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501. Interior Chinatown

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Jennifer Lum

Author:   Charles Yu

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Cultural

273  pages, published  January 28, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Your oppression is second-class.”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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497. Troubled Blood

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

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

Genre:   Fiction, Crime, Suspense, Thriller, Mystery

944 pages, published  September 15, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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494. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   J.K. Rowling

Genre:   Fiction, Young Adult, Fantasy

759 pages, published  July 21, 2007

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the final book in the classic series by JK Rowling.  The book, and the series, build to a final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort.  Only one can survive.

Quotes 

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

 

“It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.”

 

“Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.”

 

“Death’s got an Invisibility Cloak?” Harry interrupted again.

“So he can sneak up on people,” said Ron. “Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking…”

 

“Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.

“After all this time?”

“Always,” said Snape.”

 

“He can run faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo.”

“Cinderella? Snow White? What’s that? An illness?”

 “Albus Severus,” Harry said quietly, so that nobody but Ginny could hear, and she was tactful enough to pretend to be waving to Rose, who was now on the train, “you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew.”

 

 “There was a clatter as the basilisk fangs cascaded out of Hermione’s arms. Running at Ron, she flung them around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth. Ron threw away the fangs and broomstick he was holding and responded with such enthusiasm that he lifted Hermione off her feet.  “Is this the moment?” Harry asked weakly, and when nothing happened except that Ron and Hermione gripped each other still more firmly and swayed on the spot, he raised his voice. “OI! There’s a war going on here!”  Ron and Hermione broke apart, their arms still around each other.  “I know, mate,” said Ron, who looked as though he had recently been hit on the back of the head with a Bludger, “so it’s now or never, isn’t it?”

“Never mind that, what about the Horcrux?” Harry shouted. “D’you think you could just — just hold it in, until we’ve got the diadem?”  “Yeah — right — sorry —” said Ron, and he and Hermione set about gathering up fangs, both pink in the face.”

 

 “I’m going to keep going until I succeed — or die. Don’t think I don’t know how this might end. I’ve known it for years.”

 

 “Does it hurt?” The childish question had escaped Harry’s lips before he could stop it.

“Dying? Not at all,” said Sirius. “Quicker and easier than falling asleep.”

 

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”

 

 “Every second he breathed, the smell of the grass, the cool air on his face, was so precious: To think that people had years and years, time to waste, so much time it dragged, and he was clinging to each second.”

 

 “Here lies Dobby, a free elf.”

 

“Snape’s patronus was a doe,’ said Harry, ‘the same as my mother’s because he loved her for nearly all of his life, from when they were children.”

 

“The last words Albus Dumbledore spoke to the pair of us?’

Harry is the best hope we have. Trust him.”

 

My Take

I read through the entire Harry Potter set with my son Nick while he was in elementary school.  It was a pleasure then and at least an equal pleasure to listen to the audio version of the books during my reading quest.  Narrator Jim Dale is masterful, creating unique and fitting voices for all of the characters.  Author J.K. Rowling finishes the series strong with rising tension, compelling character arcs and a perfect ending.  Even if you have previously read the series, I highly recommend trying out the audio version (especially if you can do so with young kids).  You will not be disappointed.

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492. The Book of Longings

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Sue Monk Kidd

Genre:    Fiction, Historical Fiction, Theology, Christian

416 pages, published April 21, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The Book of Longings is a new take on the story of Jesus Christ.  It is told from the perspective of Ana who was raised in a wealthy family in Sepphoris with ties to the ruler of Galilee.  Ana longs to be a writer and rebels against the stifling expectations and oppression of her family and culture.  Author Sue Monk Kidd engages in poetic license and has Ana marrying Jesus and then making her home with his brothers, James and Simon, and their mother, Mary. Ana and Jesus are separated for several years and are reunited just before the crucifixion.  Ana then carries on, chronicling Jesus’ story and reaching her potential in a small artists’ colony.

Quotes 

“When I tell you all shall be well, I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.”

 

“Anger is effortless. Kindness is hard. Try to exert yourself.”

 

“Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.”

 

“Each of us must find a way to love the world. You have found yours.”

― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

 

“Why should we contain God any longer in our poor and narrow conceptions, which are so often no more than grandiose reflections of ourselves? Let us set him free.”

 

“Your moment will come because you’ll make it come.”

 

“It does the world no good to return evil for evil. I try now to return good to them instead.”

 

“Your moment will come, and when it does, you must seize it with all the bravery you can find.”

 

“Life will be life and death will be death.”

 

“Her mind was an immense feral country that spilled its borders.”

 

“Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it.”

 

“You think with your head. You know with your heart.”

 

“I went to stand beside him and looked in the same direction as he, and it seemed for an instant I saw the world as he did, orphaned and broken and staggeringly beautiful, a thing to be held and put back right.”

 

“It’s always a marvel when one’s pain doesn’t settle into bitterness, but brings forth kindness instead.”

 

“When I was finally able to read the Scriptures for myself, I discovered (behold!) there were women.”

 

My Take

I had previously read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings and enjoyed both books, so I was interested in her latest effort.  It’s a good book, not a great one.  Kidd offers a unique perspective on Christianity by imagining Jesus with a wife, but does seem to be accurate with a lot of the other historical details in her story.  Her main character Ana provides an compelling portal to view the life, death and resurrection Jesus.

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490. My Dark Vanessa

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Valerie Flores

Author:   Kate Elizabeth Russell

Genre:    Fiction

385  pages, published  March 10, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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489. Watch Me Disappear

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Janelle Brown

Genre:   Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Thriller

358 pages, published July 11, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Watch Me Disappear tells the story of Billie, Olive and Jonathan, a family that is torn apart when Mom Billie disappears while on a solo hiking trek and is presumed dead.  Olive and Jonathan are left to cope and wonder what happened.

Quotes 

“Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”

 

“You don’t realize how much you’ll miss the asphyxiating intimacy of early parenthood until you can finally breathe again.”

 

“All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism.”

 

“Only someone fearful of his own ordinariness would buy, so unquestioningly, someone else’s extraordinariness. Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”

 

“You believe what you think you believe, until suddenly, you realize that you don’t anymore. Or maybe you do believe, but it’s no longer convenient to do so, so you decide to forget. You decide to find other beliefs, ones that more comfortably fit the constantly evolving puzzle of your life. To put it more finely: There are those beliefs that you will carry with you until the end of your days. A belief in friendliness; a belief in long vacations; a belief in the power of the press and the merits of good coffee. And then there are the beliefs that seem so vital when you are young, but that the passing years steadily leach out of you: a belief in not selling out; a belief in the superiority of the artist; a belief in hardwood floors and staying fit and your ability to change the world. Most of all: a belief that love is forever, that you can climb into a stranger’s heart and know that person and be known in return.”

 

“Take two people with a mutual willingness to connect, convince them to expose their innermost thoughts, and presto: true love.”

 

“Think about what a miracle it is that we’re all working in concert with one another. Every day humans get a fresh chance to decide whether we’re going to destroy each other or build a better world, and you know what? For the most part, we do the latter.”

 

“It didn’t seem fair, and then that love could fizzle,curdle, ossify into something less wonderful than what it once was. And then you were stuck, because, ultimately, love is a kind of trap. Once you find it, you can’t deviate from that commitment without everyone getting hurt. You can’t just leave. Instead, need wins out over freedom; and everyone stands around feeling wounded and bitter, letting inertia take over.”

 

My Take

I picked up Watch Me Disappear after reading and loving Janelle Brown’s taut, page turning thriller Pretty Things.  I didn’t enjoy Watch Me Disappear nearly as much and it took me a lot longer to finish than it should have, but it was still a decent read with some ideas to ponder.

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485. Uprooted

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   Naomi Novik

Genre:   Fiction, Fantasy

435 pages, published May 19, 2014

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The protagonist of Uprooted is Agnieszka, a village girl who is selected by “The Dragon,” a magical wizard who every ten years chooses a girl to take to his tower.  The Dragon, who protects the villagers against the malevolent and encroaching Wood, trains Agnieszka in his magical ways and enlists her help in fighting the Wood.

Quotes 

“You intolerable lunatic,” he snarled at me, and then he caught my face between his hands and kissed me.”

 

“truth didn’t mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn’t come and listen.”

 

“I’m glad,” I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn’t that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn’t, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn’t.”

 

“I was a glaring blot on the perfection. But I didn’t care: I didn’t feel I owed him beauty.”

 

“I don’t want more sense!” I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. “Not if sense means I’ll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that’s worth holding on to?”

 

“I don’t want more sense!” I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. “Not if sense means I’ll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that’s worth holding on to?”

 

“I leaned against his side, his irritation oddly comforting. After a moment he grudgingly put his arm around me. The deep quiet was already settling back upon the grove, as if all the fire and rage we’d brought could make only a brief interruption in its peace.”

 

“You’ve been inexpressibly lucky,” he said finally. “And inexpressibly mad, although in your case the two seem to be the same thing”

 

“His name tasted of fire and wings, of curling smoke, of subtlety and strength and the rasping whisper of scales.”

 

“Those the walkers carried into the Wood were less lucky. We didn’t know what happened to them, but they came back out sometimes, corrupted in the worst way: smiling and cheerful, unharmed. They seemed almost themselves to anyone who didn’t know them well, and you might spend half a day talking with one of them and never realize anything was wrong, until you found yourself taking up a knife and cutting off your own hand, putting out your own eyes, your own tongue, while they kept talking all the while, smiling, horrible. And then they would take the knife and go inside your house, to your children, while you lay outside blind and choking and helpless even to scream. If someone we loved was taken by the walkers, the only thing we knew to hope for them was death, and it could only be a hope.”

 

My Take

While a lot of people love Uprooted, I am not a fan.  It had way too many action sequences, was often disjointed (incomprehensively jumping from one thing to another) and failed to develop the main characters or their relationship.  A bit of a slog to get through it.

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484. Station Eleven

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Emily St. John Mandel

Genre:    Fiction, Dystopia, Science Fiction

333  pages, published September 9, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Station Eleven is a dystopian novel set in the days of civilization’s collapse after a virus kills off most of the world’s population.  Author Emily St. John Mandel examines how human beings cope when almost every aspect of the world as they knew it ceases to exist.

Quotes 

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”

 

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”

 

“No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.”

 

“They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.”

 

“She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle.”

 

“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”

 

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”

 

“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think – this will maybe sound weird – it’s like the corporate world’s full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I’ve had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia’s no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood’s full of ghosts.”

 

 “She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”

 

“I’ve been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they’ll never truly die. I know that’s a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They’re all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”

 

“Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.”

 

 “An incomplete list:

No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.

No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.

No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.

No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.

No more countries, all borders unmanned.

No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.”

 

“He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.”

 

My Take

After reading and loving The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, I was intererested to see if she had written any other books.  I discovered that Station Eleven was her breakthrough novel, so added the audio version to my library queue.  While I prefer The Glass Hotel, I did enjoy Station Eleven, especially her fascinating descriptions of how life changes after a pandemic wipes out most of civilization.

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483. A Star is Bored

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Byron Lane

Genre:    Fiction

343 pages, published July 8, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

A Star is Bored is written from the perspective of Charlie Besson, a young gay man who is hired by movie star Kathi Kannon to work as her personal assistant.  The novel is not so loosely based on author Byron Lane’s time working as Carrie Fisher’s personal assistant.

Quotes 

“Travel is a wonderful alternative to suicide”

 

 “My attorney told me there are a bunch of questions I’m not supposed to ask you, so I’d like to go ahead and get those out of the way,” she says.”

 

“Beautiful people, they’re never really alone.”

 

 “Life only exists in your mind. Everything you see, everything you hear, all of it, it goes through your eyes and ears and is processed by your mind, and the mind can lie, can be sick, can get it wrong”

 

“They’re all little things until one of them kills you.”

 

“Therapista says hating others is hating yourself.”

 

“Therapista says judging others is really judging yourself.”

 

 “Therapista says a wonderful, healthy life doesn’t include a requirement to be constantly entertained. She says what we really want is peace of mind, peace in being. Maybe another word for boredom is peace.”

 

“I’m not exactly suicidal-suicidal—I don’t have a plan or anything—but suicide has always had a spot on my vision board. With my shitty news job and pathetic, lonely life, I admit I think of suicide like some people think of going back to college.”

 

“Waiting for what? For me?” Kathi asks, smiling kindly. “I’m not a leader. I’m a follower. It might look like I’m a leader because I’m in movies, but I’m just a follower who’s in movies and I happen to have other followers following me but we’re just all confused followers following followers following followers and it’s a clusterfuck of following. There’s a line of people following me and thinking I’m leading them and I’m just, like, trying to find somewhere to take a nap.”

 

“We’re all victims of what others think of us, of our identity based on our employer. It doesn’t matter who you really are, it’s how you’re perceived.”

 

My Take

A Star is Bored is a fun, clever read that takes you behind the scenes in the life a personal assistant to a Hollywood star.  Good choice for a beach vacation.

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480. The Dispatcher

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   John Scalzi

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction, Mystery, Novella

130 pages, published October 4, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In the not too distant future, it becomes almost impossible to murder anyone.  99.9% of people intentionally killed come back to life.  We don’t know how it happens, but it impacts the human race in unexpected and interesting ways.  Tony Valdez is a Dispatcher, a licensed professional whose job is to humanely dispatch those whose circumstances put them in death’s crosshairs, so they can have a second chance to avoid death, who races the clock to save a fellow who has been kidnapped.

Quotes 

“I don’t look smug.” “You always look smug. You have resting smug face.”

 

“It’s because I remind them they’re not God,” I said. “And that if there is one, I’m closer to Him than they are.”

 

My Take

“I don’t look smug.” “You always look smug. You have resting smug face.”

 

“It’s because I remind them they’re not God,” I said. “And that if there is one, I’m closer to Him than they are.”

/by