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533. A Column of Fire

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ken Follett

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

916 pages, published September 12, 2017

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

A Column of Fire is the third book in Ken Follett’s series of historical fiction that focuses on the town of Kingsbridge, England during succeeding time periods.  In this book, the focus is on the continent wide conflict between Protestants and Catholics.  The story unfolds with a focus on characters from England, France and Spain as they navigate the treacherous mid 1500’s.  In England, after a young Ned Willard is stymied in his desire to marry Margery Fitzgerald by class and religious differences he enlists in service to Princess Elizabeth.  When she becomes queen, all Europe turns against England. Over a turbulent half century, the love between Ned and Margery seems doomed as extremism sparks violence from Edinburgh to Geneva.

Quotes 

“When a man is certain that he knows God’s will, and is resolved to do it regardless of the cost, he is the most dangerous person in the world.”

 

“Some men craved deference; others craved wine, or the bodies of beautiful women, or the monastic life of order and obedience. What did Ned crave? The answer came into his mind with a speed and effortlessness that took him by surprise: justice.”

 

“Trials rarely found men not guilty. The general view was that if a man were innocent he would not have got into trouble in the first place.”

 

“I may yet go through anguish in hell for my sin. But if I had to live that time again I would do the same, to end Margery’s ordeal. I preferred to suffer myself than to know that her agony continued. Her well-being was more important to me than my own. I have learned, during the course of a long life, that that is the meaning of love.”

 

“Changing your beliefs with every change of monarch was called “policy,” and people who did it were “politicians.”

 

“there are no saints in politics, but imperfect people can make the world a better place.”

 

“he thinks the aldermen’s job is to make decisions and then enforce them. When your father was mayor he said that aldermen should rule the town by serving it.” Ned said impatiently: “That sounds like two ways of looking at the same thing.” “It’s not, though,” said his mother. “It’s two different worlds.”

 

“We hanged him in front of Kingsbridge Cathedral. It is the usual place for executions. After all, if you can’t kill a man in front of God’s face you probably shouldn’t kill him at all.”

 

“My father taught us to learn as much as possible of any tongue we came across. He says it’s better than money in the bank.”

 

“The simple idea that people should be allowed to worship as they wished caused more suffering than the ten plagues of Egypt.”

 

“Elizabeth’s true attitude was probably that of someone who hears two drunks fighting in the street at night: it did not matter who won so long as neither tried to get into the house.”

 

My Take

With his engaging style that effortlessly weaves historical figures into compelling stories, I always find Ken Follett a pleasure to read and A Column of Fire is no exception.  I had previously read several authors’ take on the frought Elizabethan era, but gained some new information and insights from Follett’s book.  I also found myself involved with the characters and often kept playing the audio book to see what would happen next.  If you like this book, then check out the rest of the Kingsbridge series:  The Pillars of the Earth, World Without End and The Evening and the Morning.  All are excellent.

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527. The Evening and the Morning

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ken Follett

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

913 pages, published September 15, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Evening and the Morning is a prequel to Ken Follett’s very popular Pillars of the Earth series which center on life in the medieval town of Kingsbridge, England.  Set in 997 CE, it starts with the pillaging of a coastal English town by the ruthless Vikings.  A young Edgar, who is a skilled boatmaker, survives along with his mother and two brothers.  They start over as farmers in the town that will become Kingsbridge. Around the same time, Lady Ragna, a Norman noblewoman comes to England to marry Wielf, the man she loves.   Finally, we follow the story of Aldred, a monk who dreams of transforming his humble abbey into a center of learning.  The lives of Edgar, Ragna and Aldred intertwine to illuminate life in England during the end of the Dark Ages.

Quotes 

“In dog philosophy it was always better to go somewhere than to be left behind.”

 

“Ma and Pa had taught their sons to keep themselves fresh by bathing at least once a year.”

 

“And so, Aldred thought, great ones sin with impunity while lesser men are brutally chastised.”

 

“And that would be sufficient, if we lived in a world that was ruled by laws.” Aldred sat on a stool, leaned forward, and spoke quietly. “But the man matters more than the law, as you know.”

 

“in the end there’s no way to get rich crops out of poor earth.”

 

 “Coming to Glastonbury was like visiting the grave of his youth.”

 

 “When the Roman Empire declined, Britain went backward. As the Roman villas crumbled, the people built one-room wooden dwellings without chimneys. The technology of Roman pottery—important for storing food—was mostly lost. Literacy declined. This period is sometimes called the Dark Ages, and progress was painfully slow for five hundred years. Then, at last, things started to change”

 

“In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Aldred felt he could spend his life trying to comprehend that mystery.”

 

My Take

Having thoroughly enjoyed The Pillars of the Earth trilogy, I looked forward to reading Ken Follett’s prequel to the series.  The Evening and the Morning did not disappoint.  Well developed and intriguing characters interwoven with historical events make for a captivating tale in the hands of the master storyteller Follett.  Well worth reading!

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523. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Genre:   Fiction, Young Adult

359 pages, published February 21, 2012

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe tells the story of teenage friends Aristotle,an angry teen with a brother in prison, and Dante, the loner child of a professor who is gay.  As the boys start spending time together, they discover that they share a special friendship.

Quotes 

“Words were different when they lived inside of you.”

 

“I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get–and never would get.”

 “Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.”

 

“The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.”

 

“I wanted to tell them that I’d never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren’t meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn’t have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. “Dante’s my friend.”

 

 “I hated being volunteered. The problem with my life was that it was someone else’s idea.”

 

 “I renamed myself Ari.  If I switched the letter, my name was Air.  I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.  I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.”

 

“Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you’re thinking but because you’re feeling. Because you’re feeling too much. And you can’t always control the things you do when you’re feeling too much.”

 

 

“I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.”

 

“I had a rule that it was better to be bored by yourself than to be bored with someone else. I pretty much lived by that rule. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have any friends.”

 

 “Scars. A sign that you had been hurt. A sign that you had healed.”

 

“Senior year. And then life. Maybe that’s the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you — but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher’s pens and your parents’ pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn’t that be sweet?”

 

My Take

While I mostly enjoyed Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, I found it to be a bit pedestrian.  As a fiction novel for young adults, I’m not the target audience.  It’s not bad, just not great.

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521. Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Michael Shellenberger

Genre:  Non Fiction, Environmental, Public Policy

272 pages, published June 23, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

In Apocalypse Never, longtime environmentalist Michael Shellenberger addresses the alarmism surrounding climate change and other environmentalist issues.  Responding to these claims and the rising anxiety, including among adolescents, Shellenberger decided to a deep dive and separate science from fiction.  He reports that carbon emissions peaked and have been declining in most developed nations for over a decade, deaths from extreme weather, even in poor nations, declined 80 percent over the last four decades, and the risk of Earth warming to very high temperatures is increasingly unlikely thanks to slowing population growth and abundant natural gas.  Shellenberger also discovered that people who are the most apocalyptic environmentalists also tend to oppose the most obvious solutions like nuclear power.   He believes this is due to the desire among secular people to use environmentalism as a substitute for religion.

Quotes 

“nuclear has saved more than two million lives to date by preventing the deadly air pollution that shortens the lives of seven million people per year.”

 

“The news media also deserves blame for having misrepresented climate change and other environmental problems as apocalyptic, and for having failed to put them in their global, historical, and economic context.”

 

 “Economic development outweighs climate change in the rich world, too.”

 

“Only nuclear, not solar and wind, can provide abundant, reliable, and inexpensive heat.”

 

“All of which raises a question: if nuclear power is so good for the environment and necessary for replacing fossil fuels, why are so many of the people who say they most fear climate change so against it?”

 

“Between 1980 and 2018, U.S. carbon monoxide levels decreased by 83 percent, lead by 99 percent, nitrogen dioxide by 61 percent, ozone by 31 percent, and sulfur dioxide by 91 percent.”

 

“unless we do very, very disruptive actions, people do not want to talk to us.”

 

“Oppenheimer explained that nuclear weapons had created a revolution in foreign policy. No defense against them was possible, only deterrence, or frightening away adversaries through the threat of assured destruction.”

 

“environmentalists were “self-righteous, elitist, neo-Malthusians who call for slow growth or no growth . . . and who would condemn the black underclass, the slum proletariat, and rural blacks, to permanent poverty.”

 

“350.org, the Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF were all accepting money from fossil fuel billionaires Steyer and Bloomberg.”

 

“It is hard to imagine a more “pay-to-play” relationship than the one between Steyer and his grantees. It epitomizes the cynicism of Washington, D.C. And it exposes the news media’s double standard.”

 

“What is inappropriate is accepting fossil fuel funding while attacking others for doing the same. Even less appropriate is lying about it.”

 

“IPCC authors were exaggerating or misrepresenting the science for effect.”

 

“Many of the more worrying impacts of climate change are really symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.”

 

“Happily, nobody saves mountain gorillas, yellow-eyed penguins, and sea turtles because they believe human civilization depends on it. We save them for a simpler reason: we love them.”

 

“Irrational ideas about nature repeatedly creep into the environmental sciences.”

 

“nature gracefully, gradually self-regulates species and environments”

 

“Solar panels require sixteen times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste.”

 

“The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad.  And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.”

 

“people learning about climate change for the first time might understandably believe, upon listening to Lunnon and Thunberg, that climate change is the result of deliberate, malevolent actions. In reality, it is the opposite. Emissions are a by-product of energy consumption, which has been necessary for people to lift themselves, their families, and their societies out of poverty, and achieve human dignity. Given that’s what climate activists have been taught to believe, it’s understandable that so many of them would be so angry.”

 

“Just as the far higher power densities of coal made the industrial revolution possible, the far lower power densities of solar and wind would make today’s high-energy, urbanized, and industrial civilization impossible. And, as we have seen, for some advocates of renewables, that has always been the goal.”

 

My Take

In  Apocalypse Never, longtime environmentalist Michael Shellenberger lays out in painstaking detail how destructive much of the current environmental alarmism is to humanity, especially those humans at the lower rungs who require abundant energy to improve their economic plight.  A bit slow and dense in parts, but still an informative read that challenges the conventional orthodoxy.

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507. The Best of Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Art Drake

Author:    David Sedaris

Genre:  Non Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Essays, Short Stories

387 pages, published November 3, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Best of Me is retrospective compilation of Humorist David Sedaris’ stories and essays from the past twenty-five years.

Quotes 

“A Dutch parent has a decidedly hairier story to relate, telling his children, “Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before going to bed. The former bishop of Turkey will be coming tonight along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in your shoes, they might stuff you into a sack and take you to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don’t know for sure, but we want you to be prepared.”

 

“If you read an essay in Esquire and don’t like it, there could be something wrong with the essay. If it’s in The New Yorker, on the other hand, and you don’t like it, there’s something wrong with you.”

 

“It’s pathetic how much significance I attach to the Times puzzle, which is easy on Monday and gets progressively harder as the week advances. I’ll spend fourteen hours finishing the Friday, and then I’ll wave it in someone’s face and demand that he acknowledge my superior intelligence. I think it means that I’m smarter than the next guy, but all it really means is that I don’t have a life.”

 

“Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings”

 

“If you read someone else’s diary, you get what you deserve.”

 

“On Undecided Voter​s: “To put them in perspective, I think​ of being​ on an airplane.​ The flight attendant comes​ down the aisle​ with her food cart and, eventually,​ parks​ it beside my seat.​ “Can I inter​est you in the chick​en?​” she asks.​ “Or would​ you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broke​n glass​ in it?”  To be undecided in this elect​ion is to pause​ for a moment and then ask how the chick​en is cooked.”

 

“I said that Santa no longer traffics in coal. Instead, if you’re bad he comes to your house and steals things.”

 

“Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable.”

 

“I often see people on the streets dressed as objects and handing out leaflets. I tend to avoid leaflets but it breaks my heart to see a grown man dressed as a taco. So, if there is a costume involved, I tend not only to accept the leaflet, but to accept it graciously, saying, “Thank you so much,” and thinking, You poor, pathetic son of a bitch. I don’t know what you have but I hope I never catch it.”

 

“On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use. From the dog owners I learned “Lie down,” “Shut up,” and “Who shit on this carpet?” The couple across the road taught me to ask questions correctly, and the grocer taught me to count. Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. “Is thems the thoughts of cows?” I’d ask the butcher, pointing to the calves’ brains displayed in the front window. “I want me some lamb chop with handles on ’em.”

 

“When a hurricane damaged my father’s house, my brother rushed over with a gas grill, three coolers of beer, and an enormous Fuck-It Bucket – a plastic pail filled with jawbreakers and bite-size candy bars. (“When shit brings you down, just say ‘fuck it,’ and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.”

 

“Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.”

 

 “Hugh consoled me, saying, “Don’t let it get to you. There are plenty of things you’re good at.”

 

When asked for some examples, he listed vacuuming and naming stuffed animals. He says he can probably come up with a few more, but he’ll need some time to think.”

 

“At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.”

“I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to lady crack pipe or good sir dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”

 

My Take

I have long been a fan of writer and humorist David Sedaris.  I was introduced to him back in the mid-90s when my husband Scot and I saw him read his essay The Santaland Diaries where he recounts with side splitting humor his time working as an elf at a major department store in New York.  If you haven’t read it, do so immediately.  The Best of Me, a collection of his best essays and stories, doesn’t include this classic gem which is a real shame.  I’ve read most of Sedaris’ books, including several reviewed on this website (Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls  and Calypso) and found them highly entertaining.  While there are many good choices included in The Best of Me, there are unfortunately some great essays and stories that were omitted.

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501. Interior Chinatown

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Jennifer Lum

Author:   Charles Yu

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Cultural

273  pages, published  January 28, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

In Interior Chinatown, author Charles Yu explores the roles played by Chinese Americans over the last 150 years and touches on issues of race, pop culture, immigration, and assimilation.  His protagonist is Willis Wu who is portrayed as an average Asian man who lives in the Chinatown area of Los Angeles and works at the Golden Palace restaurant where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production.  Willis has a bit part on the show, but dreams of being Kung Fu Guy, the highest aspiration he can imagine for himself.

Quotes 

“There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.”

 

“You’re here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.”

 

“As, everyone knows, water hates poor people. Given the opportunity, water will always find a way to make poor people miserable, typically at the worst time possible.”

 

“The truth is, she’s a weirdo. Just like you were. Are. A glorious, perfectly weird weirdo. Like all kids before they forget how to be exactly how weird they really are. Into whatever they’re into, pure. Before knowing. Before they learn from others how to act. Before they learn they are Asian, or Black, or Brown, or White. Before they learn that all the things they are and about all the things they will never be.”

 

“……cut us off from our families, our history. So we made it our own place – Chinatown. A place for preservation and self-preservation; give them what they feel what’s right, is safe; make it fit the idea of what is out there..Chinatown and indeed being chinese is and always has been, from the very beginning a construction,a performance of features, gestures, culture and exoticism, invention/reinvention of stylization.”

 

“But at the same time, I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins. And letting that define how I see other people. I’m as guilty of it as anyone. Fetishizing Black people and their coolness. Romanticizing White women. Wishing I were a White man. Putting myself into this category.”

 

“Unofficially, we understood. There was a ceiling. Always had been, always would be. Even for him. Even for our hero, there were limits to the dream of assimilation, to how far any of you could make your way into the world of Black and White.”

 

“[Willis is] asking to be treated like an American. A real American. Because, honestly, when you think American, what color do you see? White? Black? We’ve been here two hundred years. Why doesn’t this face register as American?”

 

“She says that telling a love story is something one person does. Being in love takes both of them. Putting her on a pedestal is just a different way of being alone.”

 

“The widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by, and not getting by.”

 

“This is it. The root of it all. The real history of yellow people in America. Two hundred years of being perpetual foreigners.”

 

“Black and White always look good. A lot of it has to do with the lighting, designed to hit their faces just right. Someday you want the light to hit your face like that. To look like the hero. Or for a moment to actually be the hero”

 

“You came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived.”

 

“You wish your face was more—more, something. You don’t know what. Maybe not more. Less. Less flat. Less delicate. More rugged. Your jawline more defined. This face that feels like a mask, that has never felt quite right on you. That reminds you, at odd times, and often after two to four drinks, that you’re Asian. You are Asian! Your brain forgets sometimes. But then your face reminds you.”

 

“Able to pass in any situation as may be required,” she says. “I get it all. Brazilian, Filipina, Mediterranean, Eurasian. Or just a really tan White girl with exotic-looking eyes. Everywhere I go, people think I’m one of them. They want to claim me for their tribe.”

 

“Mr. Wu, is it true that you have an internalized sense of inferiority?

 

That because on the one hand you, for obvious reasons, have not been and can never be fully assimilated into mainstream, i.e., White America— And on the other hand neither do you feel fully justified in claiming solidarity with other historically and currently oppressed groups. That while your community’s experience in the United States has included racism on the personal and the institutional levels, including but not limited to: immigration quotas, actual federal legislation expressly excluding people who look like you from entering the country. Legislation that was in effect for almost a century. Antimiscegenation laws. Discriminatory housing policies. Alien land laws and restrictive covenants. Violation of civil liberties including internment. That despite all of that, you somehow feel that your oppression, because it does not include the original American sin—of slavery—that it will never add up to something equivalent. That the wrongs committed against your ancestors are incommensurate in magnitude with those committed against Black people in America. And whether or not that quantification, whether accurate or not, because of all of this you feel on some level that you maybe can’t even quite verbalize, out of shame or embarrassment, that the validity and volume of your complaints must be calibrated appropriately, must be in proportion to the aggregate suffering of your people.

Your oppression is second-class.”

 

“Cross that gap and everything changes. Being on this side of it means that time becomes your enemy. You don’t grind the day—the day grinds you. With the passing of every month your embarrassment compounds, accumulates with the inevitability of a simple arithmetic truth. X is less than Y, and there’s nothing to be done about that. The daily mail bringing with it fresh dread or relief, but if the latter, only the most temporary kind, restarting the clock on the countdown to the next bill or past-due notice or collection agency call.”

 

 “If you didn’t know it already, now you do: old dudes from rural Taiwan are comfortable with their karaoke and when they do karaoke for some reason they love no one like they love John Denver.”

 

 “Bruce Lee was proof: not all Asian Men were doomed to a life of being Generic. If there was even one guy who had made it, it was at least theoretically possible for the rest. But easy cases make bad law, and Bruce Lee proved too much. He was a living, breathing video game boss-level, a human cheat code, an idealized avatar of Asian-ness and awesomeness permanently set on Expert difficulty. Not a man so much as a personification, not a mortal so much as a deity on loan to you and your kind for a fixed period of time. A flame that burned for all yellow to understand, however briefly, what perfection was like.”

 

My Take

While there are some interesting and entertaining parts of Interior Chinatown, the book just did not do it for me.  Part of the reason is that it is primarily a vehicle of delivering racial grievances (this time on behalf of Asian Americans) and after a year of non stop racial grievances (2020), I’m wearied by more of the same.

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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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497. Troubled Blood

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling)

Genre:   Fiction, Crime, Suspense, Thriller, Mystery

944 pages, published  September 15, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Troubled Blood is the fifth book in J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike detective series.  Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott are hired by a woman whose mother, Margot Bamborough, disappeared forty years ago in 1974 without a trace.  As they investigate this cold case, Strike and Robin encounter tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot be trusted, along with their own long simmering feelings for each other.

Quotes 

“We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.”

 

“Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution.”

 

“Then he closed his eyes, and like millions of his fellow humans, wondered why troubles could never come singly, but in avalanches, so that you became increasingly destabilized with every blow that hit you.”

 

 “. . . she’d seen a flicker of something in his face that wasn’t mere friendship, and they’d hugged, and she’d felt . . . Best not to dwell on that hug, on how like home it had felt, on how a kind of insanity had gripped her at that moment, and she’d imagined him saying ‘come with me’ and known she’d have gone if he had.”

 

“But he was her best friend. This admission, held at bay for so long, caused an almost painful twist in Robin’s heart, not least because she knew it would be impossible ever to tell Strike so.”

 

“But people who fundamentally change are rare, in my experience, because it’s bloody hard work compared to going on a march or waving a flag. Have we met a single person on this case who’s radically different to the person they were forty years ago?”  “I don’t know . . . I think I’ve changed,” said Robin, then felt embarrassed to have said it out loud.  Strike looked at her without smiling for the space it took him to chew and swallow a chip, then said, “Yeah. But you’re exceptional, aren’t you?”

 

 “How could he say, look, I’ve tried not to fancy you since you first took your coat off in this office. I try not to give names to what I feel for you, because I already know it’s too much, and I want peace from the shit that love brings in its wake. I want to be alone, and unburdened, and free.  But I don’t want you to be with anyone else. I don’t want some other bastard to persuade you into a second marriage. I like knowing the possibility’s there, for us to, maybe . . .  Except, it’ll go wrong, of course, because it always goes wrong, because if I were the type for permanence, I’d already be married. And when it goes wrong, I’ll lose you for good, and this thing we’ve built together, which is literally the only good part of my life, my vocation, my pride, my greatest achievement, will be forever fucked, because I won’t find anyone I enjoy running things with, the way I enjoy running them with you, and everything afterward will be tainted by the memory of you.

 

 “If I’ve taken you for granted,” said Strike, “I’m sorry. You’re the best I’ve got.”

 

“I think there are a lot of nutters in the world, and the less we reward them for their nuttery, the better for all of us.”

 

“He was well aware that he hadn’t told Polworth the whole truth about his relationship with Robin Ellacott, which, after all, was nobody else’s business. The truth was that his feelings contained nuances and complications that he preferred not to examine. For instance, he had a tendency, when alone, bored, or low-spirited, to want to hear her voice.”

 

“And there was something more, something highly unusual. Strike had never once made her feel physically uncomfortable. Two of them in the office, for a long time the only workers at the agency, and while Robin was a tall woman, he was far bigger, and he’d never made her feel it, as so many men did . . .”

 

“The roses, which were for Joan, were also for him: they said, you won’t be alone, you have something you’ve built, and all right, it might not be a family, but there are still people who care about you waiting in London. Strike told himself ‘people,’ because there were five names on the card, but he turned away thinking only of Robin.”

 

“. . . Strike explained about his failed attempt to buy Robin perfume, the previous December.

‘ . . . so I asked the assistant, but he kept showing me things with names like . . . I dunno . . . “Shaggable You” . . . ‘  The laugh Robin failed to repress was so loud that people turned to look at her . . .  and I panicked,’ Strike admitted . . .”

 

“Robin was thinking, is this where single people end up, people without children to look out for them, without double incomes? In small boxes, living vicariously through reality stars?”

 

“She’s lived with it for forty years . . . People who live with something that massive stop being able to see it. It’s the backdrop of their lives. It’s only glaringly obvious to everyone else.”

 

My Take

Having read the four previous Cormoran Strike novels ( The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, Career of Evil and Lethal White) I was really looking forward to Troubled Blood.  I was not disappointed.  While J.K. Rowling is adept at spinning an engrossing mystery, this series really shines when it focuses on the protagonists Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacot.  The two are fascinating characters and the “will they, won’t they” dynamic really works.  At 944 pages, Troubled Blood is a commitment to read, but it is well worth the time.

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491. The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s: An Oral History

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Andy Greene

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Cultural, Biography, Humor

464 pages, published  March 24, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Interspersed with quotes from the creators, writers, and actors of The Office, this book is a behind the scenes account of one of the most iconic television shows of the 2000’s.  Readers are invited behind the scenes of their favorite moments and characters. Starting with the original BBC show starring Ricky Gervais, we go through the entire nine-season run in America.

Quotes 

“We’re so divided as a nation, we’re so divided as a world, but the one thing that brings us together always is love and smiles and comedy and an outside family that makes you feel a part of it.”

 

“Even at the peak of its popularity around seasons four and five, The Office never generated ratings even comparable to sitcoms like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, procedural dramas like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and NCIS, or, especially, reality competition shows like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. But bars all over America in 2019 don’t host Dancing with the Stars or NCIS trivia nights. The Big Bang Theory isn’t breaking streaming records on Netflix and teens aren’t bingeing Two and a Half Men on their phones. It’s The Office that has emerged as the most beloved sitcom of the 2000s and just gets bigger with each passing year.”

 

“The only thing that gives me an adrenaline rush is the idea. I wish I could just have the idea, watch it on telly, and not actually have to do anything.”

 

“Oscar Nunez (Oscar Martinez, Seasons 1–9): The great, great, great sitcoms of yore all had a simple premise. It’s character driven. Taxi’s just a fucking taxi place. Cheers is just a bar. That’s all it is. And we were just an office.”

 

“I saw Michael Scott as just socially desperate and yet good-hearted, which is probably how I would, in my darkest moments, describe myself. (Caroline Williams)”

 

“For me, Michael was just lonely. Loneliness is, at least for me, the most universal emotion. (Caroline Williams)”

 

 “What was so amazing about Steve was that as Michael Scott, he could make your skin crawl in one scene by being such a jerk, and such an asshole, and in the very next scene you would weep for him. You bled for the man because he was so blind to his own faults. (Randy Cordray)”

 

“A lot of my friends who have teenagers, they’ve shared with me that they watch it almost as an emotional soother. If they’re in a bad mood, they’ll just pop on The Office and they’ll binge-watch it. (Amy Ryan)”

 

“Larry Wilmore: There was a blog at the time called Television Without Pity. That was Twitter from back then. The Office got a whole section on it and people were pouring out love and opinions for The Office and the fan base really started growing during the season.”

 

My Take

I loved watching The Office when it was originally on TV (including the British version) and I love watching The Office years after it concluded on Netflix, this time with my kids who are huge fans.  It is comedy gold that stands the test of time.  This book is a well written, thorough, informative retrospective of the show and enhances subsequent viewing.

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490. My Dark Vanessa

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Valerie Flores

Author:   Kate Elizabeth Russell

Genre:    Fiction

385  pages, published  March 10, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

My Dark Vanessa  tells the haunting story of 15 year old Vanessa Wye, a fifteen year old girl, and her long term romantic entanglement with Jacob Strane, her 42 year old English teacher a private boarding school.  Author Kate Elizabeth Russell explores the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher and how Vanessa slowly comes to terms with the true nature of the liason.

Quotes 

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.” “I know,” she says. “Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”

 

“People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful.”

“Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.”

 

“Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, ‘I’m going to ruin you.”

 

“To be groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing.”

 

“I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.”

 

“Pathetically in love with you.” As soon as he says this, I become someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has already lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and still thinks I’m worthy of his love. I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet.”

 

“He wants to make sure he’ll always be there, no matter what. He wants to leave his fingerprints all over me, every piece of muscle and bone.”

 

“I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me—breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.”

 

“Strane says I need to contextualize my reluctance to grow up, that everyone my age is drawn to self-victimization. “And that mentality is especially difficult for young women to resist,” he says. “The world has a vested interest in keeping you helpless.” He says as a culture we treat victimhood as an extension of childhood. So when a woman chooses victimhood, she is therefore freed from personal responsibility, which then compels others to take care of her, which is why once a woman chooses victimhood, she will continue to choose it again and again.”

 

“I’m starting to understand that the longer you get away with something, the more reckless you become, until it’s almost as if you want to get caught.”

 

“This, I think, is the cost of telling, even in the guise of fiction. Once you do, it’s the only thing about you anyone will ever care about. It defines you whether you want it to or not.”

 

“Girls in those stories are always victims, and I am not. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what Strane did or didn’t do to me when I was younger. I’m not a victim because I never wanted to be, and If I didn’t want to be, then I’m not. That’s how it works. The difference between rape and sex is state of mind. You can’t rape the willing, right?”

 

“He touched me first, said he wanted to kiss me, told me he loved me. Every first step was taken by him. I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge. But maybe he has to believe that. Maybe there’s a whole list of things he has to believe.”

 

“Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.”

 

“The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.”

 

“Hide all you want, but the truth will always find you.”

 

My Take

While the Lolitaesq premise of My Dark Vanessa is disturbing on many levels, it is an engrossing, page turner that sucks you into its story.  Author Kate Elizabeth Russell does a masterful job of showing the reader how easily this atrocity could happen and how hard it is of protagonist Vanessa Wye to let go of her idealized version of the past.

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