My Favorite Books and Music
| Vivaldi
Album / Cecilia Bartoli, Il Giardino Armonico Antonio Vivaldi was a prolific composer of operas that show off the same magic powers of musical description familiar from his beloved Four Seasons concertos. On her Vivaldi Album, Cecilia Bartoli breathes fire into the elaborate displays of vocal acrobatics and emotional intensity typical of Baroque opera. 2001 Grammy Best Classical Vocal Performance | Sacred Arias Andrea Bocelli, including Gounod's "Ave Maria". |
| Verdi - Requiem / Angela Gheorghiu, Roberto Alagna, Daniela Barcellona, Julian Konstantinov, Claudio Abbado, Berlin Philharmonic. Gheorghiu is amazing, and watching her emotions change during the piece adds to the performance. She is better than Sutherland in the final (mostly-soprano) Lux Aeterna and Libera Me. | |
| Verdi Requiem with Sir Georg Solti, Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, Luciano Pavarotti, Matti Talvela. Pavarotti and Horne are outstanding, but the performance drags in a few places. I fell in love with the Requiem hearing the cassette version of this, I haven't seen the DVD. | |
| Santana Sacred Fire: Live In South America. This is an amazing performance, you can have a dance party with just this CD. (Makes his studio recordings seem flat, dull.) | |
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Project Gutenberg
A grassroots e-book project, making thousands of classic texts available for free downloads. Only includes writings that are exempt from copyright laws. | |
| The Alchemist - A Fable About Following Your Dream by Paulo Coelho. A magical little book that teaches us the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and above all, following our dreams. | |
| Conversations
with God: An Uncommon Dialog
, by Neale Donald Walsch
Conversations With God : An Uncommon Dialogue : Book 2 Conversations With God : An Uncommon Dialogue : Book 3 I love these books, very easy to read, highly thought-provoking. Fun, enjoyable, challenging, insightful conversation. | |
| The Complete Conversations with God, books 1, 2 and 3. | |
| The New Revelations: A Conversation with God, perhaps the most challenging of the Conversation with God books, especially to those who cling to a belief that God stopped talking to us millenia ago, and that beliefs can't be updated as our understanding increases. | |
| Conversations With God, a movie on Neale Donald Walsch's life that led to his publishing the books. | |
| Bringers of the Light | |
| Recreating Your Self | |
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Way of the Superior Man
: A Man's Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work,
and Sexual Desire by David Deida About living as a powerful, present, conscious man. "Reveals how a man can live a life of fulfillment without compromise by relaxing into the truth of his very being, discovering his deepest vision, and giving his gifts without holding anything back. What emerges is a wholly revolutionary look at what it means to be a man in today's world, as well as an astonishingly practical guidebook to living a masculine life of integrity, authenticity, and freedom." Courses and Online Excerpts | |
| Mensa Genius Quiz-A-Day Book . This fun book will flex your mental muscles! (the answers are in the back, if you can't figure one out) | |
| Ecotopia What if Northern California, Oregon and Washington were to secede from the USA, to form an ecologically-oriented country? Many ideas on how every-day living would change for the better if we organized our lives around ecological principles. | |
| Rudy's Rules for Success by Rudy Ruettiger "Everybody dreams. Everybody. And if you're like me, you've given up on your dreams dozens of times. Back when I graduated third from the bottom of my class in high school, everyone told me to forget my dream of going to Notre Dame and getting on the football team. But I got into Notre Dame and I played football. Then they said I should forget the looney idea of getting a movie made about my life. I got the movie. They called it "Rudy". You can be a Rudy, too! Never give up. Do everything in your power—and more—to overcome obstacles you will face in your life. I'll show you how." | |
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King,
Warrior, Magician, Lover
: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine by Robert L. Moore, Douglas Gillette. Discusses how mature masculine energy is different from the overwhelmingly common, immature forms. We have a shortage of mature, centered, conscious, powerful, caring, creative male energy in our culture -- and an abundance of immature, unbalanced, abusive, demanding, demeaning, shortsighted energy, resulting in the crisis in male identity that we face today. This book is about our accessing the mature masculine energies in our lives. | |
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Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America by Philip K. Howard This concise and eloquent manifesto shows how the excess of government regulations does not protect Americans but instead acts as legal quicksand, stifling growth and creating paralyzing overbureaucratization. Using blood-boiling examples of government regulations run amok, Howard reveals a society in which rules have replaced thinking — allowing law to infiltrate the nooks and crannies of everyday life. | |
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Ender's Game
and Speaker for the Dead
by Orson Scott Card. About how we might behave towards people of cultures we truly don't understand. Scary in that he writes how a six year old genius would behave, grow up, deal with what happens. My favorite science fiction (Hugo and Nebula Awards). | |
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