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Since
Beryl suffered a
stroke in 2000 she has been unable to read except for the odd word for
information; both
novels and non-fiction which were really important for her are
impossible. As a very 'visual' person Beryl has never enjoyed
listening to spoken books. But we have recently
tried having Stuart read aloud to Beryl. Sometimes it works well
- sometimes
not. We also discuss lots of TV.
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(Well?
sa
prof. molesworth, You seme thortful?)
includes:
See all books below
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LINKS are
marked to
interesting
sources
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WATCHED
DVD or Video of
some of Beryl's favourite novels which she read many years ago:
War and
Peace Anna Karenina Brideshead
Revisited Room with a View Howards
End
Recent television
programmes:
Simon Schama's
Power of
Art Coast
The Naked Pilgrim (Brian Sewell on the Camino de Santiago de
Compostella - the pilgrimage of which Ali and Hugh walked half the
Spanish part and got engaged at the end!)
READ
Read
aloud with great success and enjoyment:
* Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog
in the Night-time (the first book we
successfully read together - skipping the mathematical chapters for
Beryl - and a great success, wonderfully empathetic to all the
characters)
* Bill Bryson A Sunburned Country
(aka Down Under) and Notes from a Small
Island
* Karen Armstrong's three
autobiographical books The Spiral
Staircase (no. 3 but we read it first) Through
the Narrow Gate (no. 1) and Beginning the World
(no. 2 which Karen disowns now but which Beryl had in fact read in Hong
Kong)
Also Karen Armstrong A Short History of Islam
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Read aloud but
either not a success or a complete disaster:
* Virginia Woolf The
Lighthouse - a real favourite of Beryl but in the disaster
category; the first sentence runs for most of the first page! (We
didn't even try Mrs Dalloway
which was a seminal discovery for Beryl just over 50 years ago!)
What
Stuart has been reading for himself:
(It was a full year
after the stroke before he could manage to read
anything to himself with Beryl in the room, because of feeling
uncompfortable that it seemed unfair, or something like that; we are
told this is a common experience for partners.)
Molesworth
(Down with Skool! ect) by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle
Alain de Botton How
Proust can change your life (...
dissects what Proust has to say about friendship, reading, looking
carefully, paying attention, taking your time, being alive ... The
result is ... wise, amusing as well as stimulating ...)
Simon Conway
Morris The
Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and
the Rise of Animals
Life's
Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe
Richard Dawkins The God Delusion
(lent by my friend Diane
Sparks - see the website of the charity she supports and works with
related to dental care for children in Cambodia here) An interesting review of The God Delusion by
Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books is here
(opens in an
new page; close that page - don't Quit your browser - to return here).
Michael Frayn The Human Touch: our
part in the creation of the universe (also lent by my friend Diane Sparks -
see under Richard Dawkins above)
One Hundred Great Books
in Haiku by David Bader Quite
brilliant e.g. Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (if you allow that as a 'book'
and including his quaint spelling of " dids't "):
O'er and o'er God warned,
'Eat not th'Apple!' Man dids't and
God ballistick went.
Sandy Toksvig's (first) two novels: Whistling
for the Elephants and
Flying Under
Bridges Both are
wonderfully funny but both are also full of profound insights and
reflections on families and relationships, e.g. in Whistling the mother of the young
narrator speaks like this, "You know how I get all ... et
cetera." Of her brother Charles she writes about an annual visit
to Granny:
"What's for dinner?" said Charles, probably six then to my four. "Roast
beef," said Granny. "What else is on the menu?" asked my brother,
sealing his fate. [boarding school]
Galileo's Daughter: A Drama of Science,
Faith and Love by Dava Sobel
Darwin, His Daughter, and
Human Evolution by Randal Keynes Charles and Emma Wedgwood Darwin produced
10 children but lost three--an infant daughter and son, and the bright
and charming 10-year-old Annie, whose death plunged her parents into
profound bereavement. To
comfort his friend Sir Joseph Hooker when the botanist's young son fell
ill, Darwin drew on his own agonizing deathwatch of Annie: "Much
love, much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love."
Note:
darwin-online.org.uk
includes Darwin's notebooks
(see next item) but they are in
photographic format
and not searchable, so I can't give a
precise reference yet.)
David Lodge Thinks.. Re-read in parts several times (first
published 2001) mainly because of reference to Charles Darwin. He
has one of his characters cite Darwin's 1838 notebook. Darwin has the
idea of evolution ... he hasn't gone public ... he knows all to well
what an uproar it will cause ... he's been thinking about laughter:
"This way of viewing the subject important, laughing modified barking,
smiling modified laughing. Barking to tell other animals ... of good
news, discovery of prey ..." Then comes the afterthought, "Crying
is a puzzler." Another of Lodge's characters responds just
as cryptically, "Sunt
lacrymae rerum ... 'There are tears of things.' Virgil."
Lamin Sanneh
Whose religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West
... Being
the original Scripture of the Christian movement, the New Testament
Gospels are a translated version of the message of Jesus. ...
Christianity seems unique in being the only world religion that is
transmitted without the language or originating culture of its founder.
... The general rule that people had a right to understand what they
were being taught was matched by the view that there was nothing God
wanted to say that could not be said in simple everyday language.
Marcus Borg Reading the Bible
again for the first time
Meeting
Jesus again for
the first time
LINK to Marcus Borg's website to be added
The
changing face of God ed. Schmidt,
contributors include Karen Armstrong and Marcus Borg
Armstrong: The mystics in all three
monotheistic faiths .. insist that it is better to call God "Nothing"
with a capital N than it is to assert that God exists in any
conventional sense. God,
they say, is not another being. God is not even the Supreme
Being. To use that language suggests that he's rather like
ourselves, only writ large ...
Borg: In my own life I have moved
from the God of supernatural theism (transcendence) to the God of
panentheism (not that everything is God - pantheism - but that
everything is in God).
I have also moved from the God of requirements to the God of
relationships.
Karen Armstrong A Short History of
Islam
A
History of God
The Koran (English
translation by
N.J. Dawood)
Neil Douglas-Klotz The Hidden Gospel:
decoding the spiritual
message of the Aramaic Jesus
The Lost Gospel Q -
the original sayings
of Jesus ed Borg, Moore,
Powelson and Riegert
The Gospel of Thomas
The emerging
Christian Way ed
Schwartzentruber, contributors
include Marcus Borg, Matthew Fox, Sallie
McFague et al
David Boulton Gerrard Winstanley
and the republic of
heaven
Augustine City
of God
MORE SOURCES AND MORE COMMENTS WILL BE
ADDED SOON
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