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560. Red Island House

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Andrea Lee

Genre:   Fiction, Foreign, Race

288 pages, published March 23, 2021

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Red Island House tells the story of Shay, an African American Literature Professor from Berkley, and her older, Italian husband Senna.  Senna builds Shay an idyllic beach house on the island of Madagascar.  Over several decades, we witness the rise and fall of Shay and Senna as they start and raise a family and then inevitably drift apart.

Quotes 

“Outsiders always want something from Madagascar. The emotion is always the same, whatever the thing desired: whether to establish the country as a locus for fabulous legends … as a source for gemstones, rare butterflies, rosewood, spices, slaves; or as fertile ground to produce sugar … or even – as Hitler once planned – as a convenient penal colony for the exiled Jews of Europe.”

 

My Take

While the book has a few interesting insights, I did not love Red Island House.  I never became invested in any of the characters and the plot was boring.

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557. One Good Turn

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Kate Atkinson

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Foreign, Crime

418 pages, published September 10, 2007

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

One Good Turn takes place during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland when a near-homicidal attack occurs which changes the lives of everyone involved. Jackson Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective, is also an innocent bystander – until he becomes a murder suspect.

Quotes 

“They said love made you strong, but in Louise’s opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn’t get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.”

 

“Love was the hardest thing. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different.”

 

“Julia’s vocabulary was “chock-full” of strangely archaic words – “spiffing,” “crumbs,” “jeepers” – that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls’ annual rather than in Julia’s own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.”

 

“You said five little words to someone–How can I help you?–and it was as if you’d mortgaged your soul out to them.”

 

“The Grim Reaper, Gloria corrected herself – if anyone deserved capital letters it was surely Death. Gloria would rather like to be the Grim Reaper. She wouldn’t necessarily be grim, she suspected she would be quite cheerful (Come along now, don’t make such a fuss).”

 

 

“Gloria regretted that she wasn’t a knitter, she could be producing a useful garment while waiting for Graham to die.”

 

“Boxes within boxes, dolls within dolls, worlds within worlds. Everything was connected. Everything in the whole world.”

 

“One of the things Jackson liked about Julia was her independence, one of the things he didn’t like about Julia was her independence.”

 

“Sometimes you wondered why anyone bothered crawling out of the cradle when what lay ahead was so darn difficult.”

 

 “No one ever warned you about how ferocious mother love could be, let’s face it, no one warned you about anything.”

 

My Take

While I’m a fan of some of Kate Atkinson’s books (Life After Life and A God in Ruins), other ones that I have read (Transcription and Behind the Scenes at the Museum) are a bit clunky.  You can put One Good Turn in the clunky category.  Actually, it is the most clunky Atkinson.  In this case, One Good Turn does not deserve another.  Skip.

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550. The Test

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Sylvain Neuvel

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction, Novella

108 pages, published March 1, 2019

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The Test is a short novella that takes place in the not to distant future of the UK.  Idir, an immigrant from Iran, is taking the 25 question British Citizenship Test.  If he passes, then his entire family will be allowed to stay.  If he fails, they will be sent back to the Middle East.  However, a few questions in and the test takes an unexpected and terrifying turn.

Quotes 

“When faced with a choice, humans almost invariably seek a no-action, no-change option, even when one of the presented alternatives is quantifiably and logically more advantageous.”

 

“System justification is the idea that many of our needs can be satisfied by defending and justifying the status quo. It gives stability to our political and economic systems because people are inherently inclined to defend it. It prevents people at a disadvantage from questioning the system that disadvantages them, makes people buy the inevitability of social inequity, ignore or support policies that hurt them.”

 

“Here the aversion to decision-making is reinforced by a phenomenon called reactance: when we feel that someone, or something, is threatening or eliminating our behavioural freedom, even just limiting our options, our innate reaction is to try to re-establish that freedom.”

 

“People who talk a lot about the environment are always the ones living the farthest away from nature.”

 

“The goal of the values assessment is not the selection of model human beings, but of model citizens. This means the test should favour homogeneity, not atypical attitudes, no matter how commendable they may be.”

 

My Take

An interesting book in parts with some ideas in the middle that made me think about human nature and decision making, especially when under stress.  However, a bit thin on the plot and character development.

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540. Migrations

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Terra McKinish

Author:   Charlotte McConaghy

Genre:  Fiction, Environment

256 pages, published August 4, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Migrations chronicles the life and adventures of bird specialist Franny Stone who leaves behind everything to trek to Greenland so that she can follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica.  Franny joins the crew of a fishing boat as her only hope of completing her mission.  Set in a world where all animal species are quickly becoming extinct, Migrations contemplates the ramifications of a climatic apocalypse.

Quotes 

“It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.”

 

“A life’s impact can be measured by what it gives and what it leaves behind, but it can also be measured by what it steals from the world.”

 

“But there won’t be any more journeys after this one, no more oceans explored. And maybe that’s why I am filled with calm. My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million.”

 

“It’s not life I’m tired of, with its astonishing ocean currents and layers of ice and all the delicate feathers that make up a wing. It’s myself.”

 

“I don’t know how to force the world into a shape I can manage.”

 

“We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it’s precious, and maybe it’s enough, and maybe it’s right that our bodies dissolve into the earth, giving our energy back to it, feeding the little creatures in the ground and giving nutrients to the soil, and maybe it’s right that our consciousness rests. The thought is peaceful.”

 

“It’s impossible to control someone else’s capacity for forgiveness.”

 

“He said our lives mean nothing except as a cycle of regeneration, that we are incomprehensibly brief sparks, just as the animals are, that we are no more important than they are, no more worthy of life than any living creature. That in our self-importance, in our search for meaning, we have forgotten how to share the planet that gave us life.”

 

“We’re the only planet that has oceans. In all the known universe, we’re the only one sitting in the perfect spot for them, not too hot and not too cold, and it’s the only reason we’re alive, because it’s the ocean that creates the oxygen we need to breathe.”

 

“I think there is meaning, and it lives in nurturing, in making life sweeter for ourselves, and for those around us.”

 

“think of the courage of this and I could cry with it, and maybe there’s something in his eyes that suggests he understands a little of that.”

 

“Yours is a terrible will,” he told me once. And that is true, but I have been a casualty of it far longer than he has.”

 

My Take

While there is some interesting imagry and concepts in Migrations, I had a hard time warming up to this book.  Probably because I really didn’t like the self absorbed and self destructive protagonist Franny.  However, others in my book group really liked it, so it might just be me.

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513. This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Melody Warnick

Genre:   Non Fiction, Self Improvement

308 pages, published June 21, 2016

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

In This Is Where You Belong, author Melody Warnick explores ways and methods to  love your new hometown.  She herself had already moved multiple times when her husband’s new job landed her in Blacksburg, Virginia.  Rather than hope this new town would be her family’s perfect fit, she decided to figure out how to fall in love with it.  From that desire and her subsequent actions sprang this book.

Quotes 

“We speak of searching for happiness, of finding contentment, as if these were locations on an atlas, actual places that we could visit if only we had the proper map and the right navigational skills.”

 

“What could I do to feel happier living here? …

  1. Walk more.
  2. Buy local.
  3. Get to know my neighbors.
  4. Do fun stuff.
  5. Explore nature.
  6. Volunteer.
  7. Eat local.
  8. Become more political.
  9. Create something new.
  10. Stay loyal through hard times.”

 

“Faced with developing a brand-new social network [after having moved cross-country to a new city], her approach was: Show up to everything; talk to everyone.”

 

“The more uprooted I felt, the more I longed to be moored in place. In a world that’s supposedly flat, loving where we live still matters, even when we move a lot. Maybe especially when we move a lot.”

 

My Take

My husband Scot and I are considering a cross-country move in a few years from Boulder, Colorado to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  I picked up this book to see if there was any useful advice on how to adapt to a new place and build connections.  While there were a few tips that I will try to use, most of the recommendations are common sense or not germane to us.

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505. The Perfect Wife

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Blake Pierce

Genre:  Fiction, Thriller, Suspense, Mystery

199 pages, published November 13, 2018

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

In The Perfect Wife, after 29 year old criminal profiler in training and newly married Jessie Hunt moves to Orange County, the intrigue begins.  Her husband Kyle insists they join an expensive yacht club with perfect couples that Kyle insists is key to his professional advancement.  Jessie is uncomfortable from the get-go and discovers that dark secrets lurk in her new town and club.  As her world unravels, Jessie fights for her survival.

Quotes 

“got a lot of energy,” she said, trying to sound admiring. “I’d like to bottle it.” “Yeah,” Mel agreed. “He’s a piece of work. But I love him. It’s weird how stuff that annoys other people is charming when it’s your kid. You’ll see what I mean when it happens to you.

 

 “when conducting an investigation, guarding against making assumptions and setting aside preconceptions about people.”

 

My Take

Despite its 4.06 rating on Goodreads, I was disappointed in The Perfect Wife.  Full of clichés and highly implausible scenarios, I was never hooked into the underlying mystery and felt like the ending was especially contrived.  You can skip this one.

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500. Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Don A. Moore

Genre:    Non Fiction, Self Improvement, Psychology, Business

272  pages, published  May 5, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Perfectly Confident is written by Don Moore, an expert on the psychology of decision making at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and examines the importance of confidence while also assessing the harm from underconfidence and overconfidence.  Moore identifies the ways confidence behaves in real life and advises the reader on how to achieve the appropriate level of confidence.

Quotes 

“Ways that psychology research demonstrates we are often overconfident in the decisions we make:

Overestimation – thinking that you are better, faster, or more likely to succeed than you are

Overplacement – the exaggerated belief that you are better than others

Overpercision – excessive faith that you have the right answer.”

 

“Thinking probabilistically, view the future in probabilities and distributions of outcomes as opposed to one specific outcome.”

 

“Ask yourself: WHAT ARE YOU WRONG ABOUT RIGHT NOW?  Calibrating your confidence includes appreciating all the reasons why you might be wrong. Some of the things you currently believe now are WRONG.”

 

“Don’t fall prey to “resulting,” don’t view outcomes as inevitable.”

 

“Why you should start thinking in “expected value.”

 

“Fooling yourself into being more confident can lead you to take risks that may not turn out well. “

 

“Powerful leaders are willing to admit ignorance and bring people to the table who will raise difficult questions.”

 

“Consider thinking of the downside and use a pre-mortem to understand why things have gone horribly awry.”

 

“Capitalize on disagreement. Rather than avoiding or hiding disagreement, try to pull it out to the forefront.”

 

“Ask yourself – what does the other person know that you don’t?”

 

“wisdom is the tolerance for cognitive dissonance.”

 

My Take

While there are a few interesting ideas in Perfectly Confident, on the whole I found it to be a dense read that is better suited to management professionals rather than the average person.  Not many takeaways for improving your confidence or your life.

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485. Uprooted

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   Naomi Novik

Genre:   Fiction, Fantasy

435 pages, published May 19, 2014

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The protagonist of Uprooted is Agnieszka, a village girl who is selected by “The Dragon,” a magical wizard who every ten years chooses a girl to take to his tower.  The Dragon, who protects the villagers against the malevolent and encroaching Wood, trains Agnieszka in his magical ways and enlists her help in fighting the Wood.

Quotes 

“You intolerable lunatic,” he snarled at me, and then he caught my face between his hands and kissed me.”

 

“truth didn’t mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn’t come and listen.”

 

“I’m glad,” I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn’t that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn’t, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn’t.”

 

“I was a glaring blot on the perfection. But I didn’t care: I didn’t feel I owed him beauty.”

 

“I don’t want more sense!” I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. “Not if sense means I’ll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that’s worth holding on to?”

 

“I don’t want more sense!” I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. “Not if sense means I’ll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that’s worth holding on to?”

 

“I leaned against his side, his irritation oddly comforting. After a moment he grudgingly put his arm around me. The deep quiet was already settling back upon the grove, as if all the fire and rage we’d brought could make only a brief interruption in its peace.”

 

“You’ve been inexpressibly lucky,” he said finally. “And inexpressibly mad, although in your case the two seem to be the same thing”

 

“His name tasted of fire and wings, of curling smoke, of subtlety and strength and the rasping whisper of scales.”

 

“Those the walkers carried into the Wood were less lucky. We didn’t know what happened to them, but they came back out sometimes, corrupted in the worst way: smiling and cheerful, unharmed. They seemed almost themselves to anyone who didn’t know them well, and you might spend half a day talking with one of them and never realize anything was wrong, until you found yourself taking up a knife and cutting off your own hand, putting out your own eyes, your own tongue, while they kept talking all the while, smiling, horrible. And then they would take the knife and go inside your house, to your children, while you lay outside blind and choking and helpless even to scream. If someone we loved was taken by the walkers, the only thing we knew to hope for them was death, and it could only be a hope.”

 

My Take

While a lot of people love Uprooted, I am not a fan.  It had way too many action sequences, was often disjointed (incomprehensively jumping from one thing to another) and failed to develop the main characters or their relationship.  A bit of a slog to get through it.

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461. Ninth House

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Leigh Bardugo

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Fantasy

459 pages, published October 8, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Galaxy “Alex” Stern was raised in Los Angeles by a hippie mom and dropped out of school into a world of drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and worse. At 20, she is the sole survivor of a multiple homicide.  Alex is then given a second chance when she is offered the opportunity to attend Yale on a full ride scholarship.  When she arrives in New Haven, she is called upon to use her special skill to see “grays” or ghosts on behalf of Yale’s secret societies.

Quotes 

“All you children playing with fire, looking surprised when the house burns down.”

 

“I let you die. To save myself, I let you die.  That is the danger in keeping company with survivors.”

 

“But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.”

 

“Maybe all rich people asked the wrong questions. For people like Alex, it would never be what do you want. It was always just how much can you get?”

 

“Only two things kept you safe: money and power.”

 

“That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for.”

 

My Take

I had a hard time following the plot of this book and never really engaged with any of the characters.  A mish-mash.  Skip.

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457. The Optimist’s Daughter

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Terra McKinish

Author:   Eudora Welty

Genre:   Fiction

192 pages, published 1972

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Optimist’s Daughter is the story of Laurel McKelva Hand, a young woman who has left the South and returns, years later, to New Orleans, where her father is dying. After his death, she and her foolish young stepmother travel to the small Mississippi town where Laurel grew up.  Alone in the old house, Laurel finally comes to an understanding of the past, herself, and her parents.

Quotes 

“The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.”

 

“She was sent to sleep under a velvety cloak of words, richly patterned and stitched with gold, straight out of a fairy tale, while they went reading on into her dreams.”

 

“And perhaps it didn’t matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight. Between some two people every word is beautiful, or might as well be beautiful.”

 

“You know, sir, this operation is not, in any hands, a hundred percent predictable?”

“Well, I’m an optimist.”

“I didn’t know there were any more such animals,” said Dr. Courtland.

“Never think you’ve seen the last of anything,”

 

“The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.”

 

“It is memory that is the somnambulist. It will come back in its wounds from across the world, like Phil, calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears. It will never be impervious. The memory can be hurt, time and again — but in that may lie its final mercy. As long as it’s vulnerable to the living moment, it lives for us, and while it lives, and while we are able, we can give it up its due.”

 

My Take

Some books stand the test of time (I’m looking at you John Steinbeck) and some do not.  Unfortunately, The Optimist’s Daughter falls into the latter category.  I say this even though it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973 and was a National Book Award Finalist for Fiction that same year.  I found it hard to follow, had little interest in the plot or characters and was bored throughout.

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