The Resolute Woman

Category: book

  • Solitude and silence

    —

    by

    resolutewoman
    in , ,

    When Malcolm Gladwell runs, he never has anything in his ears. He doesn’t listen to music or the radio or an audio book, he told the audience recently at an Arts & Letters presentation in Dallas. Gladwell prefers silence. “Something beautiful happens when you’re alone with your thoughts,” he said. His father was a mathematician,…

  • I cheated on Valentine’s

    —

    by

    resolutewoman
    in , ,

    Yes, I admit that I cheated on Valentine’s Day. I bought my daughter, Mary Elizabeth, a book of beautiful poems called Dog Songs by Mary Oliver for a Valentine’s Day present, and I read the entire book before I gave it to her. This is the poem I liked best. Percy, Waiting for Ricky Your…

  • Read a good book

    —

    by

    resolutewoman
    in , ,

    Tonight, I’m going to sit on the sofa and read a book. Reading is good for you! Of course, I enjoy reading, and I already knew that reading is a good thing to do. However, I was pleased to read that “people who frequently read for pleasure are 52 percent less likely than reluctant readers…

  • Words can be abusive, too

    —

    by

    resolutewoman
    in , ,

    “He practically trailed me around the house from morning until night, calling out my shortcomings,” the author writes. “He had developed an obsession with knobs and handles. It seemed that I turned them too hard or not hard enough. I over tightened the knobs on the shower and stripped them. I didn’t turn the knobs…

  • Are your ducks in the water?

    —

    by

    resolutewoman
    in , ,

    Too many of us spend too much time thinking about how we are going to get our ducks in a row, says Jane Pauley, author of a new book Your Life Calling: Reimagining the Rest of Your Life. Sometimes doing something is more important than soul searching, Pauley explains. “Do you want your ducks in…

  • Change comes slowly

    —

    by

    resolutewoman
    in ,

    I was the eager beaver at the beginning of January, ready to stick to my resolutions and make big changes this year. Beryl Markham, in her book West with the Night, reminds me that change comes slowly. “A word grows to a thought—a thought to an idea—and idea to an act,” Markham writes. “The change…

  • Work and hope

    —

    by

    resolutewoman
    in ,

    I love the book West with the Night by Beryl Markham, who wrote about her experiences as an airplane pilot in Africa during the 1930s. I also love the advice that Markham’s father gave her when she started her first job as a horse trainer. “Work and hope,” he said. “But never hope more than…

  • Why do we keep running?

    —

    by

    resolutewoman
    in ,

    Claudia, Faith’s daughter in the book Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale by Ann Rutledge, has been running for years from her parents, from her parents’ 19th-century mansion, from her past. Claudia “had begun to fail at everything—being tough, being buff, being young, even being a Buddhist, a practically impossible thing to do….You can only…

  • Do our possessions possess us?

    —

    by

    resolutewoman
    in ,

    I just finished reading Faith Bass Darling’s Last Garage Sale, a delightful, funny and sad book by Lynda Rutledge. As the summary on the back of the book explains, Faith Bass Darling, the richest old woman in Bass, Texas, decides to have a garage sale. Immediately, she begins lugging her priceless Louis XV elephant clock,…

  • Extraordinary perseverance

    —

    by

    resolutewoman
    in ,

    Teddy Roosevelt, who served as president and also wrote 40 books, once described himself as an ordinary man with extraordinary perseverance. That’s what Doris Kearns Goodwin said recently in an interview on National Public Radio. Kearns was talking about her new book The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of…