Books that save us/ The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Erhlich

I have had a lot of complicated illnesses in my life but the last surgery was a bit terrifying. I had a transplant (kidney-pancreas) in 2000 after three years on dialysis. In 2009, HUP discovered cancer in my "native" kidney. (They don't take out your kidneys when you have a transplant.) The surgeon decided to remove both native kidneys. Eight hour surgery then weeks waiting for results, it came back positive for Renal Cell Carcinoma. But by the grace of God it was encapsulated inside the kidney. 

No chemo no radiation nor further surgeries.

I still worry about it every day.

 

One day post op they sent a social worker to my home to have a chat, a catch up, on how I was feeling. I was stoic, I rambled on about everything but the "cancer." The SW finally looked at me and said, you know, you had cancer, you ARE a survivor, it's perfectly alright to be upset. 

I never felt like a "survivor" I felt more like I dodged the very-bad-things-in life bullet only to worry that I would be hit at some future date as my immunosuppressants were "probably" the cause. "I will worry about that later" kind of mentality took hold when I was diagnosed post op. I have life to live! I have a child to raise! A nursing career!! A thousand and one books to read!!

I also needed to escape, (she taught me imagery too but that's a blog for another day) and needed to then face the reality of life. Merge the two for better living.

 

The SW told me about this lovely book. The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich. Now, just be forewarned,  people either love her books or hates them. Now, I think Erhlich is a beautiful writer but sometimes you feel as adrift as she does. Which is the whole reason why I was recommended to read this book. Beautiful thoughts and wanting to escape our prisons of illnesses or constraints do not coincide very well inside a thoughtful soul. She was the perfect writer for me. She took her past, merged it with her escape. Found answers. Merged.

Others may read this differently but it was a perfect book for me.

From Publishers Weekly on Barnes and Noble: 

  Like many before her, poet Gretel Ehrlich discovered the therapeutic qualities of the West. In 1976, a time of personal crisis, she moved from the East to a small farm in Wyoming where she ultimately found peace of mind and inspiration. Originally, she had gone west to make a film for PBS; she returned to work with neighbors at cattle- and sheep-ranching, taking pleasure in open spaces. Ehrlich writes with sensitivity and affection about people, the seasons and the landscape. Whether she is enjoying solitude or companionship, her writing evokes the romance and timelessness of the West. 

Every reader stumbles upon a book that makes sense to them. They take that book and the author's life/voice/narrative and gently soaks it into their own chaos. It stabilizes. It breathes a bit of life back into you. I would be interested to hear what book has "saved" you when the whole world felt like a prison.

And. I wish you well.

The Winter of Our Disconnect by Susan Maushart

If there is one way to predict how bad Internet addiction is, just start by hanging out with a bunch of readers. We all bemoan our fate of too much "Facebook" etc. All the time.

And wouldn't you know.. 

FaceBOOK is like a book. With real characters that just happen to be the protagonists and antagonists in your own story. How could you go wrong?? Multiple settings, story arcs, my God it's a library right on your techno device. What's not to like?

We discussed the barriers to our reading and it always turns to this problem. The Net. And since then I have seen a few of my book friends turn to new goals, and they have been very good at keeping them. One makes sure she reads so many pages per night, one makes sure her entire Web sources are locked down and some just left and haven't returned. That's not true, they left and came back with three read books under their belt. 

I was insanely jealous. 

Focusing on time to read is hard for me, every day I wake up and say, I am going to read, end of story. What do I do? Check out the online world, news, favorite book blogs, regular blogs, Twitter, etc and then I log off and curl up with a book. Then I nod off immediately. My brain has had enough reading, time to tune out, and I do. Book falls to floor and I take a great nap. Unfortunately, I wake up to say out loud, "how the hell can I have a book blog to write for and not read??"

The book I posted, The Winter of our Disconnect, is a book I picked up a while back. Wait, no, I bought it so quickly when I found it in the book store I nearly killed myself trying to get home to read the whole thing in one sitting. It was one of those books that pushed me to clean out the superfluous crap of my online life. I set about to go online briefly and get off in one hour so I could read. It worked for awhile but it was too difficult for me to maintain. I wanted to be Susan Maushart. I really did. However, I think about this book every. single. day, does that count? No.

I want to be free from the hassles of logging on, if Susan Maushart can do this, so can I. Well. I can certainly try.

What the book is about:

An American, Susan Maushart, and her children live on the west coast of Australia.  I believe she is freshly divorced from her Aussie husband (that part is fuzzy) and going at it as a single mom. Situations pushed her into making a decision. No online life. For ONE year. One year. Can you imagine her kids and what they had to say? She pushed it to the nth degree, and the outcome was not only entertaining, well thought out and encouraging, but honest, an honest push to look at your own addictions. Even if one cannot commit the way she did, we can certainly have days where we think of her extraordinary efforts and cheer our own selves on to take a day off for a book, a game, a walk, time with family, friends, that place that's called, Real Life. That thing that seems to be boring compared to our online lives. 

I apologize for the crude review, but I think it speaks volumes. Get offline and live. Read. Find time to enjoy your life. Everyone will be online when you get back. I promise (I swear Internet people never leave, they simply cannot which, in turn, makes them the best of people who wait for you when you go on sabbaticals, my people are phenomenal with this, very forgiving..) Set goals, read eleven pages a night, throw your phones and tablets in another room and sit down with a nice cup of tea and read. 

The feeling I experience when I go off the Grid: overwhelmingly wonderful. It's work to make time for a book, it didn't used to be, but it is. That is how our lives are now, hard and very distracted while living most of the time on the Grid. So we must work around it. Not rage against it as most of us want to do, but to put all things in perspective and actually take time off. 

See how you do, I am going to do it myself, I need to catch up on many books that are silently, patiently waiting for me. And I can't wait to meet up with them.

Buy it and keep it by your side, and then go out and buy all your Interwebz friends the book and tell them to never ever lose it. 

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston

Being a new reviewer, so to speak, I am a bit nervous about writing my second non fiction review. The Hot Zone was an amazingly terrifying read. My husband I bought a copy for each of our Kindles so we could read it together and discuss as we go. I guess you can call that a "read-date." Very good for your relationship!  And you must not read this alone.

First, I want to say this to Mr. Preston publicly,  I am sorry,  Mr. Preston,  for thinking your book was about hot flashes.  I never even had the decency to look at your cover. I do hope you forgive one of your newest fans, as I will promote the beans out of this book for my blatant ignorance and for the fact it is one hell of a read.

Sincerely, 

Cheryl

Richard Preston is very similar to Micheal Crichton in how he approaches a story for the reader. It's daring, it's concise,  it's detailed and it's very powerful in keeping you from exhaling very often. One of the best qualities in a writer.

This story is about Ebola, it is a non fiction book, of course, and he weaves the magic and terror of Ebola (we call it The Alien here at home) form Africa to America. 

Preston starts out with a French man who visits Kitum Cave, Mt Elgon, Kenya. This man ends up with Ebola and the story kicks into high gear from there. The author centers the story around the protagonist, the deadly virus, and what it does to a human down to a cellular level without causing a medical terminology  induced coma on the reader. He interviews a vast number of people involved and magically places them into a story based book. 

Leaving Africa we end up in a town near Washington D.C. where a monkey containment center starts to experience monkeys dying off rather quickly. What happens there is the heart of the book and I don't want to spoil it. By the time the reader is finished they will see how well the author infuses himself into the story. It is truly like he is a part of it and that takes the reader right into the monkey containment center with a feeling of all of your senses being assaulted without YOU being there.

So love that.

There is a character list in the back of all the scientists, US Army and CDC personnel and other people who were involved in this story. 

It's a book I will not forget as the Ebola threat at this current time is real. It may be at a small percentage but with the lack of information they can't seem to acquire from this alien virus that has four proteins they cannot figure out, a potentially shape-shifting mode of transmission issue as well as no point of origin I fear it can be a world wide issue if things change. And like most viruses, they are alien enough to change quite dramatically.

Rating: Buy it

Published: 1995