Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

This is a good book to not read just before you go to bed. At least the first part. . . .

The mind-numbing life and horrors of a concentration camp, and the effort to find meaning in life, and how much that meant.

And a discussion of finding meaning in life, its importance, that it's not a secondary excuse, and more

The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us by Bee Wilson

A history of what we have thought about the honeybee.
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Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synesthetes Color Their World by Patricia Lynn Duffy
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The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

A neurologist's take on writing.

I don't know what a non-writer would think of it, but I found it fascinating.

She starts out with a discussion of hypergraphia which is the compulsive need to write.  It's associated with temporal lobe epilepsy and with maniac-depression and it's probably not what drove you to write so much at some point.  Doctors discovered that they had a simple test for epileptic patients as to whether they were hypergraphic:  ask them to write a letter describing their health.  Non-hypergraphics wrote under a hundred.  Hypergraphics wrote thousands.

It's so compulsive that -- well, she tells the story of a Chinese woman who had hypergraphia.  She wrote, compulsively, and then she burned it all because it was criticism of the Chinese regime at the worst possible time to be caught.  (And then she would bring the ashes to a relative's house because it had a flush toilet and she could flush the ashes.)

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