REDONDOWRITER'S SACRED ORDINARY

Palos Verdes Marine LCpl. Chris Kutlesas's Unit To Receive Books for Troops

When LCpl. Chris Kutlesa, 21, a Marine Combat Correspondent currently stationed in Japan, was younger, he introduced his mom, Karen Kutlesa, to the used book sale at Malaga Cove Library. "He was and is a book sleuth and he started me coming," she said, "and I still come as often as I can." Chris was raised in Palos Verdes and graduated from Palos Verdes High School.

So, when Karen and her family dropped by yesterday to browse and buy books, she and Gene Roeder, who directs all the book sales for the Peninsula Friends of the Library, is Vice President for Operations for PFL, and the Books for Troops program, began to chat.

Since 2004 the Peninsula Friends of the Library has been sending books, videos, magazines and CDs to troops all over the world. Gene told Karen that the PFL has shipped more than 68,182 items in 508 boxes weighing more than 336 tons to military hospitals, USO facilities, Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force units in 43 countries since joining the Books for Troops program.

He asked for her son's unit's address and said he would especially pack a box just for his unit. Small world, isn't it?

And you can help with a minimum donation of $15 which will send 40 books to our troops.  Donations can be made to Peninsula Friends of the Library, Books for Troops and sent to Malaga Cove Library, 2400 Via Campesina, Palos Verdes Estates, CA 90274.

Donations of the various media can be dropped off at any of the three library locations and should be marked Books for Troops to distinguish them from our other donations. The most requested genres are: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mysteries, Westerns and Adventure.

Books are also donated to the LAX USO.

As I prepare to push this send button, I'm sending Karen Kutlesa the link for this blog post so Chris can see his mom passing on his book sleuth tradition. And I also cross posted this story to the Peninsula Friends of the Library blog. 

For additional information, call 310-377-9584, ext. 553 or e-mail at friends@pvld.org

Henceforth I Whimper No More--

This shirt was worn by a friend on the Revlon Run/Walk for Breast Cancer this year but I keep reading the phrase over and over again.

 

A two-time breast cancer survivor myself (1989 and 1997, two separate cancers in different breasts), enough time has passed that I don’t find those experiences consciously on my mind anymore on a daily basis. Unless it is test time again, which it is: bloodwork and mammogram are scheduled this month. Now I wake up from dreams about the cancer returning—cancel, cancel, as my late 12-step sponsor would say. I can control my thoughts but I can’t control my dreams.

To my surprise, I’ve been brought up short three times in the past weeks where the memories of my own treatments bombarded me. And I was one of the lucky ones with stage I cancers and I had surgery, radiation, and long time treatment first with tamoxifen and later with Femara. To say I am grateful would be the understatement of the year.

The first memory trigger was when my son-in-law gave me a self-published poetry book called “Sometimes You Dance the Monster” by Beatrice Smart who passed away in May. It is a collection of poems she wrote during her eight-year fight. If you click on the link above, the short book is downloadable in PDF. I have read and own many, many books about cancer and rarely have I been this jolted. Next came a DVD I saw when I was at my sister’s house in Washington last month called "Living Proof" which is a biopic of oncologist and researcher Dr. Dennis Slamon, the UCLA doctor who helped develop the breast cancer drug Herceptin, and his effort to keep the drug trials afloat. His inspiring journey shows the sacrifices he makes in his personal life and the obstacles that he faces to get the drug approved. Thousands of lives have been saved because of his dedication. (The film was based on Robert Bazell’s book “Her-2.”)

Because my own first treatment was at UCLA, some of the rooms in the movie were familiar to me and I have not been able to get the film out of my mind. I highly recommend it, by the way. 

Last night, while looking for images for my art journal, I ran across a book I had not looked at in a long time--Art.Rage.Us: Art and Writing by Women With Breast Cancer published by Chronicle Books. The photos, art and essays are wonderful, but I just kept thinking, "There but for the grace of God, go I." 

The saying on the shirt above reminds me that love of myself and others is letting go of fear, which is from A Course in Miracles. The photo below also reminds me that under all circumstances one must keep a sense of humor. Apparently a lot of women in the Run/Walk brought animals, too. Incredible strides have been made in breast ca drugs and treatments. As a survivor, I say thank you from the bottom of my heart. 

 

 

What Kind of Reader Are You?

My friend Elaine at Five Acres With a View had this up at her blog. These are my results and I'd like to know yours. I have a friend who actually has a separate house for his books, although I'll admit that he also uses that house to sell books from. As for me, I get extremely anxious if I don't have a pile of books ready to read. When I move someday the Friends of the Library will be getting thousands of books, many obscure, but having books and/or bookcases in every room of the house, literally, brings me comfort. 

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader   You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Children Who Read Together----

My office at school is in the library. I don't know about you, but these kids sprawled in their bean bag chairs look like they are in my kind of heaven. Children who read together make the world a much better place. 

Make This Christmas Memorable: Adopt a Rescue Animal

Dogs and cats seeking people! As many of you know, one of my volunteer jobs is at the Peninsula Library District’s Friends of the Library Book Sales. In addition to working at the monthly sale at the Malaga Cove Branch, I am also the communications person for the Peninsula Friends of the Library Board. That means that I keep the blog for the group which you can read at Peninsula Friends of the Library. 

This is a kind of cross-post between the two blogs today. One of the things I love is meeting all our regular customers and getting to know them and meeting new people, too.  We have become a library family of sorts.

Every sale I hear lots of people’s stories and share my own, but today I met someone really special: Junior, an 8-year old Cocker Spaniel and his foster mom Paula, one of our regular customers. 

Come to find out, Junior is up for adoption through Rover Rescue, an animal rescue non-profit organization. I realize that people around the world visit this blog and can’t come to the South Bay area of Los Angeles to adopt a dog, but look at this face, will you? What do you think those eyes are saying? 

Paula recently lost her 17-year-old Cocker Spaniel but still has another one. She is very fond of this breed. She has been fostering Junior for almost three months now and what an incredible gift this seasoned dog would make for just the right family. I was enchanted but my dog Cookie, who is 13, is too set in her ways to have a companion but as I've told you ad nauseum, Cookie is a rescue dog, too. 

Junior is housebroken, very friendly, is neutered and micro-chipped, and has all his shots. He just needs a home. 

Paula is a regular volunteer for Rover Rescue. She had just come from an adoption day event at a local pet store, but Junior's perfect match didn't take him today. Are you his match? Or do you have a feeling there is a pet out there who needs you for a mom or dad? Here's your Marley and Me moment.

You can read about how the adoption procedure works at Rover Rescue's Adoption link. My friends Kathy and Allen got their dog Scruffy about five years ago from Rover Rescue and he has enriched their lives immensely. 

By the way, Junior is unique. As you can see, he is very comfortable  around books and with book lovers. This holiday season, won’t you consider adopting a pet from one of the rescue non-profits in your own area? 

The Future of Books in an Electronic World

With all the technology that has altered our lives forever, and will continue to change by leaps and bounds, do you ever wonder what is going to become of books in the future? That's a vague anxiety for me, I'll admit. I’m a book and library addict and just checked out The Story of Edgar Sawtelle after I attended a meeting at the Peninsula Center Library. I cannot imagine a world without tangible books. Can you?

Kathy Gould, the Director of the Peninsula Library District, cited an article in her blog on Dec. 2 and referred readers to an op-ed piece from last Sunday’s New York Times written by James Gleick. Kathy, by the way, if you are a book and media user, has very interesting material and links on her blog.

In her blog entry, this quote by Gleick leaped out at me.

"As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars....It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text love."

This gives me hope for the future. Thanks, Kathy.

After shopping in the Library Shop (best gifts in town at reasonable prices), I visited the book sale going on all this weekend. I have bookcases throughout my house; I’m a collector. I listen to books on media, but I would have to say that one my favorite things to do in the whole world is read a book.

A Gem of a Novel: Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co.

This is author Maria Amparo Escandon who wrote Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co.: A Road Novel With Literary License and Esperanza’s Box of Saints prior to that. I was delighted when one of the members of my book club made arrangements for her to be with us today when we discussed Gonzalez. She is beautiful inside and out.

Born and educated in Mexico City, in her early 20s she came to the United States with her new husband and hoped to go into filmmaking. Starting from square one, slowly she found her niche in America and that story all by itself would make a great book. I always find it so fascinating to read an author and then listen to how their lives evolved and what part of the life experience formed the plot and characters of a book. Her father, among his occupations, owned a small trucking company when she was a child, but it was her two brothers, not her, who got to go there; as a female, trucking wasn't her option. One day stuck in L.A. traffic she saw a truck with the name of a father and son painted on its body and she began to muse about how in the business world it is always father and son, not father and daughter. She set out to change that with her book.

Her main character in Gonzalez is a Mexican-American woman named Libertad and her story unfolds inside a Mexican prison where she is incarcerated. Through flash backs, we find that since Libertad was born, her father raised her as a single parent while he is driving a truck cross country. All I can say is that I guarantee you will love this book. The critics call it a modern Scherazade--with a lot of colorful characters, each with their own story.

Maria, the author, lives in Los Angeles and has two daughters, 18 and 19. She and her former husband have been partners in a thriving public relations company for more than 20 years. As a kid she was considered "imaginative" and her mom encouraged her to use that imagination by writing down her stories. Maria researches and writes, and also teaches creative writing at UCLA, in addition to book tours and visits to schools and groups. She wrote the screenplay of Esperanza and it was made into a film called Santitos available in Spanish with English subtitles, which I'm going to order. Currently she is trying to get investors in place to film Gonzalez and she is also at work on a new book.

As a sidebar, to write the Gonzalez book she spent a lot of time researching American and Mexican women's prisons. One of the wardens told her about a non-profit group called Women in Criminal Justice. Their work is amazing. One of their projects is to bring incarcerated women's children to them on Mother's Day. Last year 38 busloads of kids visited their moms in prison. Her activities with the women and children in prisons are fodder for several more books, as far as I'm concerned.

If you get either book from your library, or buy one, I would love to hear your reactions to it. I've even had two dreams about it--Redondowriter in prison, no less. What a pleasure it was to spend some time today with this delightful author.

The Thirteenth Tale Kept Me Reading Around the Clock

Gothic mysteries are not usually my cup of tea, but I just finished Diane Setterfield's 2006 novel, "The Thirteenth Tale." I was mesmerized, reading the first half in three days and the last half in the past 24 hours. It is compared in reviews to the work of DuMaurier and the Bronte sisters.

If you haven't read it, I recommend it. If you have, I'm curious about what you thought. Perhaps I'm going to seek out more books like this. I wrote this passage in the journal. The biographer of a famous British author, whose tale the whole book is about, Margaret Lea muses:

"People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic."

Going Crazy on Good Reads

Over the past few months I have been invited by several friends to join Good Reads, a site to list the books you have read, want to read, or are currently reading. A social networking group, there are also forums, recommendations, and you can see the lists your invited friends have read. If you are also a book-a-holic, check it out. I've been keeping track of books I read for the past three years, so I plugged those in tonight along with many other favorites. Here's one more thing to keep me occupied.

I understand there are several good book sites for tracking and exchanging information, but since I am a book slut, I just wanted to share this with you in case you are interested. There really is a Book Slut blog in case you didn't know.

All I know is that at this moment, I just finished Gail Tsukiyama's "The Street of a Thousand Blossoms," and I loved it. It was the first book I put at Good Reads. And, I've got "The Thirteenth Tale" and a few non-fiction books waiting in the wings. So many books, so little time.

Breakfast With Buddha: A Great Gift for the Seekers You Know

Breakfast With Buddha by Roland Merullo did not receive great acclaim that I was aware of when it was released in fall of 2007, but I have just finished reading it and I can’t begin to tell you how much I enjoyed it. I have a memory problem with books and movies, but this is a book I will never forget. I felt so in tune with the main character, Otto Ringling, a middle-aged man who with his wife and two kids who live the American dream, are sometimes cynical about it, and deep down wish for something "more."

Otto is tricked into driving Volya Rinpoche, his “flakey” sister’s spiritual guru, across the country. To paraphrase reviewer Josh Swiller at Peace Corps Writers, Otto’s parents have died suddenly in a car crash near their home in rural North Dakota, and he is headed there from New York to tie up loose ends. He and Volya leisurely drive across the two lane country highways of middle America, stopping here and there for lectures, Americana (bowling, swimming, miniature golf) or most often, food (Otto is a publisher of food books). Along the way they talk, don’t talk, watch the scenery, get lost in their thoughts and listen to the radio and its constant stream of bullying invective. 
Volya is beyond personal conflicts, and Otto is a man with no monetary complaints, a satisfying home life, and a lovely and loving family so almost all the novel’s drama comes from Otto’s trepidation about accepting the wisdom Volya offers.

In the author’s notes at the end of the book, I was delighted to see that during Roland Merullo’s own spiritual journey over the years, many of the teachers who have been my own teachers, have been his.

This excerpt from “Breakfast With Buddha” could explain my own beliefs to a T. “I remember, at the start of the trip, saying to my sister that I was a Christian, old-fashioned Protestant stock. How strange then that after all my mental and physical travels I returned, not to those rigid doctrines exactly, but to the stories we’d been raised on, the fieldstone foundation of my faith. Precisely reported or altered by church elders, it did not really matter to me at that moment because every one of those stories circled around essentially the same idea: that there was another dimension to this life as surely as the earth turned; that there were people, there had always been people, who sensed that dimension and made some kind of leap of fith to be in harmony with it. And there were others who did not. It wad about choosing between A and B, yes and n, and sometimes those choices were petty, and sometimes they were of enormous importance. It was about cruising along in the comfortable vehicle of old habits and ways, old thought patterns, old conceits, or sensing some new truth and setting off on foot.”

This book is really a lot of fun to read because it basically is very funny yet touching; it cuts close to the bone of those who have been life-long seekers of something greater than ourselves but getting sucked into materialism and American culture. It manages to get across some universal truths in a simple story. I highly recommend this book and will look up Merullo’s other books at the library today when I return “Breakfast With Buddha.”