Friday 9 October 2009

Simply Books

I received delivery of a couple of books this week after my attention was drawn to Your Money or Your Life by Move to Portugal. I'm looking forward to reading it along with Voluntary Simplicity as I think they will compliment each other. I'm hoping they'll give me ideas and inspiration to ease my way out of the rat race.






















I must also get around to reading How to be Free, a book I bought a while ago. Just having the books in my possession won't make my life simpler. I need to READ them!! It's a bit of a Catch 22 situation. No time to read them (or take photos - hence the absence in this post) so can't put them into practice in order to make the time.............













I'm almost at the end of Cold Mountain which I read during my lunch breaks at work. Although I saw the film and prefer to read the book first I've really enjoyed the book. A film can't portray the intricacies of the language in a book or the thoughts of the characters in detail. Descriptions of landscape and surroundings can sometimes make me feel bogged down in a narrative but the ones in Cold Mountain were so clear and clever that I had to re-read some simple sentences over again and again to enjoy them a few more times until I moved on. I'm always amazed at the talent of authors who can put into words what for most people is just a vague feeling.

I'll quote a few sentences that leapt out at me as I read for my own remembrance if nothing else...

"Their breaths hovered about them as if in concern, and then the vague shapes lost interest and vanished".

"Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing".

"She wondered if literature might lose some of its interest when she reached an age or state of mind where her life was set on such a sure course that the things she read might stop seeming so powerfully like alternate directions for her being".

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Another week has passed by in a flash and Autumn has arrived with a vengeance. Extra layers are being worn and the wood-burner is kept lit full-time. I'm terrible for feeling the cold. My hands never seem to warm up and if my hands are cold I feel as though the rest of me is too.
Our local baptist minister has arranged a meeting for this Saturday to see what interest there is locally in Sing Hallelujah. I will be popping along with my dad to find out more and afterwards am taking my dad out for lunch for his birthday. On Sunday evening we are giving another performance of The Witness in a church in Abergavenny. There'll be 3 more to go after that and then we'll be giving it a rest.
Bye for now
Teresa x

3 comments:

apieceofwood said...

Be interesting to see what you thought of How To Be Free - i really looked forward to reading it and then didn't enjoy it at all, giving up half way through!

A Time for Stitching said...

Thanks for your comment APOW. I'll try to remember to blog about what I think of it - and whether I manage to get to the end!

Laura @ mtp said...

hi and thank you :-) that book really changed how I think about money, etc. Some of it is a little 'new age' for me, but overall the ideas and themes are perfect. let me know how you get on and good luck with planning your own escape!