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97. The Master Butchers Singing Club

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Boulder Public Library Librarian

Author:   Louise Erdrich

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction

388 pages, published February 4, 2003

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Master Butchers Singing Club focuses on the intertwined lives of Fidelis Waldvogel, a World War I German Sniper and master butcher who emigrates to North Dakota after the war, and American Delphine Watzka, who is part of balancing performance act with her homosexual husband and is a reluctant caretaker of her severely alcoholic father.  The men are all in a singing club, but the action of the story centers on Delphine as she struggles to find her place in the world.

 

Quotes

“She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.”

 

“Something in her was changing as she read the books. Life after life flashed before her eyes, yet she stayed safe from misery. And the urge to act things out onstage could be satisfied cheaply, and at home, and without the annoyance of other members of an acting company. Her ambition to leave faded and a kind of contentment set in. She hadn’t exactly feared the word contentment, but had always associated it with a vague sense of failure. To be discontented had always seemed much richer a thing. To be restless, striving. That view was romantic. In truth, she was finding out, life was better lived in a tranquil pattern. As long as she could read, she never tired of the design of her days.”

 

“Delphine began to read with a mad attention when she wanted to talk to Clarisse. She saw that in her life there was a woman-shaped hole, a cutout that led to a mysterious place. Through it, her mother, then Eva, and now Clarisse had walked. If only she could plunge her arms through and drag them back.”

 

“As Delphine watched, into her head there popped a strange notion: the idea that perhaps strongly experienced moments, as when Eva turned and the sun met her hair and for that one instant the symbol blazed out, those particular moments were eternal. Those moments actually went somewhere. Into a file of moments that existed out of time’s range and could not be pilfered by God.”

 

“When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.”

 

“She slowly became convinced…that at the center of the universe not God but a tremendous deadness reigned. The stillness of a drunk God, passed out cold…She had learned of it in that house…where the drunks crashed…Things had happened to her there. She was neither raped nor robbed, nor did she experience God’s absence to any greater degree than other people did. She wasn’t threatened or made to harm anyone against her will. She wasn’t beaten, either, or deprived of speech or voice. It was, rather, the sad blubbering stories she heard in the house. Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life – disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not touching her.”

 

“Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.”

My Take

It was a pleasure to read The Master Butchers Singing Club.  While Erlich’s characters are quirky and unconventional, she infuses them with such a strong core of humanity that it makes them both fascinating and relatable.  The story meanders at times and there are a few parts that could have been easily excised.  Still, it is worth reading The Master Butchers Singing Club and I recommend it.

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96. The Dinner

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Boulder Public Library Librarian

Author:   Herman Koch

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense

292 pages, published February 12, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Set in an exclusive, high priced Amsterdam restaurant, The Dinner starts off with the polite conversation of two couples.  However, the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened. Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act which has been caught on camera and their grainy images have been broadcast throughout the country.  Despite an ongoing investigation, the boys remain unidentified by everyone except their parents.  At the end of the dinner, the couples finally confront the crisis with their children and each of them must decide what they are prepared to accept and do.  

 

Quotes

“That was how I looked at life sometimes, as a warm meal that was growing cold. I knew I had to eat, or else I would die, but I had lost my appetite.”

 

“This particular restaurant is one where you have to call three months in advance—or six, or eight, don’t ask me. Personally, I’d never want to know three months in advance where I’m going to eat on any given evening, but apparently some people don’t mind. A few centuries from now, when historians want to know what kind of crazies people were at the start of the twenty-first century, all they’ll have to do is look at the computer files of the so-called “top” restaurants.”

 

“Sometimes things come out of your mouth that you regret later on. Or no, not regret. You say something so razor-sharp that the person you say it to carries it around with them for the rest of their life.”

 

“If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn’t have to be validated.”

 

“When the conversation turns too quickly to films, I see it as a sign of weakness. I mean: films are more something for the end of the evening, when you really don’t have much else to talk about. I don’t know why, but when people start talking about films, I always get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, like when you wake up in the morning and find that it’s already getting dark outside.”

 

“The first thing that struck you about Claire’s plate was its vast emptiness. Of course I’m well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but there are voids and then there are voids. The void here, that part of the plate on which no food at all was present, had clearly been raised to a matter of principle.

It was as though the empty plate was challenging you to say something about it, to go to the open kitchen and demand an explanation. ‘You wouldn’t even dare!’ the plate said, and laughed in your face.”

 

“I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? How many fathers who humiliate their children? How many morons whose breath stinks like rotten meat but who refuse to do anything about it? How many hopeless cases who go on complaining all their lives about the non-existent injustices they’ve had to suffer? Look around you, I said. How many of your classmates would you be pleased not to see return to their desks tomorrow morning? Think about that one family member of your own family, that irritating uncle with his pointless, horseshit stories at birthday parties, that ugly cousin who mistreats his cat. Think about how relieved you would be – and not only you, but virtually the entire family – if that uncle or cousin would step on a landmine or be hit by a five-hundred-pounder dropped from a high altitude. If that member of the family were to be wiped off the face of the earth. And now think about all those millions of victims of all the wars there have been in the past – I never specifically mentioned the Second World War, I used it as an example because it’s the one that most appeals to their imaginations – and think about the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of victims who we need to have around like we need a hole in the head. Even from a purely statistical standpoint, it’s impossible that all those victims were good people, whatever kind of people that may be. The injustice is found more in the fact that the assholes are also put on the list of innocent victims. That their names are also chiselled into the war memorials.”

My Take

I didn’t know what to expect when I started listening to The Dinner.  At first, it seemed like a clever, satirical commentary on our societal preening and pretensions.  However, as the story unfolds, The Dinner becomes a commentary on the callousness of society at large and it delivers a stinging indictment with rhetorical flare.  An interesting book by a talented writer.

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95. Ordinary People

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Marianne Boeke

Author:   Judith Guest

Genre:  Fiction

263 pages, published October 28, 1982

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Ordinary People is set in upper class town of Lake Forest, Illinois during the 1970s and tells the story of the Jarrett family, parents Calvin and Beth and their son Conrad.  Before the action of the book begins, there was a second Jarrett son, Buck, who was killed in a boating accident while his brother Conrad survived.  The book focuses on Conrad’s coming to grips with his brother’s death.  While Conrad is shunned by his beautiful and perfect, but ultimately cold-hearted mother, his therapist and father are there to help him survive.  

 

Quotes

“Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either.”

 

“People have a right to be the way they are.”

 

“Riding the train gives him too much time to think, he has decided. Too much thinking can ruin you.”

 

“Depending on the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.”

 

“The small seed of despair cracks open and sends experimental tendrils upward to the fragile skin of calm holding him together.”

 

“Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningless actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.”

My Take

I saw the movie version of Ordinary People (a pretty good movie, but undeserving of the Best Picture Oscar) back when it was released in 1980 and was constantly comparing the novel to the movie while reading it.  While the novel is not as good as the movie, it is still readable (while seeming a little dated) and managed to hold my attention.  I found the character study of the ice queen mother Beth to be particularly interesting.  Too bad there wasn’t more of her story in the book.

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94. Nutshell

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ian McEwan

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense

197 pages, published September 13, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Trudy and Claude are having an affair and plotting to murder Trudy’s husband who also happens to be Claude’s brother. However, there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month old resident of Trudy’s womb from whose vantage point the story is told.

 

Quotes

“It’s not the theme parks of Paradiso and Inferno that I dread most – the heavenly rides, the hellish crowds – and I could live with the insult of eternal oblivion. I don’t even mind not knowing which it will be. What I fear is missing out. Health desire or mere greed, I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness. I’m owed a handful of decades to try my luck on a freewheeling planet. That’s the ride for me – the Wall of Life. I want my go. I want to become. Put another way, there’s a book I want to read, not yet published, not yet written, though a start’s been made. I want to read to the end of My History of the Twenty-First Century. I want to be there, on the last page, in my early eighties, frail but sprightly, dancing a jig on the evening of December 31, 2099.”

 

“It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence.”

 

“You may never have experienced, or you will have forgotten, a good burgundy (her favourite) or a good Sancerre (also her favourite) decanted through a healthy placenta.”

 

“However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you’re inside them.”

 

“Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They’re not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they’ll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want.”

 

“Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose.”

 

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches civilisation.”

 

“When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It’s the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.”

 

“In science too, one dedicates his life to an Albanian snail, another to a virus. Darwin gave eight years to barnacles. And in wise later life, to earthworms. The Higgs boson, a tiny thing, perhaps not even a thing, was the lifetime’s pursuit of thousands. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.

So why not be an owl poet?”

 

“No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It’s an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.”

 

“There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact; remorse, or more drinking and then remorse.”

 

“A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs.”

 

“In the middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. She’ll wake, become insomniac, reach for the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning.”

 

“I’ve heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness…Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self…God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.”

 

“I don’t know much yet about murder. Still, his scheme is more baker than butcher. Half-baked.”

 

“My immediate neighbourhood will not be palmy Norway – my first choice on account of its gigantic sovereign fund and generous social provision; nor my second, Italy, on grounds of regional cuisine and sun-blessed decay; and not even my third, France, for its Pinot Noir and jaunty self-regard. Instead I’ll inherit a less than united kingdom ruled by an esteemed elderly queen, where a businessman-prince, famed for his good works, his elixirs (cauliflower essence to purify the blood) and unconstitutional meddling, waits restively for his crown. This will be my home, and it will do.”

My Take

Listening to Ian McEwan’s latest book Nutshell was a real treat (including the excellent voicework on the audio version by Rory Kinnear).  McEwan has always been one of my favorite writers (I especially enjoyed Atonement, The Children Act and Saturday), and Nutshell is a worthy addition to his canon. I particularly enjoyed the creative and original use of the fetal perspective to tell the story.  At first, you don’t think this is going to work or its going to get tiresome, but McEwan manages to pull it off and the device makes Nutshell a clever and memorable read.

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93. What Alice Forgot

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Heather Bohart

Author:   Lianne Moriarty

Genre:  Fiction, Romance

476 pages, published 2009

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

As the book opens, Alice Love is twenty-nine, head over heels in love with her husband and pregnant with her first child.  When Alice is admitted to the hospital after hitting her head at the gym, she is shocked to discover that she is actually 39 years old, has three kids, is in the middle of a nasty divorce and does not seem to be the person she thought she was.  As the book unfolds, Alice must discover what happened to her and the idyllic life she thought she had.  

 

Quotes

“Early love is exciting and exhilarating. It’s light and bubbly. Anyone can love like that. But after three children, after a separation and a near-divorce, after you’ve hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you’ve seen the worst and the best– well, that sort of love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.”

 

“He got Alice, the way we did, or maybe even more so than us. He made her more confident, funnier, smarter. He brought out all the things that were there already and let her be fully herself, so she seemed to shine with this inner light.”

 

“They would think she was savoring the taste (blueberries, cinnamon, cream-excellent), but she was actually savoring the whole morning, trying to catch it, pin it down, keep it safe before all those precious moments became yet another memory.”

 

“How strange it all was. Wouldn’t it be a lot less messy if everyone just stayed with the people they married in the first place?”

 

“She was busy thinking about the concept of forgiveness. It was such a lovely, generous idea when it wasn’t linked to something awful that needed forgiving.”

 

“It was good to remember that for every horrible memory from her marriage, there was also a happy one. She wanted to see it clearly, to understand that it wasn’t all black, or all white. It was a million colors. And yes, ultimately it hadn’t worked out, but that was okay. Just because a marriage ended didn’t mean that it hadn’t been happy at times.”

 

“Each memory, good and bad, was another invisible thread that bound them together, even when they were foolishly thinking they could lead separate lives. It was as simple and complicated as that.”

 

“There just wasn’t enough time in 2008. It had become a limited resource. Back in 1998, the days were so much more spacious. When she woke up in the morning, the day rolled out in front of her like a long hallway for her to meander down, free to linger over the best parts. Days were so stingy now. Mean slivers of time. They flew by like speeding cars. Whoosh! When she was pulling back the blankets to hop into bed each night, it felt as if only seconds ago.”

 

“But maybe every life looked wonderful if all you saw was the photo albums.”

 

“I’d be at work where poeple respected my opinions, said Nick. And then, I’d come home and it was like I was the village idiot.”

 

“We’d traveled, we’d been to lots of parties, lots of movies and concerts, we’d slept in. We’d done all those things that people with children seem to miss so passionately. We didn’t want those things anymore. We wanted a baby.”

 

“I remember how it crept up so slowly on me, like that agonizingly slow old electric blanket which used to almost imperceptibly heat up my frosty sheets, second by second, until I’d think, “Hey, I haven’t shivered in a while. Actually, I’m warm. I’m blissfully warm.” That’s how it was with Ben. I moved on from “I really shouldn’t be leading this guy on when I have no interest” to “He’s not that bad-looking really” to “I sort of enjoy being with him” to “Actually, I’m crazy about him.”

 

My Take

What Alice Forgot is the third book by Liane Moriarity that I have read since starting my thousand book quest (the first two are Big Little Lies and The Husband’s Secret) and it does not disappoint.  Moriarity has a formula that typifies her books and it works well for her.  Her books are set in Australia with several female protagonists and one or, usually more than one, of them has a conflict to be resolved.  There is also typically some sort of twist.  By the end of the book, all has been settled and the characters are ready to move on with their newly improved lives. While What Alice Forgot hews closely to the Moriarity formula, it’s insights into long-term marriages and how we change in them does offer some novelty and interest.  Easy read.  Perfect vacation book.

 

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92. Her

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Harriet Lane

Genre:  Fiction, Thriller, Suspense, Mystery

272 pages, published January 6, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Emma and Nina, the two main characters in Her, appear to have very little in common.  As a relatively new mother, Emma is isolated and exhausted.  She has mixed emotions about leaving her job, her marriage is strained and her self-confidence is on the decline.  Nina, who is sophisticated, generous, and effortlessly in control stands in stark contrast.  When the two women strike up an unexpected relationship, something seems a bit off.   We soon learn that there is more to Nina then meets the eye and a dangerous game of cat and mouse develops.  

 

Quotes

“Emma is the engine of this home, the person who propels it forward, keeps everyone fed and clothed and healthy and happy—and yet she’s entirely alone within it, and getting lonelier with every item ticked off her checklist. This is what it comes down to: the flat-out invisible drudgery of family maintenance, the vanishing of personality as everyone else’s accrues.”

 

“Over time, I’ve come to see that so much of a personality boils down to confidence: whether you have it, or not.”

 

“I once heard someone on the radio saying that a bee is never more than forty minutes away from starving to death, and this fact has stayed with me because it seems to have a certain personal resonance. My children are in a perpetual proximity to catastrophe: concussion, dehydration, drowning or sunstroke. Keeping them safe requires constant vigilance.”

 

“I turn my back and look out to sea, the sun so low and molten that my eyes fill with tears, and yet I can feel it: a cooler wind is coming in, the edge of evening approaching. Dusk is gathering along the coast, in the coves and quaysides and marinas, where in an hour or so the long strings of coloured bulbs will twinkle and sway; and then it will pass over us-like a visitation: a plague or a blessing….”  

 

“I found the final plot twist unsatisfying, as plot twists often are: nothing like life, which – it seems to me – turns less on shocks or theatrics than on the small quiet moments, misunderstandings, or disappointments, the things that it’s easy to overlook.”

 

“I’m already someone else, but the person I turn into at these low points is someone I never imagined I could be a few years ago: someone with a hot knot of fury where her heart used to be.”

My Take

There are several things that I really liked about Her.  First of all, it’s a page turner.  Lane infuses the story with a something is not quite right creepiness that makes you want to learn more.  Secondly, I really liked Lane’s writing style.  She is a pleasure to read.  Finally, the set pieces of London and the French countryside are two places that I love and Lane does a great job capturing these locales.  Highly recommended and an especially good vacation book.

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91. Euphoria

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Julie Horowitz

Author:   Lily King

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Anthropology

256 pages, published June 3, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Euphoria is the story of three anthropologists in 1933 New Guinea who find themselves caught in a passionate love triangle.  English Anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying a tribe on the Sepik River in the Territory of New Guinea with little success. Increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when he encounters the famous and controversial Nell Stone and her mercurial husband Fen. Bankson is enthralled by the magnetic couple whose eager attentions pull him back from the brink of despair.  Inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is a story of passion, possession, exploration and sacrifice.

 

Quotes

“It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion – you’ve only been there eight weeks – and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at the moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.”

 

“You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.”

 

“I’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.”

 

“I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilisation, right and wrong.”

 

“Why are we, with all our “progress,” so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? … I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world.”

 

“I try not to return to these moments very often, for I end up lacerating my young self for not simply kissing the girl. I thought we had time. Despite everything, I believed somehow there was time. Love’s first mistake. Perhaps love’s only mistake.”

 

“It came to him that he didn’t like holidays. . . . They bore down on you. Each one always ended up feeling like an exam . . .”

 

My Take

While Euphoria has won a whole swath of awards (WINNER, KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION 2014, WINNER, NEW ENGLAND BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2014, FINALIST, NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2014, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2014, TIME, TOP 10 FICTION BOOKS OF 2014, NPR, BEST BOOKS OF 2014, WASHINGTON POST, TOP 50 FICTION BOOKS OF 2014, AMAZON, 100 BEST BOOKS OF 2014, #16, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2014, OPRAH.COM, 15 MUST-READS OF 2014), it was not my cup of tea.  Sometimes, I find there is an inverse correlation between awards received and enjoyment of reading.  That was the case with me and Euphoria.  I could not get into either the characters or the story and had to plod through it to finish.  Obviously, many critics disagree, but that’s my two cents.

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89. The Light Between Oceans

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   M.L. Stedman

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, Romance

343 pages, published July 31, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

After four years on the Western Front during World War I, Tom Sherbourne returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on the very isolated Janus Rock where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year.  Before settling in, Tom meets the young, beautiful and bold Isabel.  They strike a correspondence that eventually leads to marriage.  Their idyllic and loving relationship begins to deteriorate after Isabel suffers two miscarriages and one stillbirth.  When a boat has washes up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby, Isabel thinks her prayers have been answered and views the baby girl as a gift from God.  Tom, who is torn by his sense of propriety and his wife’s overwhelming grief, reluctantly agrees to pretend that Isabel gave birth to this baby.  This decision sets forth a series of events which tests Tom and Isabel’s marriage, consciences and sanity.

 

Quotes

“…or I can forgive and forget…Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things…we always have a choice.”

 

“You’ve had so much strife but you’re always happy. How do you do it?” “I choose to,”

 

“Izz, I’ve learned the hard way that to have any kind of a future you’ve got to give up hope of ever changing your past.”

 

“Sometimes life turns out hard, Isabel. Sometimes it just bites right through you. And sometimes, just when you think it’s done its worst, it comes back and takes another chunk.”

 

“When it comes to their kids, parents are all just instinct and hope. And fear.”

 

“It astounds him that the tiny life of the girl means more to him than all the millennia before it. He struggles to make sense of his emotions – how he can feel both tenderness and unease when she kisses him goodnight, or presents a grazed knee for him to kiss better with the magic power that only a parent has. For Isabel, too, he is torn between the desire he feels for her, the love, and the sense that he cannot breathe. The two sensations grate at one another, unresolved.”

 

“Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers’ deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother’s life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent loss a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.”

 

“Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream.”

 

“Humans withdraw to their homes, and surrender the night to the creatures that own it: the crickets, the owls, the snakes. A world that hasn’t changed for hundreds of thousands of years wakes up, and carries on as if the daylight and the humans and the changes to the landscape have all been an illusion.”

 

“There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory….Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.”

 

“It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.”

 

“History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.”

 

“Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can’t tell which is which until you’ve shot’em both, and then it’s too late.”

 

“The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth or the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man’s name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That’s how life goes on; protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame.”

 

“No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on earth…”

 

“We live with the decisions we make, Bill. That’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.”

 

My Take

The Light Between Oceans is a beautifully written book that examines the impact of a questionable, but understandable, decision made by the main characters Tom and Isabel.  When the couple, who lives in and operate a remote lighthouse, discovers a baby girl who washed up to shore in a rowboat with a dead man, it seems like an answer to their prayers, especially for Isabel who has suffered several miscarriages and a still birth.  Tom is not so sure they should keep the child, but puts aside his concerns to keep his wife from slipping into madness.  When, several years later, Tom discovers the child has a living mother who is grief-stricken at the loss of her husband and child, he is racked by guilt.  The examination of this situation and its impact on the essentially good and decent Tom and Isabel makes The Light Between Oceans a compelling read.

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86. 100 Days of Happiness: a novel

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Fausto Brizzi

Genre:  Fiction

368 pages, published August 11, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

100 Days of Happiness tells the story of Lucio Battistini, a resident of Rome, who is separated from his wife Paola and their two young children (Lorenzo and Eva) after she learns that he has had an affair.  Lucio is sleeping in the stock room of his father-in-law’s bakery when he learns that he has inoperable cancer and only 100 days to live, give or take.  Lucio buys a notebook and the first item he writes in it is to win back Paola.  Lucio spends the next three months trying to do that and also enjoying every moment with a zest he hasn’t felt in years.  By the end of the journey, Lucio becomes the man he’s always meant to be.

 

Quotes

“I know her by heart, and that doesn’t make me love her any less. Like a Dante scholar who learns the entire Divine Comedy and then just appreciates the poem even more profoundly.”

 

“The important thing is to make sure that when death comes, it finds us still alive.”

 

“Always remember that the only riches we possess are the dreams we have as children. They are the fuel of our lives, the only force that pushes us to keep on going even when things have gone all wrong.”

 

“Just work, work, work, even at the risk of making mistakes. And if and when you do make mistakes, and you do hurt someone, ask for forgiveness. Asking forgiveness and admitting you’ve made a mistake is the hardest thing of all. But if someone else does you good, remember it always. Showing gratitude is every bit as complicated.”

 

“Every one of us has already experienced thousands of last times without even realizing it. Most of the time, in fact, you never even imagine that what you’re experiencing is the last time.”

 

“It makes me sad. Everything, even good things, makes me sad.”

 

“A chitchat shop. Simple but brilliant. Not even Leonardo da Vinci ever came up with this one. It’s like a pharmacy that stocks friendship.”

 

“Sometimes real troubles give you a strength you never had before”

 

“Papà was a professional bullshit artist so outstanding in his lying skills that if he’d set his mind to it, he could easily have become prime minister of Italy.”

 

My Take

I really loved 100 Days of Happiness and gave it one of my few five star ratings.  While the subject matter (one’s last three months to live) is somber and could be depressing, Lucio makes it into a kind of wistful adventure on which you are all too happy to tag along on. Along the way, as we learn about what matters most to Lucio, you are given the opportunity to reflect on what is most important to you.  How you spend the last 100 days of your life?  What have you left undone that you can address before it’s too late?  It also doesn’t hurt that the book takes place in Italy, one of my favorite countries, and Brizzi makes you feel as if you are there (or at least wish you were).  I highly recommend this book, especially the audio book version.

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84. The Time Keeper

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Mitch Albom

Genre:  Fiction

224 pages, published September 4, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The inventor of the world’s first clock is punished for trying to measure God’s greatest gift.  He is banished to a cave for centuries and forced to listen to the voices of all who come after him seeking more days, more years.  Eventually, with his soul nearly broken, Father Time is granted his freedom, along with a magical hourglass and a mission: a chance to redeem himself by teaching two earthly people the true meaning of time.  He returns to our world which is now dominated by the hour-counting he so innocently began.  He follows the journeys on two people, a teenage girl who is about to give up on life and a wealthy old businessman who wants to live forever.  To save himself, the Timekeeper must save them both.

 

Quotes

“Try to imagine a life without timekeeping.  You probably can’t.  You know the month, the year, the day of the week.  There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored.  Birds are not late.  A dog does not check its watch.  Deer do not fret over passing birthdays.  Man alone measures time.  Man alone chimes the hour.  And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures.  A fear of time running out.”

 

“We all yearn for what we have lost. But sometimes, we forget what we have.”

 

“There is a reason God limits our days.’  ‘Why?’  To make each one precious.”

 

“Everything man does today to be efficient, to fill the hour? It does not satisfy. It only makes him hungry to do more. Man wants to own his existence. But no one owns time. When you are measuring life, you are not living it.”

 

“As mankind grew obsessed with its hours, the sorrow of lost time became a permanent hole in the human heart. People fretted over missed chances, over inefficient days; they worried constantly about how long they would live, because counting life’s moments had led, inevitably, to counting them down. Soon, in every nation and in every language, time became the most precious commodity.”

 

“There was always a quest for more minutes, more hours, faster progress to accomplish more in each day. The simple joy of living between summers was gone.”

 

“When we are most alone is when we embrace another’s loneliness.”

 

“With no loss or sacrifice, we can’t appreciate what we have.”

 

“We do not realize the sound the world makes — unless, of course, it comes to a stop. Then, when it starts, it sounds like an orchestra.”

 

“She had been so consumed with escaping her own misery, she hadn’t considered the misery she might inflict.”

 

“This time was different. The tools of this era–phones, computers–enabled people to move at a blurring pace. Yet despite all they accomplished, they were never at peace.”

My Take

There are some interesting ideas in Mitch Albom’s The Time Keeper that made me think about my approach to time.  While I am usually concerned about being productive, I’m always happier when I make time to appreciate all of the many blessings in my life and in this world.  I’m even happier when I concretely express appreciation for these blessings.  While the story in The Time Keeper is not particularly compelling, the ideas it contains, especially the idea that we should take a step back from our fast paced world to smell the roses, makes the book a decent read.

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