my issue was more with the attitude. he made himself out to be so bad ass. everything he thought and said was true and indicated what a cool independent guy he was. everything the counselors said in there was wishy-washy bullshit. anybody who got honestly upset or emotional was a pansy. him and his hard ass crew were the real people who'd make it. it was a crock.
ive seen people come into recovery with the attitude he presented in the book. "ill do it my way and i dont give a fuck what anyone tells me." they dont make it. that's why i say his story was bs.
From the way he let Oprah walk all over him with her bullshit, you can see that he was not the tough guy that he made himself out to be.
From the way he let Oprah walk all over him with her bullshit, you can see that he was not the tough guy that he made himself out to be.
exactly. which is why i think his book sucked. it wasnt an honest look at recovering from addiction. it was a self-aggrandizing made-for-tv-movie version of how he wishes it had been.
exactly. which is why i think his book sucked. it wasnt an honest look at recovering from addiction. it was a self-aggrandizing made-for-tv-movie version of how he wishes it had been.
my book club just met last week to discuss this book, and we figured out that the character Miles (the family-man judge), who was not depicted as a 'bad-ass', but as one of the 'emotional types' who followed the program, was the only person that wasn't dead less than a year after being released from the hospital.....
so this backs up your point, soulsinging.... all the bad-asses (besides James) are dead. but Miles is doing well.
~~*~~ ...i surfaced and all of my being was enlightend... ~~*~~
i'm reading A Million Little Pieces by James Frey....it's about what he went through when he was recovering from his addiction to drugs and alchohol. there's some contraversy over the accuracy of his story, but he said he wrote it as he remembered it. it's still a really good story and helps you to understand what addicts go through in recovery.
I personally liked that book, I got a feel for what an adict of any kind go through...regardless of all the hype, I thought it was good.
If I could be anything in the world I would be your teardrop...I would be born in your eyes, live on your cheeks, and die on your lips.
my issue was more with the attitude. he made himself out to be so bad ass. everything he thought and said was true and indicated what a cool independent guy he was. everything the counselors said in there was wishy-washy bullshit. anybody who got honestly upset or emotional was a pansy. him and his hard ass crew were the real people who'd make it. it was a crock.
ive seen people come into recovery with the attitude he presented in the book. "ill do it my way and i dont give a fuck what anyone tells me." they dont make it. that's why i say his story was bs.
the book that i picked up had an added note from him and he said that he did portray himself has harder and more aggresive than he really was.....the part that i appreciate about the book is where he describes how he views himself (i.e. where he can't see himself as anything more than an addict and a criminal.....and where he can't see beyond the addiction because he doesn't know anything else). that's the part that i appreciate because it gives me a better understanding when trying to relate to my friends who are going through it.
No need to be void, or save up on life...
You got to spend it all
the book that i picked up had an added note from him and he said that he did portray himself has harder and more aggresive than he really was.....the part that i appreciate about the book is where he describes how he views himself (i.e. where he can't see himself as anything more than an addict and a criminal.....and where he can't see beyond the addiction because he doesn't know anything else). that's the part that i appreciate because it gives me a better understanding when trying to relate to my friends who are going through it.
the self-loathing of an addict is about the only thing he got right in there, ill give you that. it was the only part worth reading in that whole mess of a novel and certainly the only remotely accurate sentiment.
the self-loathing of an addict is about the only thing he got right in there, ill give you that. it was the only part worth reading in that whole mess of a novel and certainly the only remotely accurate sentiment.
Yeah, I get what you're saying.....I just like all kinds of stories so it's still interesting to me, but I can tell he elaborated or made a lot of it up.
No need to be void, or save up on life...
You got to spend it all
I just finished reading "Wonderland Avenue" by Danny Sugerman. This book was suggested by someone here in the AET for having best description of heroin use in print. I was curious as in the last few years a few former friends have died from OD's. What a fantastic writer this guy was. Definitely suggest it if you are a Doors fan too.
PJ FANS ROCK!!!
Finally got that "One for the Thumb"!!! Got the "Six Pack". Now we're on a "Stairway to Seven"
Some words when spoken...can't be taken back.
"Seeing a brick wall straight ahead and stepping on the gas." Eddie...Pittsburgh 6/23/06
I am mid way through a Michael Crichton book called "Airframe." Its pretty good. It's about an quality assurance investigation over an airplane after a suspicious mid air flight incident which killed a few people, and injured a bunch more. Meanwhile, this airplane company is trying to seal a deal with China for some airplanes. It's getting pretty suspenseful.
Anyhow, I want to finish it so I can start reading my next book; "Scar Tissue" by Anthony Kiedis.
What book are you reading?
stephen kings 'cell'. about half way through it, should have it finished in the next day or two.
"PC Load Letter?! What the fuck does that mean?"
~Michael Bolton
the self-loathing of an addict is about the only thing he got right in there, ill give you that. it was the only part worth reading in that whole mess of a novel and certainly the only remotely accurate sentiment.
Soulsinging,
I thought of you the other day when I was reading "A Million Little Pieces". In the part I was on, he sits on the couch and watches and episode of "ER" and he goes on this two page rant about how it did not depict drug addiction accurately. I thought it was really funny given what I had read from you about his book!
I thought of you the other day when I was reading "A Million Little Pieces". In the part I was on, he sits on the couch and watches and episode of "ER" and he goes on this two page rant about how it did not depict drug addiction accurately. I thought it was really funny given what I had read from you about his book!
hehe, that is kinda funny
right now im reading 'the magician's nephew' by cs lewis. i gave up on 'reading lolita in tehran.' just not my speed. if anyone wants a copy of this book, pm me and ill send it to you.
I just finished reading "Wonderland Avenue" by Danny Sugerman. This book was suggested by someone here in the AET for having best description of heroin use in print. I was curious as in the last few years a few former friends have died from OD's. What a fantastic writer this guy was. Definitely suggest it if you are a Doors fan too.
IGGY POP!! i can not believe that guy is still alive.
FUNNY PART PAGE 320:
customs telephoned from los angeles airport to say they had a 'james osterberg' in their custody whom they would not or could not release on account of he looked nothing like the picture of the person that was supposedly him in the passport he carried.
'oh it's him', i assured them,'he colours his hair once in a while.'
'that's not the only thing he's gone and coloured,' they informed me. 'he painted his entire torso during the flight from england.'
i didn't even know he'd been in england and had no time to ponder the surprise. they wanted me to come down, snappy-like, to make a positive identification.
'i'm on my way.'
sure enough, he'd used his body as a canvas and covered himself with paint from forehead to toenail in camouflage streaks,black and pinks, an exotic green and day-glo orange. we washed him off and made the identification.
********
guess he was bored on the flight. can you imagine the person who had to sit next to him.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
I just finished reading...Songs of the Doomed by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson and now I'm currently reading Confessions of an Igloo Dweller by James Houston. The latter book is a must read, Houston lived with the Inuit for 14 years and he basically was the one who first introduced Inuit art to the "outside world". It's a very fascinating book about Inuit life, culture and art...
"All the strength that you might think would disappear, resolving..."
In the same vein as Fall On Your Knees or The Way the Crow Flies by Anne Marie Macdonald (both of which I highly recommend as well), this book, The Little Friend, is a beautiful and breathtaking story of a family living with tragedy. Sounds too sad, I know, but believe me, it's written in such a way that you cannot put it down. The characters are rich and detailed and you KNOW them. And the story is just heartbreaking.
It's basically about a young girl's quest to solve the murder of her brother when he was nine years old, and she was just a baby. He was killed on Mother's Day, as the whole, big family fussed around to prepare dinner and he played outside. Here's an excerpt: the boy was Robin; Charlotte is his mother:
"Whenever Robin was going anywhere- to school, to a friend's house- it had always been important to him to say goodbye, in tender and frequently quite prolonged and ceremonious ways. She had a thousand memories of little notes he'd written, kisses blown from a window, his small hand chattering up and down at her from the backseats of departing cars: goodbye! goodbye! When he was a baby he'd learned bye-bye before hello; it was his way of greeting people as well as leaving them. It seemed particularly cruel to Charlotte that there had been no goodbye this time. She had been so distracted that she had no very clear recollection of the last words she'd exchanged with Robin, or even the last time she'd seen him (that day), when what she needed was something concrete, some small fine memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her- sightless now, stumbling- through this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life."
(bold added by me)
Maybe because I'm a mother of a boy, this passage immediately makes my throat tighten and my eyes well up. What an acute pain to lose a child, and there is something about the way she describes the tenderness felt between a mother and son- especially a sensitive one like hers, or mine- that just makes my chest ache. I'm re-reading this book now- I read it three years ago- and I'm preparing to have my heart broken again and again.
Life is the riddle
Of which we're caught in the middle.
A couple of lucky ones
Tangled up in too much love
~cowboy junkies
believe it or not, we don't "need" anything. that is only the spoiled brat in us trying to fill some temporary solution to an emptyness that does not exist.
I have eaten so much gold I crapped excellence - drtyfrnk29
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all!
I am mid way through a Michael Crichton book called "Airframe." Its pretty good. It's about an quality assurance investigation over an airplane after a suspicious mid air flight incident which killed a few people, and injured a bunch more. Meanwhile, this airplane company is trying to seal a deal with China for some airplanes. It's getting pretty suspenseful.
Anyhow, I want to finish it so I can start reading my next book; "Scar Tissue" by Anthony Kiedis.
Just finishing up A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick
For anyone thinking about reading Scar Tissue, personally i enjoyed the read. Same with Dirt.
Perferred Angels and Demons to Davinci.
Loved Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The unbearable lightness of Being) - Milan Kundera
this is a stellar classic, read it years back but it still sticks in my mind as one I have to do again, Immortality is another Kundera that blew my mind.
Just finishing up A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick
loved it, heard theres a movie coming some time this year......it occured to me while reading that it'd make a great film. Bought Valis soon after I'd finished it but whilst i m yet to taste it, a few flick-thrus seem to suggest a hard to grasp plot...........
Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The unbearable lightness of Being) - Milan Kundera
that is a pretty great book. i read it a while back and nobody captures the emotions and confusion of love and lust like kundera. the book of laughter and forgetting is great as well.
now im reading 'a prayer for owen meany' by john irving. it's pretty good, but im making slow going of it. i think i like it better than 'the world according to garp' though.
that is a pretty great book. i read it a while back and nobody captures the emotions and confusion of love and lust like kundera. the book of laughter and forgetting is great as well.
now im reading 'a prayer for owen meany' by john irving. it's pretty good, but im making slow going of it. i think i like it better than 'the world according to garp' though.
Just finished it last night. I'm going to read Žert (The Joke) next, I have to read them for my Czech class. I like Kundera's style. Too bad their are only two books of his on the reading list.
I'm going to read Karel Čapek's RUR as well, he's the inventor of the word 'robot' in case you were wondering where that word originated from.
Comments
From the way he let Oprah walk all over him with her bullshit, you can see that he was not the tough guy that he made himself out to be.
exactly. which is why i think his book sucked. it wasnt an honest look at recovering from addiction. it was a self-aggrandizing made-for-tv-movie version of how he wishes it had been.
my book club just met last week to discuss this book, and we figured out that the character Miles (the family-man judge), who was not depicted as a 'bad-ass', but as one of the 'emotional types' who followed the program, was the only person that wasn't dead less than a year after being released from the hospital.....
so this backs up your point, soulsinging.... all the bad-asses (besides James) are dead. but Miles is doing well.
Hopefully this one will last me more than a couple of days
the book that i picked up had an added note from him and he said that he did portray himself has harder and more aggresive than he really was.....the part that i appreciate about the book is where he describes how he views himself (i.e. where he can't see himself as anything more than an addict and a criminal.....and where he can't see beyond the addiction because he doesn't know anything else). that's the part that i appreciate because it gives me a better understanding when trying to relate to my friends who are going through it.
You got to spend it all
the self-loathing of an addict is about the only thing he got right in there, ill give you that. it was the only part worth reading in that whole mess of a novel and certainly the only remotely accurate sentiment.
Yeah, I get what you're saying.....I just like all kinds of stories so it's still interesting to me, but I can tell he elaborated or made a lot of it up.
You got to spend it all
Finally got that "One for the Thumb"!!! Got the "Six Pack". Now we're on a "Stairway to Seven"
Some words when spoken...can't be taken back.
"Seeing a brick wall straight ahead and stepping on the gas." Eddie...Pittsburgh 6/23/06
stephen kings 'cell'. about half way through it, should have it finished in the next day or two.
~Michael Bolton
But I have jury duty coming up in a week or so.....so that should give me lots of reading time.
Soulsinging,
I thought of you the other day when I was reading "A Million Little Pieces". In the part I was on, he sits on the couch and watches and episode of "ER" and he goes on this two page rant about how it did not depict drug addiction accurately. I thought it was really funny given what I had read from you about his book!
Bring in "101 Perfect Murders of the Twentieth Century." That should get some looks.
hehe, that is kinda funny
right now im reading 'the magician's nephew' by cs lewis. i gave up on 'reading lolita in tehran.' just not my speed. if anyone wants a copy of this book, pm me and ill send it to you.
A whisper and a chill
adv2005
"Why do I bother?"
The 11th Commandment.
"Whatever"
PETITION TO STOP THE BAN OF SMOKING IN BARS IN THE UNITED STATES....Anyone?
The Pearl
Grapes Of Wrath
East Of Eden by John Steinbeck
The Catcher in The Rye
The Bible
To Kill A Mocking Bird
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
www.bebo.com/pearljam06
IGGY POP!! i can not believe that guy is still alive.
FUNNY PART PAGE 320:
customs telephoned from los angeles airport to say they had a 'james osterberg' in their custody whom they would not or could not release on account of he looked nothing like the picture of the person that was supposedly him in the passport he carried.
'oh it's him', i assured them,'he colours his hair once in a while.'
'that's not the only thing he's gone and coloured,' they informed me. 'he painted his entire torso during the flight from england.'
i didn't even know he'd been in england and had no time to ponder the surprise. they wanted me to come down, snappy-like, to make a positive identification.
'i'm on my way.'
sure enough, he'd used his body as a canvas and covered himself with paint from forehead to toenail in camouflage streaks,black and pinks, an exotic green and day-glo orange. we washed him off and made the identification.
********
guess he was bored on the flight. can you imagine the person who had to sit next to him.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
P.G. Wodehouse.
is that exactly what I thought I read?"
How I choose to feel,...Is how I am.
In the same vein as Fall On Your Knees or The Way the Crow Flies by Anne Marie Macdonald (both of which I highly recommend as well), this book, The Little Friend, is a beautiful and breathtaking story of a family living with tragedy. Sounds too sad, I know, but believe me, it's written in such a way that you cannot put it down. The characters are rich and detailed and you KNOW them. And the story is just heartbreaking.
It's basically about a young girl's quest to solve the murder of her brother when he was nine years old, and she was just a baby. He was killed on Mother's Day, as the whole, big family fussed around to prepare dinner and he played outside. Here's an excerpt: the boy was Robin; Charlotte is his mother:
"Whenever Robin was going anywhere- to school, to a friend's house- it had always been important to him to say goodbye, in tender and frequently quite prolonged and ceremonious ways. She had a thousand memories of little notes he'd written, kisses blown from a window, his small hand chattering up and down at her from the backseats of departing cars: goodbye! goodbye! When he was a baby he'd learned bye-bye before hello; it was his way of greeting people as well as leaving them. It seemed particularly cruel to Charlotte that there had been no goodbye this time. She had been so distracted that she had no very clear recollection of the last words she'd exchanged with Robin, or even the last time she'd seen him (that day), when what she needed was something concrete, some small fine memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her- sightless now, stumbling- through this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life."
(bold added by me)
Maybe because I'm a mother of a boy, this passage immediately makes my throat tighten and my eyes well up. What an acute pain to lose a child, and there is something about the way she describes the tenderness felt between a mother and son- especially a sensitive one like hers, or mine- that just makes my chest ache. I'm re-reading this book now- I read it three years ago- and I'm preparing to have my heart broken again and again.
Of which we're caught in the middle.
A couple of lucky ones
Tangled up in too much love
~cowboy junkies
there's a snoozer for ya!
I have eaten so much gold I crapped excellence - drtyfrnk29
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all!
naděje umírá poslední
For anyone thinking about reading Scar Tissue, personally i enjoyed the read. Same with Dirt.
Perferred Angels and Demons to Davinci.
Loved Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
that is a pretty great book. i read it a while back and nobody captures the emotions and confusion of love and lust like kundera. the book of laughter and forgetting is great as well.
now im reading 'a prayer for owen meany' by john irving. it's pretty good, but im making slow going of it. i think i like it better than 'the world according to garp' though.
Just finished it last night. I'm going to read Žert (The Joke) next, I have to read them for my Czech class. I like Kundera's style. Too bad their are only two books of his on the reading list.
I'm going to read Karel Čapek's RUR as well, he's the inventor of the word 'robot' in case you were wondering where that word originated from.
naděje umírá poslední