Amy Chua "Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother"

They say that behind every outstanding person there stands his/her mother. Today it is rather a marketing team, sometimes a farther or both parents. However mothers still play a significant role in childrens' upbringing.

If you think one should be born a genius and the parents do not play any role, Amy Chua will prove that you can make a genius through  a Chinese way of education.

I read the book  Battle Hymn of the Tiger Motherbecause I heard it had caused a public outcry in a sense that Amy Chua, the mother of two daughters, killed their childhood in pursuit of making them high achievers. Did I find her way of bringing up kids totally unacceptable?...

I would like to cite Tolstoy who said about education approximately the following:

Pedagogy is a science of how living badly we can have a good influence on children. The same goes for our medicine - how living contrary to the laws of nature yet to be healthy.

Artful and empty sciences, never reaching their goal. All parenting difficulties arise from the fact that parents do not want to correct their own deficiencies, even justify them in themselves, and at the same time do not want to see their shortcomings in children.

Winter reading

If you are in a mood for reading during Christmas holidays then here are my "Winter" suggestions.

Smilla's Sense of Snow, I have already talked about this book here. The story is not without bumps. However, you  will plunge into silence masterfully created by Hoeg, you will perceive snow as a special kind of silence, you will fall in love with snow, Winter and Smilla.

The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel

You may find my impressions about the book  here. Do you like frightful and bewitching mystery? Like a hypnotic melody of fakir’s flute? Here is your book. Why did I chose the book? The main protagonist is called Vida Winter.

Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life Why Coco Chanel? Because according to the color analysis Coco Chanel belongs to Winter type (color analysis is the process of determining the colors that best suit an individual's natural coloring. There are a wide variety of approaches to analyzing personal coloring. The most well-known is "seasonal" color analysis, which places individual coloring into four general categories: Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn.)

Hans Christian Andersen "The Snow Queen"

We are accustomed to the fact that in fairy tales it is usually knights who save princesses. 

Opposite happens such as in the tale called "Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen. Here Kay represents death. The broken pieces of the magic glass lulled him. He likes regular geometric shapes in which there is no life, he finds roses ugly, his heart grows cold. 

Gerda is love itself , she goes unarmed around the world to save Kay.

Every person has Kay and Gerda inside himself/herself. The question is "Who is stronger?"

"But can you give little Gerda nothing to take which will endue her with power over the whole?", asked 

the Lapland Reindeer the witch.

"I can give her no more power than what she has already. Don't you see how great it is? Don't you see how

men and animals are forced to serve her; how well she gets through the world barefoot? 

She must not hear of her power from us; that power lies in her heart, because she is a sweet and innocent

child! If she cannot get to the Snow Queen by herself, and rid little Kay of the glass, we cannot help her", the witch replied.

As I said earlier we have both Kay and Gerda inside ourselves. Often when we see a worm-eaten apple we prefer to it a smooth, refined, full of insecticide fruit from the supermarket. Remember our pathologic fear of microbes, the French regular gardens etc? In fact, we have a lot from Kay.

Is your Gerda strong enough? Mine is hesitant and fragile. 

I wish your Gerda always saves your Kay. This beautiful fairy tale will help you.:)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez "Love in the time of cholera"

Where did the summer go? Do you happen to know?

"Love in the Time of Cholera" is one of the best I've read this summer. The plot is reminiscent of the Great Gatsby. The formula is simple: (He) Florentino Ariza is poor. Fermina Daza, the love of his life, marries the most enviable groom of the city, a Doctor, Juvenal Urbino.

If the Great Gatsby reaches his dream in American way, that is, he tries to become richer than the husband of his dream-woman, Florentino Ariza walks to his goal in Colombian way. What is this Colombian way? You will learn if you read the brilliant Marquez.

Symptoms of love are similar to the symptoms of cholera and it is easy to take one for the other, especially in the beginning. Why cholera and love go through the novel as a dotted line? I did not dive into deep meditation on this. Wikipedia explains it well (Love as an emotional and physical disease). Maybe Fermina Daza wrongly diagnosed her feelings when marrying the Doctor. Two men are antipodes - one is the rational, the most respected man, an active struggler against cholera in his hometown, the other one is a knight of love, far from being “comme il faut” though.

The charming part of the novel is Colombia, sweltering, humid and dangerous country where mules wander through the mountain passes, malicious parrots hide in huge trees and old steamers creep on the rivers hiding lovers under the cholera flag.