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280. Uncommon Type: Some Stories

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tom Hanks

Genre:  Fiction, Short Stories

405 pages, published October 17, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

A collection of 17 short stories by two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks.  Each story in some way involves a typewriter.

Quotes 

“In the real world (ours) every day in Gotham is a little like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and a lot like Baggage Claim after a long, crowded flight.”

 

“In New York City real estate parlors took your money and lied to you, drug addicts relieved themselves in plain sight, and the Public Library was closed on Mondays.”

 

“Being Anna’s boyfriend was like training to be a Navy SEAL while working full-time in an Amazon fulfillment center in the Oklahoma Panhandle in tornado season. Something was going on every moment of every day. My 2:30 naps were a thing of the past.”

 

“Are you flirting with me?”

“No,” Anna said. “I’m propositioning you. Totally different thing. Flirting is fishing. Maybe you hook up, maybe you don’t. Propositioning is the first step in closing a deal.” 

My Take

A fun read which confirms that Tom Hanks can do more than act.  He is actually a pretty good writer.  I especially enjoyed his story about the bowler who kept bowling perfect games and the Midwestern girl who made it big on Broadway.  Nice to hear the stories read by Tom Hanks.

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276. People of the Book

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Geraldine Brooks

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery

372 pages, published October 1, 2008

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

People of the Book tells the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images.  It begins in 1996 when Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, is offered the exclusive job of analyzing and conserving of the Haggadah which has been rescued from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war.  Intermixed with Hannah’s analysis is the history of the Haggadah at different points in time which trace the book’s journey from its salvation back to its creation which also shines a spotlight on the history of the Jewish people in Europe throughout the centuries.

Quotes 

“Book burnings. Always the forerunners.  Heralds of the stake, the ovens, the mass graves.”

 

“We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don’t have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.”

 

“…The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox.”

 

“I asked once, and the library assistant told me there were more than a hundred thousand books there, and more than sixty million pages of documents. It’s a good number, I think: ten pages for every person who died. A kind of monument in paper for people who have no gravestones.”

 

“I had to remind myself that Islam had once swept north as far as the gates of Vienna; that when the haggadah had been made, the Muslims’ vast empire was the bright light of the Dark Ages, the one place where science and poetry still flourished, where Jews, tortured and killed by Christians, could find a measure of peace.”

 

“…the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You’ve got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything’s humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize ‘the other’–it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists…same old, same old.”

 

“It did not even occur to David to consult Ruti herself about this, or any other matter. Had he done so, he would have been most surprised by the result. He did not realize it, but his love for his daughter marched hand in hand with a kind of contempt for her. He saw his daughter as a kind-hearteed, dutiful, but vaguely pitiable soul. David, like many people, had made the mistake of confusing “meek” with “weak.” 

My Take

I enjoyed People of the Book and learned a lot about Jewish history (which translates to how badly the Jews have been treated throughout history).  Author Geraldine Brooks weaves an engrossing tale that brings history to life.

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273. Before the Fall

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Noah Hawley

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller

401 pages, published May 31, 2016

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

On a foggy summer night, 11 people – 10 privileged, one down-on-his-luck painter – depart Martha’s Vineyard on a private jet headed for New York.  Sixteen minutes later plane has crashed into the ocean.  The only survivors are Scott Burroughs, the painter, and a four-year-old boy who is now the last remaining member of an immensely wealthy and powerful media mogul’s family.   Before the Fall weaves between the aftermath of the crash and the backstories of the passengers and crew members including a Media Mogul and his family, a captain of Wall Street and his wife, a party boy just in from London, a young woman questioning her path in life, and a career pilot.

Quotes 

“In the absence of facts…. we tell ourselves stories.”

 

“It’s hard to be sad when you’re being useful. And he liked that idea. That service to others brought happiness. It was self-involvement that led to depression, to spiraling questions about the meaning of things.”

 

“Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you.  And then it’s over.”

 

“Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.”

 

“You have kids and you think I made you, so we’re the same, but it’s not true. You just get to live with them for a while and maybe help them figure things out.”

 

“It is the job of the human brain to assemble all the input of our world—sights, sounds, smells—into a coherent narrative. This is what memory is, a carefully calibrated story that we make up about our past.”

 

“Anything is possible. Everything is gettable. You just have to want it badly enough.”

 

“Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?”

 

“What’s a handshake, after all, except a socially acceptable way to make sure the other guy doesn’t have a knife behind his back.”

 

“Someone had told her once that mothers existed to blunt the existential loneliness of being a person. If that was true then her biggest maternal responsibility was simply companionship. You bring a child into this fractious, chaotic world out of the heat of your womb, and then spend the next ten years walking beside them while they figure out how to be a person.”

 

“Where the average person appreciates the beauty of surf and waves, Gus, an engineer, sees only practical design. Gravity, plus ocean current, plus wind. Poetry to the common man is a unicorn viewed from the corner of an eye—an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty. To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.”

 

“Never fight tomorrow’s fight today,”

 

“But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire’s account than a dirty single in the torn pocket of an addict.” 

My Take

Having read and enjoyed The Good Father by Noah Hawley (in addition to the Fargo television series which he created), I looked forward to Before the Fall.  I was not disappointed.  In addition to penning a suspenseful mystery, Hawley provides the reader with an examination of human nature and an exploration of existential issues.  All in an entertaining, suspenseful format.

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272. Britt-Marie Was Here

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Fredrik Backman

Genre:  Fiction

324 pages, published May 3, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

When the story begins, Britt-Marie finds herself in a bad place.  Her husband Kent has left her and she must find a job and start over.  The unemployed office places her in charge of the Recreation Center in the just scraping by town of Borg.  Saddled with an obsessive-compulsive personality, Britt-Marie does what she always does:  clean and bring order to disorder.  Over time, her efforts extend to the kids of Borg, a motley lot who are crazy for football (soccer).

Quotes 

“One morning you wake up with more life behind you than in front of you, not being able to understand how it’s happened.”

 

“At a certain age almost all the questions a person asks him or herself are really just about one thing: how should you live your life?”

 

“You have to understand that when one is just standing there looking, then just for a second one is ready to jump. If one does it, one dares to do it. But if one waits, it’ll never happen.”

 

“It’s difficult to know when love blooms; suddenly one day you wake up and it’s in full flower. It works the same way when it wilts—one day it is just too late.”

 

“Because if we don’t forgive those we love, then what is left? What is love if it’s not loving our lovers even when they don’t deserve it?”

 

“An unreasonable amount of paperwork is required these days just to be a human being.”

 

“A human being may not choose her circumstances, but she does choose her actions.”

 

“A few years turned into more years, and more years turned into all years. Years have a habit of behaving like that.”

 

“The reason for her love of maps. It’s half worn away, the dot, and the red color is bleached. Yet it’s there, flung down there on the map halfway between the lower left corner and its center, and next to it is written, “You are here.”

 

“All marriages have their bad sides, because people have weaknesses. If you live with another human being you learn to handle these weaknesses in a variety of ways. For instance, you might take the view that weaknesses are a bit like heavy pieces of furniture, and based on this you must learn to clean around them. To maintain the illusion.”

 

“My mother worked for the social services all her life. She always said that in the middle of all the crap, in the thick of it all, you always had a sunny story turning up. Which makes it all worthwhile.’ The next words that come are smiling. ‘You’re my sunny story, Britt-Marie.”

 

Sometimes it’s easier to go on living, not even knowing who you are, when at least you know precisely where you are while you go on not knowing.”

 

“If you support Tottenham you always give more love than you get back… Tottenham is the worst kind of bad team, because they’re almost good. They always promise that they’re going to be fantastic. They make you hope. So you go on loving them and they carry on finding more and more innovative ways of disappointing you.”

 

“Human beings are the only animals that smile as a gesture of peace, whereas other animals show their teeth as a threat.”

 

“All passion is childish. It’s banal and naive. It’s nothing we learn; it’s instinctive, and so it overwhelms us. Overturns us. It bears us away in a flood. All other emotions belong to earth, but passion inhabits the universe.  That is the reason why passion is worth something, not for what it gives us but for what it demands we risk. Our dignity. The puzzlement of others and their condescending, shaking heads.”

 

“I was under the impression that one became a policeman because one believes in rules and regulations.” “I think Sven became a policeman because he believes in justice.”

 

“You love football because it is instinctive.If a ball comes rolling down the street you give it a punt. You love it for the same reason you fall in love. Because you don’t know how to avoid it.” 

My Take

While I enjoyed Britt-Marie Was Here, it is my least favorite of Fredrik Backman’s books that I have read.  Much better is A Man Called Ove and Beartown.  Nevertheless, Britt-Marie Was Here is worth a read.  Backman’s understanding of human nature and what makes us tick is present as is his ability to create a world that feels real and worth spending time in.

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271. Slam

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Nick Hornby

Genre:  Fiction, Humor

309 pages, published October 16, 2007

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Slam is narrated by Sam, a 16-year-old living in the UK whose life is getting very complicated.  His parents are divorced, he is struggling in school, his best advice comes from a Tony Hawk poster and he has just found out that his ex-girlfriend Alicia is pregnant.

Quotes 

“I hate time. It never does what you want it to.”

 

“When I went back into the kitchen, I wanted to sit on my mum’s lap. I know that sounds stupid and babyish , but I couldn’t help it. On my sixteenth birthday, I didn’t want to be sixteen, or fifteen or anyteen. I wanted to be three or four, and too young to make any kind of mess.”

 

“I’d never really had arguments like this before, arguments I couldn’t understand properly, arguments where both sides were right and wrong all at the same time.”

 

“There are many differences between a baby and an I-Pod. And one of the biggest is, no one going to mug you for your baby.”

 

“Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they’re ugly, but because they’re mad.”

 

“It seems to make a difference to some girls. If you say something that isn’t sexist to the right sort ofgirl, she likes you more. Say one of your mates is going on about how all girls are stupid, and you say ‘not all girls are stupid,’ then it can make you look good. There have to be girls listening, though, obviously. Otherwise it’s a waste of time.”

 

“Seeing as he wasn’t very bright, I was pretty sure that he was going to be good at fighting.”

 

“There was a lot of work to do, and arguments to have, and kids to take care of, and money to find from somewhere, and sleep to lose.

I could do it, though. I could see that.

I wouldn’t be sitting here now if I couldn’t do it, would I?

I think that’s what Tony Hawk was trying to tell me all along.” 

My Take

Having recently read Funny Girl (also by Nick Hornby), I was looking forward to another delightful and fun book.  I was not disappointed.  Hornby is a witty and poignant writer who creates great dialogue and has a keen understanding of human nature and relationships.   I look forward to reading more good books by this very talented writer.

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270. The Sandcastle Girls

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Chris Bohjalian

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

299 pages, published July 17, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Sandcastle Girls recounts the love story between Elizabeth Endicott , a young American  woman that  accompanies her father to Armenia in 1915 to deliver food and medical aid to refugees of the Armenian genocide by the Turks and Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and infant daughter.   Elizabeth and Armen’s story is juxtaposed with a present day narrative by  Laura Petrosian, granddaughter  of Elizabeth and Armen and a novelist living in suburban New York. After seeing a newspaper photo of her grandmother promoting an exhibit at a Boston museum, Laura embarks on a journey back through her family’s history that reveals love, loss – and a terrible secret that has been buried for generations.

Quotes 

“But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?”

 

“It was Aldous Huxley who observed, “Every man’s memory is his private literature.”

 

“When it seems you have nothing at all to live for, death is not especially frightening.”

 

“Those who participate in a genocide as well as those who merely look away rarely volunteer much in the way of anecdote or observation. Same with the heroic and the righteous. Usually it’s only the survivors who speak-and often they don’t want to talk much about it either.”

 

“we have on earth exactly the amount of time that has been allotted to us, no more and no less. We really have precious little control.”

 

My Take

Right before reading The Sandcastle Girls, I read Before You Know Kindness, also by Chris Bohjalian (I did not realize the books were by the same author until I was halfway through The Sandcastle Girls).  While both books are well written, I much preferred Before You Know Kindness.  I had a hard time following the narrative of The Sandcastle Girls and, in contrast to Before You Know Kindness, found the characters a bit one-dimensional.  The positive takeaway is that I learned a lot about the horrifying Armenian genocide, a piece of history about which I only know a cursory amount.  As with so many other 20th Century atrocities, it is a depressing reflection on the capability of our fellow man to inflict unspeakable violence on other human beings for the crime of having a different ethnicity and/or religion.

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268. Before You Know Kindness

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Lisa Stock

Author:   Chris Bohjalian

Genre:  Fiction

429 pages, published August, 2005

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Before You Know Kindness is a multi-generational saga focused on the McCullough and Seton families.  Every summer Matriarch Nan Seton, an avid sportswoman, hosts her two granddaughters at the family compound in New Hampshire.  Twelve year old Charlotte is an only child striving to fit with the teenagers in her midst and whose father, Spencer McCullough, is a true believer spokesman for FERAL, an animal rights organization.  Her mother Catherine, daughter of Nan, is a lifelong flirt who is tiring of her marriage to Spencer of not eating meat (not necessarily in that order).   John and Sara Seton (a public defender and therapist) are parents to 10 year old Willow Seton and a Patrick, a young toddler.  While family dynamics are at play and everyone is distracted, a violent event occurs that turns the relationships of everyone upside down and strains the fabric of every family.

 

Quotes 

“As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagination for humans to identify with animal suffering than it did to conceive of space flight or cloning or nuclear fusion. Yes, she was a fanatic in the eyes of most of the country. . .Mostly, however, she just lacked patience for people who wouldn’t accept her belief that humans inflicted needless agony on the animals around them, and they did so in numbers that were absolutely staggering.”

 

“Sara knew that behind its locked front door no home was routine. Not the house of her childhood, not the apartment of her husband’s. not the world they were building together with Willow and Patrick. All households had their mysteries, their particular forms of dysfunction.”

 

My Take

Even though some readers have characterized Before You Know Kindness as slow, I found it to be a page turner.  I was particularly interested the character of Spencer McCullogh is fiercely dogmatic in his support of animal rights, sometimes to the exclusion of human beings, especially his wife and daughter.  When tragedy befalls Spencer, he is forced to reconsider his life and his relationships.  I believe the title of the book comes from the following poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye, which really sums up the central theme of this well-written, engrossing book.

 

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

 

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

 

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

 

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and

purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

It is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

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267. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Gabrielle Zevin

Genre:  Fiction

260 pages, published April 1, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

At the beginning of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, we meet A.J. Fikry, a 39 year old bookstore owner on Alice Island whose wife has just died and whose one very valuable asset, a first edition of the Edgar Allan Poe book of poems, Tamerlane, has been stolen after A.J. went on a bender and left his shop unlocked.  At this low point, A.J.’s life is about to take a major turn.  A young woman at the end of her rope leaves her two year old baby, Maya, in A.J.’s store with a note asking him to care for her.  What follows this event makes up the storied life of A.J. Fikry.

 

Quotes 

“You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?”

                 

The words you can’t find, you borrow.

We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.

My life is in these books, he wants to tell her. Read these and know my heart.

We are not quite novels.

The analogy he is looking for is almost there.

We are not quite short stories. At this point, his life is seeming closest to that.

In the end, we are collected works.”

 

“We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.”

 

“It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,” the passage goes, “but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.”

 

“Someday, you may think of marrying. Pick someone who thinks you’re the only person in the room.”

 

“They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?”

 

“I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.”                 

 

“No Man Is An Island; Every Book Is A World.”

 

“Every word the right one and exactly where it should be. That’s basically the highest compliment I can give.”

 

“Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that we can be exhilarated every now and again.”

 

“The words you can’t find, you borrow.  We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone.”

 

“A question I’ve thought about a great deal is why it is so much easier to write about the things we dislike/hate/acknowledge to be flawed than the things we love.”

 

“You tell a kid he doesn’t like to read, and he’ll believe you.”

 

“I don’t want to die,” A.J. says after a bit. “I just find it difficult to be here all the time.”

 

“What is the point of bad dates if not to have amusing anecdotes for your friends?”

 

“I worry for you. If you love everyone, you’ll end up having hurt feelings most of the time. I suppose, relative to the length of your life, you feel as if you’ve known me a rather long time. Your perspective of time is really very warped, Maya. But I am old and soon, you’ll forget you even knew me.”

 

“Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of ‘quality.’ But it’s forcing kids to read books like that that make them think they hate reading.”

 

My Take

As with Young Jane Young, the other book that I read this year by Gabrielle Zevin,  The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is primarily a character study.  But it is the kind of character study that really works.  You enjoy getting to know these characters, like living in their world and are moved by their choices and stories.  For me there was also an added bonus that this book is a love letter to books and to reading, things that are (obviously) dear to my heart.  Highly recommended.

 

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266. The Great Divorce

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   C.S. Lewis

Genre:  Fiction, Christian, Theology

146 pages, published 1945

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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264. The Screwtape Letters

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  John Breen

Author:   C.S. Lewis

Genre:  Fiction, Theology, Christian, Fantasy

223 pages, published 1942

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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