This week’s Weekly Geeks challenge was to adopt a policy of linking to other people’s reviews of a book I’ve reviewed. Like, if you blogged about The Number: A Completely Different Way To Think About The Rest Of Your Life, you could tell me and I would say “Hey! Somebody else wrote about this too, look at that!” As Dewey says, this is great fun because:

1. As a blog reader, I like that I can have my review linked in someone else’s blog.

2. As a blog reader, I like that if I’m interested in a book Darla writes about, there will be other reviews linked at the bottom of the page, so I can get other viewpoints. You can see how this works here.

3. As a blog writer, when I review a book, I often remember that I read someone else’s review at some point, but whose? And when? With Darla’s method, people tell her about their reviews, and she can see what they had to say about a book that is still fresh in her mind.

I think it sounds fun and builds community, so I’m in.

And in fact, I already have one; the whole reason I blogged about The Saturdays was that Dewey did! Which reminded me of that awesome book and author.

I don’t think any other Weekly Geeks have reviewed books I have (other than that one) but I did a little glance through the blogosphere to see if anyone else had reviewed some of the books I’ve talked about here.

D. Estitute at Sober N Clean talked about When Society Becomes an Addict, which echoes my Saint Patrick’s Day post a bit as well as, of course, When Society Becomes an Addict 1 and 2 My favorite part of their review was this little story:

A group of mothers would meet for a boozy lunch in a Dublin hotel and get the doorman to collect the children who would do their homework in the lobby while they got smashed next door. I didn’t ask if cars were crashed as a result of these sessions, but I bet many little hearts crashed when they saw their withering mum on a bar stool.

“We didn’t know the extent of the harm we were inflicting,” she said. Which is understandable. Because when we’re drinking, we don’t see ourselves.

Far from it, we think all is well. That’s the magic of booze — it casts a spell. Because alcohol tells lies — some are harmless and fun but others hurt how we want to see ourselves and behave towards those around us.

M’Lady Lemonbrick of galacticchick brought some incisive analysis to the party too:

Anthropologists, social scientists, indigenous commentators and others, for the past fifty years and more, have been documenting the many similarities between modern society and addicts, as well as the inherant pathology of civilisation. When Society Becomes An Addict, by Ann Wilson Schaef, is a starting point for the investigation of these similarities. There is no doubt that any society that believes it can poison its home, destroy the fertility of the soil, create products that will pollute the planet for tens of thousands of years, daily drive species into extinction and generally act in a fashion that indicates a complete disconnection and disinterest in- indeed, an active hatred towards- the landbase that supports it, is a society that to all intents and definitions is insane.

To ignore the underlying insanity and self-destructive longing of one’s own society is to invite one’s own destruction. To cover over the underlying unsustainability of any society by blithely trotting forth the ‘benefits’ of that society is to await slow death by starvation, toxic overload, environmental disaster or any number of essentially preventable outcomes. Certainly, Bach is beautiful music, but how much land degredation is Bach’s music worth? How many species? What about art- how much environmental destruction is modern art worth? The extinction of twenty species? The destruction of how much landbase? The deaths of how many indigenous people? Apply this analysis to everything you personally think is valuable about civilisation and see where your values really sit.

Locarb at The Zen of Ken contrasted a quote from When Society Becomes an Addict with an editorial from the Vancouver Sun:

It’s not that people no longer crave a connection with one another. They do, just not in person. The widespread popularity of chat rooms and social networks such as Facebook and MySpace suggests we’d rather talk online with friends and strangers than we would with our loved ones, face-to-face…. They’re even used by Alzheimer’s patients to help with memories. Ironically, hours can disappear with the click of a mouse, at the computer, on video games, e-mailing or just surfing the Internet.

And Eddie at [un]Common Sense revisited a wonderful four-year-old post about the book:

When we come into the present, we begin to feel the life force around us again, but we also encounter whatever we have been avoiding. We must have the courage to face whatever is present — our pain, our desires, our grief, our loss, our secret hopes, our love — everything that moves us most deeply. As we stop the war, each of us will find something from which we have been running — our loneliness, our unworthiness, our boredom, our shame, our unfulfilled desires. We must face these parts of ourselves as well.

We all share a longing to go beyond the prisons of our personal fear or anger or addiction, to connect with something greater than “I” (the “mini me”), greater than our small story and our small self. It is possible to stop the war and come into the eternal present — to touch a great ground of being that contains all things. For me, this is the true purpose and mission of life — to discover peace and connectedness in ourselves and to stop the war in us and around us.

That was a lot of fun! I think I’ll post a couple more overviews of other people’s reviews of the books we’ve blogged about over the weekend. I learned that I wasn’t alone (yet again!) and saw some amazing perspectives and insights on what that book was saying. And I got to discover fascinating new blogs!

Oh, so: if you’ve reviewed/blogged about Lee Eisenberg’s The Number, Elizabeth Enright’s The Saturdays (and the other Melendy books) Renee Fredrickson’s Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery From Sexual Abuse, Helen Fielding’s Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, Lauren Catuzzi Grandcolas’ You Can Do It! The Merit Badge Handbook for Grownup Girls (or for that matter, any of the books about Girl or Boy Scout Badges and Signs), or Karen Kingston’s Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui, drop me a comment and I’ll link you up! Phew… that was a lot.