I am enjoying two books, "How to Be Sick" by Toni Bernhard and "Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error" by Kathryn Schultz.
Bernhard was a law professor and dean but when she came down with an undiagnosed, chronic disease, she was confined to bed. She had studied Buddhist techniques of thought, self-awareness and personal psychology and has found them valuable in facing her confined life.
Schultz is a writer of some success but evidently has only the one published book. It is very well written, with both very good language and excellent organization. I had read comments about the book's high quality and they come to mind each time I run into a gem of wording or association.
I am reading both books on a Kindle, which now sells for $139 for the least expensive model. I learned in the book No Shelf Required the answer to a question I've had. I had heard that some libraries are experimenting with loaning out Kindles. Since you can download books through the atmosphere (or to a computer for transfer) to a Kindle, I wondered how the library controls its e-properties so that patrons can't download added books into the library Kindle at the library's expense. The answer is that the library de-registers their Kindles once they are loaded with some books. That way, further books can not be added at the library's expense. That seems to be an excellent strategy to me and is also the answer to how I can loan a Kindle to my great-grandson and know that he will not purchase added books with it.
Bernhard is the mother of two children and is married. She has vitality and plenty of reasons for living in as vital a way as she can manage. She comments on the difficulty of seeing her husband interact with, and travel with, her children without being part of the excursions. She is a thoughtful practitioner of self-awareness and self-compassion and worth reading. At some point in our lives, we may all be confined to bed with pain and limitations and without much hope of improvement or change.
Schultz moves through various sorts of beliefs and changes in what we think is correct. Yesterday, she pointed out that once we abandon a belief as no longer right, we tend to explain our former belief by emphasizing parallel, external reasons for the belief, such as having learned it from our parents or our religion while we looked at the belief differently while believing it. At that time, we emphasized the logical, factual, evidential rightness of the belief, not its source or concomitant reasons for adhering to it.
