April's books (wherein all planning goes awry)

The best laid plans...

Ah well, here are April's two books: one fiction, one non-fiction.

I'm not an anxious person per say but I do tend to overthink things.  I have variously been diagnosed as ADD, "on the spectrum" and a "highly sensitive person.  So when I saw Born Anxious by Daniel Keating I was at first not exactly ready to read it. 

 

 

When I read a review, however, and a snippet of it online I wanted to read it to see if some of my childhood trauma's explained some of diagnoses in my latter years. 

 

Spot on.  He'd read my mind. This is a learned discussion of how early stress leads subconsciously to what we are now and how to try to compensate for it.  He doesn't say that you need years of Freudian analysis (though someone to help you through couldn't be bad) he gives suggestions and an interesting diagnosis that I had never heard of before, Stress-Dysregulated Adults (SDR) where the body has been under stress for so long it has sustained physiological as well as psychological changes. These physiological changes contribute to the rise of metabolic disorders like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, sleep disorders and depression.

 

This book isn't an easy read if you want to get something out of it (I suggest you savor it) but it was well worth my time.

 

 

Now for the fiction book, Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay. 

 

 

 

 

I came to this one by the back door.  That is to say I was looking for a movie to watch on a gloomy evening and found this and since Kristen Scott Thomas is on my favorites list and I had already watched a French film with her (this film was in French also, she is fluent in the language) and also since I am writing a novel of the holocaust, I figured this would work.  I loved the film and loved the book even more.

 

This is not to say the film was not as good as the book but there are things that can be expressed better in print and that can be shaped and backgrounded better in a book.

 

A modern day American living journalist in Paris is about to be moved into the family apartment by her husband.  That apartment sends her on a journey to find the previous owners of the flat and into revelations that will change both her life and that of many other people.  It is also a cautionary tale about how people tend to bury the past selectively and what happens when it is unearthed.

 

Loved both the movie and the book.

 

Well lets see how long now it takes me to write the next two reviews.