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Zadie Smith recommended High Windows in Books (curated)

 
High Windows
High Windows
Philip Larkin | 1979
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"All of Larkin delights me, but this is a good book to start with. Larkin didn’t have great range, but the area he chose is so important it doesn’t matter. His deal is making you understand that death is a total and permanent annihilation. Not the nicest news a poet can give you, but still worth knowing. He likes you to believe that the thought of death prompts nothing else in him but despair. That’s not entirely true. Larkin was scared of infinity, but he was also capable of making infinity beautiful. ‘Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, / And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows / Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.’ And what a genius he was with compound phrases. Sun-comprehending!"

Source
  
40x40

Adam Carolla recommended Love and Death (1975) in Movies (curated)

 
Love and Death (1975)
Love and Death (1975)
1975 | Classics, Comedy, Drama
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Movie Favorite Watch

"One of the best joke-for-joke movies ever put together, and many people haven’t seen it. That’s part of the reason why I’d like to [mention it]. I don’t want to create a list of movies that everyone has seen before; I want you guys to dig it out a little bit. A lot of physical humor, a lot of intellectual humor, just an insane movie for Woody Allen to make. Tons of jokes. People remember Sleeper and they remember Bananas, and Take the Money and Run and stuff like that. Love and Death gets lost a little in the Woody Allen shuffle. He has better films, like one I’ll name in a second, but he does not have a film with more jokes — just jokes — than Love and Death."

Source
  
40x40

Laura Doe (1350 KP) rated This Party’s Dead in Books

Mar 8, 2021  
This Party’s Dead
This Party’s Dead
Erica Buist | 2021 | Mind, Body & Spiritual, Philosophy, Psychology & Social Sciences
10
9.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
Well, who would have thought a book about death and death festivals would be so entertaining? We start the book on what the author calls the “Worst Tuesday” when her father-in-law to be is found dead in his house and has unfortunately been for over a week. What then follows is a series of events that although not funny at the time are funny when you look back – the funeral directors becoming locked in the room with the body, a sandwich throwing incident in the local shop and deciding whether food is a good enough reason to cure a case of agoraphobia.
In an idea to cure her agoraphobia and the death anxiety she has developed since her father-in-law-to-be passed, the author (Erica) decides to visit festivals around the world that celebrate rather than mourn death.
We start of in Mexico at the colourful Day of the Dead celebrations, and we are taken through the story behind La Catrina and the traditions that aren’t normally seen by tourists because it isn’t the party side. Next we are taken to Nepal and the Gaijatra festival which is led by a cow (or if a cow is unavailable a boy dressed as a cow). Next, we go to Sicily where there are biscotti specially made to represent bones and sugar knights. Madagascar’s Famadihana involves families “turning the bones” where they take their ancestors from the crypts and rewrap them and put their names on them before putting them back. China’s tomb-sweeping festival (Qingming) where they burn paper effigies of iPhones and money is next on the tour and then swiftly onto Japan’s Obon festival where they spend three days visiting their ancestors and honouring them with offerings. Finally we stop at Bali, where they can have a corpse resting in their house for years until family arguments are settled and they also will take them out of their tomb and hang out with them. Finally, we go back to the UK where Erica and her husband finally scatter her father-in-laws ashes.
Erica takes us through a journey of learning to accept death (unless you’re of the transhuman persuasion) and gives us a book full of humour whilst doing it. It’s definitely made me realise death shouldn’t be such a taboo subject and gave me a lot to think about. You can also visit her Instagram @thepartysdead for pictures of her journey!