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164. 100 Days of Happiness: a novel (2nd Reading)

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Fausto Brizzi

Genre:  Fiction, Happiness

368 pages, published August 11, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

100 Days of Happiness tells the story of Lucio Battistini, a resident of Rome, who is separated from his wife Paola and their two young children (Lorenzo and Eva) after she learns that he has had an affair.  Lucio is sleeping in the stock room of his father-in-law’s bakery when he learns that he has inoperable cancer and only 100 days to live, give or take.  Lucio buys a notebook and the first item he writes in it is to win back Paola.  Lucio spends the next three months trying to do that and also enjoying every moment with a zest he hasn’t felt in years.  By the end of the journey, Lucio becomes the man he’s always meant to be.

 

Quotes 

“I know her by heart, and that doesn’t make me love her any less. Like a Dante scholar who learns the entire Divine Comedy and then just appreciates the poem even more profoundly.”

 

“The important thing is to make sure that when death comes, it finds us still alive.”

 

“Always remember that the only riches we possess are the dreams we have as children. They are the fuel of our lives, the only force that pushes us to keep on going even when things have gone all wrong.”

 

“Just work, work, work, even at the risk of making mistakes. And if and when you do make mistakes, and you do hurt someone, ask for forgiveness. Asking forgiveness and admitting you’ve made a mistake is the hardest thing of all. But if someone else does you good, remember it always. Showing gratitude is every bit as complicated.”

 

“Every one of us has already experienced thousands of last times without even realizing it. Most of the time, in fact, you never even imagine that what you’re experiencing is the last time.”

 

“It makes me sad. Everything, even good things, makes me sad.”

 

“A chitchat shop. Simple but brilliant. Not even Leonardo da Vinci ever came up with this one. It’s like a pharmacy that stocks friendship.”

 

“Sometimes real troubles give you a strength you never had before”

 

Papà was a professional bullshit artist so outstanding in his lying skills that if he’d set his mind to it, he could easily have become prime minister of Italy.

 

My Take

A mantra of one of my favorite writers and happiness guru Gretchen Rubin is that the best reading is re-reading.  I took that to sentiment to heart when I re-read 100 Days of Happiness (the first re-read during my thousand book quest) (this time I read the book instead of listening to the audiobook).  It was time well spent because I loved this book even more the second time through.  While I still enjoyed themes and characters, on the second reading, I noticed all of the small details that give Lucio’s world texture and depth.  His daughter saying “meow” instead of “ciao,” the marriage proposal to his wife that was spoiled by his best friend Umberto, his reminiscing about youth travel when he tries to relive the experience 25 years later, the folks who inhabit the Chit Chat shop, and the regular invocation of Leonardo Da Vinci.  While 100 Days of Happiness made me think again about how I would live my life if the end was near, I also just loved spending time with Lucio, his family and friends.  Highly recommended.

 

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163. Summer House with Swimming Pool

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Herman Koch

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense

387 pages, published January 26, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

When famous actor Ralph Meier winds up dead, the authorities begin to suspect Dr. Marc Schlosser, Ralph’s personal doctor and friend.  As the story unfolds, we learn that the real truth is a lot more complex than simple malpractice.  Still haunted by his eldest daughter’s rape during his family’s stay at Ralph’s extravagant beachfront summerhouse, one they shared with Ralph’s family, film director Stanley Forbes and Stanley’s younger girlfriend, Emmanuelle, Marc believes that the perpetrator of the rape could be either Ralph or Stanley.  Stanley, who is weirdly fixated on Marc’s daughters’ future fashion careers, seems like an obvious suspect.  However, Marc’s reasons for wanting Ralph dead become increasingly compelling as events start to unravel.

 

Quotes 

“There are times when you run back through your life, to see whether you can locate the point at which it could still have taken a different turn.”

 

“You get a stain on your pants. Your favorite pair of pants. You wash them ten times in a row at 160 degrees. You scrub and scour and rub. You bring in the heavy artillery. Bleaches. Abrasive cleaners. But the spot doesn’t go away. If you scrub and scour too long, it will only be replaced by something else. By a stretch of fabric that is thinner and paler. The paler cloth is the memory. The memory of the spot. Now there are two things you can do. You can throw the pants away, or you can walk around for the rest of your life with the memory of the stain. But the paler cloth reminds you of more than just the stain. It also reminds you of when the pants were still clean.”

 

“Free-ranging single men are like a house that has been empty too long. There must be something fishy about the house, the woman thinks. Up for sale for six months and it’s still vacant.”

 

“Life as a widow, she thinks, will always be like this. The friends will go on proposing toasts for months (for years!). To her. To their new center of attention. What she doesn’t know yet is that, after a few courtesy calls, it will all be over. The silence that will follow is the same silence that always falls after a life in the shadows.”

 

“Flippancy. A laughing matter. It’s like with funerals. They are, first and foremost, expected to be fun. There is laughter and drinking and bad language. To keep the whole thing from being too bourgeois. A bourgeois funeral is an artist’s worst nightmare.”

 

“An overburdened liver sounds different from a healthy one. An overburdened liver groans. It groans and begs. It begs for a day off.  A day to deal with the worst of the garbage.”

 

My Take

Best-selling Dutch author Herman Koch is a unique voice whose writing is a bit unnerving.  On the recommendation of a Boulder Librarian (who also recommended Summer House with Swimming Pool) I had previously read The Dinner.  While I found that book to be the superior read, Summer House has its captivating moments.  Koch takes you inside the warped psyche of Dr. Marc Schlosser.  Marc’s take on biology and human relations is sometimes ghoulish and creepy, but it is never boring.  If you liked The Dinner, you might want to give Summer House with Swimming Pool a try.

 

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162. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Jamie Ford

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, Romance, World War II

290 pages, published January 27, 2009

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is set in World War II era Seattle and tells the story of two star-crossed lovers (well actually friends who love each other):  Henry Lee, a 13 year old Chinese kid whose father is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American , and Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American girl whose parents are proud to be American but are becoming increasingly worried after war breaks out with Japan.  Both Henry and Keiko are “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary school where the two outcasts find each other while working together in the school cafeteria.  When the internment of American-Japanese families begins, Henry and Keiko are torn apart.  Fate separates them until forty years later, when newly widowed Henry contemplates finding his first true love.

 

Quotes 

“The hardest choices in life aren’t between what’s right and what’s wrong but between what’s right and what’s best.”

 

“He’d do what he always did, find the sweet among the bitter.”

 

“Henry was learning that time apart has a way of creating distance- more than mountains and time zone separating them. Real distance, the kind that makes you ache and stop wondering. Longing so bad that it begins to hurt to care so much.”

 

“I had my chance.’ He said it, retiring from a lifetime of wanting. ‘I had my chance, and sometimes in life, there are no second chances. You look at what you have, not what you miss, and you move forward.”

 

“But choosing to lovingly care for her was like steering a plane into a mountain as gently as possible. The crash is imminent; it’s how you spend your time on the way down that counts.”

 

“I try not to live in the past, he thought, but who knows, sometimes the past lives in me.”

 

“The waitress brought a fresh pot of tea, and Marty refilled his father’s cup and poured a cup for Samantha. Henry in turn filled Marty’s. It was a tradition Henry cherished—never filling your own cup, always filling that of someone else, who would return the favor.”

 

My Take

The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is a quick and enjoyable read that does a fine job of demonstrating the staggering impact of the World War II internment on the Japanese families who were forced to abandon their homes, businesses and lives.  The characters are engaging and provide a sweet lens through which to view a historical atrocity.

 

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161. Family Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Akhil Sharma

Genre:  Fiction

240 pages, published April 7, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

 

In Family Life, Akhil Sharma tells the story of the Mishra family.  It begins in India in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets and wait for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America.  America is everything that the Mishras could have imagined and more.  Older Birju studies hard and his work pays off with admittance to a selective charter school in New York.  However, before he can start, tragedy strikes and Birju is left in a brain-damaged state.  The family copes in different ways.  The father becomes an alcoholic, emotionally abandoning the family for solace at the bottom of a bottle.  The mother redoubles her focus on the older brother who is unable to respond to her.  Younger brother Ajay turns to writing and tries to match the academic achievement of his older brother.

Quotes 

“An elderly black man with gray hair said, “Every bottle should come with a warning: ‘This bottle may cause you to lose your job. This bottle may cause you to get a divorce. This bottle may cause you to become homeless.”

 

“I used to think my father had been assigned to us by the government.”

 

“During the coming days, the wealth of America kept astonishing me. The television had programming from morning till night. I had never been in an elevator before and when I pressed a button in the elevator and the elevator “started moving, I felt powerful that it had to obey me. In our shiny brass mailbox in the lobby, we received ads on colored paper. In India colored paper could be sold to the recycler for more money than newsprint. The sliding glass doors of our apartment building would open when we approached. Each time this happened, I felt that we had been mistaken for somebody important.”

 

“We have to keep trusting God. We can’t just trust God when he’s doing what we want. We have to trust him even when things are not as we would like them.”

 

“I had been nervous about not doing well in college. During my first class, I looked at the notes the boy next to me was taking. His supply and demand curves seemed more neatly drawn than mine. Nearly everyone appeared to have gone to preparatory schools and already knew such odd things as the fact that there was no inflation during the Middle Ages. Very few, however, were willing to work the way I did.  When I would come out of Firestone Library at two in the morning, walk past the strange statues scattered around campus, and then sit at my desk in my room till the trees in the yard appeared out of the darkness, I felt that I was achieving something, that every hour I worked was generating almost physical value, as if I could touch the knowledge I was gaining through my work.”

 

My Take

While I enjoyed Family Life, it did not fully deliver on the promise of the first 50 pages, getting bogged down in the mundane details of the Mishra’s day to day family life with a mentally impaired son.  Perhaps that is the point, but I found my interest flagging during this section of the book.  Sharma is a gifted writer, but I didn’t love this book.

 

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160. Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Rob Walker

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Business, Psychology, Economics

261 pages, published January 1, 2008

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The themes of Buying In is that brands are dead, advertising no longer works, and consumers are in control.  Rob Walker argues that as a result, there has been an important cultural shift that includes a practice he calls murketing, in which people create brands of their own and participate in marketing campaigns for their favorites.  Rather than becoming immune to them, we are rapidly embracing brands.  Profiling Timberland, American Apparel, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Red Bull, iPod, and Livestrong, among others, Walker demonstrates the ways in which buyers adopt products not just as consumer choices but as conscious expressions of their identities.

 

My Take

I picked up Buying In off the shelf at a Malibu vacation rental we were staying at, having heard nothing about the book.  With swaths of free time and a four day deadline to read it, I managed to finish the book.  While I learned a few somewhat interesting things about marketing for different brands, the book barely held my attention.  If you work in the field of marketing and brands, then this book is for you.  If not, my advice is to skip it.

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159. The Age of Miracles

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Karen Thompson Walker

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Young Adult

294 pages, published June 21, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The premise of The Age of Miracles is that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow.  While the days and nights grow longer and longer, the world’s environment, including gravity and electro magnestism, are hugely impacted.  When the worlds’ governments declare that they will keep the standard 24 hour daily calendar, even though days and nights no longer correspond to it, some people respond by becoming rebellious real-timers who are shunned and eventually ostracized.  In this dystopian future, we follow the life of middle schooler Julia as she tries to cope not just with the impact of the slowing, but all of the ups and downs of the ordinary landscape of her life.

 

Quotes 

“How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.”

 

“Some say that love is the sweetest feeling, the purest form of joy, but that isn’t right. It’s not love–it’s relief.”

 

“The only thing you have to do in this life is die,” said Mrs. Pinsky…”everything else is a choice.”

 

“Doesn’t every previous era feel like fiction once it’s gone?”

 

“We were, on that day, no different from the ancients, terrified of our own big sky.”

 

“This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall.”

 

“It was that time of life: Talents were rising to the surface, weaknesses were beginning to show through, we were finding out what kinds of people we would be. Some would turn out beautiful, some funny, some shy. Some would be smart, others smarter. The chubby ones would likely always be chubby. The beloved, I sensed, would be beloved for life. And I worried that loneliness might work that way, too. Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom.”

 

“Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”

 

“I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”

 

“Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.”

 

“And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.”

 

“I liked the idea, how the past could be preserved, fossilized, in the stars. I wanted to think that somewhere on the other end of time, a hundred light years from then, someone else, some distant future creature, might be looking back at a preserved image of me and my father at that very moment in my bedroom.”

 

“A man should enjoy things if he can; he should spend his final days in the sun. Mine will be spent by a reading lamp.”

 

“Seth and I used to like to picture how our world would look to visitors someday, maybe a thousand years in the future, after all the humans are gone and all the asphalt has crumbled and peeled away. We wondered what thise visitors would find here. We liked to guess at what would last. Here the indentations suggesting a vast network of roads. Here the deposits of iron where giant steel structures once stood, shoulder to shoulder in rows, a city. Here the remnants of clothing and dishware, here the burial grounds, here the mounds of earth that were once people’s homes.  But among the artifacts that will never be found – among the objects that will disintegrate long before anyone from elsewhere arrives – is a certain patch of sidewalk on a Californian street where once, on a dark afternoon in summer at the waning end of the year of the slowing, two kids knelt down together on the cold ground. We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew – our names, the date, and these words: We were here.”

 

My Take

The Age of Miracles has an interesting premise, i.e. what happens if the rotation of the earth begins to slow.  While Thompson explores the real world ramifications of a slowing, most of her book is focused on the life of Julia, a California middle schooler who is coping with ordinary issues that face many 12 and 13 years old:  the loss of friends as you move from one stage of growing up to the next, her parents’ estrangement, first love, social isolation, peer pressure, etc.  These issues are handled with a deft touch and you do feel compassion for Julia as she tries to navigate the difficult world of pre-teen angst while the real world is busy falling apart.  If found The Age of Miracles to be an enjoyable read, but without a great deal of lasting impact.

 

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158. An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Barbara Brown Taylor

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Theology, Christian, Memoir

216 pages, published February 10, 2009

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor shares how she learned to encounter God beyond the walls of any church.  From simple practices such as walking, working, and getting lost to deep meditations on topics like prayer and pronouncing blessings, Taylor reveals practical ways to discover the sacred in the small things we do and see. Something as ordinary as hanging clothes on a clothesline becomes an act of devotion if we pay attention to what we are doing and take time to attend to the sights, smells, and sounds around us.  Making eye contact with the cashier at the grocery store becomes a moment of true human connection. Allowing yourself to get lost leads to new discoveries.  All of her methods share a common theme of taking the time to step outside your normal routine and thoughtfully contemplate the myriad blessings that surround each and every one of us.

 

Quotes 

“To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.”

 

“Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.”

 

“Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.”

 

“Who had persuaded me that God preferred four walls and a roof to wide-open spaces? When had I made the subtle switch myself, becoming convinced that church bodies and buildings were the safest and most reliable places to encounter the living God?”

 

“People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay. Whoever wrote this stuff believed that people could learn as much about the ways of God from paying attention to the world as they could from paying attention to scripture. What is true is what happens, even if what happens is not always right. People can learn as much about the ways of God from business deals gone bad or sparrows falling to the ground as they can from reciting the books of the Bible in order. They can learn as much from a love affair or a wildflower as they can from knowing the Ten Commandments by heart.”

 

“but I know that I have an easier time loving humankind than I do loving particular human beings.”

 

“Plato once said that pain restores order to the soul. Rumi said that it lops off the branches of indifference. “The throbbing vein / will take you further / than any thinking.”14 Whatever else it does, pain offers an experience of being human that is as elemental as birth, orgasm, love, and death. Because it is so real, pain is an available antidote to unreality—not the medicine you would have chosen, perhaps, but an effective one all the same. The next time you are in real pain, see how you feel about television shows, new appliances, a clean house, or your resumé. Chances are that none of these will do anything for you. All that will do anything for you is some cool water, held out by someone who has stopped everything else in order to look after you. An extra blanket might also help, a dry pillow, the simple knowledge that there is someone in the house who might hear you if you cried.”

 

“According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, “Grow, grow.”

 

“All I am saying is that anyone can do this. Anyone can ask and anyone can bless, whether anyone has authorized you to do it or not. All I am saying is that the world needs you to do this, because there is a real shortage of people willing to kneel wherever they are and recognize the holiness holding its sometimes bony, often tender, always life-giving hand above their heads. That we are able to bless one another at all is evidence that we have been blessed, whether we can remember when or not. That we are willing to bless one another is miracle enough to stagger the very stars.”

 

“The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.”

 

“To see takes time, like having a friend takes time. It is as simple as turning off the television to learn the song of a single bird. Why should anyone do such things? I cannot imagine—unless one is weary of crossing days off the calendar with no sense of what makes the last day different from the next. Unless one is weary of acting in what feels more like a television commercial than a life. The practice of paying attention offers no quick fix for such weariness, with guaranteed results printed on the side. Instead, it is one way into a different way of life, full of treasure for those who are willing to pay attention to exactly where they are.”

 

“No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it. The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.”

 

“Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.”

 

“The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.”

 

“What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.”

 

“Whatever I decided to do for a living, it was not what I did but how I did it that mattered.”

 

“You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Those most likely to befriend strangers, in other words, are those who have been strangers themselves. The best way to grow empathy for those who are lost is to know what it means to be lost yourself.”

 

“Since some people consider being human a liability, and “fully” would only make things worse, I should perhaps explain what I mean. To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that “I’m only human” does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality. “The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote Irenaeus of Lyons some two thousand years ago. One of the reasons I remain a Christian-in-progress is the peculiar Christian insistence that God is revealed in humankind—not just in human form but also in human being.”

 

My Take

An Alter in the World planted a wonderful idea in my brain, i.e., we should not just worship God in church, but should worship Him in everything that we encounter and experience, including nature, our bodies, work, suffering, and most of all in other people.  In a very accessible manner, Taylor relates how we can find God and joy in all things, especially in our humanness.  I got a lot out of this book and will keep it in mind for a future re-read.

 

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157. One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   B.J. Novak

Genre:  Fiction, Short Stories, Humor

288 pages, published February 4, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

One More Thing is a collection of humorous, witty and sometimes surprisingly affecting short stories from B.J. Novak, an actor, writer, and director best known for his work on The Office (where he played Ryan the temp).  In one story, a boy wins a $100,000 prize in a box of Frosted Flakes, only to discover that claiming the winnings may break up his family.  A woman sets out to seduce motivational speaker Tony Robbins and asks Tony Robbins himself for help achieving this mission.  Author John Grisham contemplates an epic typo.  A new arrival in heaven, overwhelmed by infinite options, procrastinates over his long-ago promise to visit his grandmother.  One of my favorites is a retelling of the classic fable The Tortoise and the Hare in which a revenge minded hare is obsessed with scoring a rematch against the tortoise who ruined his life.

 

Quotes 

“…slow and steady wins the race, till truth and talent claim their place.”

 

“In the aftermath of an athletic humiliation on an unprecedented scale—a loss to a tortoise in a footrace so staggering that, his tormenters teased, it would not only live on in the record books, but would transcend sport itself, and be taught to children around the world in textbooks and bedtime stories for centuries; that hundreds of years from now, children who had never heard of a “tortoise” would learn that it was basically a fancy type of turtle from hearing about this very race—the hare retreated, understandably, into a substantial period of depression and self-doubt.”

 

“If you love something, let it go.

If you don’t love something, definitely let it go.

Basically, just drop everything, who cares.”

 

“Regret is just perfectionism plus time.”

 

“But nobody remembers how long anything takes; they only remember how good it was in the end.”

 

“You have infinite time here, and there are infinite things to do, but you still don’t end up doing much of it. You do what you love most, over and over.”

 

“It’s not always enough to be brave, I realized years later. You have to be brave and contribute something positive, too. Brave on its own is just a party trick.”

 

“I think it’s better to not know certain things. It gives the world an extra bit of mystery, which is important to us as human beings.”

 

“Being young was her thing, and she was the best at it. But every year, more and more girls came out of nowhere and tried to steal her thing.  One of these days I’m going to have to get a new thing, she thought to herself–but as quietly as she could, because she knew that if anyone caught her thinking this thought, her thing would be right over right then.”

 

“I was sad that summer was over. But I was happy that it was over for my enemies, too.”

 

“In my opinion, there are two types of perfect. The first is the type that seems so obvious and intuitive to you and everyone else that in a perfect world it would simply be considered standard; but, in reality, in our flawed world, what should be considered standard is actually so rare that it has to be elevated to the level of “perfect.” This is the type of perfect that makes you and most other people think, “Why isn’t everything like this? Why is it so hard to find …” a black V-neck cotton sweater, or a casual non-chain restaurant with comfortable booths, etc.—“that is just exactly the way everyone knows something like this should be?” “Perfect,” we all say with relief when we finally find something like this that is exactly as it should be. “Perfect. Why was this so hard to find?”

The other type of perfect is the type you never could have expected and then could never replicate.”

 

“All eyes are beautiful, I said, which is why it’s such an easy compliment.”

 

“It is an inside joke of history that all its most exciting adventures inevitably end their careers as homework. Beheadings, rebellions, thousand-year wars, incest on the royal throne, electricity, art, opera, dogs in outer space.”

 

My Take

My family and I love watching The Office, so I was interested to see what B.J. Novak (who was a creative force on that classic show in addition to playing the somewhat dodgy temp Ryan) would come up with.  I also had really enjoyed reading two books by Novak bestie Mindy Kaling.  While Novak’s stories are often entertaining and sometimes thought provoking, the collection is a bit uneven.  He tackles a wide variety of subjects, themes, tones, and narrative voices.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  Still, I am happy to have read this book, even if I didn’t enjoy it as much as Kaling’s work.

 

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156. A Gentleman in Moscow

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Blair Norman, Barbara Corson

Author:   Amor Towles

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction

462 pages, published September 6, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

In A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles depicts Russia during the beginning and middle of the twentieth century through the eyes of Count Alexander Rostov.  In 1922, Count Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin.   Rostov, a paragon of sophistication and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors.  Unexpectedly, his changed circumstances provide him a unique viewpoint into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

 

Quotes 

“if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.”

 

“For his part, the Count had opted for the life of the purposefully unrushed. Not only was he disinclined to race toward some appointed hour – disdaining even to wear a watch – he took the greatest satisfaction when assuring a friend that a worldly matter could wait in favor of a leisurely lunch or stroll along the embankment. After all, did not wine improve with age? Was it not the passage of years that gave a piece of furniture its delightful patina? When all was said and done, the endeavors that most modern men saw as urgent (such as appointments with bankers and the catching of trains), probably could have waited, while those they deemed frivolous (such as cups of tea and friendly chats) had deserved their immediate attention.”

 

“For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”

 

“The principle here is that a new generation owes a measure of thanks to every member of the previous generation. Our elders planted fields and fought in wars; they advanced the arts and sciences, and generally made sacrifices on our behalf. So by their efforts, however humble, they have earned a measure of our gratitude and respect.”

 

“He had said that our lives are steered by uncertainties, many of which are disruptive or even daunting; but that if we persevere and remain generous of heart, we may be granted a moment of lucidity—a moment in which all that has happened to us suddenly comes into focus as a necessary course of events, even as we find ourselves on the threshold of the life we had been meant to lead all along.”

 

“the Confederacy of the Humbled is a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile. ”

 

“It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life,” he began, “that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces.”

 

“It is a well-known fact that of all the species on earth Homo sapiens is among the most adaptable. Settle a tribe of them in a desert and they will wrap themselves in cotton, sleep in tents, and travel on the backs of camels; settle them in the Arctic and they will wrap themselves in sealskin, sleep in igloos, and travel by dog-drawn sled. And if you settle them in a Soviet climate? They will learn to make friendly conversation with strangers while waiting in line; they will learn to neatly stack their clothing in their half of the bureau drawer; and they will learn to draw imaginary buildings in their sketchbooks. That is, they will adapt.”

 

“After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”

 

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

 

“Invariably dressed in black, the Countess was one of those dowagers whose natural independence of mind, authority of age, and impatience with the petty made her the ally of all irreverent youth.”

 

“Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate and our opinions evolve–if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew.”

 

My Take

I had high expectations for A Gentleman in Moscow after my friend Barbara told me that she loved the book so much that as soon as she finished reading it, she started rereading it again.  I cannot think of higher praise.  While high expectations can sometimes ruin an experience, that was not the case here.  It started a bit slowly, but after an hour or two of listening to the audio book version (with excellent voice work by Nicholas Guy Smith), I was hooked.  Full of humor, a magnificent cast of characters, and one wonderful scene after another, A Gentleman in Moscow reveals layer after layer of discovery and growing self awareness as Count Rostov comes to understand the reality of the world surrounding him and his place in it.

 

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155. Everything Changes

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Jonathan Tropper

Genre:  Fiction, Humor

352 pages, published March 28, 2006

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Everything Changes tells the story of Zachary King.  In his appearance to the outside world, Zack has it all.  A steady, well-paying job, a rent-free luxurious Manhattan apartment, and an engagement to Hope, who is beautiful, smart, and from a wealthy family.  However, as the wedding day looms, Zack finds himself haunted by the memory of his best friend, Rael, killed in a car wreck two years earlier—and by his increasingly complicated feelings for Tamara, the beautiful widow Rael left behind.  When Norm, Zack’s unemployed,  freewheeling, Viagra-popping father, resurfaces after a twenty-year absence, looking to make amends, Zack begins to question everything in his life.

 

Quotes 

“You can never totally hate someone who sang you to sleep like that, can you? Who calmed you down and eased your fears. You can feel angry and betrayed, but some part of you will always love them for being there on those scary nights, for giving you a place to run to where your nightmares couldn’t follow, the one place where you could descend finally into slumber knowing, at least for the time being, that you were completely safe.”

 

“The really good liars, the true grandmasters of bullshit, are so damn convincing because they actually believe their own lies.”

 

“Few things are more pathetic than an unemployed man with a business card.”

 

“it’s a point of pride whenever you can point to the ways in which you’re avoiding your progenitor’s defective character. I’m not like him becomes your mantra,”

 

“Things have been going too well for me lately. I feel like I have some bad karma headed my way.” Tamara frowns at me as she leads me toward the dressing rooms. “That’s a pretty dire outlook on life,” she says. “What’s the point in working to be happy if you’re going to be constantly looking over your shoulder, wondering when it’s time to pay the bill?”

 

“The reason wisdom is meant to be imparted is because you acquire it only after it’s too late to apply to yourself.”

 

“I wake up like this, this sense that I’ve somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right because of some seemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I’ve made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into…something.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and thoroughly enjoyed several books by Jonathan Tropper (The Book of Joe, This is Where I Leave You, and One Last Thing Before I Go), I had high hopes for Everything Changes.  I was not disappointed.  Tropper has a knack for creating colorful, sometimes eccentric (and always entertaining) characters that retain enough of their humanity that they seem like real people.  He then puts them in situations that combine pathos with the outlandish.  The result is often extremely humorous with an undercurrent of the poignant.  Everything Changes hits all of these notes and it was a pleasure to read.

 

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