Showing posts with label Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses. Show all posts

Jan 4, 2012

Book Review : Poser, my life in twenty-three yoga poses by Claire Dederer

"You girls, you take everything so seriously," said my mother. "You make it so hard on yourselves. When our children were little, we weren't so worried about everything. We liked to have a good time." (ch. 4)

Book description: Ten years ago, Claire Dederer put her back out while breastfeeding her baby daughter. Told to try yoga by everyone from the woman behind the counter at the co-op to the homeless guy on the corner, she signed up for her first class. She fell madly in love.

Over the next decade, she would tackle triangle, wheel, and the dreaded crow, becoming fast friends with some poses and developing long-standing feuds with others. At the same time, she found herself confronting the forces that shaped her generation. Daughters of women who ran away to find themselves and made a few messes along the way, Dederer and her peers grew up determined to be good, good, good—even if this meant feeling hemmed in by the smugness of their organic-buying, attachment-parenting, anxiously conscientious little world. Yoga seemed to fit right into this virtuous program, but to her surprise, Dederer found that the deeper she went into the poses, the more they tested her most basic ideas of what makes a good mother, daughter, friend, wife—and the more they made her want something a little less tidy, a little more improvisational. Less goodness, more joy."
(publisher)

Comments: Claire Dederer says about her memoir Poser, "This book was inspired by my mother and her life." Claire and her brother Dave grew up in a nontraditional family, since her mother left her home and her husband when her two children were young and took them with her to live with Larry, a much younger man. Over the years, the families on both sides came to live with this unusual arrangement. Claire's parents refused to divorce and continued to be "married" while they lived separate lives.

Though Claire admits that growing up with this arrangement did not really damage her or her brother, she concludes that her mother's life may have both liberated her, Claire, from living a conventional life as a young adult, and helped form her as a mother and wife who had to do everything the right way, no matter what. The discovery and the practice of yoga helped to show Claire what lay inside her subconscious, underneath the outward layers where she was being the perfect person and mother.

I loved reading about her journey to self-realization and, as a beginning yoga enthusiast, ate up the detailed descriptions of the 23 different yoga poses that she melded into the story of her life - her life as a child growing up in two different households, as an adventurous and unorthodox young adult, and as an overly-dedicated married woman and mother.

Title: Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses by Claire Dederer
Published: December 21, 2010
Genre: memoir
Source: library
My rating - 4.5/5


© Harvee Lau of Book Dilettante. Please do not reprint without permission

Dec 30, 2011

Library Finds: New Reads for the New Year

It's been a while since I've borrowed books from the library, so on a visit yesterday to pick up a book on hold, I found a few others to read over the holidays. Here are two memoirs and two mystery novels, with brief descriptions from the publishers...


Title: Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses by Claire Dederer

"Ten years ago, Claire Dederer put her back out while breastfeeding her baby daughter. Told to try yoga by everyone from the woman behind the counter at the co-op to the homeless guy on the corner, she signed up for her first class. She fell madly in love....Dederer found that the deeper she went into the poses, the more they tested her most basic ideas of what makes a good mother, daughter, friend, wife—and the more they made her want something a little less tidy, a little more improvisational. Less goodness, more joy." Published December 21st 2010 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Title: I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (A Flavia de Luce Novel) by Alan Bradley

"It’s Christmastime, and the precocious Flavia de Luce—an eleven-year-old sleuth with a passion for chemistry and a penchant for crime-solving—is tucked away in her laboratory, whipping up a concoction to ensnare Saint Nick. But she is soon distracted when a film crew arrives at Buckshaw, the de Luces’ decaying English estate, to shoot a movie starring the famed Phyllis Wyvern. Amid a raging blizzard, the entire village of Bishop’s Lacey gathers at Buckshaw to watch Wyvern perform, yet nobody is prepared for the evening’s shocking conclusion: a body found, past midnight, strangled to death with a length of film.... As the storm worsens and the list of suspects grows, Flavia must use every ounce of sly wit at her disposal to ferret out a killer hidden in plain sight." Published November 1st 2011 by Delacorte Press

Title: A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan

"Starting with charred fried rice and ending with flaky pineapple tarts, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan takes us along on a personal journey that most can only fantasize about--an exploration of family history and culture through a mastery of home-cooked dishes. Tan's delectable education through the landscape of Singaporean cuisine teaches us that food is the tie that binds."  Published February 8th 2011 by Voice



Title: A Florentine Death (Michele Ferrara) by Michele Giuttari

"Meet Michele Ferrara. Lover of a good bottle of local Rossi di Montalcino, smoker of Antico Toscano cigars - and head of Florence's elite police force, the Squadra Mobile. With a rising murder rate and high levels of Mafia activity, Ferrara has an unenviable job....It seems a deadly serial killer is at work...Ferrara doesn't understand what links the victims - but, with sick, teasing notes arriving for him from the killer, he needs to solve the crime before he becomes the next victim."  Published July 31st 2007 by Abacus (first published 2004)

These are not all newly published books, but their covers caught my eye on the library stands. I had read about all of them before, except for the Michele Ferrara mystery novel.

What are you planning to read over the New Year's holidays? Anything special?

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