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144. Room

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Emma Donoghue

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Sociology

321 pages, published September 13, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Room has a very interesting premise.  Five year old Jack has spent his entire life confined to a small room along with his Ma.  They have constructed an entire world within the confines of a very limited space.  At night, Ma shuts him in wardrobe, so he can be safe when Old Nick visits.  While Room is home to Jack, to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years.  Ma has created the best life she can for Jack, but she is psychologically on the edge and knows she needs to somehow free them before she has a complete breakdown.  She devises a bold escape plan which depends on the courage of Jack.  However, being free from Room is only the beginning of Ma’s struggle.

 

Quotes

“So they’re fake?” “Stories are a different kind of true.”

 

“Really, a novel does not exist, does not happen, until readers pour their own lives into it.”

 

“Jack. He’d never give us a phone, or a window. “Ma takes my thumbs and squeezes them. “We are people in a book, and he wont let anybody else read it.”

 

“Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.  “Huh?” “Scaredybrave.” “Scave.”

Word sandwiches always make her laugh but I wasn’t being funny.”

 

“People don’t always want to be with people. It gets tiring.”

 

“I bang my head on a faucet. “Careful.” Why do persons only say that after the hurt?”

 

“I think the sea’s just rain and salt.”

“Ever taste a tear?” asks Grandma.

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s the same as the sea.”

I still don’t want to walk in it if it’s tears.”

 

“It’s called mind over matter. If we don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

 

“The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it’s going to be the next minute.”

 

“[E]verywhere I’m looking at kids, adults mostly don’t seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don’t want to actually play with them, they’d rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there’s a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn’t even hear.”

 

“Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.”

 

“In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there’s only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit….”

 

My Take

I listened to Room as an audio book and was captivated by the story.  Told from the perspective of a five year old boy who has never been outside a small room, Donahue has created an entire new world, creatively filled with routines and make believe devised by Ma to keep her and Jack sane and healthy,  inside that room.  Just as interesting is the escape plot hatched by Ma and Ma and Jack’s response to the outside world once they do escape.  It is interesting how Jack responds to all of the things we take for granted and compelling to see how Ma struggles to integrate back into a world she hasn’t lived in for more than seven years.  Room demonstrates the resilience of the human spirit and the extraordinary bond between a mother and her child as Ma and Jack move from one world to another.

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136. A Life in Parts

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Bryan Cranston

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir

271 pages, published October 11, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

A Life in Parts is the memoir of Bryan Cranston, star of Malcolm in the Middle and Breaking Bad.  Cranston landed his first role at seven, when his father cast him in a United Way commercial.  While he loved acting from a young age, after his father left the family, it took a back seat to survival.  A Life in Parts follows Cranston’s journey from an abandoned son to a successful television and movie star by recalling the many odd parts he’s played in real life—paperboy, farmhand, security guard, dating consultant, murder suspect, dock loader, lover, husband, father.  While Cranston starred in a soap opera, played the unforgettable Dentist Tim Whatley on Seinfeld, created the indelible dad Hal Wilkerson on Malcolm in the Middle, he will always be best remembered for his portrayal of Walter White, chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin, on Breaking Bad.  Cranston relates the grittiest details of his greatest role, explaining how he searched inward for the personal darkness that would help him create one of the most memorable performances ever captured on screen.  Finally, Cranston gives an in depth account of how he prepared, physically and mentally, for the challenging role of President Lyndon Johnson, a tour de force that won him a Tony to go along with his four Emmys.

Quotes

 “I will pursue something that I love — and hopefully become good at it, instead of pursuing something that I’m good at — but don’t love.”

 

“The greatest thing about youth is that you’re not yet battle-weary, so you’ll try anything.”

 

“Console the failure, but nurture the hunger.”

 

“The best teacher is experience. Find the educational in every situation.”

 

My Take

I found A Life in Parts to be a fascinating read.  Breaking Bad is my husband’s favorite show of all time and it is in my top five, so I was already a fan of Cranston’s when I started his memoir.  He takes the reader on a journey through his hardscrabble, chaotic life in which his clear sense that he wanted to be an actor and his devotion to always improving his craft carried him through many hard times and setbacks to the success that he enjoys today.  Even before he was famous, Cranston’s life provided lots of great content for a memoir.  It also doesn’t hurt that he is a very fine writer.  Even if you are not interested in being an actor, there are many lessons to be learned from Cranston’s work ethic.

 

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134. His Bloody Project

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Graeme Macrae Burnet

Genre:  Fiction, Crime

280 pages, published November 5, 2015

Reading Format:  E-Book on Overdrive

 

Summary

A brutal triple murder in a remote Scottish farming community in 1869 leads to the arrest of seventeen-year-old Roderick “Roddy” Macrae.  While there is no question that Macrae committed this terrible crime, the authorities are puzzled as to why such a shy and intelligent boy would go down this bloody path?  Presented as a collection of documents discovered by the author, His Bloody Project opens with a series of police statements taken from the villagers of Culdie, Rossshire. They offer conflicting impressions of the accused; one interviewee recalls Macrae as a gentle and quiet child, while another details him as evil and wicked.  Among the papers is Roddy’s own memoirs, where he outlines the series of events leading up to the murder in eloquent and affectless prose.  The book also contains medical reports, psychological evaluations, a courtroom transcript from the trial, and other documents that throw both Macrae’s motive and his sanity into question.

 

Quotes

“One man can no more see into the mind of another than he can see inside a stone…”

 

“These unfortunates are distinguished by the prevalence of malicious feelings, which often arise at the most trivial provocation. They see enmity where none exists and indulge themselves in great fantasies of revenge and mischief; fantasies which they are then powerless to resist acting upon.”

 

My Take

I decided to read His Bloody Project after seeing that it was a Man Booker Prize Nominee in 2016.  The format of the book as a collection of documents surrounding a triple murder, investigation and trial in 17th Century Scotland made for a fascinating read, especially as it revealed details of the different social classes of the time.  After finishing it, I still had some questions about what exactly happened, but I think that is the point of the book.  Life is often messy and incomprehensible.  Although we would like to put people and events into neat little boxes, it is sometimes impossible to do that and we have to live with the ambiguity.

 

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126. Commonwealth

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Ann Patchett

Genre:  Fiction

322 pages, published September 13, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Commonwealth opens on a Sunday afternoon in Southern California at the christening party for Franny Keating.  Bert Cousins shows up uninvited, kisses Franny’s mother Beverly and setting into motion the termination of his and Beverly’s marriages and the joining of two families.  From there, the book skips around time wise as we watch the six children grow up and see the four parents deal with their new lives.  When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.

 

Quotes

“Did you ever want to be a writer?” “No,” she said, and she would have told him. “I only wanted to be a reader.”

 

“Life, Teresa knew by now, was a series of losses. It was other things too, better things, but the losses were as solid and dependable as the earth itself.”

 

“He is fifteen and ten and five. He is an instant. He is flying back to her. He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back.”

 

“Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.”

 

“When Teresa was told that she had lost summers, she made a point to curse and weep, but she wondered silently if she hadn’t just been handed the divorce equivalent of a Caribbean vacation.”

 

“Field after field after field, and not an inch of space wasted on something as decorative and meaningless as a tree.”

 

“You could see just a trace of the daughter there, the way she held her shoulders back, the length of her neck. It was a crime what time did to women.”

 

“Lelia gave a dharma talk about letting go of self-definition: I can’t do this because of what happened to me in my childhood; I can’t do that because I am very shy; I could never go there because I’m afraid of clowns or mushrooms or polar bears. The group gave a gentle, collective laugh of self-recognition. Teresa found the talk helpful, as she had been having an extended interior dialogue during meditation about how septuagenarians from Torrance were fundamentally unsuited for Buddhism.”

My Take

Ann Patchett, a very fine writer, has some interesting things to say in her latest novel Commonwealth.  As a child whose parents divorced when I was five and who are each on their third marriage, I could very much relate to the splitting up and re-combining of families and all of the issues, problems and emotions that are created as a result.  Divorce is a very big deal to the lives of the children affected and it should not be done unless absolutely necessary.  Patchett captures the angst and tribulations of children of divorce in a unique voice that really resonated with me.  Patchett also has an insightful and humorous take on the expectations of upper class hangers on when they invade one of the character’s summer beach house. I definitely recommend this book.

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120. Hillbilly Elegy : A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Katy Fassett

Author:   J.D. Vance

Genre:  Memoir, Sociology, Public Policy

272 pages, published June 28, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir by J.D. Vance, a former Marine and Yale Law School Graduate, about his childhood growing up in a poor Appalachian town.  While for the most part a personal account of his unique challenges, his book also includes a broader, questioning look at the struggles of America’s white working class.   Drawing on his own story and a variety of  sociological studies, Vance burrows deep into working class life of Appalachia which has been on a downward trajectory for the past forty years.  In an effective style, Vance helps the reader to  understand when and how “hillbillies” lost faith in any hope of upward mobility and their shot at the American Dream.

 

Quotes

“Whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, “The feeling that our choices don’t matter.”

 

“I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”

 

“What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.”

 

“Psychologists call it “learned helplessness” when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life.”

 

“If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.

 

“Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.”

 

“I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

 

“We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents. Our kids perform poorly in school. We might get angry with them, but we never give them the tools—like peace and quiet at home—to succeed.”

 

“There is no group of Americans more pessimistic than working-class whites. Well over half of blacks, Latinos, and college-educated whites expect that their children will fare better economically than they have. Among working-class whites, only 44 percent share that expectation.”

 

“Religious folks are much happier. Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are in better health, live longer, make more money, drop out of high school less frequently, and finish college more frequently than those who don’t attend church at all.”

 

“Mamaw always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.”

 

“Efforts to reinvent downtown Middletown always struck me as futile. People didn’t leave because our downtown lacked trendy cultural amenities. The trendy cultural amenities left because there weren’t enough consumers in Middletown to support them.”

 

“Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.”

 

“People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”

 

“And a young man with every reason to work—a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way—carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.”

 

“Despite its reputation, Appalachia—especially northern Alabama and Georgia to southern Ohio—has far lower church attendance than the Midwest, parts of the Mountain West, and much of the space between Michigan and Montana. Oddly enough, we think we attend church more than we actually do. In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South.”

 

“Pajamas? Poor people don’t wear pajamas. We fall asleep in our underwear or blue jeans. To this day, I find the very notion of pajamas an unnecessary elite indulgence, like caviar or electric ice cube makers.”

 

“To this day, being able to “take advantage” of someone is the measure in my mind of having a parent. For me and Lindsay, the fear of imposing stalked our minds, infecting even the food we ate. We recognized instinctively that many of the people we depended on weren’t supposed to play that role in our lives, so much so that it was one of the first things Lindsay thought of when she learned of Papaw’s death. We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people—that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn’t indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives.”

 

“I don’t believe in epiphanies. I don’t believe in transformative moments, as transformation is harder than a moment. I’ve seen far too many people awash in a genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realized just how difficult change actually is.”

My Take

Hillbilly Elegy has become part of the zeitgeist after the election of Donald Trump as liberal America was desperate to understand what motivated all of the Trump voters.  This book is a fascinating look into a world that I knew little about, the struggling white working class of the Appalachia which includes parts of the Midwest and South.  While it is the personal story of J.D. Vance and how he went from a chaotic, unstable, poor childhood to Yale Law School, it is also a primer on how to choose a good life.  He rightly gives credit to his maternal grandparents, whom he called Mamaw and Papaw, and the island of steadiness and support that they provided during his childhood.  Vance makes a convincing argument that it doesn’t matter how many government programs you enact or how much you reform the schools if kids don’t have a certain level of stability and encouragement at home.  I agree with Vance’s message that is delivered in a highly readable and engrossing book and look forward to seeing what he produces in the future.

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41. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Rachel Joyce

Genre:  Fiction, Happiness

320 pages, published July 24, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Recently retired and at loose ends, Harold Fry receives a letter from Queenie Hennessy, an old friend and former work colleague who he hasn’t heard from in twenty years who has written to say she is dying and to tell Harold goodbye.  Harold writes Queenie a letter in reply and walks to his neighborhood mailbox to post it, but something unexpected happens.  Harold  becomes convinced that he must deliver his message in person to Queenie, who is 600 miles away in a hospice, because as long as he keeps walking, Harold believes that Queenie will not die.   So begins the unexpected pilgrimage of Harold Fry.  Harold meets meets various characters along the way who cause Harold to look back on his life and examine his failed relationships with his wife and son.

 

Quotes

“Upstairs, Maureen shut the door of David’s room quietly and stood a moment breathing him in.  She pulled open his blue curtains that she closed every night and checked that there was no dust where the hem of the net drapes met the windowsill.  She polished the silver frame of his Cambridge portrait and the black and white baby photograph beside it.  She kept the room clean because she was waiting for David to come back and she never knew when that might be.  A part of her was always waiting.  Men had no idea what it was like to be a mother.  The ache of loving a child, even when he had moved on.”

 

“Harold asked himself if years ago he shouldn’t have pressed Maureen to have another baby.  “David is enough,” she had said.  “He is all we need.”  But sometimes he was afraid that having one son was too much to bear.  He wondered if the pain of loving became diluted the more you had.  A child’s growing was a constant pushing away.”

 

“People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The superhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.”

 

“If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, it stands to reason that I’m going to get there. I’ve begun to think we sit far more than we’re supposed to.” He smiled. “Why else would we have feet?”

 

“you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way.”

 

“He must have driven this way countless times, and yet he had no memory of the scenery. He must have been so caught up in the day’s agenda, and arriving punctually at their destination, that the land beyond the car had been no more than a wash of one green, and a backdrop of one hill. Life was very different when you walked through it.”

 

“There was no escaping what he had realized as he fought for warmth in the night. With or without him,the moon and the wind would go on, rising and falling. The land would keep stretching ahead until it hit the sea. People would keep dying. It made no difference if Harold walked, or trembled, or stayed at home.”

 

“I miss her all the time.  I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain.  It’s like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it’s there and keep falling in.  After a while, it’s still there, but you learn to walk round it.”

 

“… He went under the stars, and the tender light of the moon, when it hung like an eyelash and the tree trunks shone like bones. He walked through wind and weather, and beneath sun-bleached skies. It seemed to Harold that he had been waiting all his life to walk. He no longer knew how far he had come, but only that he was going forward. The pale Cotswold stone became the red brick of Warwickshire, and the land flattened into middle England. Harold reached his hand to his mouth to brush away a fly, and felt a beard growing in thick tufts. Queenie would live. He knew it.”

 

My Take

I really loved listening to The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry.  This is a beautifully written book about the human spirit, the meaning of life, and coming to terms with not only what you did in life, but more importantly what you failed to do.  As a side note, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, reminded me a lot of A Man Called Ove, another book I read this year and really enjoyed.

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104. H is for Hawk

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Helen MacDonald

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Animals

300 pages, published March 3, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Written by Helen MacDonald after her father’s sudden, devastating death, H is for Hawk is two books in one.  An account of MacDonald’s training of a vicious predator goshawk whom she names Mabel and a touching, insightful meditation on grief.  Through the demanding and difficult goshawk training process and her research into the life of The Once and Future King author and fellow falconer T.H. White, MacDonald gains new insight into the meaning of life and death.

 

Quotes

“There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.”

 

“Everything about the hawk is tuned and turned to hunt and kill. Yesterday I discovered that when I suck air through my teeth and make a squeaking noise like an injured rabbit, all the tendons in her toes instantaneously contract, driving her talons into the glove with terrible, crushing force. This killing grip is an old, deep pattern in her brain, an innate response that hasn’t yet found the stimulus meant to release it. Because other sounds provoke it: door hinges, squealing breaks, bicycles with unoiled wheels – and on the second afternoon, Joan Sutherland singing an aria on the radio. Ow. I laughed out loud at that. Stimulus: opera. Response: kill.”

 

“In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.”

 

“I once asked my friends if they’d ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don’t know anything about them, but you feel the other person’s there, one friend told me. It’s like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow.”

 

“When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe anymore. Being an expert opens you up to judgment.”

 

“It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.”

 

“We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.”

 

“Hands are for other human hands to hold.”

 

“Nature in her green, tranquil woods heals and soothes all affliction,’ wrote John Muir. ‘Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal.’ Now I knew this for what it was: a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own conscious certainty that t his was the cure I needed. Hands are for other humans to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.”

 

“the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again.”

 

“Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”

 

“The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.”

 

“Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there – rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.”

 

“Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.”

 

“Watching, not doing. Seeking safety in not being seen. It’s a habit you can fall into, willing yourself into invisibility. And it doesn’t serve you well in life. Believe me it doesn’t. Not with people and loves and hearts and homes and work. But for the first few days with a new hawk, making yourself disappear is the greatest skill in the world.”

 

My Take

Helen MacDonald has won numerous awards for her reflective and moving memoir including the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year and the acclaim is well-deserved.  Reading H is for Hawk, I not only learned about the intricacies and challenges of training a hawk, which is an entirely new and fascinating subject for me, but I also gained keen insight into what it means to be a human and the nature of grief.  I also give the book bonus points for the best cover artwork of books I have so far read in my quest.  MacDonald is a fine writer and it was a pleasure to read her book.

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100. The Invention of Wings

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Public Library Librarian

Author:   Sue Monk Kidd

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, History

384 pages, published January 7, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Invention of Wings, which is based on real people, tells the story of two girls in early nineteenth century Charleston.  Hetty “Handful” Grimke is a slave who works in the wealthy Grimke household with dreams of freedom.  Sarah Grimke idolizes her father who is a judge and wants to follow in his footsteps but is subject to the restrictions and expectations of that era placed on women. On her eleventh birthday, Sarah is given ownership of Handful and she tries in vain to free her, but promises Handful’s slave mother that she will someday accomplish this mission.  Over the next 35 years, both Handful and Sarah endure disappointment, loss, sorrow, and betrayal, but continue courageously on and discover their destiny in the process. Sarah, along with her younger sister, Angelina, becomes an abolitionist and feminist.  

 

Quotes

“My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.”

 

“We ‘re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren ‘t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”

 

“I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.”

 

“I’d been wandering about in the enchantments of romance, afflicted with the worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations.”

 

“The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-com, and you never will outpace your grief.”

 

“It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.”

 

“A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost—don’t see it, don’t hear it, but it’s always hovering round on ready.”

 

“To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”

 

“If you must err, do so on the side of audacity.”

 

“I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all.”

 

“I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn’t choose.”

 

“How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.”

 

“I said, “Where’s all that delivering God’s supposed to do?”

He snorted. “You’re right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn’t have any hands and feet but ours.”

“That doesn’t say much for the Lord.”

“It doesn’t say much for us, either.”

 

“Her name was Mary, and there ends any resemblance to the mother of our Lord.”

 

“He that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life shall find it.” Do not fear to lose what needs to be lost.”

My Take

I had previously read The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and enjoyed it, but liked The Invention of Wings even more.  With layers of detail on the place, time and characters, Kidd creates a world that feels immediate and real.  She also tells a compelling story that is interwoven with historical details about the Antebellum South and the movement for Abolition and Women’s rights.  I highly recommend The Invention of Wings, especially the audio version.

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94. Nutshell

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ian McEwan

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense

197 pages, published September 13, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Trudy and Claude are having an affair and plotting to murder Trudy’s husband who also happens to be Claude’s brother. However, there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month old resident of Trudy’s womb from whose vantage point the story is told.

 

Quotes

“It’s not the theme parks of Paradiso and Inferno that I dread most – the heavenly rides, the hellish crowds – and I could live with the insult of eternal oblivion. I don’t even mind not knowing which it will be. What I fear is missing out. Health desire or mere greed, I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness. I’m owed a handful of decades to try my luck on a freewheeling planet. That’s the ride for me – the Wall of Life. I want my go. I want to become. Put another way, there’s a book I want to read, not yet published, not yet written, though a start’s been made. I want to read to the end of My History of the Twenty-First Century. I want to be there, on the last page, in my early eighties, frail but sprightly, dancing a jig on the evening of December 31, 2099.”

 

“It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence.”

 

“You may never have experienced, or you will have forgotten, a good burgundy (her favourite) or a good Sancerre (also her favourite) decanted through a healthy placenta.”

 

“However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you’re inside them.”

 

“Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They’re not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they’ll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want.”

 

“Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose.”

 

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches civilisation.”

 

“When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It’s the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.”

 

“In science too, one dedicates his life to an Albanian snail, another to a virus. Darwin gave eight years to barnacles. And in wise later life, to earthworms. The Higgs boson, a tiny thing, perhaps not even a thing, was the lifetime’s pursuit of thousands. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.

So why not be an owl poet?”

 

“No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It’s an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.”

 

“There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact; remorse, or more drinking and then remorse.”

 

“A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs.”

 

“In the middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. She’ll wake, become insomniac, reach for the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning.”

 

“I’ve heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness…Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self…God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.”

 

“I don’t know much yet about murder. Still, his scheme is more baker than butcher. Half-baked.”

 

“My immediate neighbourhood will not be palmy Norway – my first choice on account of its gigantic sovereign fund and generous social provision; nor my second, Italy, on grounds of regional cuisine and sun-blessed decay; and not even my third, France, for its Pinot Noir and jaunty self-regard. Instead I’ll inherit a less than united kingdom ruled by an esteemed elderly queen, where a businessman-prince, famed for his good works, his elixirs (cauliflower essence to purify the blood) and unconstitutional meddling, waits restively for his crown. This will be my home, and it will do.”

My Take

Listening to Ian McEwan’s latest book Nutshell was a real treat (including the excellent voicework on the audio version by Rory Kinnear).  McEwan has always been one of my favorite writers (I especially enjoyed Atonement, The Children Act and Saturday), and Nutshell is a worthy addition to his canon. I particularly enjoyed the creative and original use of the fetal perspective to tell the story.  At first, you don’t think this is going to work or its going to get tiresome, but McEwan manages to pull it off and the device makes Nutshell a clever and memorable read.

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92. Her

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Harriet Lane

Genre:  Fiction, Thriller, Suspense, Mystery

272 pages, published January 6, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Emma and Nina, the two main characters in Her, appear to have very little in common.  As a relatively new mother, Emma is isolated and exhausted.  She has mixed emotions about leaving her job, her marriage is strained and her self-confidence is on the decline.  Nina, who is sophisticated, generous, and effortlessly in control stands in stark contrast.  When the two women strike up an unexpected relationship, something seems a bit off.   We soon learn that there is more to Nina then meets the eye and a dangerous game of cat and mouse develops.  

 

Quotes

“Emma is the engine of this home, the person who propels it forward, keeps everyone fed and clothed and healthy and happy—and yet she’s entirely alone within it, and getting lonelier with every item ticked off her checklist. This is what it comes down to: the flat-out invisible drudgery of family maintenance, the vanishing of personality as everyone else’s accrues.”

 

“Over time, I’ve come to see that so much of a personality boils down to confidence: whether you have it, or not.”

 

“I once heard someone on the radio saying that a bee is never more than forty minutes away from starving to death, and this fact has stayed with me because it seems to have a certain personal resonance. My children are in a perpetual proximity to catastrophe: concussion, dehydration, drowning or sunstroke. Keeping them safe requires constant vigilance.”

 

“I turn my back and look out to sea, the sun so low and molten that my eyes fill with tears, and yet I can feel it: a cooler wind is coming in, the edge of evening approaching. Dusk is gathering along the coast, in the coves and quaysides and marinas, where in an hour or so the long strings of coloured bulbs will twinkle and sway; and then it will pass over us-like a visitation: a plague or a blessing….”  

 

“I found the final plot twist unsatisfying, as plot twists often are: nothing like life, which – it seems to me – turns less on shocks or theatrics than on the small quiet moments, misunderstandings, or disappointments, the things that it’s easy to overlook.”

 

“I’m already someone else, but the person I turn into at these low points is someone I never imagined I could be a few years ago: someone with a hot knot of fury where her heart used to be.”

My Take

There are several things that I really liked about Her.  First of all, it’s a page turner.  Lane infuses the story with a something is not quite right creepiness that makes you want to learn more.  Secondly, I really liked Lane’s writing style.  She is a pleasure to read.  Finally, the set pieces of London and the French countryside are two places that I love and Lane does a great job capturing these locales.  Highly recommended and an especially good vacation book.

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