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217. Code Name Verity

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Nancy Sissom

Author:  Elizabeth Wein

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II

353 pages, published May 15, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

On October 11th, 1943, a British plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. It is piloted by English Maddie (code name Kitty Hawk) after her best friend and spy Scotswoman Julie (code name Kitty Hawk), parachuted out.  Verity is arrested by the Gestapo and she’s given the choice of revealing her mission or face a painful execution. Through her confession, Julie tells the story of her friendship with Maddie and how she came to enter France as a spy for Britain.

 

Quotes 

“I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can’t believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant.

But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.”

 

“KISS ME, HARDY! Kiss me, QUICK!”

 

“It’s awful, telling it like this, isn’t it? As though we didn’t know the ending. As though it could have another ending. It’s like watching Romeo drink poison. Every time you see it you get fooled into thinking his girlfriend might wake up and stop him. Every single time you see it you want to shout, ‘You stupid ass, just wait a minute,’ and she’ll open her eyes! ‘Oi, you, you twat, open your eyes, wake up! Don’t die this time!’ But they always do.”

 

“A whore, we’ve established that, filthy, it goes without saying, but whatever else the hell I am, I AM NOT ENGLISH.”

 

“People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realize. You see someone in school everyday, or at work, in the canteen, and you share a cigarette of a coffee with them, and you talk about the weather or last night’s air raid. But you don’t talk so much about what was the nastiest thing you ever said to your mother, or how you pretended to be David Balfour, the hero of Kidnapped, for the whole of the year when you were 13, or what you imagine yourself doing with the pilot who looks like Leslie Howard if you were alone in his bunk after a dance.”

 

“What’s strange about the whole thing is that although it’s riddled with nonsense, altogether it’s true – Julie’s told our story, mine and hers, our friendship, so truthfully. It is us. We even had the same dream at the same time. How could we have had the same dream at the same time? How can something so wonderful and mysterious be true? But it is.

 

And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie’s written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I’m reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She’s right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can’t be landed, stuck in the climb – alive, alive, ALIVE.”

 

“Mary Queen of Scots had a little dog, a Skye terrier, that was devoted to her. Moments after Mary was beheaded, the people who were watching saw her skirts moving about and they thought her headless body was trying to get itself to its feet. But the movement turned out to be her dog, which she had carried to the block with her, hidden in her skirts. Mary Stuart is supposed to have faced her execution with grace and courage (she wore a scarlet chemise to suggest she was being martyred), but I don’t think she could have been so brave if she had not secretly been holding tight to her Skye terrier, feeling his warm, silky fur against her trembling skin.”

 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the audio version of Code Name Verity (which had terrific voice work) and felt transported to World War II era England and France.  While the story is crackling good, what really appealed to me was wonderful, fully drawn characters of Julie and Maddie and the development of their signature friendship.  I’ve read a lot of books in the past two years that take place during World War II, but this is one of the best (see also The Nightingale).

 

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216. State of Wonder

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Julie Horowitz

Author:  Ann Patchett

Genre:  Fiction, Foreign

353 pages, published June 7, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary

State of Wonder chronicles the journey of Dr. Marina Singh into the insect-infested Amazon jungle in attempt to find out what happened to her longtime professional colleague Anders Eckman.  Anders, who was sent to Brazil by his pharmaceutical company employer to track down Dr. Annick Swenson, is presumed dead after contracting a mysterious illness.  Marina must find Dr. Swenson, who was her professor in medical school, and report on the status Dr. Swenson’s research on a drug that will allow women to maintain lifelong fertility.  Along the way, Marina will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice.

 

Quotes 

“Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”

 

“Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don’t know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it’s not. It’s a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.”

 

“Everyone knows everything eventually.”

 

“No one tells the truth to people they don’t actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.”

 

“In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.”

 

“There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.”

 

“It is said the siesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.”

 

“The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived. That is how one respects indigenous people. If you pay any attention at all you’ll realize that you could never convert them to your way of life anyway. They are an intractable race. Any progress you advance to them will be undone before your back is turned. You might as well come down here to unbend the river. The point, then, is to observe the life they themselves have put in place and learn from it.”

 

“Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one’s partner on both the left and the right.”

“Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand. If you don’t have the starch to stand up in class and admit what you don’t understand, then I don’t have the time to explain it to you. If you don’t have a policy against nonsense you can wind up with a dozen timid little rabbits lined up in the hall outside your office, all waiting to whisper the same imbecilic question in your ear.”

 

My Take

This was my second time reading State of Wonder (by the wonderful novelist Ann Patchett), although this time I listened to the audio version.  With respect to this book, I must say that Gretchen Rubin’s axiom “the best reading is re-reading,” certainly is true.  The voice work by Hope Davis (an actress that I have always liked) brings State of Wonder to life in a way that I didn’t get with the book.  This time around, I particularly enjoyed the character of Dr. Annick Swenson, an extremely self-confident, domineering woman who charts her own path with little regard to the impact on others. She has most of the best lines of the book and it was a treat to once again visit the Amazon jungle in my second reading of State of Wonder.

 

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205. Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Author:   Scott Adams

Recommended by:   Scot Reader

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Psychology, Humor

304 pages, published November 16, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

From author Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, Win Bigly is an analysis of the strategies Donald Trump used to persuade voters to elect the most unconventional candidate in the history of the presidency.  Scott Adams, a trained hypnotist and a lifelong student of persuasion, was one of the earliest public figures to predict Trump’s win, doing so a week after Nate Silver put Trump’s odds at 2 percent in his FiveThirtyEight.com blog. The mainstream media regarded Trump as a novelty and a sideshow. But Adams recognized that Trump was a master persuader.  The book isn’t about whether Trump is good or bad.  Rather, Win Bigly explores the “how” of persuasion.

 

Quotes 

“We humans like to think we are creatures of reason. We aren’t. The reality is that we make our decisions first and rationalize them later….Your illusion of being a rational person is supported by the fact that sometimes you do act rationally.”

 

“On August 13, 2015, I predicted in my blog that Donald Trump had a 98 percent chance of winning the presidency based on his persuasion skills. A week earlier, the most respected political forecaster in the United States—Nate Silver—had put Trump’s odds of winning the Republican nomination at 2 percent in his FiveThirtyEight.com blog.”

 

“Trump’s unexpected win created a persuasion bomb that no one knew how to defuse. The anti-Trumpers were locked into their Hitler movie, and confirmation bias would keep them there. It was a terrible situation for a country. And it was an enormous challenge for Trump, the Master Persuader.”

 

“A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.”

 

“When you identify as part of a group, your opinions tend to be biased toward the group consensus.”

 

“People are more influenced by the direction of things than the current state.”

 

“Humans are hardwired to reciprocate favors. If you want someone’s cooperation in the future, do something for that person today.”

 

“The things that you think about the most will irrationally rise in importance in your mind.”

 

“Persuasion is effective even when the subject recognizes the technique. Everyone knows that stores list prices at $9.99 because $10.00 sounds like too much. It still works.”

 

“Unfortunately, most people believe that analogies are one of the best ways to persuade. That fact goes far in explaining why it seems that every debate on the Internet ends with a Hitler analogy. The phenomenon is so common it has its own name: Godwin’s law. But I doubt many people have changed an opinion just because a stranger on the Internet compared them to Hitler. A direct attack usually just hardens people into their current opinions.”

 

“I have no reason to believe humans evolved with the capability to understand their reality. That capability was not important to survival. When it comes to evolution, any illusion that keeps us alive long enough to procreate is good enough.”

 

“The grand illusion of life is that our minds have the capacity to understand reality. But human minds didn’t evolve to understand reality. We didn’t need that capability. A clear view of reality wasn’t necessary for our survival. Evolution cares only that you survive long enough to procreate. And that’s a low bar. The result is that each of us is, in effect, living in our own little movie that our brain has cooked up for us to explain our experiences”

 

“The common worldview, shared by most humans, is that there is one objective reality, and we humans can understand that reality through a rigorous application of facts and reason. This view of the world imagines that some people have already achieved a fact-based type of enlightenment that is compatible with science and logic, and they are trying to help the rest of us see the world the “right” way. As far as I can tell, most people share that interpretation of the world. The only wrinkle with that worldview is that we all think we are the enlightened ones. And we assume the people who disagree with us just need better facts, and perhaps better brains, in order to agree with us. That filter on life makes most of us happy—”

 

“The worst thing your brain could do is reinterpret your reality into a whole new movie with each new bit of information. That would be exhausting and without benefit. Instead, your brain takes the path of least resistance and instantly interprets your observations to fit your existing worldview. It’s just easier.”

 

“PERSUASION TIP 9 Display confidence (either real or faked) to improve your persuasiveness. You have to believe yourself, or at least appear as if you do, in order to get anyone else to believe.”

 

My Take

If you want to understand how Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, I suggest that you read Win, Bigly.  Scott Adams presciently predicted Trump’s win and does a masterful job explaining in this book how it happened.  He does so in an easy to read, informative, witty and humorous style.  You also learn a lot about the subject of persuasion.  A very quick, easy and fun read.

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199. The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mel Robbins

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self Improvement, Psychology

267 pages, published February 28, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In The 5 Second Rule, author Mel Robbins recounts how she was trapped in a downward spiral so much so that she had trouble even getting out of bed in the morning.  Her entire world shifted when she discovered the 5 second rule.  The secret isn’t knowing what to do—it’s knowing how to make yourself do it.  Basically, when you first think about doing something you should (or shouldn’t), you count backwards from 5 (5-4-3-2-1) and then immediately take action.  For example, when you alarm goes off in the morning, you cant backwards from 5 and then immediately take action to get out of bed.  If you find yourself about to reach for a cookie, you count backwards from 5 and then stop yourself from taking it.

Robbins explains how the power of a “push moment” (i.e. counting backwards from 5) can help us do the things we want to do and stay away from the things we want to avoid.   By following the rule, Robbins believes that you will:  become more confident, break the habits of procrastination and self-doubt, beat fear and uncertainty, stop worrying and feel happier and share your ideas with courage.

 

Quotes 

“Hesitation is the kiss of death. You might hesitate for a just nanosecond, but that’s all it takes. That one small hesitation triggers a mental system that’s designed to stop you. And it happens in less than—you guessed it—five seconds.”

 

“The 5 Second Rule:  The moment you have an instinct to act on a goal you must 5-4-3-2-1 and physically move or your brain will stop you.”

 

“Anytime there’s something you know you should do, but you feel uncertain, afraid, or overwhelmed…just take control by counting backwards 5- 4- 3- 2- 1. That’ll quiet your mind. Then, move when you get to “1.”

 

“You change your life one five-second decision at a time.”

 

“We are all so afraid of uncertainty that we want a guarantee before we even try. We want evidence that if we take a risk we will “get the girl” Its a numbers game. To play any game, you have to start. To win, you need to keep going. If you want to make your dreams come true, get ready for the long game.

Life is not a one and done sort of deal. You’ve got to work for what you want.

Picasso created nearly 100 masterpieces in his lifetime. But what most people don’t know is that he created a total of more then 50,000 works of art. .. Thats two pieces of art a day. Success is a numbers game. You are not going to win if you keep telling yourself to wait. The more often that you choose courage, the more likely you’ll succeed.”

 

“Your feelings don’t matter. The only thing that matters is what you DO.”

 

“When it comes to goals, dreams, and changing your life, your inner wisdom is a genius. Your goal-related impulses, urges, and instincts are there to guide you. You need to learn to bet on them.”

“This is where the #5SecondRule comes into play—you don’t have to want to do it, you just have to push yourself to do it.”

 

“locus of control.” The more that you believe that you are in control of your life, your actions and your future, the happier and more successful you’ll be.”

 

“I owe my morning routine to Duke University professor Dan Ariely. According to Ariely, the first two to three hours of the day are the best hours for your brain, once you fully wake up. So, if you pop out of bed at 6 a.m., your peak thinking and productivity window is 6:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. And so on.”

 

“I was the problem and in five seconds, I could push myself and become the solution.”

 

“There’s one thing that is guaranteed to increase your feelings of control over your life: a bias toward action.”

 

“If you have one of those impulses that are pulling you, if you don’t marry it with an action within 5 seconds, you pull the emergency break and kill the idea.”

 

“That’s an instinct reminding you of the goal. That’s your inner wisdom, and it’s important to pay attention to it, no matter how small or silly that instinct may seem.”

 

“Life is gritty and hard and then suddenly it is brilliant and amazing.”

 

“pushing yourself to take simple actions creates a chain reaction in your confidence and your productivity.”

 

“You can’t control how you feel. But you can always choose how you act.”

 

“I have a hard time finding the balance between not beating myself up when it doesn’t happen as fast as I’d like it to, and not wasting time while I wait for it to happen.”

 

“Start before you’re ready.  Don’t prepare, begin.”       

 

“Passion is not a thing, it’s a state of mind.”

 

My Take

I was skeptical when I first started reading this book.  How could five seconds be such a life changer?  However, author Mel Robbins provides some convincing examples of the rule at work.   Basically, the rule is a spur to action.  How much of our lives are just lazed away?  After finishing the book, I tried out the rule and it does work.  The only problem for me is remembering to use it in the first place.  When I do, I see results.

 

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197. Days Without End

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Sebastian Barry

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Western

259 pages, published January 24, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary

Days Without End is a western set in the middle of the 1800’s, during the American Indian and Civil Wars.  It is narrated by seventeen year old Thomas McNulty who fled Ireland’s Great Famine for a better life in America.  Thomas, along with his best friend and lover John Cole, joins the U.S. Army in the 1850s.  The men witness repeated cruelties, but rely on each other for love and create a family with a young Sioux girl.

 

Quotes 

“Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.”

 

“There’s no soldier don’t have a queer little spot in his wretched heart for his enemy, that’s just a fact. Maybe only on account of him being alive in the same place and the same time and we are all just customers of the same three-card trickster.”

 

“A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”

 

“Things that give you heart are rare enough, better note them in your head when you find them and not forget.”

 

“Why should a man help another man? No need, the world don’t care about that. World is just a passing parade of cruel moments and long drear stretches where nothing going on but chicory drinking and whisky and cards.”

 

“It’s a dark thing when the world sets no value on you and your kin, and then Death comes stalking in, in his bloody boots.”

 

“The men hunched around, talking with the gaiety of souls about to eat plentifully, with the empty dark country about us, and the strange fabric of frost and frozen wind falling on our shoulders, and the great black sky of stars above us like a huge tray of gems and diamonds.”

 

“Gods work! Silence so great it hurts your ears, colour so bright it hurts your staring eyes. A vicious ruined class of man could cry at such scenes because it seems to tell him that his life is not approved. The remnant of innocence burns in his breast like a ember of the very sun.”

 

My Take

While I am typically not a big fan of the Western genre, I did really enjoy Days Without End which received numerous accolades:  Man Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist, Costa Book Award for Novel, Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction, Walter Scott Prize, Costa Book of the Year and HWA Endeavour Ink Gold Crown Nominee for Longlist.  While Barry vividly captures the rough and tumble of war time America in the middle of the 19th Century, the compelling part of his story are the characters of Thomas McNulty and John Cole who start a relationship when they are both hired to dress up as women and dance with miners.  As the story progresses, the reader is impressed with their fundamental decency during an indecent time and their affection for each other and the Indian girl they save and adopt.  Recommended.

 

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193. The Last Tudor

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Philippa Gregory

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

528 pages, published August 8, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Last Tudor tells the stories of three Grey sisters:  Jane, Katherine and Mary.  The great-granddaughter of Henry VII through his younger daughter Mary Tudor, Jane was a first cousin once removed of Edward VI, Henry VIII’s only male heir who was King of England and Ireland in 1547.  When Edward VI died at 15 years old, Jane served as queen of England for nine days after Edward VI wrote in his will that his successor should be Jane, partly because his half-sister Mary was Roman Catholic while Jane was Protestant and would support the religion whose foundation Edward claimed to have laid.  Edward’s will named his half-sisters Mary (daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon) and Elizabeth (daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boelyn) as illegitimate and removed them from succession.  When the country’s allegiance switched to Mary, Jane was tried for treason and beheaded.  Jane’s sister Katherine Grey was the beauty of the family who earned the lifelong hatred of her cousin Elizabeth I when she married Edward Seymour for love.  Under four feet tall, the third sister Mary Grey was an extraordinary little person known as a dwarf in Tudor times, who defied Elizabeth to marry the tallest man at court in her own secret love match.

 

Quotes 

“You don’t get to be a favorite at a tyrant’s court without beheading your principles every day.”

 

My Take

Philippa Gregory, master storyteller and premier writer of historical fiction, has once again woven a fascinating tale that continues the stories of Elizabeth and Mary, the two daughters of Henry VIII.  In The Last Tudor, we get a different view of Elizabeth I who is portrayed as a tyrant who was constantly worried about losing her throne, especially to Mary Queen of Scots, and who was vindictively jealous of her prettier and happier cousin Katherine Grey.  As with all Philippa Gregory novels that I have read during my quest (The Queen’s Fool, The Taming of the Queen, The Kingmakers Daughter) I thoroughly enjoyed the rich details of the period and the compelling character studies of historical figures.

 

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190. The Sparrow

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mary Doria Russell

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Theology

431 pages, published September 8, 1997

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

In the year 2019, we find proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post picks up exquisite singing from a planet that will come to be known as Rakhat.  While the UN debate and try to figure out what to do, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition.  The journey to and the discoveries on Rakhat lead the crew to ponder the meaning of life and God.

Quotes 

“There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists.”

So God just leaves?”

No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.”

Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.”

But the sparrow still falls.”

 

“The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne’s are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.”

 

“I believe in God the way I believe in quarks. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they’ve learned, I’d find quarks and God just like they did.”

 

“Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.”

 

“I do what I do without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require Heaven or Hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently.”

 

“See that’s where it falls apart for me!” Anne cried. “What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame. I just can’t swallow that kind of theological candy. Either God’s in charge or he’s not…”

 

“There are times…when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all it’s unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to it’s higher truth ….When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying.”

 

“That is my dilemma. Because if I was led by God to love God, step by step, as it seemed, if I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real and true, the rest of it was God’s will too, and that, gentlemen, is cause for bitterness. But if I am simply a deluded ape who took a lot of old folktales far too seriously, then I brought all this on myself and my companions and the whole business becomes farcical, doesn’t it. The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances…is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God.”

 

“Watching him with one eye, she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman.”

 

“You know what’s the most terrifying thing about admitting that you’re in love? You are just naked. You put yourself in harm’s way and you lay down all your defenses. No clothes, no weapons. Nowhere to hide. Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it tolerable is to believe that the other person loves you back…”

 

“we all make vows, Jimmy. And there is something very beautiful and touching and noble about wanting good impulses to be permanent and true forever,” she said. “Most of us stand up and vow to love, honor and cherish someone. And we truly mean it, at the time. But two or twelve or twenty years down the road, the lawyers are negotiating the property settlement.”

“You and George didn’t go back on your promises.”

She laughed. “Lemme tell ya something, sweetface. I have been married at least four times, to four different men.” She watched him chew that over for a moment before continuing, “They’ve all been named George Edwards but, believe me, the man who is waiting for me down the hall is a whole lot different animal from the boy I married, back before there was dirt. Oh, there are continuities. He has always been fun and he has never been able to budget his time properly and – well, the rest is none of your business.”

“But people change,” he said quietly.

“Precisely. People change. Cultures change. Empires rise and fall. Shit. Geology changes! Every ten years or so, George and I have faced the fact that we have changed and we’ve had to decide if it makes sense to create a new marriage between these two new people.” She flopped back against her chair. “Which is why vows are such a tricky business. Because nothing stays the same forever. Okay. Okay! I’m figuring something out now.” She sat up straight, eyes focused somewhere outside the room, and Jimmy realized that even Anne didn’t have all the answers and that was either the most comforting thing he’d learned in a long time or the most discouraging. “Maybe because so few of us would be able to give up something so fundamental for something so abstract, we protect ourselves from the nobility of a priest’s vows by jeering at him when he can’t live up to them, always and forever.” She shivered and slumped suddenly, “But, Jimmy! What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren’t human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.”

 

“The poor you will always have with you,’ Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?”

 

“It is the human condition to ask questions like Anne’s last night and to receive no plain answers,” he said. “Perhaps this is because we can’t understand the answers, because we are incapable of knowing God’s ways and God’s thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable.”

 

“Consider the Star of David,” he said quietly. “Two triangles, one pointing down, one pointing up. I find this a powerful image—the Divine reaching down, humanity reaching upward. And in the center, an intersection, where the Divine and human meet. The Mass takes place in that space.” His eyes lifted and met hers: a look of lucid candor. “I understand it as a place where the Divine and the human are one. And as a promise, perhaps. That God will reach toward us if we reach toward Him, that we and our most ordinary human acts—like eating bread and drinking wine—can be transformed and made sacred.”

 

My Take

When I started The Sparrow, I was expecting a science fiction story, a genre I hadn’t read in awhile.  While there is plenty of science fiction to keep the reader interested, there is a lot more to this book.  Against the backdrop of a journey and investigation of another planet inhabited by intelligent life, Author Mary Doria Russell explores the eternal question of the meaning of God and how we, as “clever apes,” are meant to relate to Him.  A fascinating and thought provoking book.

 

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186. Getting to Yes: Negotiating an Agreement Without Giving In

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Roger Fisher, William Ury, Bruce Patton

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Psychology, Business, Self-Improvement

200 pages, published December 1, 1991

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Getting to Yes is all about negotiation and how to improve your negotiating skills.  The book is based on the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, a group that deals with all levels of negotiation and conflict resolution.  Getting to Yes details a step-by-step approach for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict. The authors describe a method of negotiation that isolates problems, focuses on interests, creates new options, and uses objective criteria to help two parties reach an agreement.

Quotes 

“Any method of negotiation may be fairly judged by three criteria: It should produce a wise agreement if agreement is possible. It should be efficient. And it should improve or at least not damage the relationship between the parties.”

 

“THE METHOD 2. Separate the People from the Problem 3. Focus on Interests, Not Positions 4. Invent Options for Mutual Gain 5. Insist on Using Objective Criteria.”

“People listen better if they feel that you have understood them. They tend to think that those who understand them are intelligent and sympathetic people whose own opinions may be worth listening to. So if you want the other side to appreciate your interests, begin by demonstrating that you appreciate theirs.”

 

“The ability to see the situation as the other side sees it, as difficult as it may be, is one of the most important skills a negotiator can possess.”

 

“As useful as looking for objective reality can be, it is ultimately the reality as each side sees it that constitutes the problem in a negotiation and opens the way to a solution.”

 

“The more extreme the opening positions and the smaller the concessions, the more time and effort it will take to discover whether or not agreement is possible.”

 

“If you want someone to listen and understand your reasoning, give your interests and reasoning first and your conclusions or proposals later.”

 

“The most powerful interests are basic human needs. In searching for the basic interests behind a declared position, look particularly for those bedrock concerns that motivate all people. If you can take care of such basic needs, you increase the chance both of reaching agreement and, if an agreement is reached, of the other side’s keeping to it. Basic human needs include: security, economic well-being, a sense of belonging, recognition, control over one’s life.  As fundamental as they are, basic human needs are easy to overlook. In many negotiations, we tend to think that the only interest involved is money. Yet even in a negotiation over a monetary figure, such as the amount of alimony to be specified in a separation agreement, much more can be involved.”

 

My Take

Many years ago, when I was practicing law at a big Los Angeles law firm, I joined the other litigation attorneys from my firm for a one day seminar on negotiating at Pepperdine University.  The skills that I learned that day were not only useful in my legal practice, but they were also invaluable in my personal life.  We enter into negotiations all the time, whether it is buying a house or deciding where to have dinner or take a vacation.  Getting to Yes was a very nice complement to the Pepperdine negotiating seminar.  Not only do the authors show you how to negotiate, but they also explain why their proposed style is apt to work.  I learned some new methods for negotiating and also reinforced some of the skills I learned at the seminar.  A very useful book that I can unreservedly recommend.

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183. The Railwayman’s Wife

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ashley Hay

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

288 pages, published April 5, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Set in post World War II 1948 in the small Australian town of Thirroul, The Railwayman’s Wife follows the intersecting lives of three individuals.  Anikka Lachlan is a widow who is left to raise her daughter alone when her husband Mac is killed in a railway accident.  Roy McKinnon is a poet who has lost hope after the war, but finds poetry again when he falls for Anikka.  Frank Draper is a doctor who is weighed down by guilt of those he couldn’t save.

 

Quotes 

“There’s some comfort in seeing things go on; birds keep singing, buses keep running. But if you want those things to continue, perhaps you have to accept that the other kinds of things, unhappier, even horrific ones, will continue too. And that’s harder.”

 

“The oceans and the skies…and the sun coming up each new day. That’s all there is, I think. That’s all that matters to think on.”

 

“That is marriage, he thought, remaking yourself in someone else’s image. And who knew where the truth of it began or would end?”

 

“Such fascinating things, libraries.  She closes her eyes.  She could walk inside and step into a murder, a love story, a complete account of somebody else’s life, or mutiny on the high seas. Such potential; such adventure—there’s a shimmer of malfeasance in trying other ways of being.”

 

“How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line—how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined—well, a good poem.”

 

My Take

The Railwayman’s Wife is a beautifully written, poetic novel about loss, grief, and trying to move on with your life by Australian writer Ashley Hay.  The part of the novel that I enjoyed the most was a lovely and enchanting poem entitled “Lost World” which was specifically written for this book by Australian poet Stephen Edgar.  I’ve tried in vain to find it on-line so that I could post it with this review.  If you want to check it out, you will just have to read this recommended book.

 

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180. Brooklyn

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Colm Tóibín

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, Romance

288 pages, published September 8, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Brooklyn tells the story of Eilis (pronounced eye-liss) Lacey, a young woman who travels from a small town in Ireland to Brooklyn, New York in the years following World War II.  Eilis leaves behind her mother and her beloved sister Rose (her brothers had already left for England after their father died) when she is sponsored by an Irish priest from Brooklyn to live in the United States.  We follow Eilis as she makes her way in a transatlantic crossing on a ocean liner, lives in a boarding house with other young women, gets a job in a department store, takes accounting classes and falls in love with Tony, a sweet boy from a big Italian family.  When Eilis must return to Ireland in response to a family crisis, she is forced to choose between her comfortable life over there and her new, challenging life in America.

 

Quotes 

“What she would need to do in the days before she left and on the morning of her departure was smile, so that they would remember her smiling.”

 

“She thought it was strange that the mere sensation of savouring the prospect of something could make her think for a while that is must be the prospect of home.”

 

“Carefully, she went back up the stairs and found that if she moved along the first landing she would be able to see him from above. Somehow, she thought, if she could look at him, take him in clearly when he was not trying to amuse her or impress her, something would come to her, some knowledge, or some ability to make a decision.”

 

“She felt almost guilty that she had handed some of her grief to him, and then she felt close to him for his willingness to take it and hold it, in all its rawness, all its dark confusion.”

 

“Some people are nice and if you talk to them properly, they can be even nicer.”

 

“We keep our prices low and our manners high.”

 

“What she loved most about America, Eilis thought on these mornings, was how the heating was kept on all night.”

 

“She has gone back to Brooklyn,’ her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmire Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years already when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.”

 

My Take

At the beginning of 2016, I saw the movie version of Brooklyn and was enchanted by the simple, sweet tale of a young Irish woman who must choose between a new, challenging life in the United States and her life in Ireland which was comfortable, but with less opportunity and adventure.  After finishing the book, I can report that it is just as good as the movie.  Sometimes, a simple story that is well told can be the satisfying read.  That was the case here and I recommend you check out both the book and movie.

 

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