Shutterbabe (Adventures in Love and War) by Deborah Copaken Cogan (2000)

Cogan is a gung ho girl who after graduating from college, flew to Paris to establish herself as a photojournalist.  The book consists of six chapters narrating her travel assignments in Afghanistan, Switzerland, Zimbabwe, Romania, and Russia. She was only 22 when she took on her first assignment in Afghanistan where she travelled as a lone photojournalist with mujahideens. Cogan’s memoir stops at New York where she eventually settled when she had two children.  But that’s getting ahead of the story.

Each chapter in Shutterbabe narrates Cogan’s travel assignments in these different countries, the dangers she faced (she’s been assaulted, propositioned, and left in the middle of a desert, among other things), the financial hardships (in most of these assignments she had to pay for most of her expenses and hope that her pictures get published), the men she met in these trips (one terrifyingly obnoxious and one gently pointing to her some lessons in life), political background of the stories she was covering, her opinions on photography (she thinks “photo montees are bullshit”) and a lot of tips for those interested to take the photojournalism route.  The memoir is full of Cogan’s observations on human prejudices, poverty, and the difficulties of a woman trying to make her mark in the world.

Cogan, while in the middle of a tortuous relation with a Romanian, a liaison with a Frenchman, and an impending visit from an American who broke her heart years before, would meet a Russian émigré who became her future husband. In a span of 10 days, Cogan, who thrives on a constant adrenaline high, and who is determined to keep herself free from personal commitments, made up her mind that she couldn’t be parted with this man.  

Cogan eventually moved to New York, sold her cameras “but never her Leica”, and joined ABC.  She has now two children, a boy and a girl.

Cogan writes of her children:

“You kind of have to wonder why it took my son less than four years to own one of the truths I had to spend more than two decades figuring out.  Just ask him. He’ll tell you. The secret to a happy life is love.

When he’s old enough, when tiny Sasha’s old enough, I’ll jump on my soapbox and tell them a few more.  Simple truths, like the quest is as important, if not more important, than the goal. Like hearts have a surprising resilience.  Like war is bad.  Like some things in life are inexplicable, and many others are ambiguous.  Like not everyone can be saved.  Like sex can either be beautiful or ugly but never both simultaneously.  Like reading and travelling teach us more than we can ever learn in school.  Like girls have it tougher than boys, still, and that owing to such things as body mass and the mechanics of rape, perhaps always will.  Like babies should be born only to people who are ready for such a colossal responsibility.  Like parenthood – a parenthood sown of planning and love – is by far and away the most profound experience life holds.”

Shutterbabe reads like a travelogue/Time extended feature article/Charlie’s Angels. At the end, we’re ready for a sequel. 

French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano (2005)

In France, we don’t talk about “diets”, certainly not with strangers. Mainly, we spend our social time talking about what we enjoy: feelings, family, hobbies, philosophy, politics, culture, and yes, food, especially food (but never diets).

The book’s title may lead one to believe that this is a diet book. I would however, describe it as a stylish book of tips for living a balanced, healthy, happy life.

“French Women Don’t Get Fat” gently tells us that those pounds we would like to (permanently!) banish are bound to obstinately stay unless we get our acts right. Guiliano shares with her readers what French women have known for ages - that we all need to take time to smell the flowers, live in the now, stress less, and make time for the people in our lives. She emphasizes that French women abide by the tenets of living to work and not working to live, being gentle with one’s self, and savoring the sweetness and the beauty of what life offers.

Guiliano says that French women:

1. Think about good things to eat. Other women typically worry about bad things to eat.
2. Eat smaller portions of more things. Elsewhere, women eat larger portions of more things
3. Eat more vegetables.
4. Eat a lot more fruit.
5. Love bread and would never consider a life without carbs.
6. Don’t eat “fat-free” or “sugar-free” or anything artificially stripped of natural flavor. They go for the real thing in moderation.
7. Love chocolate, especially the dark, slightly bitter, silky stuff with nutty aroma.
8. Eat with all five senses, allowing less to seem like more.
9. Balance their food, drink, and movement on a week-by-week basis.
10. Believe in the three Ps: planning, preparation, pleasure.
11. Do stray, but they always come back, believing there are only detours and no dead ends.
12. Don’t often weigh themselves, preferring to keep track with their hands, eyes, and clothes: “zipper syndrome”.
13. Eat three meals a day.
14. Don’t snack all the time.
15. Never let themselves be hungry.
16. Never let themselves feel stuffed.
17. Train their taste buds, and those of their young, at an early age.
18. Honor mealtime rituals and never eat standing up or on the run. Or in front of the TV.
19. Don’t watch much TV.
20. Eat and serve what is in season, for maximum flavor and value, and know availability does not equal quality.
21. Love to discover new flavors and are always experimenting with herbs, spices, and citrus juices to make a familiar dish seem new.
22. Eschew extreme temperatures in what they consume, and enjoy fruits and vegetables bursting with flavor at room temperature, at which they prefer their water, too.
23. Don’t care for hard liquor or spirits.
24. Do enjoy in regularly, but with meals, and only a glass (or maybe two).
25. Get a kick from champagne, as aperitif or with food, and don’t need a special occasion to open a bottle.
26. Drink water all day long.
27. Choose their own indulgences and compensations. They understand that little things count, both additions and subtractions, and that as an adult, everyone is the keeper of her own equilibrium.
28. Enjoy going to market.
29. Plan meals in advance and think in terms of menus (a list of little dishes) even at home.
30. Think dining in is as sexy as dining out.
31. Love to entertain at home.
32. Care enormously about the presentation of food. It matters to them how you look at it.
33. Walk everywhere they can.
34. Take the stairs whenever possible.
35. Will dress to take out the garbage (you never know).
36. Are stubborn individuals and don’t follow mass movements.
37. Adore fashion.
38. Know one can go far with a great haircut, a bottle of champagne, and a divine perfume.
39. Know l’amour fait maigrir (love is slimming).
40. Avoid anything that demands too much effort for little pleasure.
41. Love to sit in a café and do nothing but enjoy the moment.
42. Love to laugh.
43. Eat for pleasure.
44. Don’t diet.
45. Don’t get fat.

The book has a wonderful bonus. It contains French recipes that look simple and fun to prepare. Wolfgang Puck (although not a Frenchman), has succinctly put it, “live, love, and eat!”

Bonjour, Happiness! (Secrets to Finding Your Joie de Vivre) by Jamie Cat Callan (2011)

“Everything you do in life has the potential to add to your happiness, your joie de vivre. You can grab a cup of coffee and take it out and drink it while you’re driving or walking down the street, talking on your cell phone,not really paying any attention to the world around you, and not really enjoying your cup of coffee, or you can buy your coffee, sit down and drink it from a real china cup. Find a great place to sit when you have a good view of passersby. Rather than multi-tasking, why not be present to the moment and do one thing at a time?”

In Callan’s newest book, she reveals that she is a typical American woman “who often feels that she is not smart enough, not rich enough, not organized enough, not accomplished enough, and definitely not young enough.”

Taking cue from her grandmother who was very French and who she thinks was someone who had mastered the art of living beautifully; she embarks on a research project that would help her unlock the secret to finding one’s joie de vivre. She applied to the Virginia Center for a Creative Arts fellowship which enabled her to live and work in Auvillar, a little village in the Southwest of France.

After interviewing, shopping, dining, and cooking with French women from all walks of life, Callan shares some lessons she’s learned from the French:

1. Stop and focus. Be present in simple and familiar activities such as grocery shopping, gardening, cooking, sitting in a park, having a picnic, enjoying a bath, or even doing housework.
2. Be in the moment and be willing to change your plans when something unique and wonderful comes into your life.
3. Break the connection between spending and money and happiness.
4. Resist chasing after happiness and give happiness a chance to sneak up on you.
5. Be creative with less.
6. Dance.
7. Revive and realize some of your old dreams.
8. Tend to the gifts that nature has given you
9. Challenge yourself and break out of the familiar.
10. Appreciate the mystery that is here and now.
11. Work to live, don’t live to work.
12. Walk.
13. Protect your privacy.
14. Add in your repertoire a few tried and tested dishes.
15. Sit down with your family at least once a week to a real meal.
16. Keep the dining room table free of clutter.
17. Practice the art of “less is more”.
18. Learn to occasionally just shrug your shoulders and say, “that’s life!”
19. Open your eyes and notice all the beauty in your world.
20. Ask yourself where you might have gone overboard in one direction or another in your life.
21. Love your body as it is right now.
22. Enjoy your food.
23. Become involved in your community.
24. Develop conversational skills by asking questions.
25. Think romantic thoughts.
26. Wear good lingerie all the time.
27. Dress up.
28. Truly give to yourself.
29. Consider making a commitment to someone else.
30. Create a rhythm and pattern in your life.

Reading “Bonjour, Happiness” is akin to eating the French macaron. First comes the visual delight in beholding this pretty concoction, followed by the satisfaction of taking the first bite, and then the overpowering saccharine sweetness. On the whole, however, a delectable little pleasure.

a long way down by nick hornby (2005)

“Some dead people who were too sensitive to live: Sylvia Plath, van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, Primo Levi, Kurt Cobain, of course. Some alive people: George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Osama bin Laden. - JJ”

Four disparate people find themselves one New Year’s Eve on Topper’s House with a common purpose: jump off from the building and put an end to what they perceive to be their respective miserable lives.

Martin Sharp was a morning television show host until he was sent to prison for sleeping with a minor. When he completed his jail time, he found his seemingly perfect life gone. No career, no wife, no daughters. He does not believe that people who take their own lives do so while the balance of their minds is disturbed. Rather, he thinks coroners’ reports should read that people take their lives “after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.”

Maureen is a 51-year old single mother tired of caring full-time for a physically and mentally incapacitated son. She can’t get used to the idea that her life is “finished, pointless, too hard, and completely without hope or color.”

Jess Crichton is an 18-year old kid who has difficulty talking to her parents. Her sister has suddenly disappeared and her boyfriend has as swiftly left her without an explanation. She can’t imagine herself waking up in the morning and she realizes that the best thing to do was to make her life as short as she possibly could. At that point, she “could feel the weight of everything – the weight of loneliness, of everything that had gone wrong.”

JJ is an American come to London who had big dreams of becoming rich and famous. His girlfriend has recently dumped him. His band, which he thought was to going to become his ticket to fame and fortune, has split up. He thinks that “suicide is supposed to be cool. It was invented for Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake”. And for JJ. He was disappointed to see that Martin, Maureen, and Jess, clearly uncool people, also wanted to jump off Topper’s House.

A Long Way Down explores the nuances of suicide in a half humorous, half contemplative manner. As Topper’s House Four (how JJ refers to the four of them) moves from 30 minutes to one year of holding off their plan to end their lives, we see that life, while it might not necessarily become better, becomes more bearable with a little help and company from friends. While we may think that it will take a happening of cosmic proportions to convince some people that life is still worth living, sometimes it only takes something simple to achieve the same. As mundane as a vacation, a ticket to a game show, or a part-time job.

Hornby is adept at keeping the four voice of Martin, Maureen, Jess, and JJ distinct and reverberating. The book has managed to put together a sensitive topic that is funny, poignant, and profound all at the same time.

water for elephants by sara gruen (2006)

Life is the most spectacular show on earth.

Water for Elephants is one of those books you can easily imagine being made into a movie. The book is fast-paced and full of color. It has a dashing hero, a pretty heroine, a mad villain, and rampaging animals. It is filled with stories of friendships, passionate affairs, tragic deaths, and geriatric woes.

Jacob Jancowski is 90. Or 93. He is in a home for the aged. One day, the circus comes to town opening a floodgate of memories. Jacob is swooped back in time when he was 23. This was the year when all changed for him in a flash. One moment, he is a young man, about to take his exams in Cornell, and life looked all rosy and promising. In the next second, he is part of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth and sharing a room in a trailer with a dwarf and his beloved cat.

Jacob will find his two great loves in this circus: Marlena Rosenbluth and Rosie (who turns out, can only follow commands in Polish). Together, the three of them will come up with a brilliant act that almost matches that of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth’s hated rival.

There are several dazzling twists and turns in this book just like in a circus. Water for Elephants will find the reader spellbound and reading long and late into the night.

Yes, a movie has been made based on the book.

on reading

Mother likes to say that I was an easy child. They could keep me quiet by placing a reading material in my crib and I could keep myself occupied for hours. Shredding the material into bits. If I really liked it, I would eat it.

I have become more sophisticated as the years have passed. I have made certain improvements on my eating habits and I can now actually read. In fact I have developed a serious relationship with reading that a considerable part of my income goes to bookstores, that I consider bookshelves as essential furniture, that it is constant struggle for me to maintain a reading-exercise balance, that a usual cause of my tardiness for appointments is that I am unable to put a book down, and that I procrastinate doing errands pending conclusion of whatever it is I am reading at a particular time. Which is why I try not to say anything against drinkers, smokers, weed enthusiasts, World Cup die-hards, or raw vegans. To each his own passion.

I consider a book particularly good when I start exhibiting book-mania signs. For example, when I was reading The Various Flavours of Coffee by Anthony Capella, I brought my car to the repair shop to have the tires checked. I stayed inside the car obliviously reading my book while the mechanic proceeded to look at the car. It was only when I got home that I remembered I have forgotten to check whether the mechanic returned the replaced tire (he did). I had it really bad with this book because I also remember leaving it in the car so I can read a few pages at every stop light.

Now I have noticed another peculiarity. A light bulb in my head starts to flash when there’s any mention of coffee, cafes, or caffeine in the book. Take for instance The-Know-It-All (One Man's Humble Questo to Become the Smartest Person in the World) by AJ Jacob which kept me entertained at Singapore’s transit hotel. On page 47, the narrator states that he needs to be drinking more coffee (there goes the bulb!) and adds a phrase on how coffee was discovered (more flashing!).

I realize that I need to be more discerning of what I am reading these days although I like giving new writers a fair chance. I calculated that I spend at least 12 hours in the office these days. If I spend 7 hours sleeping, that leaves me five hours every day to do as I please. Five hours. We have not even begun factoring in time spent in traffic.

I am somewhere midway between infancy and my dream-of-going-topless-in-the-Bahamas-when-I-retire-day but the strategy to keep me quiet remains the same. A good material to read.

Persistence Unlimited lists 26 advantages of reading, in addition to keeping the baby quiet:
1. Reading is an active mental process
2. It is a fundamental skill builder
3. Improves your vocabulary
4. Gives you a glimpse into other cultures and places
5. Improves concentration and focus
6. Builds self-esteem
7. Improves memory
8. Improves your discipline
9. Learn anywhere
10. Improves creativity
11. Gives you something to talk about
12. Books are inexpensive entertainment
13. You can learn at your own pace
14. New mental associations
15. Improves your reasoning skills
16. Builds your expertise
17. Saves money
18. Decreases mistakes
19. You’ll discover surprises
20. Decreased boredom
21. Can change your life
22. Can help break a slump
23. Reduces stress
24. Gets you away from digital distractions
25. You’ll make more money
26. The book is always better than the movie

(Photo from CSL Cartoonstock)

how starbucks saved my life (a son of privilege learns to live like everyone else) by michael gates gill (2007)

One could probably see my smirk a mile away when I chanced upon the title of Michael Gates Gill’s book, “How Starbucks Saved My Life (A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else)”. If it were “How Coca Cola Saved My Life” or how “Vegemite Saved My Life”, I would have made an audible disparaging remark in the bookstore to no one in particular. It did not help that the author, a man over sixty years old, by-lines his book with a reference to his forebears. But because it had some relation to coffee, I held my peace (and picked up the book).

The book is part memoir, part hard-sell ad campaign for Starbucks, and part motivational spiel.

Mike, as he would be referred to in his Starbucks circle, is a son of affluent parents who lived a charmed life from birth until his employment was terminated with one of the largest advertising agencies in the US and around the world.

I have to tell you first the redeeming parts of this book before I tear it apart. The good points have nothing to do with the strength of the book and all because of the reason that I ingest a lot of this black beverage.

One, I like the idea of how each chapter starts with a quotation from a Starbucks cup. The first chapter, for example, starts with the following quotation:

“The humble improve”
- A quote from Wynton Marsalis, jazz musician, published on the side of a cup of a Starbucks Double Tall Skim Latte

Two, Mike, as a new hire, has to take on the entire range of job responsibilities in Starbucks. So we get an idea of how the cafe operates, its company ethos, and trivia like the reason why the person at the register shouts out the order of the customer (properly referred to as a Guest) and why the personnel in charge of making the coffee shouts back the same order to the cashier. We also get to know what makes for “legendary service” – do you (1) make eye contact? (2) greet the guests? (3) thank the guest? (4) initiate conversation? (5) recognize a guest by drink or name?

Now for the bad news.

It is difficult to find sympathy for this guy. He whines that at age 53, he was unceremoniously fired from his job after 25 years of loyal servitude and after putting this job always before his family. He emphasized that he has missed holidays with his family, had no second thoughts of uprooting them if his job required him moving to another place, and had no qualms about his unavailability to his four growing children.

He then goes on to complain some more that because he was in such a depressed state, he had gotten into a habit of regularly going to the gym where he met a “not-so-young woman in her forties” with whom he had a son. This led to him telling his wife that he has sired a fifth child, unfortunately not with her. His wife, who was “clear-headed” would not stand for it and so they got an “amicable” divorce.

Then this thing about a rare medical condition which he gets diagnosed. At a time when he just let go of his health insurance which he could no longer afford. Sniff. (The rare medical condition of course turns out to be not that urgent or that serious towards the end of the book.)

Finally, at 64 years old, he got hired at Starbucks which he now calls the best job he’s ever had. The comparisons, the epiphanies, and all the name-dropping start here. He cannot stop gushing at how different the life of the proletariat is; at how mundane yet how meaningful it can be (do you see me brushing a tear away?). In the same breath that he extols the admirable virtue of cleaning a loo with zeal, he reminisces at how he once had an exchange of pleasantries with Jacqueline Kennedy.

Nope, the former American First Lady is not the only person he namedrops. He namedrops his father, who used to write for the New Yorker, a string of colleagues, neighbors, former classmates, so-called friends, Muhammad Ali, Robert Frost, E.B. White, Ezra Pound… I was afraid at some point that he’d mention next that he’s actually met Michelangelo.

It does not stop there. He wrote an Afterword where he says that a 28-year old woman came to his store and told him that his book so inspired her that she quit a job that was boring her to death and is now doing something she really loves. The three Ls which have allegedly helped peopled live better lives (after reading his book)?
1. Leap with faith
2. Look with respect
3. Listen to your heart to find true happiness

My important lesson which I have drawn from the book? If you are instinctively repulsed by a book’s title, run! (and it does not matter even if it was written by that goatherd who discovered coffee on the hills of Ethiopia.)