Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

(Basic Books, 2010)

Have you ever wondered how humans first discovered that coffee was a really good thing? It all came about with the help of some goats. Folklore has it that an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi noticed his goats becoming very frisky and dancing about after they ate some berries. Kaldi followed their example and was hooked.

Since its publication in 1999, Mark Pendergrast’s Uncommon Grounds has been recognized as the definitive history of coffee. As a result, the book, released in its 2nd edition in 2010, has spawned many more books, documentaries and research on the social, environmental and economic impact of coffee.

While giving the reader a history of the production, trade and consumption of coffee, Pendergrast sheds light on issues of colonization, slavery, health scares, the branding of coffee, fair trade coffee, and environmental impact. An epic story full of colorful characters, illustrative anecdotes and quotations laid out in a friendly and engaging way, it’s a book to savor with your favorite “cuppa joe.”

You are the 911 call operator for small town, Bulls Mouth, Tx. You are a policeman but since being shot this is what you do.  All day you sit at the desk and take calls ranging from domestic violence to the cat is in the tree and won’t come down.  Coffee is your best friend.  You look at the clock-one hour left-then home, a few beers, sleep, and start again.  The phone rings and you see it’s from a pay phone, probably some kids playing a trick.  “911 May I help you?”  A girls voice, “Help Me. He’s coming after me!” You tell the girl to calm down and ask her name.  “My name is Sarah, NO it’s Maggie, Maggie Hunt.  Help!”  You cannot believe what your hearing…”Maggie?!?  It’s me, Daddy!”

Just a normal day at the office except for the fact that your daughter who has been missing for seven years and was declared legally dead four months ago just called your 911 line begging you to help her.

I really liked what Ryan David Jahn did with The Dispatcher.  As a reader, you are plunged right into the story about what and why this is happening to Maggie and how it has affected all those involved the past seven years.  One could almost feel bad for the kidnappers.  There are really no questions left unanswered.  I really think that if you are looking for a book to spend the afternoon with or need something to pass the time on a airplane ride that The Dispatcher is the perfect book for it.  Not only is this book a thriller but it asks the question What will you do for someone you love?

The True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dōgen’s Three Hundred Kōans

Translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi and John Daido Loori with commentary and verse by John Daido Loori

Shambhala (2005)

This time of year is special for me, mostly because the extremes placed on the retailer lifestyle during the Christmas season slowly begin to evaporate. For retailers, January & February is the time to settle up, analyzing the previous work and discard baggage. Also, it’s time to formulate the processes to put into place before the next retail season. It may sound crazy, but for the retailer, when a Christmas is over, the work on the next Christmas starts as promptly as it can be perceived.

This time of year, I always look forward to finding new books to read on daily. Ones to live with, not read too much of the time. Reading just enough to relax with, to ponder on and develop a reading friendship.

Near the end of 2011, I finished The True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dōgen’s Three Hundred Kōans with commentary by John Daido Loori. In past readings, I have touched on reading kōans, but until I lived with them daily, did I begin to absorb ever so slightly their value.

Kōan literally means “public notice.” In Zen, a kōan is a phrase from a teaching on Zen realization points to the nature of reality. Paradox is essential to a kōan. Kōans transcend the logical or conceptual, thus they cannot be solved by reason, requiring another level of comprehension. Here’s a kōan from The True Dharma Eye:

Kōans are a highly distinctive element of Zen Buddhism, and there is no obvious parallel to them in literature or other religions. They contain a message, but not a message expressed by way of direct instruction. Each of us must arrive at our own direct experience and understanding. Understanding the kōan is difficult or impossible to be transmitted to us by words or by others. Studying kōans is to actualize a medium from which understanding may be reached, however, this is not an intellectual puzzle. A kōan has no single answer. Here is another example of a kōan from The True Dharma Eye:

Over the past year and a half of reading The True Dharma Eye, I became fond of massaging kōans. We are constantly developing our understanding of we are and how we transmit our actions to others. Kōan study helps with the actuality of our lives. Ultimately, kōan study affects our consciousness, which is how it affects our lives and that’s how it makes a difference.

Not that I can put my finger specifically on my kōan study effects personally, but I have experienced new ways to explore the creative process. The effects, I think, have helped me with maturing my work life, my health and my mind. My relationships with people in a more present and realistic way. I hope to be the product of my kōan readings.

With all that being said, the new year brings me to two new daily books to live with in 2012.

Your True Home: The Everyday Wisdom of Thich Nhat Hanh (Shambhala, 2011)

Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and The Blue Cliff Records (Shambhala, 2005)

I know since I am starting another book of kōans that I must be hooked. However, if you haven’t tried picking up a book and living with it for a year, now is a good time to consider the journey. This process can lead to a sustain reading experience.

“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.” (Salman Rushdie, “One Thousand Days in a Balloon,” New York Times, December 12, 1991)

This is the power that Jeannette Walls gained when she wrote The Glass Castle. In publishing her book, in the commitment and hard work she put into her book tours, she encouraged her readers to do the same: retell, laugh, cry it out, think new thoughts and change. This is why I want to give The Glass Castle on World Book Night April 23rd.

The above quote was the opening to a book entitled The Story of Your Life by Mandy Aftel. I chose this book to read on the craft of memoir for a course I took years ago entitled Women’s Lives. I really had no idea what it was about. I knew it would involve writing and women and a well-loved teacher named Polly Glover. That was enough for my nineteen-year-old self but I still reap the benefits of this course over ten years later.

There are so many women writers who have shared, who have bared all, blazed new trails, who have opened the door to discussion on many taboo topics, who have created community through their words. Maya Angelo, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Jeannette Walls, Virgina Woolf, Anne Moody, Alice Walker, Mary Karr. They are mothers and sisters and friends and mentors when there is a space to be filled, their words wait for the open door.

Sometimes, when I have something tough to do and when space allows (no, an e-book won’t do), I put the only thing I have tangible from these women in my bag, Maya Angelou’s Letter to my Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life, Alice Walker’s The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart and In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. Like Karr writes, it is some sort of mini-village I carry with me, a group of women who feed a confidence and bravery to move forward. The essayist Kennedy Fraser expresses a similar need:

“I felt very lonely then, self-absorbed, shut off. I needed all this murmured chorus, this continuum of true-life stories, to pull me through. They were like mothers and sisters to me, these literary women, many of them already dead; more than my own family, they seemed to stretch out a hand.”

Step Up to Hand Out . . . Become a Giver Today.

There are thirty books to choose from. See the full list here.

Click here to Sign Up by Monday, February 6th.

Fifteen is not a good number for the women in the Slocumb family.  When Ginny (Big) was fifteen, she found out she was pregnant with Liza. When Liza was fifteen, she found out that she was pregnant with Mosey. Now that Mosey is fifteen, both Big and Liza watch her like a hawk to make sure that any males who possess a certain body part do not place Mosey in the same predicament that Big and Liza found themselves in at that tender age.  Mosey, headstrong in her own right, feels the pressure of being a Slocumb woman in small town Mississippi and knows better than to get her fifteen-year-old self pregnant, which is why she keeps a secret stash of pregnancy tests underneath her floorboard.

Big is well aware that every fifteenth year brings its challenges, but no amount of superstition could have prepared her for the family mystery that begins to unravel as soon as she digs up Liza’s weeping willow in the back yard. Liza, the one person who could answer all of Big’s questions, has been silenced by a stroke at the age of thirty and cannot help Big as she tries to piece together the events of the past fifteen years. Somewhere between trying to keep her family from being ripped apart by what was once a buried down deep secret and keeping a watchful eye on Mosey, Big manages to rekindle an old love that she thought was all but done with.

Through the three voices of Big, Liza and Mosey, Joshilyn Jackson (New York Times Bestselling Author of Gods in Alabama) weaves a southern tale with plenty of plot twists to keep the pages turning. But mostly, A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty is a testament to the powerful force of love and the unexpected paths that life and family can lead.

by Anna