Some thoughts on books

I have been meandering my way through The Great Oom by Robert Love. It tells the story of Dr. Pierre Barnard, the person who brought yoga to America. He is one of those incredible Gilded Age people who just kept reinventing himself, with a huge helping of ego, and a smaller helping of lies and delusion. He had the heart of huckster, and an an amazing ability to attract people with money to his ideas. Though I enjoyed knowing about him, I thought the book was pretty badly written. For one thing, there was quite a bit of information on what he did -- institutes he set up, properties he bought, people he associated with...and the book lets us know that he absolutely changed people's lives in the way yoga can. But this is where I was left wondering -- how exactly did he do that? There wasn't much about the way he did yoga, or much detail about his philosophy. Because I know yoga I could fill in some of the gaps, but it seems to me that his magnetic appeal was never demonstrated...only told. I think this should have been a New Yorker article instead of a book.

On the plane home from Colorado I finished David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. The book takes place in 19th century Japan where Jacob is an accountant of sorts at a tiny Dutch outpost. He falls in love with an unusually gifted Japanese midwife, and though they have virtually no time together for the entire book, their paths lead to engaging storytelling. Mitchell is a great writer -- he somehow (well, how would I really know) had a handle on Dutch dialect, and I liked the way he so easily used italics to indicate thoughts rather than speech.

I'm also reading Eat, Pray, Love. I wasn't particularly interested...I had heard a lot about it, and figured it for a quick girlie read. But Kelley read it and thought it was better than that, so before my trip I downloaded it onto my iPad. I haven't finished it yet, but I do enjoy her -- Elizabeth Gilbert. I just finished her description of depression, and felt that she captured the insidious beast quite well. And, I enjoy reading on the iPad -- the text is nice and comfortable, plus adjustable, and there are numerous ways to interact with the text, click on words you don't know, etc. I don't think I've explored all of it yet. Actually, I am using Kindle for the iPad instead of Apple's version, because they seem to have more books, plus it's just one click from my Amazon account (I know...they were counting on that).