Book Beginnings and Friday 56 – An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth (April 17)

For my Friday meme combo this week I have chosen a book I picked up today at my favourite second-hand bookstore, Bearly Used Books in Parry Sound. The book is Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. I’ve been meaning to look for this for a while and the price was right today. GoodReads has the following description:

Colonel Chris Hadfield has spent decades training as an astronaut and has logged nearly 4000 hours in space. During this time he has broken into a Space Station with a Swiss army knife, disposed of a live snake while piloting a plane, and been temporarily blinded while clinging to the exterior of an orbiting spacecraft. The secret to Col. Hadfield’s success-and survival-is an unconventional philosophy he learned at NASA: prepare for the worst-and enjoy every moment of it.

In An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Col. Hadfield takes readers deep into his years of training and space exploration to show how to make the impossible possible. Through eye-opening, entertaining stories filled with the adrenaline of launch, the mesmerizing wonder of spacewalks, and the measured, calm responses mandated by crises, he explains how conventional wisdom can get in the way of achievement-and happiness. His own extraordinary education in space has taught him some counterintuitive lessons: don’t visualize success, do care what others think, and always sweat the small stuff.

You might never be able to build a robot, pilot a spacecraft, make a music video or perform basic surgery in zero gravity like Col. Hadfield. But his vivid and refreshing insights will teach you how to think like an astronaut, and will change, completely, the way you view life on Earth-especially your own.

Now for this week’s excerpts:

Book Beginnings is hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader, who invites anyone to join in, saying: ‘Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.  Please remember to include the title of the book and the author. Leave a link to your post.  If you don’t have a blog, but want to participate, please leave a comment with your Book Beginning.’

The beginning of An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth:

The windows of a spaceship casually frame miracles. Every 92 minutes, another sunrise: a layer cake that starts orange, then a thick wedge of blue, then the richest, darkest icing decorated with stars.

Chris Hadfield has lived the kind of life most of us could only dream of, so I’m glad he’s written this book to share some of that with us. I like this beginning and I’m looking forward to reading this one soon.

The Friday 56 is a book meme hosted by Freda’s Voice and the rules are as follows:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post below in Linky. Add the post url, not your blog url.

It’s that simple.

From page 56 of An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth:

Finally everyone agreed that it had been a false alarm, and we headed back to our sleep stations. An hour later, when the fire alarm sounded again, we repeated the warn, gather, work protocol just as before.

I guess that any kind of alarm when you’re way out in space would be quite unnerving, but I guess he survived and lived to tell the tale! Hopefully I’ll get around to reading this one soon. I don’t want it sitting on my ever-growing TBR pile for ever.

Book Beginnings and Friday 56 – Spiritual Rhythm (April 10)

This is my first Friday meme combo for almost two months and for it I have chosen a book I’m about to start that I was given for Christmas – Spiritual Rhythm by Mark Buchanan. I haven’t read anything by him before, but I’ve heard good things about his books and writing. The following description comes from GoodReads:

Abide in me, Jesus tells us, and you will bear much fruit. Yet too often we forget that fruit needs different seasons in order to grow. We measure our spiritual maturity by how much we do rather than how we are responding to our current spiritual season. In Spiritual Rhythm, Mark Buchanan replaces our spirituality of busyness with a spirituality of abiding. Sometimes we are busy, sometimes still, sometimes pushing with all we ve got, sometimes waiting. This model of the spiritual life measures and produces growth by asking: Are we living in rhythm with the season we are in? With the lyrical writing for which he is known, Mark invites us to respond to every season of the heart, whether we are flourishing and fruitful, stark and dismal, or cool and windy. In comparing spiritual rhythms to the seasons of the year, he shows us what to expect from each season and how embracing the seasons causes our spiritual lives to prosper. As he draws on the powerful words of Scripture, Mark explores what activities are suitable or necessary in each season and what activities are useless or even harmful in that season. Throughout the book, Mark weaves together stories of young and old, men and women, families, couples, and individuals who are in or have been through a particular season of the heart.

Now for this week’s excerpts:

Book Beginnings is hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader, who invites anyone to join in, saying: ‘Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.  Please remember to include the title of the book and the author. Leave a link to your post.  If you don’t have a blog, but want to participate, please leave a comment with your Book Beginning.’

The beginning of Spiritual Rhythm:

From the preface:

The fastest growing sport in Norway is wingsuit jumping. It’s the pastime of lunatics, or it’s what warrior-knights do in an age without dragons. It requires steel nerves, a cool head, a touch of madness. You must be able to look fast-approaching catastrophe in the face, and whoop.

Here’s what you do. Ascend the uppermost part of a fjord, walk to the edge, and jump.

From the introduction:

I live in Canada. If you don’t, forget your stereotypes: sled dogs and igloos, polar bears and ice palaces, Eskimos in fur-lined parkas and seal-skinned mukluks poised with fish spears over ice holes. Those are rare sightings anywhere in my country, but only myths in the part of Canada I’m from. I’m from Canada’s West Coast.

I wanted to include both of these beginnings because I like his sense of humour in both of them. I think I’ll probably like this one.

The Friday 56 is a book meme hosted by Freda’s Voice and the rules are as follows:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post below in Linky. Add the post url, not your blog url.

It’s that simple.

From page 56 of Spiritual Rhythm:

I started skiing when I was twelve. It was a way to break the endless dreariness of the winters where I lived.

My first time skiing was a near disaster.

Even though we have a small ski hill in town here, I’ve never tried downhill skiing in my life. I’m not about to start now. I think I’m getting too old for trying new things that could result in broken limbs. I am intrigued, though, to find out what the author’s near disaster was. Hopefully I’ll get into this book soon and find out. It looks like it will be an enjoyable read anyway.

Book Beginnings and Friday 56 – The News: A User’s Manual (Feb 13)

This is my first Friday post for a while, but I thought I’d give this Friday meme combo a try again. I’ve chosen a book that caught my eye at the library earlier in the week. The book is The News: A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton. I don’t know anything about this book, but it looks fairly interesting. Time will tell, if I get a chance to read it before it’s due back. Goodreads has the following description:

From the author of The Architecture of Happiness, a thought-provoking look at the manic and peculiar position that news has achieved in our lives.

What does the news do to our brains, our souls and our views of one another? We spend an inordinate amount of time checking on it. It molds how we view reality, we’re increasingly addicted to it on our luminous gadgets, we check it every morning when we wake up and every evening before we sleep-and yet the news has rarely been the focus of an accessible, serious, saleable book-length study. Until now.
Mixing snippets of current news with philosophical reflections, The News will blend the timeless with the contemporary, and bring the wisdom of thousands of years of culture to bear on our contemporary obsessions and neuroses. The News ranges across news categories-from politics to murders, from economics to celebrities, from the weather to paparazzi shows–in search of answers to the questions: “What do we want from this?” and “Is it doing us any good?” After The News, we’ll never look at a celebrity story, the report on a tropical storm, or the sex scandal of a politician in quite the same way again.

Now for this week’s excerpts:

Book Beginnings is hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader, who invites anyone to join in, saying: ‘Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.  Please remember to include the title of the book and the author. Leave a link to your post.  If you don’t have a blog, but want to participate, please leave a comment with your Book Beginning.’

The beginning of The News:

It doesn’t come with any instructions, because it’s meant to be the most normal, easy, obvious and unremarkable activity in the world, like breathing or blinking.

This is a fairly intriguing beginning, and I’m guessing, from the title of the book, that he’s talking about the news here. I used to faithfully watch the news every night, but I stopped doing this probably about five years ago. I started to find it quite pointless and started to get my news fix from various sources online. I don’t really think I’m missing much to be honest and the odd occasion when I’ve caught part of a news broadcast on TV, usually when visiting someone else, has pretty much confirmed this for me.

The Friday 56 is a book meme hosted by Freda’s Voice and the rules are as follows:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post below in Linky. Add the post url, not your blog url.

It’s that simple.

From page 56 of The News:

Refusing to square with human nature, it allows our hopes to smash constantly against the same shoals; it greets every day with faux cherubic innocence, only to stoke up rage and disillusionment at our condition by nightfall.

This excerpt seems to confirm my reasons as to why I don’t bother watching the news any more. It sounds like a fairly heavier kind of read, but I think I’ll give it a try nonetheless.

Book Beginnings and Friday 56 – The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an IKEA Wardrobe (Jan2)

For my first Friday meme combo of 2015 I have chosen one of the books I got for Christmas – The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an IKEA Wardrobe by Romain Puertolas. It was the title of this book that intrigued me so much that I put it on my Christmas wishlist. Thankfully, I received it and it looks like it should be a good one. GoodReads has the following description:

For readers of The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, a funny, charming, feel-good story about a fake fakir from India who arrives in France to shop at IKEA and unwittingly embarks on a European tour like no other.
Meet Ajatashatru Oghash Rathod. One day a fakir leaves his small village in India and lands in Paris. A professional con artist, the fakir is on a pilgrimage to IKEA, where he intends to obtain an object he covets above all others: a brand-new bed of nails. Without adequate euros in the pockets of his silk trousers, the fakir is all the same confident that his counterfeit 100-Euro note (printed on one side only) and his usual bag of tricks will suffice. But when a swindled cab driver seeks his murderous revenge, the fakir accidentally embarks on a European tour, fatefully beginning in the wardrobe of the iconic Swedish retailer.
As his journey progresses in the most unpredictable of ways, the fakir finds unlikely friends in even unlikelier places. To his surprise–and to a Bollywood beat–the stirrings of love well up in the heart of our turbaned hero, even as his adventures lead to profound and moving questions of the perils of emigration and the universal desire to seek a better life in an often dangerous world.
The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an IKEA Wardrobe [pause for breath] is a hilarious tale that evokes the manic energy of a Marx Brothers romp and calls to mind the incisive social commentary of Candide. Pull up your Poang chair and take an unforgettable tour of Europe propelled by laughter, love and redemption. (Meatballs not included, but highly recommended.)

Now for this week’s excerpts:

Book Beginnings is hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader, who invites anyone to join in, saying: ‘Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.  Please remember to include the title of the book and the author. Leave a link to your post.  If you don’t have a blog, but want to participate, please leave a comment with your Book Beginning.’

The beginning of The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an IKEA Wardrobe:

The first word spoken by the Indian man Ajatashatru Oghash Rathod upon his arrival in France was, oddly enough, a Swedish word.

Ikea.

With this fairly odd beginning, I think that I’m going to enjoy this one!

The Friday 56 is a book meme hosted by Freda’s Voice and the rules are as follows:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post below in Linky. Add the post url, not your blog url.

It’s that simple.

From page 56 of The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an IKEA Wardrobe:

They were working late because they had to install a new collection.

Julio Sympa, who was six foot six and had climbed Mont Blanc four times, stopping at the top each time to read Why I Am So Cold by Josette Camus before going back down eight hundred and fifty-three pages later, paused in front of the ‘American Teenager’ bedroom and pointed in several directions before continuing on his way.

I’m liking the sound of this one, so it’ll be my next read after I’ve finished my current one. Two days into the New Year and I’m facing my usual problem – too many books and not enough time to read them all! It’s a good problem to have and I’ll just have to make the best of it.

Book Beginnings and Friday 56 – It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (Oct 31)

No Halloween is complete without either watching or reading It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz, so I am choosing this classic for my Friday meme combo this week. GoodReads has the following short description:

It’s Halloween!Time for ghosts, ghouls, and…

the Great Pumpkin? Linus is sure that this year the Great Pumpkin will finally appear. Join Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy, and the rest of the Peanuts gang for some spooky tricks and hilarious treats in this adaptation of the television special!

Now for this week’s excerpts:

Book Beginnings is hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader, who invites anyone to join in, saying: ‘Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.  Please remember to include the title of the book and the author. Leave a link to your post.  If you don’t have a blog, but want to participate, please leave a comment with your Book Beginning.’

The beginning of It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown:

From costumes to candy, pumpkins to parties, each year the Peanuts gang looked forward to Halloween.

A nice, short beginning to a short classic story.

The Friday 56 is a book meme hosted by Freda’s Voice and the rules are as follows:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post below in Linky. Add the post url, not your blog url.

It’s that simple.

From page 56 of It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown:

“But maybe there is a Great Pumpkin,” Sally countered, sticking up for her beloved Linus.

“Every year Linus misses tricks or treats and then the Halloween party,” Violet observed as she put on her ghost costume.

“He’ll never learn,” Charlie Brown agreed.

Poor Linus! You have to feel sorry for him in his sincerity. I think we’ll probably be watching the TV special tomorrow, as we didn’t really have time to watch it tonight. We rarely miss a year.

Book Beginnings and Friday 56 – The Halloween Tree (Oct 24)

I recently picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree at Bearly Used Books for a dollar, so with Halloween just a week away I’ve decided to give it a read and have also chosen it as my choice of book for this week’s Friday meme combo. GoodReads has the following description:

Adventure, mystery and history are all wrapped into this eerie Halloween story about eight costumed boys who are whisked away on a kite through time and space to search for the meaning of Halloween.

It was the night of All Hallow’s Eve… a night of darkness and of dreams… of moonlight peering through the cobwebs of time and velvet silence splintered by tormented cries…

And through the streets of town raced a fiendish band–shrieking, howling, pounding on doors. “Trick or Treat” screamed the skeleton, as from every house the chilren extorted candy in the traditional blackmail of Halloween. But the last house was different. From within the black depths came Mr. Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud… a monster… a magician… a product of the night itself… who became their guide on a kite-flying, broomstick-riding trip back into the history of All Hallow’s Eve…

Now for this week’s excerpts:

Book Beginnings is hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader, who invites anyone to join in, saying: ‘Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.  Please remember to include the title of the book and the author. Leave a link to your post.  If you don’t have a blog, but want to participate, please leave a comment with your Book Beginning.’

The beginning of The Halloween Tree:

It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn’t so much wilderness around you couldn’t see the town. But on the other hand there wasn’t so much town you couldn’t see and feel and touch and smell the wilderness.

I don’t know a lot about this book, but this seems like a typical Bradbury beginning. I’m sure I’ll enjoy this one as much as his other stuff that I’ve read.

The Friday 56 is a book meme hosted by Freda’s Voice and the rules are as follows:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post below in Linky. Add the post url, not your blog url.

It’s that simple.

From page 56 of The Halloween Tree:

And the sun rose showing them…

Egypt. The River Nile. The Sphinx. The Pyramids.

“But,” said Moundshroud. “Notice anything – different?”

“Why,” gasped Tom, “it’s all new. It’s just been built. That means we really have gone back in Time four thousand years.”

This sounds quite intriguing, so I hope I can get into this book this weekend and find out what’s going on here.

Book Beginnings and Friday 56 – Willful Blindness (Oct 17)

For this week’s Friday meme combo I have chosen Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril by Margaret Heffernan. I bought this book a couple of years ago, not long after it came out, but I am only getting round to reading it now. Recent events in our little community prompted me to pick it up now and get it read. The following description is found at GoodReads:

A book that will open eyes to the most serious problem of our times.

In the case of the US Government versus Enron, the presiding judge chose to employ the legal concept of willful blindness: you are responsible if you could have known, and should have known, something which instead you strove not to see. The guilty verdict sent shivers down the spine of the corporate world. In this book, Margaret Heffernan draws on psychological studies, social statistics, interviews with relevant protagonists, and her own experience to throw light on willful blindness and why whistleblowers and Cassandras are so rare. Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to the family, this engaging and anecdotal book will explain why willful blindness is so dangerous in a globalized, interconnected world, before suggesting ways in which institutions and individuals can start to combat it. Margaret Heffernan’s thought-provoking book will force us to open our eyes.

Now for this week’s excerpts:

Book Beginnings is hosted by Gilion at Rose City Reader, who invites anyone to join in, saying: ‘Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.  Please remember to include the title of the book and the author. Leave a link to your post.  If you don’t have a blog, but want to participate, please leave a comment with your Book Beginning.’

The beginning of Willful Blindness:

On July 19, 2011, the British Member of Parliament Adrian Sanders asked James and Rupert Murdoch a question that temporarily silenced them both.

“Are you familiar with the term ‘willful blindness’?”

This week some of our local council officials were deemed by a judge to have been ‘willfully blind’. I have to admit that I wasn’t all that familiar with the term until I picked up this book, so I am looking forward to finding out more about it and why our officials were described in this way.

The Friday 56 is a book meme hosted by Freda’s Voice and the rules are as follows:

*Grab a book, any book.
*Turn to page 56.
*Find any sentence, (or few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
*Post it.
*Add your (url) post below in Linky. Add the post url, not your blog url.

It’s that simple.

From page 56 of Willful Blindness:

Cold War ideology had blinded McNamara and his colleagues to the fundamental, primary motive of the Vietnamese. They weren’t fighting to become part of a greater communist bloc. They were fighting to become free from all imperial powers.

Not perhaps the most exciting excerpt, but I am still fascinated enough by this idea to want to get this book read soon. I’m off for a week of holiday’s now, so maybe I’ll get a bit more reading in and be able to get through this one.