Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: book review

  • How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend by Monks of New Skete

    How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend: The Classic Manual for Dog OwnersHow to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend: The Classic Manual for Dog Owners by Monks of New Skete

    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    One of my favorite saints of the Church is St. Francis of Assisi because of his humanity, compassion, sweet nature, and his love of animals with whom he is believed to communicate based upon the story of his converting the Wolf of Gubbio to a tamed animal. The story goes that while living in the city of Gubbio around 1220, St Francis volunteered to take leave and meet a ferocious wolf who devastated the country by attacking people and livestock. When St. Francis finally met the wolf, instead of punishing him for the offenses, he gently admonished the wolf to cause no more plight to the people and the livestock and promised him that he would be fed daily by the people of the city. The wolf was grateful for the compassionate promise and put his front paw on the saint’s hand as a gesture of accepting the advice. Thereafter, the Wolf of Gubbio kept his promise with the saint and became a tamed pet animal of the city.

    With this evocative image in mind of the gentle saint and the tamed wolf I had once seen on a prayer card, I selected to read this book by Monks of Skete of the Eastern Orthodox Church. In this regard, I was piqued by the facts that (1) these monks were reputable German Shepherd breeders and acclaimed canine-human relationship teachers; and that (2) the monks lived with the dogs in accordance with the teachings of the Gospel manifested in their healthy relationship with the dogs. However, the monks of Skete carefully avoid religious jargon in the book lest the book should be interpreted as a promotion of their faith. Instead, their faith is carefully incorporated into the belief of fostering their ideas about dogs with a philosophical and spiritual foundation for personal change because dogs mirror who we are by responding to the way we treat them without deception.

    The gem of this book is the monks’ views on salubrious human-canine relationship as appreciation of truths of the two worlds: one world of our own human prowess as a caretaker and one world of their own pristine nature as a guide to the wondrous natural world from which we have gradually distanced. While we provide them with food, shelter, and veterinarian care, dogs enable us to appreciate the beauty, the warmth, and the compassion that are deeply rooted in our humanity we often overlook or even try to suppress in the face of existential dilemma. In consideration of the aforesaid, I believe that the story of St. Francis of Assisi and the Wolf of Gubbio is not a myth but a truth.

  • Lists of Note by Shaun Usher

    Lists of Note: An Eclectic Collection Deserving of a Wider AudienceLists of Note: An Eclectic Collection Deserving of a Wider Audience by Shaun Usher

    My rating: 3 of 5 stars

    The act of note-taking is the prerogative of humans throughout the history of civilization; impromptu, interesting, and important, the nature of notetaking is to capture a train of thoughts that comes to one’s mind. This book by Shaun Usher is a pleasant compilation of such notes flooding vicissitudes of humankind. It is a sequence to his bestseller Letters of Note, which is a riveting compendium of letters of all kinds throughout the history of the world. Mr. Usher, who is very keen on collecting personal correspondence of people, has indeed again exerted great effort and time to make this project possible through the support of his fans via Unbound com, an organization which has helped writers publish their works since the 18th century in England.

    The book contains some very intriguing notes as follows: (1) Bill of Mortality which tells of the kinds of ailment English people of the 17th century died of, (and the reader will be surprised to find that one of the common causes of death was abscess); (2) an ancient Egyptian worker’s note on his absences recorded on a limestone; (3) Leonardo Da Vinci’s notes on what he would need to research for the anatomy of a man; (4) Michaelangelo’s list of food he wanted to eat with adorable pictures accompanied during his travel to and from Pietrasanta to extract marble used for the Basilica of San Lorenzo; (5) Sir Isaac Newton’s list of note revealing his peevishness with his mother and father, striking his sister and servant and neglecting to listen to a Sunday sermon in church; (6) Mark Twain’s list of note showing all the food he wanted to eat at home upon his returning from a long European trip; (7) Marilyn Monroe’s resolution to attend her new acting class without fail and to enroll in an English Literature class; and (8) Jack Kerouac’s note to his friend for writing tips in which he asserted the importance of free writing without grammatical, syntactical, and literary inhibition. These are just a few notable excerpts from the book, and the reader will have no time for boredom in reading this book.

    This is a quick read which one can enjoy without having to analyze the contents of the notes. The only foible about this read in Kindle version is that the original scripts of some of the notes are not clearly shown due to a mechanical aspect of the device. For this reason, it will be better to own a hard copy of the book as the notes are pictured in their entirety, so that the reader can see clearly the writing styles and discern the personalities and characters of the notetakers to a certain extent. The reader will realize that the act of note-taking, however simplistic and insignificant it may seem, is in fact a way of sketching the flow of thought from a world full of things assorted and flowing without a sense of purpose for composite significance.

  • The Diary of a Mad Legal Secretary by Eve Halliburton

    The Diary of a Mad Legal SecretaryThe Diary of a Mad Legal Secretary by Eve Halliburton

    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    Stephen King said that people love reading about what others do for a living because it’s so entertaining and thrilling at the same time with subject matters being closed to the real world. It gives readers a sense of realism or verity in which we all are rooted because work is what ties to us in reality where we face existential absurdities in dealing with human imperfections in conjunction with performing demands imposed on our daily tasks at work.

    Hence a story of a neurotic legal secretary who has good heart but is driven to a borderline madness by witnessing the idiosyncratic characters she encounters in the office: The bumptious boss, the snobbish lawyers and their ilk, the ingratiating and ruthless HR personnel, the pitiful and sometimes cunning co-workers. Reading this story is like watching a black comedy which induces both pathos and satirical comedic relief.  In fact, this diary seems to be more of a therapy journal in which the narrator purges out her hidden innermost feelings and emotions about her work and the people at it; it’s a Punch-like compendium of caricatures in word format.

    Ms. Halliburton could have written this hilarious book as her memoir of a seasoned legal secretary in a prestigious Manhattan law firm. Or more likely than not, the author might have written this diary as a way of releasing her own stress and distress. For whatever reason it might be, Stephen King was right in saying that we enjoy stories of others in relation to their jobs because this book is easy to read and enjoyable, providing the reader with the kind of pleasure a Peeping Tom indulges in by peeking at what others do and feel about their work  with a telescope.

  • Before I go by Catherine Cookson

    Before I GoBefore I Go by Catherine Cookson

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    This is my first encounter with Mrs. Cookson in her writing. What a world of writing she immersed herself in out of the melee! The book is one of her post mortem work discovered by her estate with the other unpublished novel, and I can see Mrs. Cookson must have intended to have this memoir published after she’s long gone because of the self-evident title of “Before I go”. This book is filled with her innermost feelings towards her family – her mother whom she called “Our Kate” and her dearest husband Tom and the people who entered her life, such as Nan Smith, the various doctors who attended to her lifelong health frailty, and her faith as a doubting Catholic. As an illegitimate child of an unwed mother from a poverty-stricken family, Mrs. Cookson however did not yield herself to the the bare necessities of life as it demanded.

    Mrs. Cookson was a true example of a triumph of will and hope over experience and condition. Working as a manageress in a laundry, the author did not resign herself to the complacency of her social class. Instead, she raised herself above the hubbub of life and arrived as a fine writer who wrote about people whom the readers could relate to based upon her experiences. Also, her Catholic faith, which she had been fighting with reason to no avail, was the bedrock of her character and shaped the way she looked at the world around her. For it was her faith to which she held on in times of trouble and from which her compassion, pity, and forgiveness sprang.

    What I like about Mrs. Cookson is her feistiness and pride which distinguished her from her peers and people of similar social origins. But this does not mean that she became haughty and untouchable with her literary success; on the contrary, Mrs. Cookson still retained her charitable nature although she often lamented about it because of people’s appropriation of her compassion and pity gratuitously.

    The reader will be able to read the mind and heart of this fine and very human writer. It’s not about her lifelong health problems of nose-bleeding, 8 miscarriages, and a peripheral vision by advanced age; this memoir is about Mrs. Cookson’s resilient spirit that enabled her to rise above the planes of biological hindrance and societal prejudices.

  • Easy as Pie Crosswords by Stanley Newman

    Easy as Pie Crosswords: Really, Really Easy!: 72 Relaxing PuzzlesEasy as Pie Crosswords: Really, Really Easy!: 72 Relaxing Puzzles by Stanley Newman

    My rating: 4 of 5 stars

    I have always admired people who do crossword puzzles on newspaper as a pastime; unlike word searches in which your mission is to find right words and circle them, crosswords require your cognitive abilities to conjure up right words, plus a mastery of the English language, including knowledge of idioms and certain expressions endemic in the English speaking countries. So as an admirer whose English is but a second language, finding an easy crossword puzzle was necessary to partake in the craft. Hence this puzzle book came along: deliciously enjoyable and generously easy, this puzzle book is recommended to anyone who is a novice in this field of crosswords. Moreover, this puzzlebook is spiral-bound, so that you can flip back the pages easily and solve the puzzles comfortably. This will be a nice addition to your coffee table readings at your leisure time.

  • Daily Life in Victorian London by Lee Jackson

    Daily Life in Victorian London: An Extraordinary AnthologyDaily Life in Victorian London: An Extraordinary Anthology by Lee Jackson

    My rating: 5 of 5 stars

    This book is a fruitful archive of personal diaries, newspaper/magazine articles, letters both official and private, and other historical records, all of which portray a glimpse of the everyday life of the Victorian Londoners – the poor, the middles class, and the middlings in between – minus the poshness of Downton Abbey. In this book, the reader will peep into many lives of different folks, kinds of job they had, the work conditions, and the places they went for recreations on holidays, and feel empathic towards their victorian kindred spirits. However, this is not a book of insalubrious living conditions for the proletariat, nor the litany of existential woes in living hard lives. In fact, reading this book is like reading a Charles Dickens’s story featuring an Oliver Twists, a Pip, a David Copperfield, and many others of interesting characters working for odd jobs . This book is about the humble but vibrant in Victorian London who were never the boring.