Book reviews
I recently read Linden’s Last Life by Alan Cohen. The novel is a little lacking in terms of the writing style, so don’t expect a literary gem, but the idea took my fancy and I enjoyed the book very much. The story is about a man who is so depressed about his life that he decides to end it all by leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge. A Buddhist stops him jumping, and he finds himself on a journey that takes him to the Cave of Khadroma on Mount Lasya in Tibet. His aim is to meet the Lords of Karma and ask them to make his current incarnation his last. There are some excellent twists and turns in this story about love and destiny; Cohen’s light touch means it’s a pleasant read, but it’s thought-provoking at the same time.
The book is published by Hay House, founded in 1984 by Louise Hay, the author of one of the best self-help books of all time, You Can Heal Your Life. (The affirmation at the centre of this book kept me going through some very difficult times; it is the most life-enhancing affirmation I have ever read.)
I thoroughly enjoyed Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Gilbert tells the tale of her encounters and her discoveries about herself during her travels in Italy, India, and Indonesia. A delicious book altogether.
The much-awaited film of the memoir pales by comparison with the book.
I am finally, and very belatedly, reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation and am loving it. Lynne Truss is a woman after my own heart. (I get totally wound up by missing hyphens and misused apostrophes, and could go on for hours about where best to place commas and semi-colons.) I am not far into the book as yet, but I’m already finding it informative and entertaining. Truss is witty and totally passionate about her subject. Punctuation, she says, “is a system of printers’ marks that has aided the clarity of the written word for the past half-millennium”. In this era of text messages and emails, the apostrophe is an endangered species. We sticklers, as Truss calls those of us care about punctuation as much as she does, need to keep defending the cause – while there is still a cause to defend.
Reviews coming soon of My Year Of Meats by Ruth Ozeki and the Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, two of my all-time favourite books.
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