Friday, May 10, 2013

Bending Pages or A Few of My Favorite Things

What do Downward-Facing Death and Wild have in common? I never wanted them to end.

Downward-Facing Death (DFD) is a Kindle serial and I knew that I wanted to buy it from the moment that I saw it advertised. It's a yoga mystery written by Neal Pollack. How could I go wrong? I had already read Pollack's Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude and enjoyed it. Pollack is really good and he's funny. It was pretty cool, too, to get an email from Amazon letting me know when the next episode of the novel was available.

DFD is about a charismatic guru who is found all contorted and dead in a yoga studio. Loved this whodunit tale. And here's wisdom from Slim, a friend of the detective Matt Bolster:
"They try to warn us when we start practicing," Slim said. "Don't get attached. Don't trust your gurus. But then, before you know it, you're following your meditation teacher up to Mendocino and he's asking you to monitor his pot farm for three months while he goes on a silent retreat in Thailand..."
I tweeted at Pollack that I wanted more Matt Bolster and Lora Powell, a meditation teacher in the book and he tweeted back coming soon! Sweet...

I am usually a huge page bender but not so with Wild. I just went along for the ride and had an urge to go on some trail and hike...


I often click on recommendations that Netflix gives me and so that's how I ended up watching Kumare about a man, Vikram Gandhi, from New Jersey who pretends to be a guru. I felt discomfort as I watched Gandhi's charade and I would like to think that I would speak to him after it was all over with but I don't know...

I was so moved by Raw Faith, an amazing documentary about Marilyn Sewell.





On a final note, totally dug My 2-Year-Old Judges Books By Their Cover by Robert Bruce.

Okay, that was a preacher's final note. I also liked a recent Neal Pollack article featured in Yoga Journal -- When Your Teachers Leave.

What are you diggin' these days?

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for linking to Pollack's article about teachers leaving. Applies to many other fields too.
    I haven't listened to Me'shell Ndegeocello in years... used to have Plantation Lullabies on cassette tape way back when. I think that tape must still be somewhere in my parents' home in Canada.
    Right now I'm listening to Janelle Monáe, and reading The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking and Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery.

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  2. Mich,

    I had the cassette too and I hadn't thought about Ndegeocello in a long time until "What are diggin'...?" made me think of her.

    I like the title of the book you're reading about happiness.

    Re: Pollack, one of my teachers made an announcement last week and a lot of us thought it was a goodbye announcement. Fortunately, it was not but you never know, of course, when goodbye is coming...

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