Eat Pray Love

Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
Pages: 350
Genre: Memoir/Non-fiction
Rating: 5/5 (Highly Recommended!)

Have you ever found your "perfect" book? It's an amazing feeling to read the perfect book at the perfect time in your life! This one was mine :-)

It's been ages since I read a book for which I could easily give a 5 star rating without much contemplation! Undoubtedly, this is one of the best books I have read this year. I had read rave reviews about this on a few blogs and had immediately added it to my wishlist. I bought it a couple of days back and since the time I picked it up, I was just unable to put it down till I finished reading the last page. I am glad I bought it because this is one of those books I would love to treasure in my library and read it over and over again! It's truly an amazing book and I highly recommend it, especially if you are looking out for some inspiration in life!

"Eat Pray Love" - the title sounded so intriguing and different and so did the cover page, the design of which I just adored. When you read the book, you'll know the reason behind the title and realize how apt it is.

The book is a memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, which details the author's journey from US (her home country) to Italy, India and Indonesia after she goes through a painful divorce followed by an immediate rebound relationship which also fails. It's definitely not just a travelogue detailing her experiences in various cultures. What makes it different from other travelouges is the intensity with which you get engaged into her life and her emotional journey. The journey is more of her quest to find her true self, a new path to peace and enlightenment leaving her ready to love all over again.

The book is extremely heart warming, captivating, inspiring, heart-breaking and hilarious!! I could feel myself empathize with Elizabeth at many situations and see myself in her shoes at other times. Most of the times I would say - 'Hey! I've been through this, it's happened to me!' and that's what I loved the most in the book. I could relate to it completely!

It's the type of book which contains so many anecdotes that I felt like taking a pencil and underlining those tiny pieces of wisdom so that I would always remember them. Here are some of them. I am sure that just by reading these lines you'll feel like picking up the book right away!

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“Some time after I’d left my husband, I was at a party and a guy I barely knew said to me, ‘You know you seem like a completely different person, now that you’re with this new boyfriend. You used to look like your husband, but now you look like David [her new boyfriend]. You even dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you always look like your men.’”

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“[My guru] says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you are fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it…”

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“The former Catholic nun who oughtta know about guilt, after all wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Guilt’s just your ego’s way of tricking you into thinking that you’re making moral progress.’

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"You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be."

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"You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you're gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you cant learn to master your thinking, you're in deep trouble forever"

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