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277. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Jordan Peterson

Genre:  Non Fiction, Psychology, Philosophy, Self Improvement

448 pages, published January 23, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In 12 Rules for Life, celebrated Psychologist Jordan B. Peterson digs into some of the most difficult questions we face as human beings and provides a pragmatic blueprint on how to live your life.  He does so with references to biblical texts, historic philosophers (including Nietzsche and Soccrates) and cutting-edge scientific research.

Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life are:

  1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back
  2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
  3. Make friends with people who want the best for you
  4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
  5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
  6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
  7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
  8. Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie
  9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
  10. Be precise in your speech
  11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
  12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

Quotes 

“To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).”

 

“So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.”

 

“The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.”

 

“Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.”

 

“We require routine and tradition. That’s order. Order can become excessive, and that’s not good, but chaos can swamp us, so we drown— and that is also not good. We need to stay on the straight and narrow path.”

 

“Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”

 

“To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.”

 

“Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”

 

“It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons.”

 

“We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society and the world. We must each tell the truth and repair what is in disrepair and break down and recreate what is old and outdated. It is in this manner that we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world. It’s asking a lot. It’s asking for everything.”

 

“And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”

 

“In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaninglessness, and that is no improvement at all.”

 

“Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.”

 

“Intolerance of others’ views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are embarrassingly unsophisticated or, possibly, dangerous.”

 

“We deserve some respect. You deserve some respect. You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued. You may therefore have to conduct yourself habitually in a manner that allows you some respect for your own Being—and fair enough. But every person is deeply flawed. Everyone falls short of the glory of God. If that stark fact meant, however, that we had no responsibility to care, for ourselves as much as others, everyone would be brutally punished all the time. That would not be good. That would make the shortcomings of the world, which can make everyone who thinks honestly question the very propriety of the world, worse in every way. That simply cannot be the proper path forward.”

 

“loving your neighbour as yourself.” The first lesson was that neither of these statements has anything to do with being nice. The second was that both are equations, rather than injunctions. If I am someone’s friend, family member, or lover, then I am morally obliged to bargain as hard on my own behalf as they are on theirs. If I fail to do so, I will end up a slave, and the other person a tyrant. What good is that?”

 

“So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.”

 

“You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).”

 

“It is my firm belief that the best way to fix the world—a handyman’s dream, if ever there was one—is to fix yourself,”

 

“It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.”

 

“The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.”

 

“Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

 

“If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.”

 

“Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.”

 

“Stop saying those things that make you weak and ashamed. Say only those things that make you strong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honour.”

 

“It is better, proverbially, to rule your own spirit than to rule a city.”

 

“Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.  It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.”

 

“Here’s a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws. This is the ethical—even legal—equivalent of Occam’s razor, the scientist’s conceptual guillotine, which states that the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable.”

 

“A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie. One forty-something client told me his vision, formulated by his younger self: “I see myself retired, sitting on a tropical beach, drinking margaritas in the sunshine.” That’s not a plan. That’s a travel poster. After eight margaritas, you’re fit only to await the hangover. After three weeks of margarita-filled days, if you have any sense, you’re bored stiff and self-disgusted. In a year, or less, you’re pathetic. It’s just not a sustainable approach to later life. This kind of oversimplification and falsification is particularly typical of ideologues. They adopt a single axiom: government is bad, immigration is bad, capitalism is bad, patriarchy is bad. Then they filter and screen their experiences and insist ever more narrowly that everything can be explained by that axiom. They believe, narcissistically, underneath all that bad theory, that the world could be put right, if only they held the controls.”

 

“Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past—sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes, perhaps, because no alternatives beckon. People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly … unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?”

 

“If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends.”

 

“When my now-adult daughter was a child, another child once hit her on the head with a metal toy truck. I watched that same child, one year later, viciously push his younger sister backwards over a fragile glass-surfaced coffee table. His mother picked him up, immediately afterward (but not her frightened daughter), and told him in hushed tones not to do such things, while she patted him comfortingly in a manner clearly indicative of approval. She was out to produce a little God-Emperor of the Universe. That’s the unstated goal of many a mother, including many who consider themselves advocates for full gender equality. Such women will object vociferously to any command uttered by an adult male, but will trot off in seconds to make their progeny a peanut-butter sandwich if he demands it while immersed self-importantly in a video game. The future mates of such boys have every reason to hate their mothers-in-law. Respect for women? That’s for other boys, other men—not for their dear sons.”

 

“You might consider judging your success across all the games you play. Imagine that you are very good at some, middling at others, and terrible at the remainder. Perhaps that’s how it should be. You might object: I should be winning at everything! But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the present always take precedence over trajectory across time?” 

My Take

While it is a longish, somewhat dense book, I found myself quickly reading through Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life.  I could not put it down.  Peterson has a lot to say about the proper way to lead your life and I found myself agreeing with many of his admonitions and insights.  This is a book that I am still thinking about, several weeks after finishing.  Highly recommended.

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276. People of the Book

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Geraldine Brooks

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery

372 pages, published October 1, 2008

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

People of the Book tells the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images.  It begins in 1996 when Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the exclusive job of analyzing and conserving of the Haggadah which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war.  Intermixed with Hannah’s analysis is the history of the Haggadah at different points in time which trace the book’s journey from its salvation back to its creation which also shines a spotlight on the history of the Jewish people in Europe throughout the centuries.

Quotes 

“Book burnings. Always the forerunners.  Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.”

 

“We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don’t have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.”

 

“…The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox.”

 

“I asked once, and the library assistant told me there were more than a hundred thousand books there, and more than sixty million pages of documents. It’s a good number, I think: ten pages for every person who died. A kind of monument in paper for people who have no gravestones.”

 

“I had to remind myself that Islam had once swept north as far as the gates of Vienna; that when the haggadah had been made, the Muslims’ vast empire was the bright light of the Dark Ages, the one place where science and poetry still flourished, where Jews, tortured and killed by Christians, could find a measure of peace.”

 

“…the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You’ve got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything’s humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize ‘the other’–it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists…same old, same old.”

 

“It did not even occur to David to consult Ruti herself about this, or any other matter. Had he done so, he would have been most surprised by the result. He did not realize it, but his love for his daughter marched hand in hand with a kind of contempt for her. He saw his daughter as a kind-hearteed, dutiful, but vaguely pitiable soul. David, like many people, had made the mistake of confusing “meek” with “weak.” 

My Take

I enjoyed People of the Book and learned a lot about Jewish history (which translates to how badly the Jews have been treated throughout history).  Author Geraldine Brooks weaves an engrossing tale that brings history to life.

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275. Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Jackie Funk

Author:   Michael Pollan

Genre:  Non Fiction, Food, Health, Science, Nutrition

152 pages, published December 29, 2010

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The title of Food Rules describes its content perfectly.  In this short book Michael Pollan, the author of many best-selling books on food (including The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food; both of which I read and enjoyed) offers the reader practical advice on what to eat and what not to eat.  His main advice is to “eat food, mostly plants, not too much.”  The book elaborates on each part of this guidance with enough explanation to understand the reason behind the recommendation.

Quotes 

“Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!”

 

“Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is a literal shame, but most of us can: Americans spend less than 10 percent of their income on food, less than the citizens of any other nation.”

 

“Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

 

“As grandmothers used to say, ‘Better to pay the grocer than the doctor”

 

“The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead.”

 

“Use the apple test. If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re not hungry.”

 

“If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t. .”

 

“…There’s a lot of money in the Western diet. The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them. ”

 

“For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it’s more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.”

 

“The healthiest food in the supermarket – the fresh produce- doesn’t boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don’t have budget or packaging. Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.”

 

“Be the kind of person who takes supplements — then skip the supplements.”

 

“Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals].”

 

“Leave something on your plate… ‘Better to go to waste than to waist”

 

“Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millennia before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it; it is entirely possible to eat healthily without knowing what an anti-oxidant is.”

 

“So don’t drink your sweets, and remember: There is no such thing as a healthy soda.”

 

“The banquet is in the first bite.”

 

“For as you go on, you’ll be getting more calories, but not necessarily more pleasure.”

 

“So: Ask yourself not, Am I full? but, Is my hunger gone? That moment will arrive several bites sooner.” 

My Take

Having read and enjoyed two previous books by Michael Pollan, I was looking forward to this mini-book which distilled his eating philosophy into small, bite-sized, easily remembered chunks.  I was not disappointed.  Food Rules offers a lot of pithy, common-sense advice in response to the age old question:  What should I eat?  While I’m still following the low-carb recommendation of Gary Taubes (author of Why We Get Fat), I am intentionally eating more vegetables and some fruit after being reminded of their healthful properties.

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274. Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Allie Brosh

Genre:  Humor, Memoir, Cartoon, Graphic Novel

371 pages, published October 29, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Hyperbole and a Half is a graphic novel by Allie Brosh who has a blog by the same name.  In it she provides insightful takes on her nontraditional childhood and challenting adulthood.  She also spends a lot of time analyzing the behavior of her dogs.

Quotes 

“Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don’t want to do. And if I lose, I’m one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I’m going to win or lose until the last second.”

 

“The absurdity of working so hard to continue doing something you don’t like can be overwhelming.”

 

“Dear 25 year old [note: not “Dear 25-year-old me” or “Dear 25-year-old self,” just “Dear 25 year old”],”

 

“The shelter worker said, “This one hates everything and she doesn’t know anything, and I hope you aren’t planning on taking her outside ever because she’s more like a bear than a dog, really, and unfortunately, she can scale a seven-foot-tall fence like the fucking Spider-Man.” And we were like, “Sure, why not.”

 

“We’re going to play a different game now. It’s called “who can yell ‘help’ the loudest and the most.”

 

“Procrastination has become its own solution – a tool I can use to push myself so close to disaster that I become terrified and flee toward success. A more troubling matter is the day-to-day activities that don’t have massive consequences when I neglect to do them.”

 

“Fortunately, it turns out that being scared of yourself is a somewhat effective motivational technique.”

 

“Being a good person is a very important part of my identity, but being a genuinely good person is time-consuming and complicated.”

 

“You don’t have to be a good person to feel like a good person, though. There’s a loophole I found where I don’t do good, helpful things, but I keep myself in a perpetual state of thinking I might.”

 

“I don’t just want to do the right thing. I want to WANT to do the right thing.”

 

“And that’s the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn’t always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn’t even something – it’s nothing. And you can’t combat nothing.”

 

“At first, I’d try to explain that it’s not really negativity or sadness anymore, it’s more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can’t feel anything about anything—even the things you love, even fun things—and you’re horribly bored and lonely, but since you’ve lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you’re stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is.”

 

“Nobody can guarantee that it’s going to be okay, but – and I don’t know if this will be comforting to anyone else – the possibility exists that there’s a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you were laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed.”

 

“The longer I procrastinate on returning phone calls and emails, the more guilty I feel about it. The guilt I feel causes me to avoid the issue further, which only leads to more guilt and more procrastination. It gets to the point where I don’t email someone for fear of reminding them that they emailed me and thus giving them a reason to be disappointed in me.”

 

“Reality should follow through on what I think it is going to do.”

 

“I cope with it the best way I know – by being completely unreasonable and trying to force everything else in the world to obey me and do all the nonsensical things I want.”

 

“Fear and shame are the backbone of my self-control. They are my source of inspiration, my insurance against becoming entirely unacceptable. They help me do the right thing. And I am terrified of what I would be without them. Because I suspect that, left to my own devices, I would completely lose control of my life. I’m still hoping that perhaps someday I’ll learn how to use willpower like a real person, but until that very unlikely day, I will confidently battle toward adequacy, wielding my crude skill set of fear and shame.”

 

“I had tasted cake and there was no going back. My tiny body had morphed into a writhing mass of pure tenacity encased in a layer of desperation. I would eat all of the cake or I would evaporate from the sheer power of my desire to eat it.” 

My Take

I picked up Hyperbole and a Half from the “Librarian Recommendations” shelf at the wonderful Boulder Library.  While I haven’t read many graphic novels, I thoroughly enjoyed this one.  Allie Brosh has a unique and insightful sense of humor that had me laughing out loud at times (to get an idea of it you can check out her blog at http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/.  I especially enjoyed her story about burying a time capsule letter as a child which she addressed to “Dear 25 year old” rather than “Dear 25 year old self” or “Dear 25 year old me,” asked numerous questions about which kinds of dogs she liked and then implored the recipient to “Please write back.”  Her recounting of getting lost in the woods with her mother and her advice to her untrainable dogs also makes for interesting and entertaining reading.

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273. Before the Fall

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Noah Hawley

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller

401 pages, published May 31, 2016

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

On a foggy summer night, 11 people – 10 privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter – depart Martha’s Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York.  Sixteen minutes later plane has crashed into the ocean.  The only survivors are Scott Burroughs, the painter, and a four-year-old boy who is now the last remaining member of an immensely wealthy and powerful media mogul’s family.   Before the Fall weaves between the aftermath of the crash and the backstories of the passengers and crew members including a Media Mogul and his family, a captain of Wall Street and his wife, a party boy just in from London, a young woman questioning her path in life, and a career pilot.

Quotes 

“In the absence of facts…. we tell ourselves stories.”

 

“It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful. And he liked that idea. That service to others brought happiness. It was self-involvement that led to depression, to spiraling questions about the meaning of things.”

 

“Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you.  And then it’s over.”

 

“Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.”

 

“You have kids and you think I made you, so we’re the same, but it’s not true. You just get to live with them for a while and maybe help them figure things out.”

 

“It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past.”

 

“Anything is possible. Everything is gettable. You just have to want it badly enough.”

 

“Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?”

 

“What’s a handshake, after all, except a socially acceptable way to make sure the other guy doesn’t have a knife behind his back.”

 

“Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.”

 

“Where the average person appreciates the beauty of surf and waves, Gus, an engineer, sees only practical design. Gravity, plus ocean current, plus wind. Poetry to the common man is a unicorn viewed from the corner of an eye—an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.”

 

“Never fight tomorrow’s fight today,”

 

“But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire’s account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict.” 

My Take

Having read and enjoyed The Good Father by Noah Hawley (in addition to the Fargo television series which he created), I looked forward to Before the Fall.  I was not disappointed.  In addition to penning a suspenseful mystery, Hawley provides the reader with an examination of human nature and an exploration of existential issues.  All in an entertaining, suspenseful format.

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272. Britt-Marie Was Here

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Fredrik Backman

Genre:  Fiction

324 pages, published May 3, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

When the story begins, Britt-Marie finds herself in a bad place.  Her husband Kent has left her and she must find a job and start over.  The unemployed office places her in charge of the Recreation Center in the just scraping by town of Borg.  Saddled with an obsessive-compulsive personality, Britt-Marie does what she always does:  clean and bring order to disorder.  Over time, her efforts extend to the kids of Borg, a motley lot who are crazy for football (soccer).

Quotes 

“One morning you wake up with more life behind you than in front of you, not being able to understand how it’s happened.”

 

“At a certain age almost all the questions a person asks him or herself are really just about one thing: how should you live your life?”

 

“You have to understand that when one is just standing there looking, then just for a second one is ready to jump. If one does it, one dares to do it. But if one waits, it’ll never happen.”

 

“It’s difficult to know when love blooms; suddenly one day you wake up and it’s in full flower. It works the same way when it wilts—one day it is just too late.”

 

“Because if we don’t forgive those we love, then what is left? What is love if it’s not loving our lovers even when they don’t deserve it?”

 

“An unreasonable amount of paperwork is required these days just to be a human being.”

 

“A human being may not choose her circumstances, but she does choose her actions.”

 

“A few years turned into more years, and more years turned into all years. Years have a habit of behaving like that.”

 

“The reason for her love of maps. It’s half worn away, the dot, and the red color is bleached. Yet it’s there, flung down there on the map halfway between the lower left corner and its center, and next to it is written, “You are here.”

 

“All marriages have their bad sides, because people have weaknesses. If you live with another human being you learn to handle these weaknesses in a variety of ways. For instance, you might take the view that weaknesses are a bit like heavy pieces of furniture, and based on this you must learn to clean around them. To maintain the illusion.”

 

“My mother worked for the social services all her life. She always said that in the middle of all the crap, in the thick of it all, you always had a sunny story turning up. Which makes it all worthwhile.’ The next words that come are smiling. ‘You’re my sunny story, Britt-Marie.”

 

Sometimes it’s easier to go on living, not even knowing who you are, when at least you know precisely where you are while you go on not knowing.”

 

“If you support Tottenham you always give more love than you get back… Tottenham is the worst kind of bad team, because they’re almost good. They always promise that they’re going to be fantastic. They make you hope. So you go on loving them and they carry on finding more and more innovative ways of disappointing you.”

 

“Human beings are the only animals that smile as a gesture of peace, whereas other animals show their teeth as a threat.”

 

“All passion is childish. It’s banal and naive. It’s nothing we learn; it’s instinctive, and so it overwhelms us. Overturns us. It bears us away in a flood. All other emotions belong to earth, but passion inhabits the universe.  That is the reason why passion is worth something, not for what it gives us but for what it demands we risk. Our dignity. The puzzlement of others and their condescending, shaking heads.”

 

“I was under the impression that one became a policeman because one believes in rules and regulations.” “I think Sven became a policeman because he believes in justice.”

 

“You love football because it is instinctive.If a ball comes rolling down the street you give it a punt. You love it for the same reason you fall in love. Because you don’t know how to avoid it.” 

My Take

While I enjoyed Britt-Marie Was Here, it is my least favorite of Fredrik Backman’s books that I have read.  Much better is A Man Called Ove and Beartown.  Nevertheless, Britt-Marie Was Here is worth a read.  Backman’s understanding of human nature and what makes us tick is present as is his ability to create a world that feels real and worth spending time in.

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271. Slam

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Nick Hornby

Genre:  Fiction, Humor

309 pages, published October 16, 2007

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Slam is narrated by Sam, a 16-year-old living in the UK whose life is getting very complicated.  His parents are divorced, he is struggling in school, his best advice comes from a Tony Hawk poster and he has just found out that his ex-girlfriend Alicia is pregnant.

Quotes 

“I hate time. It never does what you want it to.”

 

“When I went back into the kitchen, I wanted to sit on my mum’s lap. I know that sounds stupid and babyish , but I couldn’t help it. On my sixteenth birthday, I didn’t want to be sixteen, or fifteen or anyteen. I wanted to be three or four, and too young to make any kind of mess.”

 

“I’d never really had arguments like this before, arguments I couldn’t understand properly, arguments where both sides were right and wrong all at the same time.”

 

“There are many differences between a baby and an I-Pod. And one of the biggest is, no one going to mug you for your baby.”

 

“Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they’re ugly, but because they’re mad.”

 

“It seems to make a difference to some girls. If you say something that isn’t sexist to the right sort ofgirl, she likes you more. Say one of your mates is going on about how all girls are stupid, and you say ‘not all girls are stupid,’ then it can make you look good. There have to be girls listening, though, obviously. Otherwise it’s a waste of time.”

 

“Seeing as he wasn’t very bright, I was pretty sure that he was going to be good at fighting.”

 

“There was a lot of work to do, and arguments to have, and kids to take care of, and money to find from somewhere, and sleep to lose.

I could do it, though. I could see that.

I wouldn’t be sitting here now if I couldn’t do it, would I?

I think that’s what Tony Hawk was trying to tell me all along.” 

My Take

Having recently read Funny Girl (also by Nick Hornby), I was looking forward to another delightful and fun book.  I was not disappointed.  Hornby is a witty and poignant writer who creates great dialogue and has a keen understanding of human nature and relationships.   I look forward to reading more good books by this very talented writer.

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270. The Sandcastle Girls

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Chris Bohjalian

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

299 pages, published July 17, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Sandcastle Girls recounts the love story between Elizabeth Endicott , a young American  woman that  accompanies her father to Armenia in 1915 to deliver food and medical aid to refugees of the Armenian genocide by the Turks and Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and infant daughter.   Elizabeth and Armen’s story is juxtaposed with a present day narrative by  Laura Petrosian, granddaughter  of Elizabeth and Armen and a novelist living in suburban New York. After seeing a newspaper photo of her grandmother promoting an exhibit at a Boston museum, Laura embarks on a journey back through her family’s history that reveals love, loss – and a terrible secret that has been buried for generations.

Quotes 

“But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?”

 

“It was Aldous Huxley who observed, “Every man’s memory is his private literature.”

 

“When it seems you have nothing at all to live for, death is not especially frightening.”

 

“Those who participate in a genocide as well as those who merely look away rarely volunteer much in the way of anecdote or observation. Same with the heroic and the righteous. Usually it’s only the survivors who speak-and often they don’t want to talk much about it either.”

 

“we have on earth exactly the amount of time that has been allotted to us, no more and no less. We really have precious little control.”

 

My Take

Right before reading The Sandcastle Girls, I read Before You Know Kindness, also by Chris Bohjalian (I did not realize the books were by the same author until I was halfway through The Sandcastle Girls).  While both books are well written, I much preferred Before You Know Kindness.  I had a hard time following the narrative of The Sandcastle Girls and, in contrast to Before You Know Kindness, found the characters a bit one-dimensional.  The positive takeaway is that I learned a lot about the horrifying Armenian genocide, a piece of history about which I only know a cursory amount.  As with so many other 20th Century atrocities, it is a depressing reflection on the capability of our fellow man to inflict unspeakable violence on other human beings for the crime of having a different ethnicity and/or religion.

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