Dear Mom,
A few years ago, after the nauseating experience of reading ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ I vowed that I would never, ever read another self-help book again! Of course, like all vows of this type, I ended up breaking it… but in this case only twice (so far…):
(1) Leave the Office Earlier by Laura Stack (for the obvious reasons).
(2) Find a Husband after 35 (well, it sounded interesting, okay? and as I have a good husband already, it was not really {Color:darkorchid}self help, but more educational)
Anyway.
Today I saw a book with the ultimate self-help title: ‘How to live forever or die trying’ by Bryan Appleyard. It has a really cool title for its fourth chapter as well: “Belonging, Heaven and Other Fixes”.
Unsurprisingly, really, this is not actually a self-help book, but a non-fiction history of our pursuit for immortality. I took it out the library, but to be honest, it was not really my cup of tea and don’t feel any desire to finish reading it. If, however, it is yours, here are some interesting links:
The Immortality Institute
Resistance to debate on how to postpone ageing is delaying progress and costing lives
Science fact and the SENS agenda
Personally, while I think that the brevity of our lives means that it is difficult to achieve ‘as much as we would like’, it also makes it so that there is the necessary amount of urgency to achieve ‘anything at all’.
Hmmm. This sounds a bit inconsistant coming from someone who has spent the best part of the last two days lying in the sun…
Yours etc.
Bronwen
Dear Bronwen,
I am sorry that I haven’t replied to some of your letters recently. Things have been rather maniac.
I do think the second self-help book was rather redundant: not only do you have a husband, you’re also under the required age! (I won’t tell anyone though.)
Still. I guess reading self-help books on a subject that you actually really don’t need help on is an excellent boost to the confidence. Perhaps, instead of prescribing relevant self-help books to people feeling miserable and/or lethargic about themselves, they should be prescribed a self-help book that they really don’t need so they can gloat away about having already fulfilled the criterion for needing the book and thus cheer themselves up…?
In regards to alternative medicine: why do we (read I) instinctively feel better about taking herbal medicines than about taking chemicals, when herbal medicines can be just as dangerous?
That’s all,
Mom
Hi Mom,
There seems to be a strong background mantra that “natural is good; unnatural is bad”. I think that this must be reaction against something though I am not sure what exactly. Perhaps this is something worth investigating!
I think that your idea of prescribing non-relevant self-help books is excellent! Though we would have to find a nice list of ones that are well-written.
Bye for now.
Bron
Have you read Appleyard’s novel, The First Church of the New Millennium?
This was rather odd, to be charitable, but I bought it for the creepy cover, and had it on the shelf for years, started it twice and put it down again, and finally pushed through to the end for no real reward.
This precis from amazon.co.uk says it all, I feel: "A first novel, set in the near future, by the author of “Understanding the Present”. Top architect Stephen Rix seems a man in his prime – but he knows he sold out years ago. And as the new millennium approaches, Captain Dale’s spaceship is in trouble and Mars Mission 2000 is heading for disaster."