Crash Book

 

 

Crash Book is the second of my former therapist Marlene Denessen’s books that I was delighted to discover online and read. My curiosity was peaked by the title and cover image depicting a closeup of a deer head. It turns out, the book documents her healing journey after being seriously injured in a car accident involving a deer on Route 195 in Massachusetts.

Published in 2022, this book is a pretty handy resource filled with practical advice for developing a meditation practice. It contains anecdotes that humanize the experience for those of us just beginning. Marlene’s voice is straightforward, nonjudgmental, and rings with clarity. Her salt-of-the-Earth guidance is easy to understand and incorporates background information about mindfulness and wellbeing. 

For example, here is a quote from Marc Hiles of the Iona Center that is so relatable.

“We are overdosed on data and underfed on the mysterious. Our brains inflate while our souls wither.” 

I need to be especially cognizant of not drowning my brain while my soul remains thirsty for knowledge. This concept also brings to mind a beautiful word I learned recently from Susan Cain, the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. “NUMINOUS” means mysterious, spiritual, enchanting, mystical, bewitching. Wouldn’t the world benefit from a boost of numinousness?

In Crash Book, Marlene talks about what she calls the “passing show” or the daily distractions that inevitably compete for our attention during meditation. She matter of factly counsels us to recognize the passing show, pay it no mind, and redirect our focus on our breathing and the process of clearing our heads. This is powerful advice that has always worked for me. She also references the Buddhist term for this inner chatter, “monkey mind” of which I am most definitely afflicted!

The Measure / The Serviceberry

The Measure by Nikki Erlick is probably going to scare the shit out of me, but I can’t resist. This book became available through CLAMS on May 5, and like a moth to a flame, I clicked borrow.  When my teacher friend Elaine talked about it a couple of years ago, I was intrigued, but I was still working and didn’t have as much time to read as I do now. 

Earlier this year, I read Here One Moment, thinking that was the book Elaine had recommended. The premise of people knowing when they will die is similar but handled in very different ways. I have dissected that book on this blog. 

Naturally, all the books I have on hold are ready at the same time, and last night I began reading The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the more well-known Braiding Sweetgrass. Probably, I will become either totally frustrated or wholly enlightened trying to read these two books at the same time. Let’s see how this plays out.

I’m still slogging away on The Measure but last night (5/21/25) I finished The Serviceberry. The book’s subtitle says it all really: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. It’s appropriate that I finished reading this tiny book during a time when I’m losing patience with the clown in charge of our country and the posse of idiots he has surrounded himself with as they wreak havoc on the environment and the common good.

Turns out my dual reading experiment worked out nicely as I finished The Measure today (5/22/25). The books, despite being very different, are oddly complimentary. Both brought in elements of current events and the politics of humanity. 

All Fours

I really need to become more discerning in my choices of reading material. Information overload and overwhelm is real, especially these days when I let myself ponder how few years I realistically have left I know that sounds dark, but it’s just reality. I probably shouldn’t have wasted my precious time reading All Fours by Miranda July, but once I made it halfway, I was committed to completion.

I also probably should’ve recognized the sexual connotation in the title too, but again, no, I missed that clue and was taken aback a little bit when the book lurched into full-blown soft-porn as the main character awkwardly explores her sexuality and questions her life choices. 

In case you’re thick like me, toward the end of the book you’ll be treated to this pearl of wisdom, “Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable…but it’s actually the most stable position. Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.” So says the unnamed protagonist’s long-suffering artist friend when describing her sculpture of a green marble, headless woman on her hands and knees! And by long-suffering, I’m referencing her putting up with her annoyingly, self-indulgent 45 year old friend throughout the entire book.

I wish I could recall how this book came to be on the long list of selections I wait patiently for on Libby. Could have been the Titcomb’s newsletter or New York Times bestseller lists. If I could remember, I’d avoid future recommendations from that source.

It’s never good when you can’t wait to finish reading a book, hoping all along a tornado comes along and wipes out all the characters or they all die in a house fire. No such luck. I finally made it to the end and was left scratching my head. Somehow the irritating main character was still going, like a demented Energizer Bunny, leaving a trail of devastation and confusion in her wake.

Shark Heart

Shark Heart: A Love Story by Emily Habeck is a weird-ass book raved about by the woman leading the weird-ass poetry workshop I took in February. I actually participated in three free workshops, and the poetry was my least favorite for many reasons. Poetry is a challenge for me even though I love it. The instructor did her best to her passion for the craft. And I did heed this book recommendation from her.

As so often happens with weird-ass books I read, I kind of like it, but it needs some tweaking/editing. It is a quick and easy read so that’s nice.  I originally rated it harshly, 3-stars on Goodreads, but after reviewing my highlights and writing this summary, I would change it to 4-stars.

The idea is a good one, creative and original, but the orchestration of all the pieces misses the mark for me. The structural elements, choppy chapters, and awkward transitions between viewpoints distracted me from the many profound declarations, such as this one.

“Joy and grief are human birthrights, but mostly, being alive is everything in between.”

And this one.

“Truth and Love were complicated concepts on their own, and patching the two words together created a significant tangle Lewis could not unwind.”

The setting is an otherwise realistic world but it appears normal for some humans to contract an ailment that causes them to change into animals. The main character named Wren, who is not a bird but a woman, reflects on how her life has been impacted by these transformations. The story begins as her husband is diagnosed with a Carcharodon carcharias mutation. Thus begins the couple's misadventures as he gradually transitions into a great white shark. While the physical adaptations he endures are shocking, his psychological journey proves to be the most unsettling. 

The characters and even their animal counterparts, impart a great deal of wisdom as they are forced to reckon with their unusual circumstances. Their interactions are all a bit poetic and metaphoric. Maybe in its own weird-ass way reading this helped me connect to my own inner love of figurative language.

Maybe life has no ceiling, no floors, no walls, and we’re free-falling from the moment we’re born, lying to each other, agreeing to make invented ideas important, to numb ourselves from the secret.” “What’s the secret?” “Maybe what happens between birth and death isn’t as precious as we think.”

I’m no stranger to trying to unravel and make sense of my deep, dark emotions. Like the characters in this book, I always resurface to soak in thoughts of hope and optimism. So, I’ll conclude with this Mary Oliver quote that I love and that was shared at the poetry workshop I attended.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Tell Me Everything

 

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout should have been subtitled, But Leave Out the Uninteresting Parts, Please. If I wasn’t so stubborn, I’d have given up on this book. Instead, I put my Kindle on airplane mode and dug in my heels to finish it. 

It took a month.

I cannot say I enjoyed this reading experience. The characters are wearisome, the dialogue is ponderous, and the plot is meandering. The best part for me was the ending. To think I would’ve missed it if I hadn’t persevered. Actually the beginning kind of hooked me, but everything in between was just ‘meh’. Here is how the story grabbed my attention and drew me in. 

“This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time that we are speaking of him. Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself; like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.”

Full disclosure: Strout has written about this town and its inhabitants before. I’ve read and enjoyed some of their stories, and have felt not so much love for others.* Many of these characters make an appearance in Tell Me Everything, and therein lies a big part of the problem for me.

When these characters are introduced in this story, they  don’t have enough depth to them. For instance, I hated the book, Oh William and couldn’t really remember the backstory between Lucy Barton and her ex-husband William, so the continuation of their relationship in this novel didn’t resonate with me. Apparently, Strout also wrote about Bob and his brother Jim in The Burgess Brothers which I haven’t read. That background knowledge would’ve been helpful, too. 

On the other hand, I love the scene where Olive Kitteridge sits and observes everyone at Bob’s birthday party. Olive is the one character I appreciate, and I’m a huge fan of Strout’s other books that centered on her storyline. Added bonus: Imagine Francis McDormand in the television miniseries version bringing the curmudgeonly, down-home-Maine character to life!

The plodding, run-on-sentence style of writing also got on my last nerve. To me, it reflects the demeanor of the Lucy Barton character, who is supposedly a writer. Or maybe it’s just meant to capture the folksy familiarity of people from the Pine Tree State.

Whatever the reason, this stylistic distraction ruined my enjoyment of even the intriguing plot points such as the concept of Bob Burgess being a “sin-eater” because of his compassion for others. Similarly, the relationship between Olive and Lucy when they tell each other stories about the “unrecorded lives” of people they had known, would have been more poignant without the clumsy wordage. Here is an example of the kind of superfluous description I find annoying.

Bob bumped into Katherine Caskey on the street. “Bob!” she said, and he said, “Hello, Katherine.” They continued walking till they reached Katherine’s car. Katherine unlocked the car and took the package from Bob and stuck it into the backseat, then turned to Bob.

In contrast, here is a little, obtuse statement that I can really sink my brain into. 

“And yet, as is often the case, those of us who need love so badly at a particular moment can be off-putting to those who want to love us, and to those who do love us.”  

Here’s a little taste of why I relate so much to Olive. 

Olive was silent for a long moment. Then she said, meditatively, “It’s quite a world we live in, isn’t it. For years I thought: I will miss all this when I die. But the way the world is these days, I sometimes think I’ll be damned glad to be dead.”

Everything good about this book (finally, sort of) comes together in the last two chapters. “Love is love” seems to be the message, but even this universal theme is diluted by Lucy’s simplistic words, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.” 

*This in itself is a strange occurrence for me. How can the same author inspire such polar opposite reactions from me?

I had a similar experience with Fredrik Backman’s work. Loved: My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry and A Man Called Ove. Couldn’t get into: Anxious People or Bear Town.

🤷‍♀️