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What Are You Reading?


Chicken

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"There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you are high, it is tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes. The right words and gestures are suddenly there. The power to captivate others, a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere this changes.

The fast ideas are far too fast and there are far too many. Overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friend’s faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against. You are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and almost totally in the black in the caves of the mind.

You never knew those caves were there. It will never end. For madness carves it’s own reality. It goes on and on and finally there are only other’s recollections of your behaviors. Your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors. For mania has at least some grace, in partially obliterating memory.

What then? After the medications, the psychiatrists, despair, depression and nearly lethal overdose. All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again?

Then too are the bitter reminders. Medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent and forget. But always to take. Credit cards revoked. Bounced checks to cover. Explanations due at work. Apologies to make. Friendships gone or drained. A ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again?

Which of my feelings are real? Which of the mees is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic and crazy one or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed and tired one? Probably a bit of both. Hopefully much that is neither.

Virginia Wolff in her dives and climbs said it all. "How far do our feelings take their color from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?"

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just finished The Mormon Murders, about the false documents Mark Hoffman sold to the LDS church, so they could "hide" the real Joe Smith. It just made me ill to read how low down the church can be.

I remember being here when the bombings happened, everyone knew it was Hoffman, and could've cared less if he'd blown himself up. <_<

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  • 2 weeks later...

Can anyone suggest an author similar to SE Hinton? My almost 13 year old son loves her and is down to her last book. She is the only author he has ever gotten excited about, and we've tried all the obvious ones. He's just not really that into fiction, but he really got into Hinton's books. thanks!

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check out david sedaris

ive read couple of his books long ago

but he's hilarious

I have tickets to see him Weds- don't really know what to expect. I guess he'll just read some of his stories. I'm really looking forward to it, he's one of the only authors that can make me laugh out loud.

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I have tickets to see him Weds- don't really know what to expect. I guess he'll just read some of his stories. I'm really looking forward to it, he's one of the only authors that can make me laugh out loud.

oh cool. sure hope he does not or if he does read those stories i'll be curious how he narrates them verbally hahahaha. esp how he described visiting his dad during his college days oh rofl and so unabashedly lmao in the train haha.

his sister amy came out with her own book a few years back i dunno i didnt check that one out, she doesnt seem as funny, but he sure was describing her.

anyway enjoy the show and do share how you liked it if it's not too much

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Can anyone suggest an author similar to SE Hinton? My almost 13 year old son loves her and is down to her last book. She is the only author he has ever gotten excited about, and we've tried all the obvious ones. He's just not really that into fiction, but he really got into Hinton's books. thanks!

While not a LOT like S.E. Hinton, Chris Crutcher is a good one. The books are usually about athletes who are high-school age, and they usually make a bad decision that turns into some kind of dire consequence.

Stotan!, Running Loose, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes are some of the titles I can come up with off the top of my head. If you would like more suggestions, I'm sure the librarian at his school could help out.

I'm currently reading Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

Edited by manderlyh
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While not a LOT like S.E. Hinton, Chris Crutcher is a good one. The books are usually about athletes who are high-school age, and they usually make a bad decision that turns into some kind of dire consequence.

Stotan!, Running Loose, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes are some of the titles I can come up with off the top of my head. If you would like more suggestions, I'm sure the librarian at his school could help out.

I'm currently reading Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.

Thanks for the suggestion :)

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I just finished two books:

Bondi's Brother by Irving Roth, it's about a Holocaust survivor. I subbed for a friend of mine Monday and Tuesday, and she was having her kids read the book. Each class was reading, both days, so I was able to read the entire book. It was very interesting, but like a lot of Holocaust books, it sometimes sounded the same.

I also finished Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I read it once before, when I was in high school, and I really liked it then. I bought it about a year ago, with intent to re-read it. It's a great book set in the '30s about a black woman in the South. It's written in a phonetic version of the characters' dialect, so it's a bit hard to understand at first, though I started reading faster once I got used to it. It's a great story about a woman who finds love after wondering if it really happens. It's definitely a piece of feminist literature, but it's a wonderful, wonderful novel.

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