Individual Reading
It’s been quite a while since my last Individual Reading report, but I can explain! First of all, my book is not one of those that I might like. It’s a torture for me to read something as vague and senseless as this ‘Big Magic’. That’s why I read three more books at the same time and I will mention them a bit later.
As for my book, I have a couple of words to say. To begin with, I want to contradict two statements from my previous entry.
“…I sorted out the logic of narration. The author gives a statement and proves it with personal examples”
No, I was wrong. There were several personal examples, indeed, but it’s not the logic of the whole book. Further on the author starts her contemplations on one specific topic (will be mentioned later).
“The message of the book is that fear prevents us from creative living”
Wrong again. Well, partly it is true, that part that I had read was about fear, but not the whole book. I shouldn’t have made such loud statements having covered only 1/5 of the book.
So, the specific topic that I wanted to share could be titled “Ideas. User manual for dummies”. Elizabeth Gilbert describes the whole path of the idea being born till it’s dead. Take a look at this vivid description of “inspiration”:
Then she touches upon her experience of writing a book about a woman in Amazon Jungles. Here she gives a story about her meeting a man from Brazil who told her about people that wanted to build something big in the middle of jungles, but to no avail. Mother Nature “ate” their work, every was sucked into the soil. So Elizabeth came up with a plot for her future book. Two years passed, she met one woman who had become a very dear friend of hers. During one of their conversations Elizabeth found out that this woman had come up with an extremely similar idea of the book. It made her think that ideas can be transferred from one person to another through air.
Also it was written that when you meet your idea, you have tree options: to say yes to it, to say no or to completely ignore it. Most people prefer to do the third. Also Ms. Gilbert is sure that ideas are magical and she means it in “Hogwarts” sense. She believes in real magic and connects it with the world of ideas.
Now I would like to share some of the vocabulary items:
rampant — getting worse quickly and in an uncontrolled way;
alluring — attractive or exciting;
upheaval — a great change, especially causing or involving much difficulty, activity, or trouble;
intact — complete and in the original state;
nonchalant — behaving in a calm manner, often in a way that suggests you are not interested or do not care;
renege — to fail to keep a promise or an agreement.
And here I want to mention the books I read as well:
1. The Theory of Everything by Stephen Hawking
2. Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
3. The Why Cafe by John Strelecky
The first and the second ones make me satisfied by giving answers to my endless questions about the beginning of the Universe from two perspectives. I’m truly thrilled to read about scientific part of it: all the explanations about the singularity of Black Holes, curvatives and dimensions. And the third one is a very short book, but it makes me think about the purpose of my existence. There are three main questions that I am supposed to answer by the end of the book: Why are you here? Do you fear death? Are you fulfilled? I’ve read the book two years ago, when my values were different and it’s intriguing to see what I have now. I strongly recommend this last book on my list!
