Since I joined there have been four books read and I have made two meetings, one I missed because I was away and one I missed because I let some personal shit going on at the time get to me and I couldn’t leave my house.

So far we have read and discussed:

  • The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice – I LOVED this book, and highly recommend it although it does contain more than one editing error it is still worth the read.
  • Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez – this is the only book so far I have not read I was in Ontario for the meeting.
  • The Condition by Jennifer Haigh – This was my pick and I missed the meeting, but still finished the book, I did enjoy it although it dragged in places but over all I would recommend it.
  • Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee – This book made me realize how awesome this book club really is the content of this novel was heavy set in post-apartheid South Africa it deals with violence in many layers just when you think it can’t get worse it does, the central character a cynical middle aged snotty academic who seemingly doesn’t even know what the word change means must find away out of his darkness, out of his disgrace.

Although the content was heavy and we all had strong opinions they were all heard and we had a great talk, as mentioned in the post on my old book club most of the ladies would not even read the book I picked because it was too scary for them. It was a fictional novel for crying out loud; this book although still fiction is not far off what really went on in South Africa or rather still goes on.  I can’t be happier to have found an open minded bunch of ladies to discuss real issues with whilst enjoying BOOKS!

books.

Next up is Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.  That is all I will say on that although I do love having Adam to bounce stuff off of now and I read out passages I love or loathe to him and even though I did say I wouldn’t join another book club without men in it I’ve realized that I don’t need to be in a book club with men [not saying I'd mind] I simply needed to open up my mind and go with it.  I am still always going to leave meetings worried I’ve spoken too much, interrupted too much, gotten too personal in regards to how the book relates to my life but these things are normal to my person and my own inner struggles, I do waste a lot of energy on negative attentional bias and allow it to stress me out, but I am not letting it torture me like I used to instead I just keep on reading.

Changes in perspective.

Published on January 11, 2009 by Corinna Carlson | 0 Comments

doing my homework. One of the things I love the most after almost six years with Adam is how we can find ourselves talking for hours and hours and hours on end and the amount of laughter included in said hours of talking is enough to give my abs more of a work out than working out.

The other day we started to discuss perspective.  Pretty basic but we were baked and even though I knew it wasn’t new, this knowledge felt new like WOW people can go fuck themselves when they read not just my blog but anyone’s blog for that matter and think holy past hasher. Some blogs are like that yes, they are just noise there is nothing to learn from them or their content, but I’m not talking about those people or those blogs I’m talking about people who accept the lessons in this life, the good lessons, the bad lessons and it doesn’t matter who or where they come from. There is no one we meet that we shouldn’t be able to learn at least one lesson from and we have the choice to view that person as a good or a bad teacher from the standpoint of being able to recognize that just because you may not like someone it in no way means that you still can’t learn what sometimes turns into many lessons from them.

I have always lived by these philosophies when it comes to teachers and learning.  But I have just recently been able to view it from a much higher level.  It seems no coincidence to me that shortly after having this conversation with my husband I opened up Attachment, by John Bowlby and read the following on the very first page:

What had deceived me was that my furrows had been started from a corner diametrically opposite to the one at which Freud had entered and through which analysts have always followed.  From a new viewpoint a familiar landscape can sometimes look very different.

My shrink has been trying to get me to start reading this book for close to two months now, and as mentioned I noticed myself slipping into some old behaviors over the past couple of days, I caused myself minor bodily harm, I had actually started the real downward spiral about a week before Christmas, I spent Christmas in a functional coma with prescription drugs that are prescribed but NOT prescribed for me to abuse.  I became sick of myself and finally grabbed the book. To have it validate a conversation that ended moments before I picked it up not only says to me that my shrink is more than right for the reasons he wants me to read this book but that even though it will realistically take me six plus months to get through, I should have started it before it was even recommended.  One of the main things we are working on at present in my sessions is my learning to deal with and mourn the loss of the Ideal Parent. It is apparently a huge challenge but I have been guaranteed it is a piece to my puzzle.

There are a lot of things that I have been through with my depression and just as a woman in general that I want to share and write about but I find myself not so much held back by judgment because I let judgment get to me very rarely but held back by a the fear of rehashing. To me writing about tragic events from the past isn’t rehashing and even if they were it is my blog I can write what I want, but all those things have shaped me, made me who I am and as I grow older when I think about them and how I want to write about them it is with new eyes and new perspective.  It makes me excited to share, even the seriously heavy shit.

The Year in Books

Published on December 30, 2008 by Corinna Carlson | 16 Comments

Totally didn’t even make my minimum reading quota for this year.  I blame this on having one and a half break downs. The half one, I guess I’ll call it a mini break; I’m still having, YAY for break downs!

I’m only going to finish twenty-one books this year I’m supposed to read at least twenty-four.

self portrait #reading

Yesterday I had an epiphany thinking of sneaky ways I could pull off three more books in under two days, I’ve never really been able to decide when people ask me what super power I want because they all sound pretty cool and all but call me crazy I have decided I want to be able to speed read. How is this even a super power? Easy, I could also work undercover for anyone who needed it reading documents and intelligence super fast helping catch serial killers and environmental terrorists and those other freaky terrorists. I’d even get to be on Heroes Season Five.  Not to mention I could read 100′s of books a year. I am so sinfully jealous of fast readers.

There is one exception to what will be the final count. Adam agrees with me that technically I should get one extra credit for The Turn of the Screw, Henry James.  I did not finish this book but I attempted to read it twice, I read the first sixty-three pages two times. That would put me at twenty-two.

These are the books I did read.

1. Animal Farm, George Orwell
2. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
3. Dry, Augusten Burroughs
4. The Last Days of Socrates, Plato
5. The Undomestic Goddess, Sophie Kinsella
6. Tori Amos Piece by Piece, Tori Amos and Anne Powers
7. Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris
8. Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels
9. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
10. Under the Skin, Michel Faber
11. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris
12. sTORI telling, Tori Spelling w/Hilary Liftin
13. On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan
14. A Wolf at the Table, Augusten Burroughs
15. Snuff, Chuck Palahniuk
16. The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets, Eva Rice
17. The Definitive Edition, The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
18. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
19. Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach
20. The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold
21. The Condition, Jennifer Haigh

reading right now

In July I did a mass review that covered a random selection of books on the above list, my review of The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger appeared in the zine Estella’s Revenge and I did a full on review of my Sony eBook as well as the book Stiff, Mary Roach because it was probably the number one book of the year. Because of that book I just recently discovered having watched it twice over this horrid holiday season that the scene in Love Actually where Liam Neeson HAS to play, at his late wife’s funeral,  the montage of photos set to the Bay City Rollers version of Bye Bye Baby (Baby Goodbye) now bugs me A LOT.  Both times I yelled at the TV.  I still seriously love that movie; that particular book just happened to change my life.

I am really looking forward to what books 2009 brings, I’m back in a book club which I love, I’ve missed two meetings but I’ve still read two of the three books read by the group since joining and have the book for the next meeting in my reading pile.

Just a couple of books that I already have in my possession that I hope to read next year are;

Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
The Gum Thief, Douglas Coupland
Attachment, John Bowlby
The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb
Rant, Chuck Palahniuk

I am particularly eager to start The Hour I First Believed I read that it apparently references his other two books, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much is True; I can’t wait to see how those characters play into the eight hundred page book that is ninety six pages shorter than his last book.

saturday morning.

I did not like Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels, seriously stick to poetry please. Under the Skin, Michel Faber was horrid, I read it because I found it on the 1001 books to read before you die list and I already owned it and I can not for the life of me figure out WHY it is on that list, maybe to free up bed space in hospitals? I also despised YES DESPISED The Time Traveler’s Wife. But I’ve bashed it enough this year.  The rest I would highly recommend. Other than Stiff if I had to pick a favourite this year it would have to be Tori Amos Piece by Piece, Tori Amos and Anne Powers and Snuff, Chuck Palahniuk which equals three favourites because I can’t pick one of anything except one Adam Bradley Carlson.

Please feel free to leave your favourite reads of 2008 in the comments because I am always looking for great new reads.