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555. Seeing Further: Ideas, Endeavours, Discoveries and Disputes — The Story of Science Through 350 Years of the Royal Society

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Art Drake

Author:    Bill Bryson (Editor, Introduction), James Gleick (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Henry Petroski (Contributor), Georgina Ferrey (Contributor), Steve Jones (Contributor), Philip Ball (Contributor), Paul C.W. Davies (Contributor), Ian Stewart (Contributor), John D. Barrow (Contributor), Oliver Morton (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Maggie Gee (Contributor), Stephen H. Schneider (Contributor), Margaret Atwood (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Gregory Benford (Contributor), Martin J. Rees (Contributor), Margaret Wertheim (Contributor), Neal Stephenson (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Rebecca Goldstein (Contributor), Simon Schaffer (Contributor), Richard Holmes (Contributor), Richard Fortey (Contributor), Richard Dawkins

Genre:   Non Fiction, History, Essays, Science, Nature

490 pages, published 2010

Reading Format:   e-book on Hoopla

Summary

Edited and introduced by Bill Bryson, and with contributions from Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, David Attenborough, Martin Rees and Richard Fortey, Seeing Further was compiled to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society.  The Society was started after a small audience listened to a lecture by  twenty-eight year old Christopher Wren on astronomy with the intention of promoting the accumulation of useful knowledge.  Since its inception, the

Royal Society has fostered scientific exploration and discovery and includes Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Thomas Bayes, Albert Einstein, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Joseph Banks, Humphry Davy, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, John Locke, and Alexander Fleming as fellows.  Members of the Royal Society have split the atom, discovered the double helix, the electron, the computer and the World Wide Web. In short, it is has played an enormous role in the creation of modern science.

Quotes 

“We are not only what we do, we are also what we imagine.”

 

 “Each mobile phone today – indeed, each washing machine – has more computing power than NASA could deploy on the Apollo programme.”

 

“Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.”

 

“Human memories are short and inaccurate.”

 

“Almost all the energy that now comes from within the Earth was put there, in one form or another, at the time of its creation (a tiny amount is now added by the flexing of the planet under the tides of Moon and Sun, but it is the merest smidgen).”

 

 “The Earth thus started off with vast supplies of heat inside it, and a rocky planet, like any other rock, takes a long time to cool down. Stones in a campfire may still be hot the morning after; a stone the size of the Earth can hold heat for billions of years.”

 

“The upward flow of ancient heat to the Earth’s surface is measured in tens of milliwatts per square metre; the flow from the Sun above is measured in hundreds of watts per square metre.”

 

“The amount of energy actually liberated in the burning of these fossil fuels is tiny by planetary scales – ten terawatts or so a year, not that much more than the nuga-tory contribution made by the tides. But the side effects are huge.”

“The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so forth, all the way up to psychology, sociology – and the economists in the penthouse.”

 

“A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science. There is nothing wrong”

 

 “To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet’s

 

“A quick Google search reveals there to be seven, ten, five, four or eight ‘years to save the planet’, depending on your headline writer and expert of choice (‘Eleven years to save the planet’ seems at the moment a rallying cry still up for grabs).”

 

“And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.”

 

“Very little arrives (those asteroid impacts are few and far between), and only a whisper of gas escapes. Everything else must be endlessly recycled: and so it is. The rain becomes the ocean and the ocean becomes the rain, the mountains are ground down to cover the sea-floors with silt, ancient silts rise up to make new mountains.”

 

“There is energy of all sorts flowing through our world; it is not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity, new ways to align our needs and the planet’s behaviours.”

 

“As the Bhagavad Gita says, ‘There never was a time when I was not . . . there will never be a time when I will cease to be.’ Since time and space began together – as both St Augustine and the big bang attest – the Bhagavad Gita has a point. The chicken and the egg arrived at the same time.”

 

“Bacon’s dichotomy is still germane today: a former President of the Royal Society, George Porter, encapsulated it by the maxim ‘there are two kinds of science, applied and not yet applied’.”

 

“It may seem topsy-turvy that cosmologists can speak confidently about galaxies billions of light years away, whereas theories of diet and child rearing – issues that everyone cares about – are still tentative and controversial.”

 

“For minds and cogitation are, to Leibniz, the ultimate reality, and unless the minds have free will, they are not minds at all but physical mechanisms numbly obeying deterministic rules.”

 

“It’s easy to make bricks, but making houses requires far more than throwing a pile of bricks in the air.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and enjoyed several books by Bill Bryson, I was looking forward to this one.  Unfortunately, Bryson only serves as the Editor and contributes a brief introduction.  Each chapter is written by a different scientific or literary luminary and focuses on some aspect of life related to the Royal Society.  Some are very interesting and some are incredibly dense, causing my eyes to glaze over.  If you are interested in science, you may like this book but I recommend an ala carte approach.

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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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477. Notes from a Small Island

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Bill Bryson

Genre:   Non Fiction, Travel, Foreign, Humor, Memoir, Essays

324 pages, published May 28, 1997

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Notes from a Small Island is author Bill Bryson’s take on the two decades that he spent living in the United Kingdom.

Quotes 

“I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, ‘Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!’ Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I’ll tell you that.”

 

“Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad – Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but’, people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays – every bit of it.  What a wondrous place this was – crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? (‘Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.’) What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners’ Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course.  How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state – in short, did nearly everything right – and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things – to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view.  All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.”

 

“The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.”

 

“Is it raining out?’ the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. ‘No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.”

 

“To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one’s mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright”

 

“…it occurred to me, not for the first time, what a remarkably small world Britain is. That is its glory, you see–that it manages at once to be intimate and small scale, and at the same time packed to bursting with incident and interest. I am constantly filled with admiration at this–at the way you can wander through a town like Oxford and in the space of a few hundred yards pass the home of Christopher Wren, the buildings where Halley found his comet and Boyle his first law, the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, the meadow where Lewis Carroll strolled; or how you can stand on Snow’s Hill at Windsor and see, in a single sweep, Windsor Castle, the playing fields of Eton, the churchyard where Gray wrote his “Elegy,” the site where The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed. Can there anywhere on earth be, in such a modest span, a landscape more packed with centuries of busy, productive attainment?”

 

“When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.”

 

“The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course, the British are all aware, in an abstract sort of way, that there is a substantial landmass called Europe nearby and that from time to time it is necessary to go over there to give old Jerry a drubbing or have a holiday in the sun, but it’s not nearby in any meaningful sense in the way that, say, Disney World is.”

 

“It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource.”

 

“I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York—and even New York can’t touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more courteous inhabitants than any other large city in the world.”

 

“One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to ‘bugger off’ to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.”

 

My Take

Like Bryson, I am a committed Anglophile and agree with him that London is the best city on earth.  I enjoyed his insights and witticisms as he recounted the twenty years he spent living in the UK.  Reading this book made me want to plan another trip that special place.

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473. Better

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Atul Gawande

Genre:   Non Fiction, Health, Medicine, Science, Memoir, Essays

273 pages, published April 3, 2007

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

In Better, surgeon and author Atul Gawande explores different aspects of medical care (hygiene, obstetrics, medical malpractice, battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, doctor assisted administration of the death penalty, the treatment of polio in India) and explores how to bring improvements to different systems.

Quotes 

“Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.”

 

“People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as “the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.”… Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.”

 

“The seemingly easiest and most sensible rule for a doctor to follow is: Always Fight. Always look for what more you could do.”

 

“We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.”

 

“The hardest question for anyone who takes responsibility for what he or she does is, What if I turn out to be average?”

 

“Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice.”

 

“Indeed, the scientific effort to improve performance in medicine—an effort that at present gets only a miniscule portion of scientific budgets—can arguably save more lives in the next decade than bench science, more lives than research on the genome, stem cell therapy, cancer vaccines, and all the other laboratory work we hear about in the news.”

 

“Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from deliberate, even obsessive, reflection on failure and a constant searching for new solutions.”

“We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right – one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.”

 

“Human birth…is a solution to an evolutionary problem: how a mammal can walk upright, which requires a small, fixed, bony pelvis, and also possess a large brain, which entails a baby whose head is too big to fit through that small pelvis…in a sense, all human mothers give birth prematurely. Other mammals are born mature enough to walk and seek food within hours; our newborns are small and helpless for months.”

 

“Betterment is perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only human ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one’s life is bound up in others’ and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two It is to live a life of responsibility. The question then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.”

 

My Take

I always think the mark of a good non fiction book is how much I learned from reading it.  Well, I learned a lot about modern medicine after reading Better.   It also didn’t hurt that Atul Gawande (author of Being Mortal) is a talented writer with something to say.

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462. In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Adam Carolla

Genre:   Non Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Cultural, Politics, Essays

256 pages, published November 2, 2010

Reading Format:  e- Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks is basically a humorous rant by Adam Carolla against many things PC.  He rips into an absurd culture that demonizes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, turned the nation’s bathrooms into a free-for-all, and puts its citizens at the mercy of a bunch of minimum wagers with axes to grind.

Quotes 

“My feeling is this whole country is founded on the principle of ‘if you are not hurting anyone, and you’re not fucking with someone else’s shit, and you are paying your taxes, you should be able to just do what you want to do.’ It’s the freedom and the independence.”

 

“Fixing your fucked-up life is not government’s job. Handling the stuff that people can’t do themselves—like war—is.”

 

“The government is a giant corporation with no competition that is constantly trying to keep you off balance so it can siphon more money from you.”

 

“I don’t know why I seem to be the only one who understands that when the government provides something for free—whether it’s food, housing, or health care—there is a human cost. The government may be handing you a free block of cheese but they are taking away your motivation to get a job and buy your own f***ing cheese. And what more powerful motivator is there to get up, get work, and get insurance than the fact that not having it could literally kill you?”

 

“But our leaders can’t tell the truth. We won’t let them. We’ve created a society where the politicians aren’t allowed to criticize the people. There’s no tough love coming out of the White House or Congress. They’ve gone from leaders and legislators to wedding caterers. If they want to keep the gig, they better give us what we want.”

 

“Humans need challenges to overcome, just like a muscle needs resistance to grow. In a zero-gravity environment, an astronaut’s muscles atrophy because there is no resistance. The government giving you a bunch of handouts and living your life for you is the equivalent of doing push-ups in outer space. Big government is like the void of space—it’s massive, constantly expanding, and if we immerse ourselves in it, we’ll simply wither away.”

 

“I also remember it was Sunday night because that was the time I felt most depressed and vulnerable. Somehow have a moment to contemplate the miserable, low-paying week that lay ahead was more painful than living it.”

 

“Until you get the family unit back together, we have no hope and we’ll never dig ourselves out of this hole. No matter how great the school is, how excellent the teachers are, how many computers, field trips, or other window dressing there is, until you have intact families that give a s***, we’re doomed. If you have chalk, pencils, and a roof that doesn’t leak, you’ve got a school. Back in the day people would do stuff by candlelight on the prairie and are a f***load smarter than kids now despite all the iPads and online homework. Why? Because if they didn’t read their assignment, their parents would take the ruler they were supposed to be using for that assignment and smack them with it. We don’t need to keep throwing money at the problem, we need to throw parents at the problem.”

 

“Everything seems overwhelming when you stand back and look at the totality of it. I build a lot of stuff and it would all seem impossible if I didn’t break it down piece by piece, stage by stage. The best gift you can give yourself is some drive–that thing inside of you that gets you out the door to the gym, job interviews, and dates. The believe-in-yourself adage is grossly overrated.”

 

“I am not agnostic. I am atheist. I don’t think there is no God; I know there’s no God. I know there’s no God the same way I know many other laws in our universe. I know there’s no God and I know most of the world knows that as well. They just won’t admit it because there’s another thing they know. They know they’re going to die and it freaks them out. So most people don’t have the courage to admit there’s no God and they know it. They feel it. They try to suppress it. And if you bring it up they get angry because it freaks them out.”

 

“As I’ve often said, this is the biggest problem we have in our society—unwanted kids. If we solve this problem we solve all the other problems. So we have to start judging. As I said before, we judge smokers more harshly than we judge deadbeat dads in our current society. Seriously, how many antismoking PSAs have you seen this week vs. ones saying raise your kids, or don’t have kids if you can’t afford them? And what’s hurting our society more? People need to see that asshole and call him an asshole so maybe other people thinking about being assholes wouldn’t become assholes. We stopped judging people a long time ago because the idiots on the left told us everyone is the same and that we couldn’t do that. We need to bring back judging.”

 

“This silliness always starts with celebrities and then spreads to the common folk.”

 

“You should never say to a superior, “I did my best,” when you fuck up, because you are then declaring you are a fuckup. Your best is fucking up. If that’s the case I’d hate to see you on a bad day when you were only putting in 50 percent. The answer is not “I did my best,” it’s “I’ll do better.”

 

“Alaska seems like the most rough-and-tumble spot in the world. Everyone there seems to be running from something in the Lower 48, whether it’s the law, the tax man, or their ex. Alaska’s where you go to forget your past, especially when you owe your past a shitload in child support. The state motto should be “Love fishing but hate your kids? Alaska.” Forget the Jackass movies. I’d like to do a hidden-camera show where we get a guy with a salt-and-pepper mustache, put him in an ATF windbreaker, have him walk into any Alaska bar or honky-tonk after quitting time, and say, “I have a warrant for . . .” and just watch everyone jump out the window. It’s never “I was born and raised in Alaska, lived here my whole life.” It’s usually something like, “My business partner faked his own death and then tried to kill me, but that was before my wife had her gender reassignment . . .” Basically Alaska is the cold-weather Florida. It’s Florida without the Jews. The state capital should be spelled “Jew? NO!”

 

“Being a depressed hippie is a lose-lose. It would be like if a rice cake had the caloric content of a MoonPie.”

 

“My son I worry about. I’m pretty sure he’s gonna be gay. At this point I’m just hoping he’s not a bottom. Sorry to sound closed-minded and uptight, but let’s face it, no dad wants his son to be gay. Not only do you get no grandkids, but I’m sure high school is no picnic for a fifteen-year-old gay boy. On the other hand, maybe I’m just viewing this through the bifocals of an old heterosexual dude. The way things are going, my son will probably get his ass kicked for not being gay. ‘Carolla thinks he’s too good to suck cock. Come on boys, lets get him.”

 

“You measure a good song the same way you measure architecture, fashion, or any other artistic endeavor. Time. You know when you see a picture of yourself from the eighties with a horrible hairdo and some stone-washed jeans and you think, “How embarrassing—what the fuck was I thinking? Why didn’t somebody stop me?” It’s the same thing Mick Jagger and David Bowie should be thinking every time they hear their cover of “Dancing in the Streets.” The point is, at the time it seemed like a good idea, just like kitchens with burnt-orange Formica and avocado appliances, den walls covered with fake brick paneling, and segregation—all horrible decisions that we now universally recognize as wrong. But somehow when it comes to music, we can’t just admit we made a mistake with “Emotional Rescue.” There’s always some dick who defends the past. “Hey, man, I lost my virginity to ‘Careless Whisper.’ ” I’m sure there was somebody who got laid for the first time on 9/11 but they don’t get a boner when they see the footage of the planes going into the tower.”

 

My Take

While not quite as good as the classic Not Taco Bell Material, I mostly enjoyed reading In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks, Adam Carolla’s anti-PC rant.  A bit repetitive at times, but there are some true nuggets of comedy gold.

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416. Do You Mind If I Cancel? (Things That Still Annoy Me)

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Gary Janetti

Genre:   Nonfiction, Humor, Memoir, Essays

159 pages, published October 22, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Do You Mind If I Cancel?  is a humorous memoir of essays by Gary Janetti, a television writer and producer for some of the most popular television comedies of all time.

Quotes 

“Let’s see, what else? Don’t go into debt over clothes. Hug your dogs while you have them. Know that you can skip most anything. You will fall in love eventually. Remember that. Also, the things you like aren’t weird. Don’t worry about being normal. It’s an awful thing to aspire to.”

“You will derive much satisfaction in later life simply by shooting looks at people.”

 

“This is also very important. Never take the first table they offer you in a restaurant. Don’t even start walking with the host until you know where you’re going. “What table were you thinking of giving us?” always lets them know you mean business right off the bat. Never sit by the door, near a waiter station, or across from the bathroom. Always take the seat facing out to the room. If there is a booth available you definitely want that.”

 

“I’d go through the swinging doors into the kitchen, hunch over the trash can and begin shoveling the uneaten food into my mouth as fast as I could. When the door would once again swing open I’d look up, frozen in fear, with half a baked potato sticking out of my mouth and when I’d see it was just another waiter I’d resume my pose over the trash can and continue frantically shoveling it down my throat. Raccoons had more dignity than I did.”

 

My Take

I gave this book a rare 4 ½ stars because there were parts of it that were so funny that I couldn’t stop laughing.  In fact, I laughed so hard that my sides actually hurt.  That is a rare thing and should be rewarded.

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412. The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Marina Keegan

Genre:   Nonfiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Essays, Memoir

208 pages, published April 8, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Opposite of Loneliness is a collection of essays written by Marina Keegan , a talented young writer whose title essay captured the world’s attention in 2012.   Tragically, five days after her graduation from Yale, Keegan died in a car crash.  The 22 year old had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker.  The essays and stories included in The Opposite of Loneliness give voice to the struggles young people confront as they try to figure out their place in the world.

Quotes 

“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life.”

 

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over.”

 

“We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.”

 

“We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not loose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

 

“I want enough time to be in love with everything . . .”

 

“I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There’s less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting to involved.”

 

“And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short.”

 

“something about the stillness or my state of mind reminded me of the world’s remarkable capacity to carry on in every place at once.”

 

“We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves.”

 

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating from college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

 

“I will live for love, and the rest will take care of itself.”

 

“I blame the Internet. Its inconsiderate inclusion of everything.Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning.  At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don’t want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO.”

 

“The middle of the universe is tonight, is here, And everything behind is a sunk cost.”

 

My Take

While I enjoyed reading some of the essays in The Opposite of Loneliness, it is really written for a younger generation than me.  Keegan is also a bit uneven.  Some of her work is quite good, but other essays not so much.

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408. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   David Foster Wallace

Genre:   Nonfiction, Essays, Humor, Memoir

353 pages, published February 2, 1998

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

This book by the much praised David Foster Wallace is a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling on a Caribbean cruise.

Quotes 

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”

 

“I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.”

 

“Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”

 

“I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.”

 

“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable–if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”

 

“One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? — that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow? — that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit?”

 

“Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.”

 

“I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying. One of my basic goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that’s extremely easy to terrify.”

 

“Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we find appealing. We try to see ourselves in them. The same I.D.-relation, however, also means that we try to see them in ourselves. When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it’s less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with. Not only does this cause some angst personally, but the angst increases because, nationally, everybody else is absorbing six-hour doses and identifying with pretty people and valuing prettiness more, too. This very personal anxiety about our prettiness has become a national phenomenon with national consequences.”

 

“How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”? How is one to be bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century Americans’ biggest fear was of anarchist and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.”

 

“….basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste.”

 

“Can you “choose” something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours?”

 

My Take

While I had heard of David Foster Wallace of Infinite Jest fame, I had never read his writing.  Thus, when I saw A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again recommended as part of best of the nonfiction books of the past 30 years, I decided to give it a try.   Wallace is a unique and talented voice and made me think about certain things in a new way.  His essay on the cruise vacation also had some very funny moments.  However, other parts of the book were a bit too dense for me and more of an acquired taste.

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358. Southern Lady Code

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Helen Ellis

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

224 pages, published April 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Southern Lady Code is a collection of 23 essays by Helen Ellis, a Southern woman living in New York City.  She takes on topics such as marriage, manners, thank-you notes, ghosts, gunshots, gynecology, and the art of living life as a Southern Lady.

Quotes 

“One of Mama’s parenting mantras was: “Oh, Helen Michelle, I have yet to begin to embarrass you.”

 

“If you don’t know what to do with the rest of your life, make your bed. If you’re going to be a couch potato, at least fluff the pillows. If you can’t afford pearls, red nail polish is your best accessory. If you don’t have time to do your nails, smile and stand up straight.”

 

“Mama says, ” Helen Michelle, a lot of women have trouble saying no and then find themselves in worse situations because they were afraid of being rude. So, if you have trouble saying no, say ‘No, thank you.’ Let’s practice.”

 

“No fairy tale begins: “Once upon a time, he blindfolded me in the back of a car.” No fantasy suite has another woman’s hair clogging the drains. A suitcase full of gowns doesn’t make you a princess. Be careful what you wish for, Cinderella’s house was infested with mice. If a man doesn’t kiss you, he doesn’t want to kiss you. If a man doesn’t kiss you on the mouth, he doesn’t find you attractive. A fist bump is not a kiss. An ass pat is not a kiss. Don’t trust a man who keeps your kisses a secret.”

 

“Because it turns out, “If it happens, it happens” is Southern Lady Code for we don’t want kids.” 

My Take

A fun, fluffy diversion.  I especially enjoyed the story of how the author’s parents staged a home invasion when she was a teenager as a party trick to see what she and her friends remembered.

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107. Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Melissa Byers

Author:   David Sedaris

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Essays, Memoir, Humor

275 pages, published April 23, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

An eclectic collection of essays from David Sedaris, an eminent humorist, which cover different eras in his life, from his time as a child in swim competitions fruitlessly trying to impress his dad to his daily routine of picking up trash around the English countryside to his surprisingly pleasant colonoscopy. The essays range from hilariously funny to serious, moving or even depressing.  

 

Quotes

“All these young mothers chauffeuring their volcanic three-year-olds through the grocery store. The child’s name always sounds vaguely presidental, and he or she tends to act accordingly. “Mommy hears what you’re saying about treats,” the woman will say, “But right now she needs you to let go of her hair and put the chocolate-covered Life Savers back where they came from.”  “No!” screams McKinley or Madison, Kennedy or Lincoln or beet-faced baby Reagan. Looking on, I always want to intervene. “Listen,” I’d like to say, “I’m not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won’t stop its crying, but at least now it’ll be doing it for a good reason.”

 

“I don’t know how these couples do it, spend hours each night tucking their kids in, reading them books about misguided kittens or seals who wear uniforms, and then reread them if the child so orders. In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: “Shut up.” That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognized it for what it was: crap. They did not live in a child’s house, we lived in theirs.”

 

“Their house had real hard-cover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.”

 

“As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts.”

 

“Neighbors would pass, and when they honked I’d remember that I was in my Speedo. Then I’d wrap my towel like a skirt around my waist and remind my sisters that this was not girlish but Egyptian, thank you very much.”

 

“There’s a short circuit between my brain and my tongue, thus “Leave me the fuck alone” comes out as “Well, maybe. Sure. I guess I can see your point.”

 

“Of course, the diary helps me as well. ‘That wasn’t your position on July 7, 1991,’ I’ll remind Hugh an hour after we’ve had a fight. I’d have loved to rebut him sooner, but it takes awhile to look these things up.”

 

“It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something’s said by a stranger I’ve been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, “Listen. I’m with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.”

 

“I asked her, dreamily, if we had met, and when she told me that we had not, I gave her a little finger wave, the type a leprechaun might offer a pixie who was floating by on a maple leaf. “Well, hi there,” I whispered.”

 

“Then there are vegans, macrobiotics, and a new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching.”

 

“My first boyfriend was black as well, but that doesn’t prove I’m color-blind, just that I like big butts.”

 

“Drawing attention to Gretchen’s weight was the sort of behavior my mother referred to as ‘stirring the turd,’ and I did it a lot that summer.”

 

“In Japanese and Italian, the response to [“How are you?”] is “I’m fine, and you?” In German it’s answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by “Not so good.”

 

“On a recent flight from Tokyo to Beijing, at around the time that my lunch tray was taken away, I remembered that I needed to learn Mandarin. “Goddamnit,” I whispered. “I knew I forgot something.”

 

“It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it. I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It’s not “Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece” but “Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!”

My Take

I have always enjoyed the humor of David Sedaris, especially his autobiographical essays, and this book was no exception.  His essay on modern parenting compared to his childhood had me trying to read parts of it to my husband Scot, but being unable to do so because I was laughing too hard.  The book was worth reading for that experience alone.

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