It's Monday! What are you reading? - March 15

Currently Reading:

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor
Date Started: March 8, 2021
Goodreads Summary: 
No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you're not breathing properly.

There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.

Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren't found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of Sao Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe.

Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is.

Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

Little Thoughts: Reading this for a book club, it was my selection.  I'm really enjoying it, though a bit concerned about my own breathing. 

Sansei and Sensibility  by Karen Tei Yamashita
Date Started: March 5, 2021
Goodreads Summary: 
In these buoyant and inventive stories, Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance―familial, cultural, emotional, artistic―really means. In a California of the ’60s and ’70s, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives’ freezers, tape-record high-school locker-room chatter, or collect a community’s gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace balls, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with wit and humor. (less)

Little Thoughts: Reading for the JANSA-NJ Book Discussion this month.  I enjoyed most of the short stories in the first half and I'm just starting on the Jane Austen themed stories in the second half. 

Currently Listening:

The Trail of the Serpent by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Date Started: February 14, 2021
Goodreads Summary: 
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837–1915), Victorian England’s bestselling woman writer, blends Dickensian humor with chilling suspense in this “exuberantly campy” (Kirkus Reviews) mystery. The novel features Jabez North, a manipulative orphan who becomes a ruthless killer; Valerie de Cevennes, a stunning heiress who falls into North’s diabolical trap; and Mr. Peters, a mute detective who communicates his brilliant reasoning through sign language.

Little Thoughts: Listening through the podcast Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Almost done with this one, probably only another week or so depending on the chapter lengths.  Still don't know what to make of this story, it's finally starting to feel like it's coming together. 

Check out my Goodreads 2021 Challenge to see what I've read this year.