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430. The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Jancy Campbell

Author:    Hyeonseo Lee

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir, Foreign

304 pages, published July 2, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Girl with Seven Names is written by Hyeonseo Lee and tells the incredibly story of her escape from North Korea and her efforts to get her mother and brother out twelve years later.

Quotes 

“I hope you remember that if you encounter an obstacle on the road, don’t think of it as an obstacle at all… think of it as a challenge to find a new path on the road less traveled.”

 

“This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything – our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.”

 

“After years in the Chinese workforce, I had developed an emotional attachment to money. My earnings were my hard work and long hours; my savings were comforts deferred.”

 

“Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all.”

 

“Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.”

 

“I had to learn Mandarin. And I had the best teacher – necessity. You can study a language for years at school, but nothing helps you succeed like need, and mine was clear, and urgent.”

 

“Dictatorships may seem strong and unified, but they are always weaker than they appear.”

 

“Among the 27,000 North Koreans in the South, two kinds of life have been left behind: the wretched life of persecution and hunger, and the manageable life that was not so bad. People in the first group adjust rapidly. Their new life, however challenging, could only be better. For the people in the second group, life in the South is far more daunting. It often makes them yearn for the simpler, more ordered existence they left behind, where big decisions are taken for them by the state, and where life is not a fierce competition.”

 

“One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights. To know that your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are.”

 

“One of the tragedies of North Korea is that everyone wears a mask, which they let slip at their peril.”

 

“North Koreans who have never left don’t think critically because they have no point of comparison – with previous governments, different policies, or with other societies in the outside world.”

 

“Not only did I believe that humans were selfish and base, I also knew that plenty of them were actually bad – content to destroy lives for their own gain. I’d seen Korean-Chinese expose North Korean escapees to the police in return for money. I’d known people who’d been trafficked by other humans as if they were livestock. That world was familiar to me. All my life, random acts of kindness had been so rare that they’d stick in my memory, and I’d think: how strange.”

 

“As many discover, freedom – real freedom, in which your life is what you make of it and the choices are your own – can be terrifying.”

 

“North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour. Shamans and fortune-tellers, too, are outlawed, but high cadres of the regime consult them. We’d heard that even Kim Jong-il himself sought their advice.”

 

My Take

The Girl with Seven Names is an informative and inspirational story by Hyeonseo Lee who escaped from North Korea and then got her mother and brother out.  Lee suffered many setbacks and overcame some impossible obstacles, but her perseverance and grit ultimately paid off.  In addition to a compelling personal story, I also learned a lot about the horrific country of North Korea.

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429 . Under the Banner of Heaven

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Jon Krakauer

Genre:   Nonfiction, Theology, Crime, History

399 pages, published July 10, 2003

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer explores the story behind two horrific murders of a young woman and her baby daughter by brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty.  The Lafferty’s were caught up in an offshoot Mormon fundamentalist sect and claimed that they were instructed by God to carry out their gruesome crime.  Additionally, Krakauer examines the Mormon religion in detail, from its origins in the early 1800’s with Joseph Smith, to its settlement in Utah led by Brigham Young to its embrace of polygamy to its modern day incarnation as a mainstream American religion.

Quotes 

“There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane, there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of 911. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremist have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans.”

 

“Common sense is no match for the voice of God.”

 

“But some things are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.”

 

“Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off.”

 

“Neither Emma’s tears nor her rage were enough to make Joseph monogamous, however; nor were the prevailing mores of the day. He kept falling rapturously in love with women not his wife. And because that rapture was so wholly consuming, and felt so good, it struck him as impossible that God might possibly frown on such a thing.”

 

“But perhaps the greatest attraction of Mormonism was the promise that each follower would be granted an extraordinarily intimate relationship with God. Joseph taught and encouraged his adherents to receive personal communiqués straight from the Lord. Divine revelation formed the bedrock of the religion.”

 

“Balanced atop the highest spire of the Salt Lake Temple, gleaming in the Utah sun, a statue of the angel Moroni stands watch over downtown Salt Lake City with his golden trumpet raised. This massive granite edifice is the spiritual and temporal nexus of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which presents itself as the world’s only true religion. Temple Square is to Mormons what the Vatican is to Catholics, or the Kaaba in Mecca is to Muslims. At last count there were more than eleven million Saints the world over, and Mormonism is the fastest-growing faith in the Western Hemisphere. At present in the United States there are more Mormons than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. On the planet as a whole, there are now more Mormons than Jews. Mormonism is considered in some sober academic circles to be well on its way to becoming a major world religion–the first such faith to emerge since Islam.”

 

My Take

I had previously read Into Thin Air and Into the Wild, two terrific page turners also written by the writer Jon Krakauer.  I therefore had high hopes for Under the Banner of Heaven.  While not of the same caliber as Into Thin Air, it was still quite compelling and informative.  I learned a lot about Mormonism (a very weird religion with some very good people who follow it) and how dangerous any type of religious fundamentalism can be.  It certainly got me thinking.

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428. Lab Girl

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Marianne Boeke

Author:  Hope Jahren

Genre:   Nonfiction, Science, Memoir

290 pages, published March 1, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Lab Girl is written by acclaimed scientist and geobiologist Hope Jahren who has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil.  Jahren writes about both her long, difficult journey to become a world renowned scientist and insights from her botanical experiments.

Quotes 

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.”

 

“Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick. If you are not sick, shut up and help.”

 

“Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to

  1. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that

waited.”

 

“A CACTUS DOESN’T LIVE in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet.”

 

“Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted.”

 

“We love each other because we can’t help it. We don’t work at it and we don’t sacrifice for it. It is easy and all the sweeter to me because it is so undeserved. I discover within a second context that when something just won’t work, moving heaven and earth often won’t make it work — and similarly, there are some things that you just can’t screw up. I know that I could live without him: I have my own work, my own mission, and my own money. But I don’t want to. I really don’t want to. We make plans: he will share his strength with me and I will share my imagination with him…”

 

“I have learned that raising a child is essentially one long, slow agony of letting go.”

 

“No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor — to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only once chance to guess what the future years, decades — even centuries — will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge.”

 

“My true potential had more to do with my willingness to struggle than with my past and present circumstances.”

 

“Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times.”       

 

“The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only – a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat – but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It’s inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves.”

 

 

“After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed (Nelumbo nucifera) and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell. And then one day this little plant’s yearning finally burst forth within a laboratory. I wonder where it is right now.”

 

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.”

 

“I’m good at science because I’m not good at listening. I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded. I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman. I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death. I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine. I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous. But I was told all of these things by people who can’t understand the present or see the future any better than I can. Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along. I don’t take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it. When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences: You shouldn’t take this job too seriously. Except for when you should.”

 

“A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. Neither the seed nor the old oak is growing; they are both just waiting. Their waiting differs, however, in that the seed is waiting to flourish while the tree is only waiting to die.”

 

“America says it loves science, but it sure as hell doesn’t want to pay for it.”

 

“Plants are not like us. They are different in critical and fundamental ways. As I catalog the differences between plants and animals, the horizon stretches out before me faster than I can travel and forces me to acknowledge that perhaps I was destined to study plants for decades only in order to more fully appreciate that they are beings we can never truly understand. Only when we begin to grasp this deep otherness can we be sure we are no longer projecting ourselves onto plants. Finally we can begin to recognize what is actually happening.  Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood…”

 

My Take

Lab Girl is an informative, interesting and inspirational memoir by the talented scientist/writer Hope Jahren.  Jahren had to overcome a lot of obstacles and endure some tough times before receiving recognition for her work as a geobiologist, but she would not have chosen any other path.  I especially enjoyed reading about her relationship with the idiosyncratic Bill Hagopian, a true American original, Jahren’s career long scientist sidekick.

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427. The Giver of Stars

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Aileen Schwab, Katy Fasset

Author:   Jojo Moyes

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

400 pages, published October 8, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Set in the Depression, The Giver of Stars is the story of five women who become the Packhorse Librarians, delivering library books to the residents of rural Kentucky and changing lives (their own and others) in the process.  The main character is Alice Wright, a beautiful young British woman who marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her provincial English life.  Alice is befriended by Margery, a rugged, self-sufficient woman who advises Alice who advises Alice that “there is always a way out of a situation” when Alice’s marriage becomes interminable.  So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically.

Quotes 

“There is always a way out of a situation. Might be ugly. Might leave you feeling like the earth had gone and shifted under your feet. But there is always a way around.”

 

“She just wasn’t sure she had yet been to the place she was homesick for.”

 

“That some things are a gift, even if you don’t get to keep them.”

 

“You know the worst thing about a man hitting you?” Margery said finally. “Ain’t the hurt. It’s that in that instant you realize the truth of what it is to be a woman. That it doesn’t matter how smart you are, how much better at arguing, how much better than them period. It’s when you realize they can always shut you up with a fist. Just like that.” She mulled over it for a Monet, then straightened up , and flashed Alice a tight smile. “Course, you know that only happens till you learn to hit back harder.”

 

“There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham. • ANNA SEWELL, Black Beauty”

 

“Time flew. And each ended the night full and happy with the rare glow that comes from knowing your very being has been understood by somebody else. And that there might just be someone out there, who will only ever see the best in you.”

 

“he makes my heart flutter like a clean sheet on a long line.”

 

“And there followed a strange, elongated couple of minutes. The kind in which two people know they have to part, and don’t want to.And while neither can acknowledge it, each believes the other feels it too.”

 

“She had earned every one of her bruises and blisters, had built a new Alice over the frame of one with whom she had never felt entirely comfortable.”

 

My Take

I really enjoyed The Giver of Stars, another great book by Jojo Moyes.  Previous books by Moyes, a talented and entertaining writer, that I have read on my Quest include  After You, One Plus On, The Girl You Left Behind, Silver Bay, Still Me and Paris for One.  A foray into historical fiction, The Giver of Stars is one of Moyes’ best books.  The characters are interesting, well detailed and come to life, especially in the audio version that I listened to, and the plot definitely holds your interest.  Highly recommended.

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426. Long Bright River

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Ashley Christianson

Author:   Liz Moore

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime

482 pages, published January 7, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Long Bright River takes place in Kensington, a rundown Philadelphia neighborhood that has been decimated by the opioid crisis.  Mickey is a single mother and a beat police officer trying to escape her painful childhood by making a better life with her young son.  Her estranged sister Kacey, from whom whe was once inseparable, is a junkie and a prostitute.  When Kacey disappears and young women begin showing up as murder victims, Mickey risks everything to find her sister before it is too late.

Quotes 

“This was the secret I learned that day: none of them want to be saved. They all want to sink backward toward the earth again, to be swallowed by the ground, to keep sleeping. There is hatred on their faces when they are roused from the dead.”

 

“Who on earth can explain, in words alone, the great gutting tenderness of holding your child in your arms? The animal feeling of it—the baby’s soft muzzle, the baby’s new skin (which throws into relief the wear your own has endured), the little hand reaching up to your face, searching for family. The quick small pats, light as moths, that land on your cheek and chest.”

 

“I wouldn’t listen. I wanted everything to stay as it was. I was more afraid of the truth than the lie. The truth would change the circumstances of my life. The lie was static. The lie was peaceful. I was happy with the lie.”

 

“Some people do have trouble with Kensington, but to me the neighborhood itself has become like a relative, slightly problematic but dear in the old-fashioned way that that word is sometimes used, treasured, valuable to me.”

 

“I tried hard to ignore the low noise that thrummed throughout my day, some tolling, cautionary bell. I wouldn’t listen. I wanted everything to stay as it was. I was more afraid of the truth than the lie. The truth would change the circumstances of my life. The lie was static. The lie was peaceful. I was happy with the lie.”

 

My Take

I really loved Long Bright River, a gripping, beautifully written thriller that is so much more than a thriller.  Author Liz Moore takes you deep inside the life of Mickey Fitzpatrick, a flawed but deeply human police officer, who struggles to do the right thing as she is repeatedly forced to deal with difficult situations.  The back stories of Mickey and her sister Kacey are heart breaking but ring very true.  I couldn’t put this book down.  Highly recommended.

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425. The Silent Patient

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Alex Michaelides

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller, Mystery

325 pages, published February 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Silent Patient is a psychological thriller written from the point of view of Theo Faber, a criminal psychotherapist whose latest patient is Alicia Berenson, a famous painter who is in a mental ward after killing her husband Gabriel, a successful fashion photographer.  Since the murder, Alicia has refused to speak.  Her most recent painting, entitled Alcestis, is a self portrait and is based on the Greek myth of a female heroine who is betrayed by her husband who selfishly asks his wife, Alcestis, to die in his place. When Alcestis is returned to him from her death, Alcestis mysteriously remains mute.

Quotes 

“Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist. We need to ask ourselves, is this someone who will be honest with me, listen to criticism, admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible?”

 

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. —SIGMUND FREUD”

 

“The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it. —ALICE MILLER”

 

“We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.”

 

“About fireworks?

About love. About how we often mistake love for fireworks – for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm – and constant. I imagine you do give Kathy love – in the true sense of the word. Whether or not she is capable of giving it back to you is another question.”

 

“At the time I didn’t understand. But that’s how therapy works. A patient delegates his unacceptable feelings to his therapist; and she holds everything he is afraid to feel, and feels it for him. Then, ever so slowly, she feeds his feelings back to him.”

 

“There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other.”

 

“Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness: an act of possession that instantly gives way to nothing. It reminded me that there was a world outside this house: a world of vastness and unimaginable beauty; a world that for now, remained out of my reach. That memory had repeatedly returned to me over the years. It’s as if the misery that surrounded that brief moment of freedom made it burn even brighter: a tiny light surrounded by darkness.”

 

“Love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”

 

“You know, one of the hardest things to admit is that we weren’t loved when we needed it most. It’s a terrible feeling, the pain of not being loved.”

 

“I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health. We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged – we study psychology to heal ourselves. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.”

 

“No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”

 

My Take

The Silent Patient is a taut thriller that delves into the worlds of greek mythology and modern day therapy.  It kept me guessing and there were some unexpected twists at the end.  Recommended.

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424. Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Katy Fassett

Author:    Amaryllis Fox

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir, Foreign

240 pages, published October 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA is the memoir of Amaryllis Fox who writes about her life  as a young woman in the CIA.   Fox was an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded.  Roused by this horrific event, Fox applied to a master’s program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world.  At the tender age of 21, Fox was recruited by the CIA where she went from analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day to help prepare the daily briefing for the president. She then worked on the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training and then deployed as a spy under non-official cover as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Life Undercover is a quick read.  I learned a lot about the CIA training and covert operations.  Fox is a good writer and has some interesting tales to tell about her live undercover and how she got there.

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423. The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Ben Emerson

Author:    Stephen E. Ambrose

Genre:   Nonfiction, World War II, History, Biography

299 pages, published August 14, 2001

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Written by World War II military historian Stephen Ambrose, The Wild Blue tells the story of the courageous young men who flew the massive B-24 bombers over Germany during the last two years of World War II.  These missions were incredibly dangerous as the planes almost always encountered anti-aircraft fire before they dropped their bombs and the casualty rate of the pilots and crew were stratospherically high.  In addition to sections devoted to pilot training and the aircraft, the focus of the book is on George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, who served as a brave B-24 pilot stationed in Italy at the age of 22.  McGovern ultimately flew 35 missions and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Quotes 

 

My Take

I have a great interest in World War II and The Wild Blue filled in a gap in my knowledge of that subject, namely the American pilots stationed in Italy who flew missions into Germany to bomb factories and other strategic targets necessary to winning the war.  Reading about the heroism and courage of these very young men (truly the best of America) gave me an increased appreciation for the silent sacrifice of the World War II generation.  It was also very interesting to read about the back stories of the B-24 bomber, airmen training, life in Italy, the missions and the wartime home front.  An excellent book.

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422. The Bluest Eye

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Marlys Lietz

Author:   Toni Morrison

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

216 pages, published September 6, 2005

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel and tells the story of 11 year old Pecola Breedlove.  Pecola, a poor black child from a dysfunctional family, prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as the blond, blue-eyed children in her town.

Quotes 

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”

 

“We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.”

 

“And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

 

“guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.”

 

“Anger is better.  There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

 

“Jealousy we understood and thought natural… But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.”

 

“She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one’s major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.”

 

“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us–all who knew her–felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used–to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.  And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

 

My Take

I liked, but did not love, The Bluest Eye.  While it is well written and has something to say, I found it hard to relate to the characters and was not very engaged in the story.  Also, it is depressing.

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421. The Dutch House

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Clare Telleen

Author:   Ann Patchett

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

337 pages, published September 24, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Dutch House is a book about a family that purchases an unusual and luxurious estate in the suburbs of Philadelphia in the late 1940’s.  The house proves to be the undoing of the family.  The story is told by the son Danny, as he and his older sister Maeve are exiled from the Dutch house by their stepmother after their father unexpectedly dies.  Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House tells the story of Danny and Maeve as they struggle to rise above their past.

Quotes 

“I see the past as it actually was,” Maeve said. She was looking at the trees.  But we overlay the present onto the past. “We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”

 

“Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?”

 

“And so I made the decision to change. It might seem like change was impossible, given my nature and my age, but I understood exactly what there was to lose. It was chemistry all over again. The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.”

 

“The dinner was a huge production, with kids stashed in the den to eat off card tables like a collection of understudies who dreamed of one day breaking into the dining room.”

 

“Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink.”

 

“Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.”

 

“The biggest lie in business is that it takes money to make money, remember that. You gotta be smart, have a plan, pay attention to what’s going on around you. None of that costs a dime.”

 

“We were all so young, you know. We were still our best selves.”

 

“That night in my sister’s bed I stared at the ceiling and felt the true loss of our father. Not his money or his house, but the man I sat next to in the car. He had protected me from the world so completely that I had no idea what the world was capable of. I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes.”

 

“Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we has lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost has been taken from us by the person who still lived inside…”

 

“There would never been an end to all the things I wished I’d asked my father.”

 

“Celeste and I had made a few halfhearted attempts to get the kids to church when they were young, and then we gave up and left them in bed. In the city of constant stimulation, we had failed to give them the opportunity to develop strong inner lives for those occasions when they would find themselves sitting through the second act of The Nutcracker.”

 

“You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself.”

 

“Maeve, speak up. Don’t expect that anyone will do you the favor of listening if you don’t trouble yourself to use your voice.”

 

My Take

I listened to the audio version of The Dutch House and really enjoyed the narration by Tom Hanks.  I have read several books by Ann Patchett (Commonwealth and State of Wonder) and have a lot of respect for her as a writer.  The Dutch House tells a compelling story about a brother and sister and how they cope with some really bad curve balls thrown at them by life.

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