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269. The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Mark Logue and Peter Conradi

Genre:  Non Fiction, Historical Fiction, Biography

242 pages, published November 1, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The King’s Speech is the story of Lionel Logue, a speech therapist from Australia working in London, and King George VI (aka Bertie) of England, Logue’s most famous patient.  For several decades, Logue helped Prince Albert (who would become King George VI when his older brother, the Duke of Windsor, abdicated the English throne to marry Wallis Simpson) overcome a lifelong stammering problem.  In this historical novel, we learn how Logue accomplished this feat as well as a lot of British and Australian history from that era.

 

Quotes 

“When the fresh patient comes to me the usual query is: “Will I be able to speak like the King?” and my reply is: “Yes, if you will work like he does.”

 

“Every public speaker likes his hearer to imagine his oratory as an unpremeditated gift of nature, and not the result of prolonged and patient study.”

 

My Take

A few years ago, I saw the movie version of The King’s Speech and really enjoyed it.  I was, therefore, keen to read the novel upon which it was based.  Like the movie, I found the book to be a very interesting, behind the scenes peek into history.  I always like learning more about history, especially British history, and was pleased to learn more about King George VI , the Duke of Windsor and the pre-World War II period.

 

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266. The Great Divorce

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   C.S. Lewis

Genre:  Fiction, Christian, Theology

146 pages, published 1945

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Great Divorce is C.S. Lewis’s vision of the Afterworld in which the narrator boards a bus on a rainy English afternoon and embarks on an incredible voyage through Heaven and Hell.  Along the way, he meets a variety of supernatural beings far removed from his expectations, and comes to some significant realizations about the nature of good and evil.

 

Quotes 

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”

 

“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”

 

“Milton was right,’ said my Teacher. ‘The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality.”

 

“You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.”

 

“The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.”

 

“Son,’ he said,’ ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why…the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”

 

“There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”

 

“Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness; but your darkness cannot now infect our light.”

 

“That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves part of eternal reality.”

 

“Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind – is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”

 

“I wish I had never been born,” she said. “What are we born for?” “For infinite happiness,” said the Spirit. “You can step out into it at any moment…”

 

“And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that (Hell) contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.”

 

My Take

I listened to The Great Divorce on the heels of The Screwtape Letters and there is a lot of similarity between the two books.  Both books are characterized by admonitions on how to live a holy life dedicated to God, and how we so often get that wrong (even though we may think we are getting it right).  Pride truly is the worst sin.  If you have an interest in Christian Apologetics, then both The Great Divorce and the The Screwtape Letters are essential reading.

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264. The Screwtape Letters

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  John Breen

Author:   C.S. Lewis

Genre:  Fiction, Theology, Christian, Fantasy

223 pages, published 1942

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

This classic satire by the acclaimed C.S. Lewis is a sardonic portrayal of human life by the demon Screwtape, a senior tempter in the service of “Our Father Below.” The device used by Lewis are letters from the experienced old devil Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, a novice demon in charge of securing the damnation of an ordinary young man.

 

Quotes 

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. ”

 

“We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.”

 

“Humour is…the all-consoling and…the all-excusing, grace of life.”

 

“The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forewarmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.”

 

“Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead.”

 

“[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist’s shop.”

 

“Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

 

“She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expression.”

 

“One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself—creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food;

(2) He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct.”

 

“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”

 

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

 

“You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to him employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which h allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.”

 

“The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents–or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall.”

 

“When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.”

 

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

 

“Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.”

 

“A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others…thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.”

 

“A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.”

 

“By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the the impossible.”

 

My Take

Even though it has been almost 80 years since The Screwtape Letters was published, it still has a lot of relevance to modern day life and makes the expression “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” particularly apt.  C.S. Lewis’ clever device of a conversation between demons on how best to ensnare human beings made me really think about how I was living my own life and what God expects of me.  Lots of food for thought told in a very interesting fashion.

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261. Funny Girl

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Nick Hornby

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Humor

452 pages, published February 3, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Funny Girl is the story of Sophie Straw, a blonde bombshell from a small English town who, in addition to her beauty, has a talent for making people laugh.  Sophie moves to London to pursue her dream of being the British version of Lucille Ball.  Set in 1960’s, we follow Sophie as her she lands a leading role on a BBC Comedy Playhouse series and makes her dream a reality.

 

Quotes 

“I’ve never been happy in the way that I’ve been happy in this room, and in the studios,” said Sophie. “I’ve never laughed so much, or learned so much, and everything I know about my job is because of the people here. Even you, Clive. And I’m worried that I’ll spend the rest of my working life looking for an experience like this one, where everything clicks and everyone pushes you to do the best you can, better than anything you think you’re capable of.”

 

“Love meant being brave, otherwise you had already lost your own argument: the man who couldn’t tell a woman he loved her was, by definition, not worthy of her.”

 

“What was he doing with her? How on earth could he love her? But he did. Or, at least, she made him feel sick, sad, and distracted. Perhaps there was another way of describing that unique and useless combination of feelings, but “love” would have to do for now.”

 

“She began to fear that she would always be greedy, all the time. Nothing ever seemed to fill her up. Nothing ever seemed to touch the sides.”

 

“She wasn’t the sort of catch one could take home and show off to people; she was the sort of catch that drags the angler off the end of the pier and pulls him out to sea before tearing him to pieces as he’s drowning. He shouldn’t have been fishing at all, not when he was so ill-equipped.”

 

“Years later, Tony would discover that writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers. It was strange, however, failing to belong even at a party full of outsiders.”

 

“They already knew that they would be telling people about the morning for a long time to come, maybe for the rest of their lives, and the taxi ride was the first attempt at a first draft of a story that would have to satisfy parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren.”

 

“Clive was rapidly coming to the conclusion that being engaged to somebody meant that he spent an awful lot of time not doing things he wanted to do.”

 

“He was kind, he was single, he was vulnerable, he made her laugh (not always intentionally, true, but often enough). Every time she saw him, he seemed to have become a little more handsome.”

 

“The anger was clearly real, though. It was in there, sloshing around, looking for the nearest hole to escape through.”

 

“And also, what kind of job was comic magician? She didn’t think she could bear to be married to a comic magician, even if his breath were sweeter than Parma violets and his kisses were like atom bombs. Comic magicians belonged on seaside piers. Comic magicians were what she had come to London to escape, not to find, and certainly not to marry.”

 

“There aren’t any buts,” said Bill. “That’s the whole point of being a writer, isn’t it? If I wanted buts, I’d go and work in a fucking but factory.”

 

My Take

Listening to the audio book version of Funny Girl was a delight.  This was the second book that I have read by Nick Hornby (the first being A Long Way Down), but it won’t be the last.  I was charmed by the characters (especially Sophie), the stories and the writing.  I so enjoyed living in the 1960’s London world of Sophie Straw that I was disappointed when the book ended.

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259. Rose Under Fire

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Elizabeth Wein

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II

368 pages, published September 10, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

While flying an Allied fighter plane from Paris to England, American ATA pilot and amateur poet, Rose Justice, is captured by the Nazis and sent to Ravensbrück, a notorious women’s concentration camp.  During her time there, Rose befriends the “Rabbits,” a group of women subjected to horrific Nazi experimentation. In the face of unspeakable crimes, Rose and her friends suffer horribly, but also find the strength to act with compassion, courage and cunning.

 

Quotes 

“Hope is the most treacherous thing in the world. It lifts you and lets you plummet. But as long as you’re being lifted you don’t worry about plummeting.”

 

“God knows what I thought! Your brain does amazing acrobatics when it doesn’t want to believe something.”

 

“There are four forces which work together if you want to put something into the sky and have it stay there. One of these is lift.

 

Lift is made when the air pressure under a wing is greater than the air pressure over the wing. Then the wing gets pushed upwards. That’s how birds fly. That’s how kites fly – a kite is basically just a solitary wing. That’s how airplanes fly.

 

But people need lift too. People don’t get moving, they don’t soar, they don’t achieve great heights, without something buoying them up.”

 

“Hope has no feathers

Hope takes flight

tethered with twine

like a tattered kite,

slave to the wind’s

capricious drift

eager to soar

but needing lift

 

Hope waits stubbornly

watching the sky

for turmoil, feeding on

things that fly:

crows, ashes, newspapers,

dry leaves in flight

all suggest wind

that could lift a kite

 

Hope sails and plunges

firmly caught

at the end of her string –

fallen slack, pulling taught,

ragged and featherless.

Hope never flies

but doggedly watches

for windy skies.”

 

“Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can’t feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.”

 

‘When you cut down the hybrid rose,

its blackened stump below the graft

spreads furtive fingers in the dirt.

It claws at life, weaving a raft

of suckering roots to pierce the earth.

The first thin shoot is fierce and green,

a pliant whip of furious briar

splitting the soil, gulping the light.

You hack it down. It skulks between

the flagstones of the garden path

to nurse a hungry spur in shade

against the porch. With iron spade

you dig and drag it from the gravel

and toss it living on the fire.

 

‘It claws up towards the light again

hidden from view, avoiding battle

beyond the fence. Unnoticed, then,

unloved, unfed, it clings and grows

in the wild hedge. The subtle briar

armors itself with desperate thorns

and stubborn leaves – and struggling higher,

unquenchable, it now adorns

itself with blossom, till the stalk

is crowned with beauty, papery white

fine petals thin as chips of chalk

or shaven bone, drinking the light.

 

‘Izabela, Aniela, Alicia, Eugenia,

Stefania, Rozalia, Pelagia, Irena,

Alfreda, Apolonia, Janina, Leonarda,

Czeslava, Stanislava, Vladyslava, Barbara,

Veronika, Vaclava, Bogumila, Anna,

Genovefa, Helena, Jadviga, Joanna,

Kazimiera, Ursula, Vojcziecha, Maria,

Wanda, Leokadia, Krystyna, Zofia.

 

‘When you cut down the hybrid rose

to cull and plough its tender bed,

trust there is life beneath your blade:

the suckering briar below the graft,

the wildflower stock of strength and thorn

whose subtle roots are never dead.”

 

My Take

Rose Under Fire is the third book in a loose trilogy by Elizabeth Wein (the others are Code Name Verity and The Pearl Thief).  Even though Code Name Verity was by far my favorite, I did enjoy Rose Under Fire.  While it was hard to read another book dealing with the Holocaust, Wein manages to tell an inspirational story and, as a bonus, embellishes it with some very beautiful poems.

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258. Go Set a Watchman

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Harper Lee

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

278 pages, published July 14, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Go Set a Watchman is the sequel to the American classic To Kill a Mockingbird and the only other book written by Harper Lee who died within two years of its publication.   The title comes from Isaiah 21:6: “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth” and alludes to Jean Louise Finch’s (aka Scout) view of her father, Atticus Finch, as the moral compass or watchman of Maycomb.  In Go Set a Watchman, Jean Louise  is now 26 years old and has returned home to Alabama from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus.  Set during the Civil Rights struggles, Jean Louise’s world view comes crashing down when she discovers some disturbing truths about her family and longtime beau and must decide what values will define her.

 

Quotes 

“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”

 

“Every man’s island, Jean Louise, every man’s watchman, is his conscience. There is no such thing as a collective conscious.”

 

“[T]he time your friends need you is when they’re wrong, Jean Louise. They don’t need you when they’re right”

 

“A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them.”

 

“She was almost in love with him. No, that’s impossible, she thought: either you are or you aren’t. Love’s the only thing in this world that is unequivocal. There are different kinds of love, certainly, but it’s a you-do or you-don’t proposition with them all.”

 

“If you did not want much, there was plenty.”

 

“The only thing I’m afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn’t be worth living in. The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won’t be that way much longer.”

 

“But a man who has lived by truth—and you have believed in what he has lived—he does not leave you merely wary when he fails you, he leaves you with nothing. I think that is why I’m nearly out of my mind.”

 

“She was a person who, when confronted with an easy way out, always took the hard way. The easy way out of this would be to marry Hank and let him labor for her. After a few years, when the children were waist-high, the man would come along whom she should have married in the first place. There would be searchings of hearts, fevers and frets, long looks at each other on the post office steps, and misery for everybody. The hollering and the high-mindedness over, all that would be left would be another shabby little affair à la the Birmingham country club set, and a self-constructed private Gehenna with the latest Westinghouse appliances. Hank didn’t deserve that.”

 

“[S]ome men who cheat their wives out of grocery money wouldn’t think of cheating the grocer. Men tend to carry their honesty in pigeonholes, Jean Louise. They can be perfectly honest in some ways and fool themselves in other ways.”

 

“I’m only trying to make you see beyond men’s acts to their motives. A man can appear to be a part of something not-so-good on its face, but don’t take it upon yourself to judge him unless you know his motives as well. A man can be boiling inside, but he knows a mild answer works better than showing his rage. A man can condemn his enemies, but it’s wiser to know them. … Have you ever considered that men, especially men, must conform to the demands of the community they live in simply so they can be of service to it?”

 

My Take

Having read, and loved, To Kill a Mockingbird, I was very interested to check out Go Set a Watchman, Harper’s Lee update to her classic American novel.  I was also intrigued that these were the only two books ever written by Lee.  While Mockingbird is by far the superior novel, there is much of interest in Watchman.  The de-pedalsting (not really a word) of the moral giant Atticus Finch took me by surprise, but added a fascinating conflict for Jean Louise (aka Scout) to grapple with.  I was also intrigued by the characters’ differing views on the Civil Rights movement and what that meant to Southern states and towns of the time.  If you, like me, are a fan of To Kill a Mockingbird, then a I recommend giving Go Set a Watchman a read.  Also worth noting is the very good voice work by Reese Witherspoon.

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254. The Word is Murder

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Michael Koss

Author:   Anthony Horowitz

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Suspense

400 pages, published June 5, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Word is Murder opens with Diana Cowper, a wealthy woman who is the mother of a famous British actor, planning her own funeral.  Six hours later she is strangled.  Daniel Hawthorne, a bigoted, gruff, yet brilliant investigator teams up with author Anthony Horowitz (who inserts himself into the story under the guise of documenting Hawthorne’s exploits) to solve the crime.

 

Quotes 

“Again, I found myself wondering what it must be like to work there, sitting in a room with those miniature urns, a constant reminder that everything you were and everything you’d achieved would one day fit inside.”

 

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

 

“But the thing is, you see -and to be honest, I don’t like to mention this- I’m a bit short. There just aren’t enough people getting murdered.”

 

“I’ve often wondered how I would have managed if I’d been born with a stammer or chronic shyness. The modern writer has to be able to perform, often to a huge audience. It’s almost like being a stand-up comedian except that the questions never change and you always end up telling the same jokes.”

 

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”

 

My Take

Having recently read several of Anthony Horowitz’s books (especially the terrific Magpie Murders), I really looked forward to diving into The Word is Murder.  While not as good as Magpie, it was still a thoroughly entertaining mystery with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing. I especially enjoyed how Horowitz uses himself as a foil to the grumpy, eccentric Investigator Daniel Hawthorne.

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253. The Orphan Master’s Son

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Aileen Schwab

Author:   Adam Johnson

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

443 pages, published January 10, 2012

Reading Format:  e-Book

 

Summary

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Orphan Master’s Son is an epic novel set in North Korea.  The book follows the life of Pak Jun Do, whose mother, a beautiful singer, was “stolen” to Pyongyang to entertain the corrupt elites.  Pak is left to languish in Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans that is run by his influential father who does not acknowledge him.  Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Pak becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive.  His service to North Korea takes him to the United States where his contact with a woman in the CIA changes the course of his life.  Surviving horrific torture by the pitiless state machine, Pak pretends to be a rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”

 

Quotes 

“Where we are from… [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change. …But in America, people’s stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters.”

 

“But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.”

 

“Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.”

 

“A name isn’t a person,’ Ga said. ‘Don’t ever remember someone by their name. To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they’re always with you because they’re a part of you.”

 

“They’re about a woman whose beauty is like a rare flower. There is a man who has a great love for her, a love he’s been saving up for his entire life, and it doesn’t matter that he must make a great journey to her, and it doesn’t matter if their time together is brief, that afterward he might lose her, for she is the flower of his heart and nothing will keep him from her.”

 

“In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range”

 

“When the dogs returned, the Senator gave them treats from his pocket, and Jun Do understood that in communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.”

 

“I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do. Is it true you’re given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself? Is it true that you labor for no higher purpose than paper money? What is California, this place you come from? I have never seen a picture. What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives? Where does a woman go with her children on Sunday afternoons, and if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement? With whom would she curry favor to ensure her children got the best Youth Troop leader?”

 

“It’s called a gui-tar. It’s used to perform American rural music. It’s said to be especially popular in Texas,” he told her. “It’s also the instrument of choice for playing ‘the blues,’ which is a form of American music that chronicles the pain caused by poor decision making.”

 

“Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn’t matter what they were about. It didn’t matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack—if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous.”

 

“It’s called a gui-tar. It’s used to perform American rural music. It’s said to be especially popular in Texas,” he told her. “It’s also the instrument of choice for playing ‘the blues,’ which is a form of American music that chronicles the pain caused by poor decision making.”

 

“Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn’t matter what they were about. It didn’t matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack—if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous.”

 

My Take

The Orphan Master’s Son is a depressing, yet intriguing, book.  Depressing because author Adam Johnson takes you deep inside the violent, arbitrary and dehumanizing world of North Korea where even young children are fodder for the ruthless, totalitarian machine of the government.  In 2018, it is remarkable that a place like North Korea exists.  While the all encompassing suffering imposed on the people of North Korea is hard to read about, Johnson interlaces it with a captivating story of one man’s response to crushing dehumanization.  He even manages to interject a little romance into his grim tale.  Not hard to see why this book earned a Pulitizer Prize.

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252. Young Jane Young

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Gabrielle Zevin

Genre:  Fiction

294 pages, published August 22, 2017

Reading Format:  e-Book

Summary

Young Jane Young is the fictional story of Aviva Grossman, a young Congressional intern in Florida whose life is ruined after she has an affair with her married boss, a beloved Congressman and blogs about it. When the affair becomes front page news, Aviva is the recipient of public scorn and ridicule.  After a period of depression, she leaves Florida and reinvents herself in Maine as a wedding planner and raises a daughter on her own.  When she decides to run for public office herself, her long past mistake comes back to haunt her again.

 

Quotes 

“Maybe you survive cancer, maybe you survive the Holocaust, but life’ll get you every time.”

 

“It’s the special privilege of youth to make mistakes.”

 

“When someone tells you, ‘it’s not what it looks like,’ it’s almost always exactly what it looks like.”

 

“The key to happiness in life is knowing when to keep your mouth shut.”

 

“Anticipating the worst doesn’t provide insurance from the worst happening.”

 

“The only past you have a right to know about is your own.”

 

“Later, you yell at your mother, but you know it isn’t her fault. You yell at her because she’s there and because she’s your mother and she’ll take it.”

 

“When you have much, you must accept that you could someday have little.”

 

“Because the things we don’t have are sadder than the things we have. Because the things we don’t have exist in our imaginations, where they are perfect.”

 

“I am ‘neurotic.’ ‘Neurotic’ means ‘I think about things until I am sick.’“

 

My Take

Young Jane Young was a quick and fun read.  I was drawn in by Zevin’s wry and humorous writing style as well as her keen insights on the human condition.  I would definitely be interested in other books by this writer. If you are looking for a good beach or vacation read, this is it.

 

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250. And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Fredrik Backman

Genre:  Fiction, Short Stories, Novella

97 pages, published November 1, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Bestselling author Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove and Bear Town) has written a moving, poignant short novella about the end of life transition faced by the elderly through the characters of Grandpa and his grandson Noah.

 

Quotes 

“Our teacher made us write a story about what we want to be when we’re big,” Noah tells him.

“What did you write?”

“I wrote that I wanted to concentrate on being little first.”

“That’s a very good answer.”

“Isn’t it? I would rather be old than a grown-up. All grown-ups are angry, it’s just children and old people who laugh.”

“Did you write that?”

“Yes.”

“What did your teacher say?”

“She said I hadn’t understood the task.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said she hadn’t understood my answer.”         

 

“Those who hasten to live are in a hurry to miss.”

 

“Isn’t that the best of all life’s ages, an old man thinks as he looks at his grandchild. When a boy is just big enough to know how the world works but still young enough to refuse to accept it.”

 

“You were a busy man, ” she whispers, regret filling every word because she knows she bears the same guilt.

“And now Ted is a busy man,” he says.

But the universe gave you both Noah. He’s the bridge between you. That’s why we get the chance to spoil our grandchildren, because by doing that we’re apologizing to our children.”

 

“Almost all grown adults walk around full of regret over a good-bye they wish they’d been able to go back and say better.”

 

“…this would be my greatest fear: imagination giving up before the body does. I guess I’m not alone in this. Humans are a strange breed in the way our fear of getting old seems to be even greater than our fear of dying.”

 

My Take

Having really enjoyed Fredrick Backman’s A Man Called Ove and Bear Town, I was looking forward to listening to the audio version of this short novella.  It did not disappoint.  Poignant, sweet, heartwarming, and sad.  It makes you think about how wonderful life is and how sad it will be say goodbye at the end.

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