Michalyn's recent posts

Recent public discussion board posts (showing 1-20 of 32).

*nods* the ending was a let down but I hear Daniel Craig will be playing Lucifer and Ewan McGregor will be Gunn in the movie. That's enough reason for me to watch :D

That looks great! I'm going to add it to my wishlist.

Lorna, thank you so much! :D I'm still surprised that this review generated so many responses. I'm glad it resonated with you. And please, don't let my review stop you! I'd love to read what you thought of the book too.

Jane, I totally understand what you're saying and maybe if I'd been able to read EPL in that way I would have liked it alot more. I think the importance of "acceptance" of oneself and the world as it is, is something Gilbert excels at and I think that's a good thing, at least up to a certain point.

I only have a very rudimentary understanding of Buddhism so I can't speak too much on that front. The one thing I always took away from it though was that the core teaching was that there is no such thing as a single unchanging self, that everything is in flux and that because of that there is no real separation between you and me. I think because I had that in my head I was expecting more of the abandonment of that idea of "ME" that comes so strongly from EPL.

I don't know if that makes any sense. It's not that I wanted Gilbert to change the world but more that I expected her to see more of the fact that she's not essentially different from any of the people she encounters. I don't know how to express it well but I do appreciate what you're saying.

Tonya, you're right. I almost wish it had been. I think for me fiction makes it easier to accept characters at face value. Maybe memoirs aren't supposed to be taken seriously but I find myself being more invested in them than in a novel.

Jane,

I totally agree with you about the writing style. I think Gilbert is a great writer. I don't know if it's right to call Gilbert shallow, but I do wish she'd been a bit more aware of not just herself but her environment.

Sarah, you're definitely right. Memoirs are automatically self-centered. I think in the end it comes down to a matter of taste. For me, the best memoirs have some universal thread, however deeply buried. Ironically, I found more of that universal thread in Italy than in any other part of the book. She was entirely focused on herself, but the combination of her humor and her observations of the people and places really made it easy for me to identify with her.

I didn't want Gilbert to explicitly give me a guide to spirituality or ending world hunger. That wasn't the purpose of the book. I just found it very difficult to understand how the deep level of spirituality Gilbert thought she achieved didn't automatically go hand in hand with more self-awareness and more awareness of the world.

Thanks, Lena! I think the self-absorption was what bothered me most about the book because it didn't seem to be balanced by anything. I guess I have to say it really left me disillusioned about that kind of New Age spirituality in general.

I always thought that the enlightenment that comes from looking within comes hand in hand with a greater capacity for compassion and for reaching out to others. I don't think Gilbert was callous or mean, but it made me realize that someone can become "enlightened" without ever taking the step to moving past themselves. I guess that's okay but for me, it's not enough.

Patricia, I know what you mean. I think Gilbert is a genuinely charming woman, but it's hard not to think that she doesn't realize how easy (at least relatively) she has it.

Angela, I agree with you. I didn't expect this to be a treatise on how everyone can attain enlightenment, but for me what makes a good memoir or biography is that it's inspiring in some way. Even if it's based on the very specific events of a person's life, I still want to be able to feel like buried under everything there's a more universal message. Otherwise, what's the point?

Judi, I agree. I really enjoyed the Italy part best. I think Gilbert is more at home with that kind of humor than the more spiritual parts.

Pinkbullets, I have to say the simplicity of the language really helped me get through the book. I think a different style of writing might have caused me to abandon the book altogether!

Caitlin, you're right! Thanks for catching that!

Claudine, you're definitely right. I think one of the most enjoyable things about the book is the openness and the honesty. Without that, I don't think I could have ever kept reading Eat, Pray, Love at all.

Thanks, Raych! I think the book is worth reading because so many people are reading it right now and there's lots to discuss about it at least. I think it's one of those books you either love or hate. Gilbert is great writer and she's incredibly funny but if you're the type to want to dig a little bit more beneath the surface, it can be hard to get into it.

http://www.goodreads.com/revie...


Wow, this book took me on a roller-coaster ride. I couldn't decide if I loved it or hated it and it seemed like every few pages I'd go from thinking Gilbert was delightfully witty to thinking this was the most horribly self-absorbed person to ever set foot on the earth.

In the end the overall effect was rather like sitting at a party listening to someone tell a long involved story all about themselves, and you're alternately annoyed and fascinated and you want to get up and leave but she's just so entertaining that you keep telling yourself you'll leave in the next minute--and so you end up sticking through the whole thing.

I didn't hate Eat, Pray, Love, but it left me really unsatisfied. When I first started reading the book, I couldn't help rolling my eyes and thinking "Here we go, another tale of a precious, privileged woman who is unsatisfied with her life." I stuck with it though and was charmed through the Italy section by Gilbert's humor and down-to-earth writing style. Still, for a woman who abandons everything in search of a true spiritual experience, she leaves most of the important questions unanswered. I felt that Gilbert projects herself so strongly onto every place and every person she encounters that I'm not sure what she really learnt along the way.

As delightful as the Italy section was to read, I felt like she never really stepped out of herself to understand the country on its own terms and to move beyond the stereotype. Despite it being a bit of a superficial assessment, I have no problem with Gilbert associating Italy with pleasure. There is enough beauty there to warrant it.It was more her interpretation of what it means to open oneself to pleasure that bothered me and seemed very narrow. For Gilbert this consisted mostly of overindulging in foods and allowing herself to put on weight. It seemed like she came to Italy thinking she already knew how to experience pleasure and proceeded to enact it based on her definition (even though there are indications that the Italian interpretation of pleasure is not merely restricted to this.) I would have liked to see her explore what it meant to devote herself to pleasure just as seriously and reverently as she seemed to take the meditative experiences in India.

Overall though, my biggest problem with this book was I had difficulty at times believing Gilbert achieved the enlightenment she talks about because she is so internally focused. Most importantly I still have not really grasped why it was necessary for her to travel to these 3 places.

I understand that her intention was not for this book to be a travelogue but it begs the question, "Why was it necessary to go to Italy, India and Indonesia if the purpose was to not to gain something from them that could not be found elsewhere?" In every country Gilbert created a little security blanket of expat friends who seemed to cushion her from really understanding the lessons the countries had to offer on their own terms. Why go to India to meet Richard the big Texan Guru, for example? Why not just go to Texas?

For those of us with "eyelids only half-caked with dirt" but who can't uproot our lives and travel to countries of our choosing is "enlightenment" still an option? I wanted Gilbert to talk more about how anyone with an ordinary life but who is searching for insight could still balance spiritual yearning with duty.

And that's my final peeve about this book. I wondered if Gilbert had any sense of duty or sense of obligation to anything beyond herself. Gilbert seems to recognize the bonds of duty that restrict the locals she encounters. Yet, she somehow paints them as pleasurable or inevitable yokes for the people who bear them. Her detached observations of life and death rituals in India and Indonesia as though they are restricted to those parts of the world made me want to shake her and say "but there are rituals everywhere; you have made a conscious decision to remove yourself from the ones you know."

I ask about duty not because I wanted Gilbert to stay in a loveless marriage but because the concept of duty is also linked to a concept of justice. What is it that we ought to do? What do we owe each other?

Part of me felt that Gilbert took comfort in the non-dual aspects of Eastern philisophies in a strange way. She seemed almost relieved that the non-duality of existence would ensure that one would not necessarily be punished by the universe for selfish deeds. I felt like Gilbert embraced that aspect of the philosophy without realizing the equal importance those cultures place on the balancing notions of reciprocity, duty, of being social beings in the truest sense (often taking it to the other negative extreme).

The lack of sense of obligation to anyone other than herself made Gilbert seem curiously dead to the contradictions around her. She didn't seem perturbed at the abject poverty of the Indian women around her, or to question if it was just. She never wondered how a spiritual person should grapple with the injustice of the world, nor did she seem to question the "rightness" of living in the midst of poverty in an artificial environment created to specifically cater to pampered Westerners. In Indonesia, she finally seems to see beyond herself to the suffering of others but when she does try to help someone it seems impulsive and done almost with carelessness so that the whole thing almost becomes a big mess.

After all of this, the end of the book just seemed to fall flat as Gilbert tried to wrap things up quickly, crowning it all of course with a romance with a doting and exotic lover.

This book had a lot of potential but ultimately it seemed like a story about one woman's sense of entitlement and her inability to ever quite move beyond that though she does make some valiant efforts to do so.

John,I'm glad my review got you intrigued :). I hope you enjoy it!

You know, I'm not sure what it was about this one. I really wanted to like it but I have to say I much preferred Yellow even though the plot is kinda weak. With Jazz the couple just didn't pull me in. They didn't seem compatible and they were just too tortured for me.

I tried with this one but ended up giving it away to a friend. I just couldn't get into it. I didn't mind the art but the whole thing just wasn't inspiring even with the "disguise" plot and all.

Thank you! I'm so glad you liked my review. I had a lot of of trouble putting into words exactly what I was feeling about this book so I'm glad what I said resonated with you. For a book that's supposed to be so "universal" it's funny how difficult a read it can be.