Books – A Good Read!

Ever since I can remember I have always loved books. I remember going to the library at school and I also remember waiting for the yellow mobile library to show up in the field above my primary school once a month on Thursdays. Both then and now, books have given me insights into other worlds.

In my home, my living room is set up as a library with works from my favorite authors whom tell my story and reflect my interests. I have always made it a practice not to give away or sell books even my text books from college and university. I am obsessive about this point. I loaned a psychology book to a friend in college and it has almost been twenty years but every time I see her I asked her for my book. No I am not a mean spirited. Let me explain the way I see it. As we know text books are revised all the time and that particular edition is special to me as I am familiar with it and can find exactly what I am looking for in it. I know my college textbooks very well. In college I never skipped a page as I read my books from cover to cover for fear of something that I might miss.  As I get older I feel uncomfortable in loaning out my books any more because I have a phobia of my books not been returned.

There is a television commercial for the 2011 Kia Sorento. I always get excited when I see it as on the commercial books are everywhere even around a tree. To me it seems like paradise. The writer and essayist Jorge Luis Borges agrees with me, as he says “I had always imagined paradise as a kind of library.” I also always recall Carl Gustav Jung acknowledging in his book Memories, Dreams and Reflections that when he was growing up he had always like the idea of books but he did not read much. I guess most of us are like that to a certain degree. But as one notable person once said it is not how many books we have that is important but it is how many books we read. To me there are so many more books to read. Let us make a resolve to read at least one book a week or no less than a chapter a night.

Dreams, Goals

It has been seven years since I left the halls of a University, but continuously rooted and recurring in my dreams are assignments uncompleted. This morning I jumped out of bed thinking that I overslept with a black and white exercise book in my hand. Is my dreams steering me towards something I need to explore? Is it conveying a few thoughts and questions about my future?  Or are my dreams of late simply a gentle reminder that it is time to act on goals set earlier? Maybe a similar situation has kept reoccurring for you too?

Maybe we are too busy with the day to day happenings in our lives that we have not been listening. As Carl Gustav Jung says it best “It is on the whole probably that we continually dream, but that consciousness makes such a noise that we do not hear it.”

Its lapis eyes
Serrate the setting
Ink works veil in blue
Prime notes lined the writers pad
Crystal spire mimics
As language drops into form.

-

Poem Written by Brenda L. McCartney

Whole books at 1/2 the price! Save 50% on 50 new & upcoming fiction and nonfiction favorites!

Reading Rewards

Illustration from istockphoto.com

“GRAY MATTER left-Neurons make new connections during learning. Right-  no connections”

Have you looked into your library recently and found that you can not recall most of the books you  have read?  Well, research shows that the neural connections which are responsible for receiving and processing information weaken when not in use. According to Dr. Taylor a professor at St. Mary’s College of California “we need to know stuff, but we need to move beyond that and challenge our perception of the world. If you always hang around with those you agree with that you already know, you are not going to wrestle with your established brain connections.” Reading is great way to focus your thoughts and exercise your brain. It may take a lot of discipline to read consistently but the rewards are never-ending.