Quike Castillo Castillo itibaren Uttar Shibarampur, West Bengal 721601, Hindistan itibaren Uttar Shibarampur, West Bengal 721601, Hindistan

if I *had* to make a top 5 list, "jazz" would be on it. though it's hard to decide between "beloved" and "jazz" for some reason, "jazz" just gets me in that painful place we never want to go to but must in order to truly know ourselves.

As witty and entertaining as this woman writes, it's difficult to get past the fact that she is spoiled and self absorbed and is on a prepaid journey to do nothing but eat and come to the conclusion that she is her own god. I did feel sorry for her with her divorce (which it seems she brought on herself and had no reasons for leaving other than a voice in her head telling her she didn't want to be married anymore) and her depression (possibly brought on by her selfish actions) and her search for God (ended at, for, and by - again - herself), but for goodness sake if you can't get over yourself when you're traveling around the world at someone else's expense and all you have to do is write about it, it's going to be hard for me to feel any empathy for you. I kind of wish she had spent her time helping the poor and maybe she would have "found herself." I suppose part of the reason I didn't enjoy all the book (and I did enjoy the Italy part) was coming from a christian persepective. I can respect the Yogis and other cultures without loving their beliefs, but sometimes I just wanted to shake her and tell her to stop making it all so complicated! I think it's funny and odd that people can go to a different country and pay money and do endless chores/slave labor, meditate for hours, chant, etc etc, and it's trendy and cool and empowering. If a christian church asked you to do those things in order to find God, she (and most trendy, cool, empowered Americans) would laugh them off and simultaneously be insulted at the very idea. So I was saddened by her conclusions that her very own god lived inside her, not asking her to change or become a better person, and that at the end of her journey she was much the same woman that she was at the beginning, having had a strange vision of her marriage that took away all her guilty feelings (I doubt her exhusband would confirm that he had indeed been in that upper room with her in spirit forgiving each other) and jumping cheerfully into the sack with another man who loved her, whom she will most likely do the same thing to when she gets an itch to move on again. I did enjoy her witty writing style and would recommend this book for what I took out of it - but not for the spiritual journey she believes she took.

This book would have so much more enjoyable if some of the language had been cleaned up. The writing style is excellent, I just don't enjoy the 'F' word, I think it's crude and unneccessary. The story is about A.J. and his best friend Eugene and various family members and others in a small GA town. Mostly the wild escapades of the two. Eugene lives up on a mountain in a cabin, A..J. is married and lives in town. Some rather wild things happen such as a house being moved by helicopter and the porch falls off and lands on one of the characters dog. Rather unrealistic, but the writer adds a lot of humor from the situation. Not that having a dog die is funny, far from it, but the way the situation is handled is funny. Eugene has lived a rather wild & crazy life and A.J. is a stable guy with a wife, kids and a job, yet the two have been friends since they were young boys. Eugene gets cancer and A.J. manages his care giving. Eugene requests that when the time comes & the pain gets to be too much that A.J. will shoot him so he doesn't have to suffer. A.J. tells him that there's no way he will do it. But then toward the end he sees him in extreme pain and nothing left off him, but skin & bones, just a shodow of what he once was. Does he do it or not?