It never reads; it pores.

Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

What a great book. While not ambitious, it set out with a clear purpose--to reproduce as entertainingly and accurately as possible the experience of a drug-induced bender--and accomplished it with brevity and indelibility. I immediately netflixed the movie, for I cannot remember reading a book that is suited so perfectly to a film adaptation, while remaining successful as a book.

David Rice: Crazy Loco

My students are creating reading journals, and this is one that several have had positive reactions to, so I decided to take a look for pedagogical purposes. I was a bit disappointed at the relative shallowness, and irritated at the editor's borderline insulting choice to gloss every other word. The final story in the book redeemed it to a large extent, however. "Last Mass" was the longest story in the book, and it was clear that the relative lack of skill in the previous stories was a function of the constraints of length rather than of the author's amateurity. In fact, I found it quite touching and, though I don't plan on teaching the whole collection, may well find an opportunity to teach just this one story.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Sign of Four

I found this significantly easier to read than its predecessor, A Study in Scarlet, but I'm not precisely sure why. It is possible that there are subtle touches Doyle had incorporated as a more experienced author which, though barely noticeable individually, gave the story some refinement that was lacking in Scarlet. At any rate, the structure of the story was essentially the same, and neither Doyle's nor Holmes' skills shone particularly brightly. Nonetheless, a worthy read--once.

Athene Raefiel: Getting to the Heart

Easily the worst written book of the four in this post, and at the same time the only one likely to make a lasting impression on my life. I feel like giving Athene a gift of my editing skills next time she plans to publish something; not only is the book peppered with misspellings and grammatical sins, but it lacks structure and fluency.

Yet I have revisited it at least three times since finishing it. Lately I have returned mentally to certain seemingly insignificant events in my life, and found myself stuck there. Although I would not have thought either had a psychological impact at the time, returning to them has had the effect of making me feel like a frightened little boy all over again: peculiar and unprecedented, in my life at least.

I was reminded, while troubled by these memories, of this book. "One can," she writes, "explore their [sic] own past lives and childhood . . . You can heal and readily change many of the feeling patterns stuck in your emotional and mental bodies" (20,21). So I went for it. I used some of the visualizations in the book to--I almost feel silly saying it--shift the energy around these memories and heal the patterns. For patterns they were; both events that were troubling me had to do with exactly the same behavior on my part and the shame and regret surrounding it. All I can say is that the exercises in the book worked. Those memories were coming up at this time for a reason, and I had some minor healing to do connected with them. Perhaps grammar is not that important after all.