{what i've been reading lately}

i thought i'd share with you some of the books i've been reading lately.

i bought this book for about $10 at costco and i'm totally enjoying it. forget about the old beliefs of how our brain can't learn new things as we get older, etc.

my grandma has alzheimers and i tend to have "brain fog" quite often. my memory is terrible! so i worry about my brain. now i realized that i need to exercise my brain too. i've learned some fun tips from this book and i plan to utilize them. here are couple of quotes from the book:

"...if we were to represent the strength and power of the world's greatest super-computer by that two-story house, the potential power of your own brain would be represented by a building far bigger than the 100-story skyscraper. The strength and power of your own brain would be more accurately represented by a heaven-scraper 10 blocks square at the base and reaching to the moon."
"The only limiting factor, biologically, to the number of thoughts, memories, behavior patterns, and habits that are available to you must lie in the physical limitation of the pattern-making potential of your amazing brain. With billions of brain cells, many with hundreds of thousands of branches, each branch with hundreds of thousands of connection points, each with trillions of messengers, and each connection point capable of forming billions upon billions of different patterns, the number must be gigantic. Even... infinite."

"For most of us, one of the biggest worries about getting older is losing our memories. Yet your memory has no limits - whatever your age. Many older people may take a little more time to remember things, yet once the memory is there it seems as good as at any age. In China, older people are still generally revered for their wisdom. "Old age" does not have the same negative connotations that it does in the West. In a Harvard study, researchers compared the memory performance of a group from performance between young people from each group. However, the older Americans were outperformed by the older Chinese, who had a much more positive attitude of aging. Similarly, Americans who had a positive outlook on age performed better than Americans who had a negative outlook."

lots of great stuff in this book!

don't forget to take care of your brain. :)

i enjoyed this book as well. it was interesting to read about life in 1960's congo (now zaire).
i loved syrie james' first two books (about jane austen & charlotte bronte) so i thought this must be good as well even though it's about dracula. i wasn't disappointed. she took the story to a new level and you actually end up thinking dracula is somewhat lovable. any story is better when you add romance to it, in my humble opinion. :) yes, i'm a hopeless romantic. i Y love. :)

syrie james can't write books fast enough for me to read.
ps. I'm very disappointed about Syrie's latest book "Forbidden". R-rated, definitely, and the story was week. :(