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334. Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Arthur C. Brooks

Genre:  Non Fiction, Politics, Cultural

256 pages, published March 12, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Love Your Enemies, author, economist and former president of free market think tank The American Enterprise Institute, diagnoses a problem we all familiar with, namely the polarization of our country into “us versus them.”  His solution is bring Americans back together around principles of respect, kindness, and dignity.  Brooks advocates adopting a culture of warm-heartedness toward our political foes coupled with a vigorous, but respectful, competition of ideas.

Quotes 

 

My Take

I, along with many other Americans, am sick of the partisan rancor and divisiveness that has engulfed our country for the past 20 years.  I have a personal rule never to post anything political on Facebook as there is nothing to be gained by doing so.  I’m not going to convince anyone to abandon their position and will most likely only alienate them from me.  In fact, I adopted a rule that family gatherings which I host are “politics free zones.” This has made for a much more harmonious and loving co-existence.  I’ve also taught my children (now young adults) that ad hominen attacks are for the weak minded and should be avoided like the plague and that they should strive to disagree without being disagreeable.  As such, the premise of Love Your Enemies really appealed to me.   Brooks offers some interesting and practical ideas to improve our civil discourse.  Our country would benefit if more people read his book and adopted its principals.

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333. Asymmetry

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:    Frank and Lisanne

Author:   Lisa Halliday

Genre:  Fiction

277 pages, published February 6, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Told in three distinct sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations:  inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, Folly tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer.   The second section, Madness is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. The final section is an NPR interview with Ezra Blazer.

Quotes 

“I once heard a filmmaker say that in order to be truly creative a person must be in possession of four things: irony, melancholy, a sense of competition, and boredom.”

 

“But then even someone who imagines for a living is forever bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes—she can even hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view—but there’s no getting around the fact that she’s always the one holding the mirror. And just because you can’t see yourself in a reflection doesn’t mean no one can.”

“Some of us wage wars. Others write books. The most delusional ones write books. We have very little choice other than to spend our waking hours trying to sort out and make sense of the perennial pandemonium. To forge patterns and proportions where they don’t actually exist. And it is this same urge, this mania to tame and possess—this necessary folly—that sparks and sustains love.”

 

“for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.”

 

“We ride too high on deceptive notions of power and security and control and then when it all comes crashing down on us the low is made deeper by the high. By its precipitousness, but also by the humiliation you feel for having failed to see the plummet coming. . . . Lulled by years of relative peace and prosperity we settle into micromanaging our lives with our fancy technologies and custom interest rates and eleven different kinds of milk, and this leads to a certain inwardness, an unchecked narrowing of perspective, the vague expectation that even if we don’t earn them and nurture them the truly essential amenities will endure forever as they are. We trust that someone else is looking after the civil liberties shop, so we don’t have to. Our military might is unmatched and in any case the madness is at least an ocean away. And then all of a sudden we look up from ordering paper towels online to find ourselves delivered right into the madness. And we wonder: How did this happen? What was I doing when this was in the works? Is it too late to think about it now? . . .”

 

“This is because my mind is always turning over this question of how I’m going to feel later, based on what I’m doing now. Later in the day. Later in the week. Later in a life starting to look like a series of activities designed to make me feel good later, but not now. Knowing I’ll feel good later makes me feel good enough now.”

 

“the more time you spend writing things down the less time you spend doing things you don’t want to forget.”

 

“As soon as you are born the sand starts falling and only by demanding to be remembered do you stand a chance of it being upturned again and again.”

 

“The older you get,” he explained, “the more you have to do before you can go to bed. I’m up to a hundred things.”

 

“the music made her more desperate than ever to do, invent, create—to channel all her own energies into the making of something beautiful and unique to herself—but it also made her want to love. To submit to the loving of someone so deeply and well that there could be no question as to whether she were squandering her life, for what could be nobler than dedicating it to the happiness and fulfillment of another?” 

My Take

I wasn’t sure what to make of Asymmetry.  While she is a gifted writer, Halliday has a unique style that takes a little getting used to.  Nevertheless, I still captivated by parts of Asymmetry, especially the first part of the book which chronicles the relationship between a talented, but somewhat aimless young woman and a much older and much more accomplished man.  The second part, which focuses on an Iraqi American detained at Heathrow Airport was much less interesting.  While Asymmetry was not one of my favorites of the year, I would read more from this author.

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332. Calypso

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   David Sedaris

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Humor

272 pages, published May 29, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Calypso is a collection of short stories by the humorous essayist David Sedaris.  As with many of his previous books (Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls) Sedaris writes about his family and also his boyfriend Hugh.   Much of the book focuses on Sedaris’ purchase of a beach house on the Carolina coast, named “the Sea Section,” where he envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. It doesn’t quite work out that way.

Quotes 

“After I die, and you read something bad about yourself in my diary, do yourself a favor and keep reading,” I often say to Hugh. “I promise that on the next page you’ll find something flattering. Or maybe the page after that.”

 

“I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso. Worse is that he loves them as much as he loves you, which is to say not at all, really. The entire relationship has been your own invention.”

 

“In France the most often used word is “connerie,” which means “bullshit,” and in America it’s hands-down “awesome,” which has replaced “incredible,” “good,” and even “just OK.” Pretty much everything that isn’t terrible is awesome in America now.”

 

“Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a “good-bye” or “thank-you,” cashiers are apt to say, “Have a blessed day.” This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne. “Get it off me!” I always want to scream. “Quick, before I start wearing ties with short-sleeved shirts!”

 

“Why do you think she did it?” I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight. For that’s all any of us were thinking, had been thinking, since we got the news. Mustn’t Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she’d taken wouldn’t be strong enough and that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposefully leave us—us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost faith in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?”

 

“Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.”

 

“there are only two kinds of flights: ones in which you die and ones in which you do not.”

 

“It is what it is,” which is ubiquitous now and means absolutely nothing, as far as we can see. “Isn’t that the state motto of South Dakota?” I said the second or third time I heard it.”

 

“Everyone in America is extremely concerned with hydration. Go more than five minutes without drinking, and you’ll surely be discovered behind a potted plant, dried out like some escaped hermit crab. When I was young no one would think to bring a bottle of water into a classroom. I don’t think they even sold bottled water. We survived shopping trips without it, and funerals. Now, though, you see people with those barrels that Saint Bernards carry around their necks in cartoons, lugging them into the mall and the movie theater, then hogging the fountains in order to refill them. Is that really necessary?”

 

“When visitors leave, I feel like an actor watching the audience file out of the theater, and it was no different with my sisters. The show over, Hugh and I returned to lesser versions of ourselves. We’re not a horrible couple, but we have our share of fights, the type that can start with a misplaced sock and suddenly be about everything. “I haven’t liked you since 2002,” he hissed during a recent argument over which airport security line was moving the fastest.”

 

“You’re not supposed to talk about your good deeds, I know. It effectively negates them and in the process makes people hate you.”

 

“Another word I’ve added to “the list” is “conversation,” as in “We need to have a national conversation about_________.” This is employed by the left to mean “You need to listen to me use the word ‘diversity’ for an hour.” The right employs obnoxious terms as well—“libtard,” “snowflake,” etc.—but because they can be applied to me personally it seems babyish to ban them. I’ve outlawed “meds,” “bestie,” “bucket list,” “dysfunctional,” “expat,” “cab-sav,” and the verb “do” when used in a restaurant, as in “I’ll do the snails on cinnamon toast.” “Ugh,” Ronnie agrees. “Do!—that’s the worst.” “My new thing,” I told her, “is to look at the menu and say, ‘I’d like to purchase the veal chop.’” A lot of our outlawed terms were invented by black people and then picked up by whites, who held on to them way past their expiration date. “My bad,” for example, and “I’ve got your back” and “You go, girlfriend.” They’re the verbal equivalents of sitcom grandmothers high-fiving one another, and on hearing them, I wince and feel ashamed of my entire race.” 

My Take

:   I always get more than a few chuckles when reading a David Sedaris book and Calypso was no exception.  It isn’t his best effort, but also not his worst.  More like average Sedaris.  I especially enjoyed his essays on buying “The Sea Section,” a beach house in North Carolina since my husband and I are contemplating doing the same thing.

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331. Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Fumio Sasaki

Genre:  Non Fiction, Self Improvement

288 pages, published April 11, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Goodbye, Things, author Fumio Sasaki changed his life by reducing his possessions to the bare minimum.  He describes how right away he repeated remarkable benefits.  Without all his “stuff,” Sasaki finally felt true freedom, peace of mind, and appreciation for the present moment.

Quotes 

“Want to know how to make yourself instantly unhappy? Compare yourself with someone else.”

 

“Why do we own so many things when we don’t need them? What is their purpose? I think the answer is quite clear: We’re desperate to convey our own worth, our own value to others. We use objects to tell people just how valuable we are.”

 

“You can avoid buying more things simply by first asking yourself if it’s something that you actually need.”

 

“If it’s not a “hell, yes!” it’s a “no.”

 

“It’s often said that cleaning your house is like polishing yourself. I think that this is a golden rule. It isn’t just dust and dirt that accumulate in our homes. It’s also the shadows of our past selves that let that dust and dirt continue to build. Cleaning the grime is certainly unpleasant, but more than that, it’s the need to face our own past deeds that makes it so tough. But when we have fewer material possessions and cleaning becomes an easy habit, the shadows we now face will be of our daily accomplishments.”

 

“The glory of acquisition starts to dim with use, eventually changing to boredom as the item no longer elicits even a bit of excitement. This is the pattern of everything in our lives. No matter how much we wish for something, over time it becomes a normal part of our lives, and then a tired old item that bores us, even though we did actually get our wish. And we end up being unhappy.”

 

“When given too many choices, people tend to worry that there’s something better out there than what they decided on.”

 

“If you can’t make up your mind about an item, I suggest you go right ahead and discard it.”

 

“We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves. —FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD”

 

“Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have. —RABBI HYMAN SCHACHTEL”

 

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. —STEVE JOBS”

 

“When you’re aware of all the things that you own, you’re not only certain of where they are, you’re also sure about whether you have them or not.”

 

“Ask yourself which of your items would truly be necessary if you were to start with zero belongings. What if everything you owned was stolen? What if you had to move next week? Which items would you take with you? There are probably a lot of things we have sitting around in our homes for no particular reason. Think about starting from scratch, and it will become clear which items are essential.”

 

“a minimalist is a person who knows what is truly essential for him- or herself,”

 

“My feeling is that minimalists are people who know what’s truly necessary for them versus what they may want for the sake of appearance, and they’re not afraid to cut down on everything in the second category.”

 

“The qualities I look for in the things I buy are (1) the item has a minimalist type of shape, and is easy to clean; (2) its color isn’t too loud; (3) I’ll be able to use it for a long time; (4) it has a simple structure; (5) it’s lightweight and compact; and (6) it has multiple uses.”

 

“We can accumulate as much as we like, but without gratitude we’ll only end up being bored with everything we’ve obtained. Conversely, we can achieve true contentment with few possessions, just so long as we treat them with gratitude.”

 

“I’ve heard it said that the secret to a happy marriage is to simply talk a lot with your partner. One study showed that happily married couples talked with each other five more hours per week than couples that aren’t happy. If people are busy taking care of their possessions, quarreling over them, spending time in separate rooms, or watching a lot of TV, they’re naturally going to have less time for conversations.” 

My Take

In  Goodbye, Things, author Fumio Sasaki makes a strong case for the value of minimalism and provides some practical tips for downsizing your belongings to the things that you really use and value.  Much like Outer Order, Inner Calm by my personal guru Gretchin Rubin, Goodbye, Things has inspired me to continue my decluttering efforts and to be even more ruthless with my discards.

 

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330. The Library Book

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Susan Orlean

Genre:  Non Fiction, History

336 pages, published October 16, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In 1986, the Los Angeles Public Library experienced a devastating fire.  It reached 2000 degrees, burned for more than seven hours, destroyed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more.  A thorough investigation failed to solve the mystery of whether someone purposefully set fire to the library.   Author Susan Orlean set out to answer that question and also incorporates her love of books and reading, as well as a history of the Los Angeles Library, into this book.

Quotes 

“The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.”

 

“In Senegal, the polite expression for saying someone died is to say his or her library has burned. When I first heard the phrase, I didn’t understand it, but over time I came to realize it was perfect. Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.”

 

“Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve cataloged and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived.”

 

“Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”

 

“Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know. All the wonders and failures, all the champions and villains, all the legends and ideas and revelations of a culture last forever in its books.”

 

“It wasn’t that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured, collected here, and in all libraries — and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up–not just stopped but saved.”

 

“books are the last things that any human being can afford to do without.”

 

“A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive in a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer’s mind to the moment it sprang from the printing press — a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, …”

 

“I have come to believe that books have souls—why else would I be so reluctant to throw one away?”

 

“People think that libraries are quiet, but they really aren’t. They rumble with voices and footsteps and a whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.”

 

“There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does—I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.”

 

“The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most peculiar book was written with that kind of courage — the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past, and to what is still to come.”

 

“librarians should “read as a drunkard drinks or as a bird sings or a cat sleeps or a dog responds to an invitation to go walking, not from conscience or training, but because they’d rather do it than anything else in the world.”

 

“Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”

 

“The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.”

 

“Destroying a library is a kind of terrorism. People think of libraries as the safest and most open places in society. Setting them on fire is like announcing that nothing, and nowhere, is safe.”

 

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten—that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. If you gaze into that bleakness even for a moment, the sum of life becomes null and void, because if nothing lasts, nothing matters. It means that everything we experience unfolds without a pattern, and life is just a wild, random, baffling occurrence, a scattering of notes with no melody. But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected in subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose—a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.” 

My Take

As a dedicated and appreciative patron of my local library (the remarkable Boulder Public Library), I am already a big library fan and was interested to read this book, a love letter by author Susan Orlean to books and libraries.  Her beautiful prose and well researched passages made me appreciate libraries even more.   If she had focused on that, I think the book would have been better.  It gets off track when she reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the prime suspect in setting fire to the Los Angeles Public Library.  Despite this, The Library Book is still an interesting read and I recommend it.

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329. The Great Alone

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:   Kristin Hannah

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

435 pages, published February 6, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Great Alone takes place in 1974 Alaska when 13 year old Leni Albright moves there with her father, Ernt, an impulsive and unstable former Vietnam POW, and her mother Cora, whose alternating deferral to and taunting of Ernt causes even more trouble for this already troubled family.  The Albrights move to Alaska for yet another “fresh start” and attempt to make a go of it with little in the way of resources or knowledge necessary to survive.  When Ernt’s mental state deteriorates and her family begins to fracture, Leni must make difficult decisions in order to survive.

Quotes 

“Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.”

 

“All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.”

 

“You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

 

“Everyone up here had two stories : the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you. No one cared if you had an old car on your deck, let alone a rusted fridge. Any Life that could be imagined could be lived up here.”

 

“A girl was like a kite; without her mother’s strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.”

 

“How will I stop loving him, Mama? Will I …. forget ?

Mama sighed.

Ah. That. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn’t. If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe , a faded version, but he’s part of you now. And you are part of him.”

 

“You have a child, so you know. You are my heart, baby girl. You are everything I did right. And I want you to know I would do it all again, every wonderful terrible second of it. I would do years and years of it again for one minute with you.”

 

“All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.”

 

“They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.”

 

“Leni saw suddenly how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst?”

 

“Did adults just look at the world and see what they wanted to see, think what they wanted to think? Did evidence and experience mean nothing?”

 

“It’s like his back is broken, Mama had said, and you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.” 

My Take

As a big fan of Kristin Hannah, having previously really enjoyed Winter Garden and The Nightingale, I was looking forward to reading The Great Alone.  I liked it, but not nearly as much as her previous books which were more gripping page turners.  The characters and the plot in The Great Alone were not quite as compelling as Hannah’s previous efforts.  Still a good, just not great, read.

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328. Outer Order, Inner Calm: declutter & organize to make more room for happiness

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Gretchen Rubin

Genre:  Non Fiction, Self Improvement

208 pages, published March 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Outer Order, Inner Calm is Gretchen Rubin’s take on the idea that maintaining order in your surroundings is an important contributor to your overall happiness.  Rubin argues that getting control of the stuff of life makes us feel more in control of our lives generally.  By getting rid of things we don’t use, don’t need, or don’t love, as well as things that don’t work, don’t fit, or don’t suit, we free our mind (and our shelves) for what we truly value.  The book is organized around helpful ideas and suggestions for achieving order and organization.

Quotes 

“Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started.”

 

“What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while.”

 

“Outer order isn’t a matter of having less or having more; it’s a matter of wanting what we have.”

 

“Getting in control of our possessions makes us feel more in control of our fates. If this is an illusion, it’s a helpful illusion–and it’s a more pleasant way to live.”

 

“When deciding what to buy, remember that some things are easy to buy—but then we have to use them. If they’re not used, they don’t enhance our lives; they just contribute to guilt and clutter.”

 

“One of the biggest wastes of time is doing something well that didn’t need to be done at all.”

 

“Rather than striving for a particular level of possessions—minimal or otherwise—it’s helpful to think about getting rid of what’s superfluous. Even people who prefer to own many possessions enjoy their surroundings more when they’ve purged everything that’s not needed, used, or loved.”

 

“Actually spending ten minutes clearing off one shelf is better than fantasizing about spending a weekend cleaning out the basement.”

 

“It’s easier to keep up than to catch up…”

 

“Just because we’re busy doesn’t mean we’re being productive. Working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination.”

 

“Having less often leads us to use our things more often and with more enjoyment, because we’re not fighting our way through a welter of unwanted stuff.” 

My Take

As my friends well know, I am a huge fan of Gretchen Rubin (Better than Before, The Four Tendencies, The Happiness Project) and consider her as my personal happiness guru.  I have internalized her many of her numerous pearls of wisdom on happiness and truly believe that I am leading a happier life as a result.  Perhaps because I am such a Rubin devotee, I found that most of the ideas presented in Outer Order, Inner Calm are ones that I have seen before.  However, it was still useful to have them collected together in one place and I think Rubin is spot on when advocates for getting rid of the clutter and organizing your physical surroundings.  I AM much happier when I live this way and I love the little jolt of happiness that I get every time I open a drawer or closet that I have recently cleaned out.

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327. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Heather Ringoen

Author:   Frederik Backman

Genre:  Fiction

372 pages, published June 16, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The protagonist of My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is Elsa, a quirky seven year old who is picked on at school and who is learning to adapt to her parents’ divorce.  Elsa’s closest friend and confidante is her 77 year old grandmother, a doctor who was always away traveling to war zones when raising her own daughter (Elsa’s mother) and who has very strong opinions matched by unpredictable actions.  Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother’s stories, in the Land of Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.  When Elsa’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa’s greatest adventure and begins and she learns to come to terms with her own life.

Quotes 

“People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.”

 

“We want to be loved,’ ” quotes Britt-Marie. “ ‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.’ ”

 

“Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details.”

 

“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”

 

“Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.”

 

“I want someone to remember I existed. I want someone to know I was here.”

 

“Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.”

 

“if you hate the one who hates, you could risk becoming like the one you hate.”

 

“People have to tell their stories, Elsa. Or they suffocate.”

 

“It’s strange how close love and fear live to each other.”

 

“Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups were generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy – space exploration, the UN, vaccines and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the ‘not-a-shit’ side as one can.” 

My Take

As a big fan of Frederik Backman (A Man Called Ove, Beartown, Britt-Marie Was Here), I was looking forward to reading My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry.  While a good read, I would classify it as lesser Backman, in the same vein as Britt-Marie Was Here; interestingly the Britt-Marie character has a relatively large role in Grandmother).  There are interesting characters and ideas, but on the whole it is not a compelling book.

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326. Come With Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Helen Schulman

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction

320 pages, published November 27, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Come With Me is set in modern day Palo Alto.  Amy Reed, a part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up run by Donny, her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old son, and her husband Dan, an unemployed print journalist, are struggling to hold onto their increasingly unaffordable lifestyle, their marriage and their family.  Donny, a genius and a junior at Stanford in his spare time has  developed an algorithm that may allow people access to their “multiverses”—all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously—to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives.   When Amy agrees to be Donny’s guinea pig, she gets a first hand view of what her life would look like if she had made different choices.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Come With Me is an okay read.  I liked parts of it, especially the futuristic passages,  but other parts felt a bit self-indulgent, very much like the main characters Amy and Dan.  The fundamental problem for me was that I did not like and had little interest in this couple, so whether their marriage would survive was ultimately a question I had no interest in finding the answer to.

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325. Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Kay Lynn Hartman

Author:   Dani Shapiro

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

272 pages, published January 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Inheritance, serial memoirist Dani Shapiro writes about her discovery (through an over the counter genetic test that she took on a lark) that the man she thought was her biological father was not.  Shapiro takes the reader with her as she pieces together the hidden story of her own life and discovers new insights about her past and present identity.

Quotes 

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

 

“It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself.”

 

“There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”

 

“Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?”

 

“The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.”

 

“What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens – that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube – formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine – at least not in the physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village – and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life.”

 

“After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: “You can say, “This is impossible, terrible.’ Or you can say, ‘This is beautiful, wonderful.’ You can imagine that you’re in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.” 

My Take

Inheritance is a book that really grew on me and that is in no small part due to the quality of the writing.  When I first started it, I found the author Dani Shapiro to be a bit overwrought in response to discovering that her biological father was a sperm donor.  However, as I got deeper into the book, I was able to relate more to her identity crisis.  I was also able to her speak at a Boulder Book Store author event and found her to be eloquent, empathetic and very moving.

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