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545. The Burgess Boys

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Elizabeth Strout

Genre:   Fiction

320 pages, published Matrch 26, 2013

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The Burgess Boys tells the story of siblings Jim, Bob and Susan Burgess, Susan’s son Zach, Bob’s ex-wife Pam and Jim’s wife Helen.  Every member of the Burgess family has grown up under the shadow of a freak accident that killed their father when they were children, an event which has shaped their lives.  Bob and Jim escaped their hometown of Shirley Falls, Maine to encamp in New York City where both practiced law, Jim becoming one of the top lawyers in the city and Bob working for a Legal Aid group.  While he revels in all the trappings of success, Jim constantly belittles his younger, bighearted brother Bob.  When teenaged Zach is accused of a hate crime, the entire family rallies to his defense, exposing old fault lines in their relationships and opening new ones.

Quotes 

“And it was too late. No one wants to believe something is too late, but it is always becoming too late, and then it is.”

 

“You have family”, Bob said. “You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That’s called family”.”

 

In case you haven’t noticed, people get hard-hearted against the people they hurt. Because they can’t stand it. Literally. To think we did that to someone. I did that. So we think of all the reasons why it’s okay we did whatever we did.”

 

“The facts didn’t matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.”

 

“I wrote the story, but you will bring to it your own experience of life, and some other reader will do the same, and it will become a different story with each reader. I believe that even the time in your life when you read the book will determine how you receive it. Our lives are changing constantly, and therefore not even our own story is always what we think it is.”

 

“And she learned – freshly, scorchingly – of the privacy of sorrow. It was as though she had been escorted through a door into some large and private club that she had not even known existed. Women who miscarried. Society did not care much for them. It really didn’t. And the women in the club mostly passed each other silently. People outside the club said, “You’ll have another one.”

 

“So she lay awake at night and at times there was a curious peacefulness to this, the darkness warm as though the deep violet duvet held its color unseen, wrapping around Pam some soothing aspect of her youth, as her mind wandered over a life that felt puzzingly long; she experienced a quiet surprise that so many lifetimes could be fit into one.”

 

“That happens in hotel rooms, people have bad dreams.”

 

“No exchange rate for the confidence of youth.”

 

“It was a sad moment. There are sad moments in life, and this was one of them.”

 

“Bob was not a young man, and he knew about loss. He knew the quiet that arrived, the blinding force of panic, and he knew that each loss brought with it some odd, barely acknowledged sense of release. He was not an especially contemplative person, and he did not dwell on this. But by October there were many days when the swell of rightness, loose-limbedness, and gentle gravity came to him. It recalled to him being a child, when he found one day he could finally color within the lines.”

 

“Pam replied that she was too old to worry about being cool, but in fact she did worry about it, and that’s one reason it was always nice to see Bobby, who was so uncool as to inhabit—in Pam’s mind—his own private condominium of coolness.”

 

“He knew the quiet that arrived, the blinding force of panic, and he knew too that each loss brought with it some odd, barely acknowledged sense of relief.”

 

“Nothing is what you imagine. Her mind hovered above this simple and alarming thought. The variables were too great, the particularities too distinct, life a flood of translations from the shadow-edged yearnings of the heart to the immutable aspects of the physical world.”

 

“For most of the nineteen years of Zachary’s life, Susan had done what parents do when their child turns out to be so different from what they’d imagined—which is to pretend, and pretend, with the wretchedness of hope, that he would be all right. Zach would grow into himself. He’d make friends and take part in life. Grow into it, grow out of it … Variations had played in Susan’s mind on sleepless nights. But her mind had also held the dark relentless beat of doubt: He was friendless, he was quiet, he was hesitant in all his actions, his schoolwork barely adequate. Tests showed an IQ above average, no discernible learning disorders—yet the package of Zachness added up to not quite right. And sometimes Susan’s melody of failure crescendoed with the unbearable knowledge: It was her fault.”

 

“My mother did not like Unitarians; she thought they were atheists who didn’t want to be left out of the fun of Christmas,”

 

“They say that’s what happens as you get older. You think about the things of your youth.”

 

“The United States is a country of laws and not men and that we will provide safety to those who come to us for safety.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and enjoyed Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again, I was interested in another book by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout.  It took me a while to get into The Burgess Boys (which includes characters that overlap with her Olive books), but once I did, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  A keen observer of human nature, Strout creates such indelible characters and probes the intracies of their relationships in such a masterful manner that the reader feels an intimacy with them that is rare.  I look forward to reading more by this talented and insightful writer.

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544. The Midnight Library

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Matt Haig

Genre:  Fiction

288 pages, published September 29, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

After contemplating ending her life, protagonist Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library with her former school librarian Mrs. Elm.  In this supernatural place where the bookshelves go on forever, Nora can pick a book which represents a different version of a life that she did not lead and is then inserted into that life.  A chance to undo her regrets.  Nora tries out mulitiple different possible lives and arrives at a surprising realization.

Quotes 

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.  It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have.  It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.  But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.  We can’t tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”

 

“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.”

 

“The only way to learn is to live.”

 

“A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”

 

 “We only need to be one person.  We only need to feel one existence.  We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”

 

“As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

 

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things.”

 

 “Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”

 

“You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”

 

“Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”

 

“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil – rich, fertile soil.  She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.

She could plant a forest inside herself.”

 

“Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely.”

 

“And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.”

 

“The thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.”

 

“You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.”

 

“Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.”

 

“Regrets don’t leave. They weren’t mosquitoe bites. They itch forever.”

 

“Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs. Elm softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’

 

‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibilities…In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living…never underestimate the big importance of small things.”

 

“That was how she had felt most of her life.

Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.”

 

“It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.”

 

“The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature…solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”

 

“Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

[…]

There are patterns of life… Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of the particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”

 

“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”

 

“Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all.”

 

“She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.”

 

“Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.”

 

“When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.”

 

My Take

The Midnight Library was a true pleasure to read (or rather listen to, in my case, with superb narration by Carey Mulligan). Author Matt Haig weaves a compelling tale of what could have been when Nora Seed is given the opportunity to explore many of the lives she could have lived, much in the same vein as George Bailey seeing how the lives around him would have been impacted if he had never been born in my favorite movie It’s a Wonderful Life.  This book will really get you thinking, appreciating your own life and may even spur you on to take some risks.  Highly recommended.

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541. Dear Edward

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Ann Napolitano

Genre:  Fiction

340 pages, published January 6, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

When a flight from Newark to Los Angeles crashes in Colorado, twelve year old Edward Adler survives while all of the other 183 passengers and crew perish.  Instead of relocating to LA with his parents and brother, Edward must start a new life with an aunt and uncle who he doesn’t know well and deal with the rapt attention of a nation that considers his survival a miracle.

Quotes 

“The air between us is not empty space.”

 

“Humans need community, for our emotional health. We need connection, a sense of belonging. We are not built to thrive in isolation.”

 

“So much could be solved, she thinks, if we simply held hands with each other more often.”

 

“What happened is baked into your bones, Edward. It lives under your skin. It’s not going away. It’s part of you and will be part of you every moment until you die. What you’ve been working on, since the first time I met you, is learning to live with that.”

 

“There was no reason for what happened to you, Eddie. You could have died; you just didn’t. It was dumb luck. Nobody chose you for anything. Which means, truly, that you can do anything.”

 

“Everything ends,” she says. “That’s nothing to be sad about. What matters is what starts in that moment.”

 

 “This was not a tragedy. Dying on your couch watching TV by yourself is a tragedy. Dying while doing something you love with every part of your body is magic. I wish you magic, Edward.”

 

“My wife is pregnant, and her physician told her that physiologically and medically speaking, there are three different kinds of humans: men, women, and pregnant women. I think the same idea applies to you, Edward. There are grown-ups, children, and then you. You don’t feel like a kid anymore, right?” Edward nods. “But you won’t be an adult for years. You’re something else, and we need to figure out what you are, so we can figure out how to help you.”

 

“When in doubt, read books. Educate yourself. Education has always saved me Edward.  Learn about the mysteries.”

 

“Eddie was leaning against his father’s chest, and the sensation of that weight — the complete trust and lack of inhibition with which the boy relaxed every ounce of his body into his father’s — was one of the things that made parenthood unmissable.”

 

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” —GEORGE ELIOT”

 

“It feels unkind that they are shoving their emotions at him when his own sadness and fear are so vast that he has to hide from them.”

 

 “All motivators are valid if they produce good work, son. And frustration can be a powerful

 

“that the smallest, truest reason he will never fly again is that the last airplane seat he ever sits in has to be the one beside his brother.”

 

“When frazzled, people tend to revert to the familiar and the well rehearsed.”

 

“if you think about one memory for most of a day, is that not your present? Some people live in the now; some people prefer to reside in the past—either choice is valid.”

 

“Edward wasn’t supposed to leave Jordan, though. They were meant to age together. That loss continues to be spiked with pain; it will never be soothed. And he can see, objectively, that Shay’s life without him would have been woven with different moments, friends or lack of friends, different fights with Besa, different books and different struggles.”

 

My Take

First off, I made the mistake of starting this book while on a flight without knowing its subject matter.  I recommend you avoid that since it deals with a plane that crashed, killing almost everyone on board.  I finished it in the comfort of my home and, since I didn’t have to worry about crashing, really enjoyed the rest of it.  Author Ann Napolitano has some interesting insights into the human condition and weaves a believeable and compelling tale of what it would be like to be the sole survivor of a plane crash.

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540. Migrations

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Terra McKinish

Author:   Charlotte McConaghy

Genre:  Fiction, Environment

256 pages, published August 4, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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539. The Searcher

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Foreign, Crime

451 pages, published October 6, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Searcher tells the story of retired detective Cal Hooper moves from Chicago to a remote village in rural Ireland with the intention to fix up the broken down cottage he’s bought, to walk the terrain, and to escape his former life.  His plans change when  he is pulled into helping a local boy who wants help in finding his missing brother.  Against his better judgment, Cal is once again acting the dectective.

Quotes 

“He appreciates mornings not for their effect on him, but for themselves. Even smack in the middle of a temperamental Chicago neighborhood, dawn sounds rose up with a startling delicacy, and the air had a lemony, clean-scoured tinge that made you breathe deeper and wider. Here, the first light spreads across the fields like something holy is happening, striking sparks off a million dewdrops and turning the spiderwebs on the hedge to rainbows; mist curls off the grass, and the first calls of birds and sheep seem to arc effortless miles. Whenever he can make himself, Cal gets up early and eats his breakfast sitting on his back step, enjoying the chill and the earthy tang of the air.”

 

 “Over the last few years it’s been brought home to him that the boundaries between morals, manners and etiquette, which have always seemed crystal-clear to him, may not look the same to everyone else. He hears talk about the immorality of young people nowadays, but it seems to him that Alyssa and Ben and their friends spend plenty of their time concentrating on right and wrong. The thing is that many of their most passionate moral stances, as far as Cal can see, have to do with what words you should and shouldn’t use for people, based on what problems they have, what race they are, or who they like to sleep with. While Cal agrees that you should call people whatever they prefer to be called, he considers this to be a question of basic manners, not of morals.”

 

“The mountains on the horizon look like someone took a pocketknife and sliced neat curves out of the star-thick sky, leaving empty blackness. Here and there, spread out, are the yellow rectangles of windows, tiny and valiant.”

 

“He feels that nineteen-year-olds, almost all of them, don’t have their feet on the ground. They’re turning loose from their families and they haven’t found anything else to moor themselves to; they blow like tumbleweed. They’re unknowns, to the people that used to know them inside out and to themselves.”

 

“The sky, dappled in subtle gradations of gray, goes on forever; so do the fields, coded in shades of green by their different uses, divided up by sprawling hedges, dry-stone walls and the odd narrow back road.”

 

“Landscape is one of the few things he knows of where the reality doesn’t let you down. The West of Ireland looked beautiful on the internet; from right smack in the middle of it, it looks even better. The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it; bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face.”

 

“Trey says, with absolute bedrock certainty, “He wouldn’t do that.”

Cal reached the point a long time ago where those words make him tired for all of humanity. All the innocents say that, and believe it to the bone, right up until the moment when they can’t any more. My husband would never do that to our children, my baby ain’t no thief. Cal feels like he ought to stand on a street corner handing out warnings, little pieces of paper that just say: Anyone could do anything.”

 

“Etiquette is the stuff you gotta do just ’cause that’s how everyone else does it. Like holding your fork in your left hand, or saying ‘Bless you’ if someone sneezes. Manners is treating people with respect.”

“Everyone was talking about talking, and the most moral person was the one who yelled at the most other people for doing the talking all wrong.”

 

 “The wind combs the heather and gorse with a low ceaseless rustle. Its smell has a sweetness almost too cold to catch. The sky is a fine-grained gray, and from somewhere in its heights a bird sends down a pure wild whistling.”

 

 “The morning has turned lavishly beautiful. The autumn sun gave the greens of the fields an impossible, mythic radiance and transformed the back roads into light-muddled paths where a goblin with a fiddle, or a pretty maiden with a basket, could be waiting around every game and-bramble bend. Cal is in no mood to appreciate any of it. He feels like this specific beauty is central to the illusion that lulled him in stupidity, turned him into the peasant gazing slack-jawed at his hand full of gold coins till they melt into dead leaves in front of his eyes. If all this had happened in some depressing suburban clot of tract homes and ruler-measured lawns, he would have kept his wits about him.”

 

“He also can’t see any reason not to let himself sit there and think about Donna, seeing as he already fucked up and called her. Cal never had much time for nostalgia, but thinking about Donna seems like an important thing to do every now and then. EH sometimes gets the feeling that Donna has methodically erased all their good times from her memory, so that she can move on into her shiny new life without ripping herself up. If he doesn’t keep them in his, they’ll be gone like they never happened.”

 

 “I’ve only myself to please. There’s great freedom in that.”

 

My Take

Having read numerous books by the incredibly talented Irish writer Tana French, I was eagerly anticipating reading The Searcher.  While I found it to be a decent read, it doesn’t live up to her previous efforts.  There is not the same engagement with the characters and the central mystery feels mundane.

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538. The Scholar

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Dervla McTiernan

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Foreign

377 pages, published March 7, 2019

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

The Scholar is book #2 in Dervla McTiernan’s Cormac Reilly series.  It opens with Reilly’s girlfriend Emma stumbling across a hit and run victim in the early morning outside of Darcy Therapeutics, the research lab where she works, and calling Reilly.  The deceased girl is found with ID identifying her as Carline Darcy, the grandaughter of the founder of Darcy Therapeutics, Ireland’s most successful pharmaceutical company.  Reilly is assigned to the case and soon discovers that the victim is not Carline, but a poor waitress who dropped out of the nearby university.  As he continues to investigate, he discovers a tangled web which threatens is relationship with Emma.

Quotes 

 

My Take

After thoroughly enjoying the first Cormac Reilly novel The Ruin, I had high hopes for The Scholar.  I was not disappointed. McTiernan does more than just deliver an intriguing detective procedural, she sets you firmly in a time, place and the lives of the characters.  Additionally, her insights into human nature make for compelling reading.

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537. Olive, Again

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Elizabeth Strout

Genre:  Fiction

289 pages, published October 15, 2019

Reading Format:   e-book on Hoopla

Summary

The sequel to Olive Kitteridge, Olive, Again continues the story of the unique Olive Kitteridge as she enters old age,  struggling to make sense of her own life and the lives of others in the small town of Crosby, Maine.

Quotes 

“I think our job–maybe even our ‘duty’–is to–To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”

 

“Because in February the days were really getting longer and you could see it, if you really looked. You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised. It promised, that light, and what a thing that was.”

 

“And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect.”

 

“When you get old,” Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, “you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way.”

 

“But we’re both old enough to know things now, and that’s good.” “What things?” “When to shut up, mainly.”

 

 “What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing. It caused him to feel an inner trembling, and he could not quite find the words—for himself—to even put it exactly as he sensed it. But he sensed that he had lived his life in a way that he had not known. This meant there had been a large blindspot directly in front of his eyes. It meant that he did not understand, not really at all, how others had perceived

 

“God, Olive, you’re a difficult woman. You are such a goddamn difficult woman, and fuck all, I love you. So if you don’t mind, Olive, maybe you could be a little less Olive with me, even if it means being a little more Olive with others. Because I love you, and we don’t have much time.”

 

“And Olive thought about this: the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary. She thought of Betty and her stupid bumper sticker, and the child who had been so frightened that Halima Butterfly had told her about, and yet to tell any of this right now to Betty, who was genuinely suffering—as Olive had suffered—seemed cruel, and she kept silent.”

 

“No. I had enough of babies growing up.” “Never mind. Kids are just a needle in your heart.”

 

“You’re an easy woman to please,” he had said to her. And she had said, “You may be the first person to think that.”

 

“But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish—all those hundreds of students she had taught, the girls and boys in high school she had passed in the corridor when she was a high school girl herself (many—most—would be dead by now), the billion streaks of emotion she’d had as she’d looked at sunrises, sunsets, the different hands of waitresses who had placed before her cups of coffee— All of it gone, or about to go.”

 

“I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.”

 

 “When you get old,” Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, “you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way.”

 

“I am the opposite of a snob.” Jack laughed a long time. “You think being a reverse snob is not being a snob? Olive, you’re a snob.”

 

“And that woman is not politics. She’s a person, and she has every right to be here.”

 

“And so the day they had had together folded over on itself, was done with, gone.”

 

“he was an old man who was talking to himself on a wharf in Portland, Maine, and he could

 

“Stop it! Tell me how it’s really been! He sat back, pushed his glass forward. It’s just the way it was, that’s all. People either didn’t know how they felt about something or they chose never to say how they really felt about something.”

 

“She did not have a family as other people did. Other people had their children come and stay and they talked and laughed and the grandchildren sat on the laps of their grandmothers, and they went places and did things, ate meals together, kissed when they parted.”

 

“Her son had married his mother, as all men—in some form or other—eventually do.”

 

“the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary.”

 

 “thought of the ants that were still going about trying to get their sand wherever they needed it to go. They seemed almost heartbreaking to him, in their tininess and their resilience.”

 

 “Personality disorder? Given the extensive and widespread array of human emotions, why was anything a personality disorder?”

 

“Betty was still weeping, but she was smiling more too, and she said, “Oh, it’s just a life, Olive.” Olive thought about this. She said, “Well, it’s your life. It matters.”

 

My Take

It was a pleasure to revisit the character of Olive Kitteridge.  Through her, author Elizabeth Strout shares so many insightful observances of human nature that I often found myself re-reading portions of the book to make sure I registered what was being said.  If you have read Olive Kitteridge and enjoyed it, then by all means read Olive, Again.

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535. The Ruin

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee

Author:   Dervla McTiernan

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Foreign

380 pages, published July 3, 2018

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

The Ruin (Book no. 1 in the Cormac Reilly series) opens with DI Cormac Reilly discovering the body of Hilaria Blake in her crumbling Georgian home, dead from a drug overdose, along with her two children, Maude and Jack.  Twenty years later, Aisling Conroy’s boyfriend Jack is found dead in a freezing river and the police conclude it was suicide. A surgical resident, Aisling suspects something is not quite right, especially after Jack’s sister Maude reappears in Ireland after a 20 year absence.  When  Cormac Reilly is assigned to re-investigate Hilaria’s accidental overdose, he also comes to suspect that things are not as they seem.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Having read and loved many books by the Irish writer Tana French, I was keen to check out Dervla McTiernan, a writer in the same vein.  I was not disappointed.  Her spot on character insights and sense of place enrich and deepen this crackling mystery.  I will continue to read her books and look forward to the second Cormac Reilly book.

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534. Machines Like Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Ian McEwan

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction

306 pages, published April 18, 2019

Reading Format:   e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Author Ian McEwan tells the story of a world where fully functional robots that closely resemble humans are introduced in an alternate reality 1980’s  Britain.  The UK has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing is alive.

In his early 30’s, Charlie finds himself unemployed and adrift when he comes into a small inheritance.  He uses the money to purchase Adam, one of the first group of synthetic humans sold to the public. With the assistance of his neighbor Miranda, whom Charlie is in love with, Charlie co-designs Adam’s personality. Adam, who is beautiful, strong and clever, develops feelings for Miranda and the three protagonists are soon emeshed in a love triangle.

Quotes 

“We create a machine with intelligence and self-awareness and push it out into our imperfect world. Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and scores of daily outrages.”

 

“As Schopenhauer said about free will, you can choose whatever you desire, but you’re not free to choose your desires.”

 

“Factory settings—a contemporary synonym for fate.”

 

“An old friend of mine, a journalist, once said that paradise on earth was to work all day alone in anticipation of an evening in interesting company.”

 

“We live alongside this torment and aren’t amazed when we still find happiness, even love. Artificial minds are not so well defended.”

 

“I couldn’t motivate myself. I was subject to occasional depression, relatively mild, certainly not suicidal, and not long episodes so much as passing moments like this, when meaning and purpose and all prospect of pleasure drained away and left me briefly catatonic. For minutes on end I couldn’t remember what kept me going. As I stared at the litter of cups and pot and jug in front of me, I thought it was unlikely I would ever get out of my wretched little flat. The two boxes I called rooms, the stained ceilings walls and floors would contain me to the end. There was a lot like me in the neighbourhood, but thirty or forty years older. I had seen them in Simon’s shop, reaching for the quality journals from the top shelf. I noted the men especially and their shabby clothes. They had swept past some crucial junction in their lives many years back – a poor career choice, a bad marriage, the unwritten book, the illness that never went away. Now there options were closed, they managed to keep themselves going with some shred of intellectual longing or curiosity. But their boat was sunk.”

 

“The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.”

 

“Have you any idea what it takes to catch a ball, or raise a cup to your lips, or make immediate sense of a word, a phrase or an ambiguous sentence? We didn’t, not at first. Solving maths problems is the tiniest fraction of what human intelligence does. We learned from a new angle just how wondrous a thing the brain is. A one-litre, liquid-cooled, three-dimensional computer. Unbelievable processing power, unbelievably compressed, unbelievable energy efficiency, no overheating. The whole thing running on twenty-five watts — one dim light bulb.”

 

 

“It’s about machines like me and people like you and our future together…the sadness that’s to come. It will happen. With improvements over time…we’ll surpass you…and outlast you…even as we love you.”

 

“What people queued the entire weekend for became, six months later, as interesting as the socks on their feet. What happened to the cognition-enhancing helmets, the speaking fridges with a sense of smell? Gone the way of the mouse pad, the Filofax, the electric carving knife, the fondue set. The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”

 

“Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.”

 

“My prejudice was that any machine that could not tell you by its very functioning how it should be used was not worth its keep.”

 

“other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom.”

 

“Europe was not simply a union that chiefly benefited large corporations. The history of the continental member states was vastly different from our own. They had suffered violent revolutions, invasions, occupations and dictatorships. They were therefore only too willing to submerge their identities in a common cause directed from Brussels. We, on the other hand, had lived unconquered for nearly a thousand years. Soon, we would live freely again.”

 

“A man newly in love knows what life is.”

 

“The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.”

 

“My opinion,” he said, “is that the haiku is the literary form of the future.”

 

“The other day, Thomas reminded me of the famous Latin tag from Virgil’s Aeneid. Sunt lacrimae rerum – there are tears in the nature of things.”

 

“football in the immaculate empty cupboards. He had lived there three years, he had told me. He was successful and rich and he inhabited a house of failure, of abandoned hope, probably.”

 

 “property, fed on each side by nationalistic stupidity. I summoned the Borges observation: two bald men fighting over a comb.”

 

“…I despised even more the agglomeration of routines and learning algorithms that could burrow into my life, like a tropical river worm, and make choices on my behalf.”

 

“The academic movement known generally as ‘theory’ had taken social history ‘by storm’ – her phrase. Since she had studied at a traditional university which offered old-fashioned narrative accounts of the past, she was having to take on a new vocabulary, a new way of thinking. Sometimes, as we lay side by side in bed (the evening of the tarragon chicken had been a success) I listened to her complaints and tried to look and sound sympathetic. It was no longer proper to assume that anything at all had ever happened in the past. There were only historical documents to consider, and changing scholarly approaches to them, and our own shifting relationship to those approaches, all of which were determined by ideological context, by relations to power and wealth, to race, class, gender and sexual orientation.”

 

My Take

Ian McEwan’s combination of an alternative history with fully realized robotic artificial intelligence make Machines Like Me a fascinating read.  The plot itself is compelling in that we want to see what robotic Adam will do next and how he will interact with the human co-creators of his personality.  However, the subtext of the book raises intriguing questions: what makes us human? Our actions or our inner selves? Could a machine understand the human heart and be capable of love?

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533. A Column of Fire

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ken Follett

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

916 pages, published September 12, 2017

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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