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579.    The Island of Sea Women

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Nancy Sissom

Author:   Lisa See

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign, World War II

374 pages, published March 5, 2019

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Set on the Korean island of Jeju, The Island of Sea Women tells the story of Mi-ja and Young-sook, two young girls who work together as sea divers in their village’s all-female diving collective. The book covers the ups and downs of their relationship through the period of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s, World War II, the Korean War, until the modern era.

Quotes 

“They did this to me. They did that to me. A woman who thinks that way will never overcome her anger. You are not being punished for your anger. You’re being punished by your anger.”

 

“How do we fall in love? … How different it is with friendship. No one picks a friend for us. We come together by choice. We are not tied together through ceremony or the responsibility to create a son. We tie ourselves together through moment. The spark when we first meet. Laughter and tears shared. Secrets packed away to be treasured, hoarded, and protected. The wonder that someone can be so different from you and yet still understand your heart in a way no one else ever will.”

 

“To understand everything is to forgive.”

 

“Fall down eight times, stand up nine. For me, this saying is less about the dead paving the way for future generations than it is for the women of Jeju. We suffer and suffer and suffer, but we also keep getting up. We keep living. You would not be here if you weren’t brave. Now you need to be braver still.”

 

“The sea is better than a mother. You can love your mother, and she still might leave you. You can love or hate the sea, but it will always be there. Forever. The sea has been the center of her life. It has nurtured her and stolen from her, but it has never left.”

 

“You are not being punished for your anger. You’re being punished by your anger.”

 

“Her house is the nest where she hides the joy, laughter, sorrows, and regrets of her life.”

 

“Parents exist in children,” Grandmother said to bolster my confidence. “Your mother will always exist in you. She will give you strength wherever you go.”

 

“I’ve had to think about the dark shadow side of friendship. This is the person who knows and loves you best, which means she knows all the ways to hurt and betray you.”

 

“Who can name a death that was not tragic?” the speaker asks. “Is there a way for us to find meaning in the losses we’ve suffered? Who can say that one soul has a heavier grievance than another? We were all victims. We need to forgive each other.”

 

Remember? Yes. Forgive? No.”

 

“How can I help change things if I sit by and do nothing?”

 

“For a tree that has many branches, even a small breeze will shake some loose.”

 

“They did this to me. They did that to me. A woman who thinks that way will never overcome her anger. You are not being punished for your anger. You’re being punished by your anger.”

 

“And it confused me to think that the cloven-footed ones could have so many marvelous creations.”

 

“Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back,” she warned the gathering. “In this world, in the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life. We are crossing between life and death every day.”

 

“As the eldest daughter, I had always been responsible for my younger siblings. Now I had to provide their food and clothing and be a second mother to them. My father was no help. He was a kind man, but he shuddered under the added responsibility. Too often I found him outside, alone with his sadness. No man was built to shoulder the full weight of feeding and caring for his family. That was why he had a wife and daughters.”

 

“You have been a good mother to your children, but now you must be an even better and stronger mother. Children are hope and joy. On land, you will be a mother. In the sea, you can be a grieving widow. Your tears will be added to the oceans of salty tears that wash in great waves across our planet. This I know. If you try to live, you can live on well.”

 

“Women live quietly,” I said. “However angry or broken a woman might get, she does not think about beating someone, does she?”

 

“If there is happiness at age three, it will last until you reach eighty.”

 

“I was a haenyeo—independent and resilient—but I’d missed my husband.”

 

“Confucius didn’t care much for women: When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son.”

 

“The saying You aren’t aware your clothes are getting wet in the rain suggests a gradual change and can be interpreted in two ways, one positive, the other negative. A positive story might involve friendship, which grows over time. First you are acquaintances, then friends, then a closer relationship develops, until you realize that you love each other. A darker example might be about a criminal. A person steals a small thing, then a larger thing, until finally he’s become a thief. The point is, you’re not aware just how wet you’re getting when the drizzle starts.”

 

“No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice. We are not tied together through ceremony or the responsibility to create a son; we tie ourselves together through moments. The spark when we first meet. Laughter and tears shared. Secrets packed away to be treasured, hoarded, and protected. The wonder that someone can be so different from you and yet still understand your heart in a way no one else will.”

 

 “When the string breaks while working, there is still the rope. When the oars wear out, there is still the tree, ” she recited. “You feel you can’t go on, but you will.”

 

“You aren’t aware your clothes are getting wet in the rain.”

 

“No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice.”

 

“A monument will never change how she feels. It’s unfair that victims should have to forgive those who raped, tortured, and killed, or burned villages to the ground. On an Island of World Peace, shouldn’t those who inflicted terrible harm on others be forced to confess and atone, and not make widows and mothers pay for stone monuments?”

 

My Take

I found The Island of Sea Women to be a fascinating piece of historical fiction.  I learned a lot about the Korean people, especially their suffering under the brutal Japanese occupation during the World War II era.  Author Lisa See brings this time period to life with a compelling tale of two best friends who belonged to an elite group of female divers who were torn apart by events and misunderstandings.  Well worth a read.

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578.    The Reckoning

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    John Grisham

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Suspense, Crime

420 pages, published October 23, 2018

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Reckoning tells the story of Pete Banning, a decorated World War II hero who survived the Bataan death march.  Shortly after returning home to his hometown of Clanton, Mississippi he coldbloodedly walked into his church and calmly shot and killed the Reverend Dexter Bell, his pastor and friend.  In response to all questions, even when facing execution, Pete’s only answer is “I have nothing to say.”  Not until the end of the story do we find out the reason for Pete’s actions.

Quotes 

“Meanness does not inspire loyalty.”

 

“Hearing the truth is like grabbing smoke in our family,”

 

 “Between 1818 and 1940, the state hanged eight hundred people, 80 percent of whom were black. Those, of course, were the judicial hangings for rapists and murderers who had been processed through the courts. During that same period of time, approximately six hundred black men were lynched by mobs operating outside the legal system and thoroughly immune from any of its repercussions”

 

 “Although he performed no acts of combat valor, as required by law, and left his troops behind, MacArthur was awarded the Medal of Honor for his gallant defense of the Philippines. The emaciated men he left on Bataan were in no condition to fight. They suffered from swelling joints, bleeding gums, numbness in feet and hands, low blood pressure, loss of body heat, shivers, shakes, and anemia so severe many could not walk.”

 

 “Pete became the trusty. As such, he served the much improved meals to the other four white prisoners, and to the six or seven black ones on the back side of the jail. Since all prisoners soon knew where the food was originating, Pete was a popular trusty. He organized work details to clean up the jail, and he paid for a plumber to modernize the equipment in both restrooms. For a few bucks, he devised a venting system to clear the smoke-clogged air, and everyone, even the smokers, breathed easier. He and a black prisoner overhauled the furnace and the cells were almost toasty at night. He slept hard, napped frequently, exercised on the hour, and encouraged his new pals to do likewise.”

 

“The Bannings were farmers and landowners, but they were workers, not gentrified planters with decadent lives made possible by the sweat of others.”

 

“Pete offered his reading materials to the others, but there was little interest. He suspected they were either fully or partially illiterate. To pass the time, he played poker with Leon Colliver, the moonshiner across the hall. Leon was not particularly bright, but he was sharp as hell at cards and Pete, who had mastered all card games in the army, had his hands full. Cribbage was his favorite, and Florry brought his cribbage board. Leon had never heard of the game, but absorbed it with no effort and within an hour was up a nickel.”

 

 “Her husband, a devout servant and follower of Christ, was reading his Bible and preparing his sermon, at church, when he was murdered. Why couldn’t God protect him, of all people? Upon deeper reflection, this often led to the more troubling question, one she never asked aloud: Is there really a God? The mere consideration of this as a passing thought frightened her, but she could not deny its existence.”

 

“In August of 1941, the United States supplied Japan with 80 percent of its oil. When President Roosevelt announced a complete oil embargo, Japan’s economic and military strength was imperiled.”

 

“She entered her home and stood in the kitchen, stopped cold by an aroma that was so thick and familiar it overwhelmed her: a mix of cigarette smoke and coffee, bacon grease, fruity pies and cakes, thick beef and venison stews that Nineva simmered on the stove for days, steam from the canning of stewed tomatoes and a dozen vegetables, wet leather from Pete’s boots in a corner, the sweet soapy smell of Nineva herself. Liza was staggered by the dense fragrances and leaned on a counter. In the darkness, she could hear the voices of her children as they giggled over breakfast and got themselves shooed away from the stove by Nineva. She could see Pete sitting there at the kitchen table with his coffee and cigarettes reading the Tupelo daily. A cloud moved somewhere and a ray of moonlight entered through a window. She focused and her kitchen came into view. She breathed as slowly as possible, sucking in the sweet smells of her former life.”

 

My Take

Another enjoyable read from the eminently readable John Grisham.  In addition to the compelling story, I learned a lot about the horrific conditions in the Pacific theater during World War II.  Grisham also makes a strong case against the death penalty with his detailed account of how the electric chair was administered.

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572.    The Four Winds

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Pam Dupont

Author:   Kristin Hannah

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

464 pages, published February 2, 2021

Reading Format:   Audiobook

 

Summary

The Four Winds takes place in Texas, during the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression, and follows the story of Elsa Martinelli.  Elsa, who never felt good enough for her family, is thrown out of her home when she finds herself pregnant by a younger man from an Italian immigrant farming family.  Elsa fights to keep her two children fed and sheltered as she faces one hardship after another, eventually moving them to California for the false hope of a better life. 

 

Quotes 

“A warrior believes in an end she can’t see and fights for it. A warrior never gives up. A warrior fights for those weaker than herself. It sounds like motherhood to me.”

 

“It wasn’t the fear that mattered in life. It was the choices made when you were afraid. You were brave because of your fear, not in spite of it.”

 

“Courage is fear you ignore.”

 

“Love is what remains when everything else is gone.”

 

“Books had always been her solace; novels gave her the space to be bold, brave, beautiful, if only in her own imagination.”

 

“Don’t worry about dying, Elsa. Worry about not living. Be brave.”

 

“As we know, there are lessons to be learned from history. Hope to be derived from hardships faced before. We’ve gone through bad times before and survived, even thrived. History has shown us the strength and durability of the human spirit, In the end, it is our idealism and our courage and our commitment to one another–what we have in common–that will save us.”

 

 “I say folks who hang on to the past miss their chance for a future.”

 

“You are of me, Loreda, in a way that can never be broken. Not by words or anger or actions or time. I love you. I will always love you.”

 

 “Elsa knew that a library card—a thing they’d taken for granted all of their lives—meant there was still a future.”

 

 “Apparently you couldn’t stop loving some people, or needing their love, even when you knew

, The Four Winds

 

“There was a pain that came with constant disapproval; a sense of having lost something unnamed, unknown. Elsa had survived it by being quiet, by not demanding or seeking attention, by accepting that she was loved, but unliked.”

 

“We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live. We shall endure. —CÉSAR CHÁVEZ”

 

“Although she hadn’t seen her parents for years, it turned out that a parent’s disapproval was a powerful, lingering voice that shaped and defined one’s self-image.”

 

“Heartache had been a part of her life so long it had become as familiar as the color of her hair or the slight curve in her spine. Sometimes it was the lens through which she viewed her world and sometimes it was the blindfold she wore so she didn’t see. But it was always there.”

 

“The four winds have blown us here, people from all across the country, to the very end of this great land. And now, at last, we make our stand, fight for what we know to be right. We fight for our American dream, that it will be possible again.”

 

“That was the first time her grandfather had leaned down and whispered, Be brave, into her ear. And then, Or pretend to be. It’s all the same.”

 

“Jean reached over for Elsa’s hand and held it. Elsa hadn’t known until right then how much difference a friend could make. How one person could lift your spirit just enough to keep you upright.”

 

“Passion is a thunderstorm, there and gone. It nourishes, si, but it drowns, too.”

 

“Fear is smart until…” He headed for the door, paused as he reached for the knob. “Until what?” He looked back at her. “Until you realize you’re afraid of the wrong thing.”

 

“The things your parents say and the things your husband doesn’t say become a mirror, don’t they? You see yourself as they see you, and no matter how far you come, you bring that mirror with you.”

 

“There was something she hadn’t known when she went into marriage and became a mother that she knew now: it was only possible to live without love when you’d never known it.”

 

My Take

Having read and previously really enjoyed booksby the talented Kristin Hannah (Winter Garden, The Nightingale, The Great Alone), I had high hopes for The Four Winds.  While not quite the caliber of The Nightingale, it was nevertheless a very good read.  Hannah creates identifiable, indelible, engaging characters and I got a really feel for how desperate times were during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

 

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571.    Cry the Beloved Country

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Alan Paton

Genre:   Fiction, Foreign, Historical Fiction

316 pages, published 1948

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic novel about South Africa during the Arpatheid period about Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu pastor, and his son, Absalom, who is charged with murdering a white man.

Quotes 

“The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again.”

 

“But there is only one thing that has power completely, and this is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power.”

 

“Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that’s the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much.”

 

“ — This world is full of trouble, umfundisi.

— Who knows it better?

— Yet you believe?

Kumalo looked at him under the light of the lamp. I believe, he said, but I have learned that it is a secret. Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering. There is my wife, and you, my friend, and these people who welcomed me, and the child who is so eager to be with us here in Ndotsheni – so in my suffering I can believe.

— I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.”

 

“Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival.

When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.”

 

“The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions.”

 

“The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.”

 

“For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing.”

 

“There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens pages of these messengers of doom. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.”

 

“We do not know, we do not know. We shall live from day to day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forego. We shall forego the coming home drunken through the midnight streets, and the evening walk over the star-lit veld. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown. And the conscience shall be thrust down; the light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in some day not yet come; and how it will come, and when it will come, we shall not think about at all.”

 

“Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who indeed knows why there can be comfort in a world of desolation? Now God be thanked that there is a beloved one who can lift up the heart in suffering, that one can play with a child in the face of such misery. Now God be thanked that the name of a hill is such music, that the name of a river can heal. Aye, even the name of a river that runs no more.

 

“because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my journey a star that will not play false to me, a compass that will not lie.”

 

“I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good for their country, come together to work for it.  I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating.”

 

“It was not his habit to dwell on what might have been but what could never be.”

 

“And were your back as broad as heaven, and your purse full of gold, and did your compassion reach from here to hell itself, there is nothing you can do.”

 

“For mines are for men, not for money. And money is not something to go mad about, and throw your hat into the air for. Money is for food and clothes and comfort, and a visit to the pictures. Money is to make happy the lives of children. Money is for security, and for dreams, and for hopes, and for purposes. Money is for buying the fruits of the earth, of the land where you were born.”

 

 “In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark and silent forest, there is a leaf that falls. Behind the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools.”

 

My Take

I read Cry, the Beloved Country just before a trip to South Africa with the hope of gaining insight into that country and its history of racial injustice.  It delivered this through the story of a black family coming to grips with the execution of their son after he kills a white man.   The book is written in a lyrical, poetic style that enhances its impact.

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565. How to Stop Time

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Matt Haig

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy

352 pages, published June 11, 2019

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Tom Hazard has a extremely rare medical condition that does not allow him to age like the rest of us.  While he looks 41 years old, he was born centuries earlier during the Elizabethan Age.  As a member of the Albatross Society, Tom has to follow their cardinal rule:  don’t fall in love.  However, after he moves back to his old home of London and starts working as a history teacher, Tom meets a , his old home, to settle down and become a high school history teacher. And on his first day at school, he becomes smitten with an enchanting French teacher.  He must then navigate the dangerous territory between his heart and his head.

Quotes 

“And, just as it only takes a moment to die, it only takes a moment to live. You just close your eyes and let every futile fear slip away. And then, in this new state, free from fear, you ask yourself: who am I? If I could live without doubt what would I do? If I could be kind without the fear of being fucked over? If I could love without fear of being hurt? If I could taste the sweetness of today without thinking of how I will miss that taste tomorrow? If I could not fear the passing of time and the people it will steal? Yes. What would I do? Who would I care for? What battle would I fight? Which paths would I step down? What joys would I allow myself? What internal mysteries would I solve? How, in short, would I live?”

 

 “Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don’t expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.”

 

“That’s the thing with time, isn’t it? It’s not all the same. Some days – some years – some decades – are empty. There is nothing to them. It’s just flat water. And then you come across a year, or even a day, or an afternoon. And it is everything. It is the whole thing.”

 

“Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.”

 

“People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don’t die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters.”

 

“To talk about memories is to live them a little.”

 

“Music doesn’t get in. Music is already in. Music simply uncovers what is there, makes you feel emotions that you didn’t necessarily know you had inside you, and runs around waking them all up. A rebirth of sorts.”

 

“It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn’t just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.”

 

“As far as I can see, this is a problem with living in the twenty-first century. Many of us have every material thing we need, so the job of marketing is now to tie the economy to our emotions, to make us feel like we need more by making us want things we never needed before. We are made to feel poor on thirty thousand pounds a year. To feel poorly travelled if we have been to only ten other countries. To feel too old if we have a wrinkle. To feel ugly if we aren’t photoshopped and filtered. No one I knew in the 1600s wanted to find their inner billionaire.  They just wanted to live to see adolescence and avoid body lice.”

 

“Maybe Shakespeare was right. Maybe all the world was a stage. Maybe without the act everything would fall apart. The key to happiness wasn’t being yourself, because what did that even mean? Everyone had many selves. No. The key to happiness is finding the lie that suits you best.”

 

“Human beings, as a rule, simply don’t accept things that don’t fit their worldview.”

 

“She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.”

 

“There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.  In those monents that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be? The future is you.”

 

“Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.”

 

“The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.  Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?”

 

“History was, is, a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards, but you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.”

 

 “She gave me peace just by looking at her, which might explain why I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people anymore. I wanted her in every sense.”

 

 “That is one of the patterns: when nothing is happening, nothing continues to happen, but after a while the lull becomes too much and the drums need to kick in. Something has to happen. Often that need comes from yourself. You make a phone call. You say, “I can’t do this life anymore, I need to change.’ And one thing happens which you are in control of. And then another happens which you have no control over. Newton’s third law of motion. Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.”

 

“This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself.”

 

“Nothing fixes a thing so firmly in the memory as the wish to forget it.”

 

“It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.”

 

“I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It’s a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.”

 

“Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard.”

 

“I loved her, instantly. Of course, most parents love their children instantly. But I mention it here because I still find it a remarkable thing. Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.”

 

“That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.”

 

“There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.”

 

My Take

Having thoroughly enjoyed Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, I went in search of another book by this very creative, thought-provoking author.  After reading How to Stop Time, I was not disappointed. Like The Midnight Library, Haig takes a very interesting idea, adds in a relateable protagonist and creates a book that is a pleasure to read and to think about long after finishing.  Highly recommended.

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562. The Final Solution

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Michael Chabon

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Historical Fiction

131 pages, published November 2005

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

After finishing this hard to follow book, I’m not really sure what it is about.  The characters include Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his African gray parrot and 89 old man who was once a famous detective.

Quotes 

“Long life wore away everything that was not essential.”

 

“The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings—the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life. And yet he had always been haunted—had he not?—by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their brilliance and sanity in decoding and interpreting the messages in cloud formations, in the letters of the Bible recombined, in the spots on butterflies’ wings. One might, perhaps, conclude from the existence of such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things. That all the apparent significance and pattern had no more intrinsic sense than the chatter of an African gray parrot. One might so conclude; really, he thought, one might.”

 

“A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man’s mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.”

 

“it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things.”

 

“He did not fear death exactly, but he had evaded it for so many years that it had come to seem formidable simply by virtue of that long act of evasion. In particular he feared dying in some undignified way, on the jakes or with his face in the porridge.”

  

My Take

This book was in the Boulder Library’s “Recommended by a Librarian” and had the advantage of brevity, so I gave it a try.  What a disappointment! I cannot even tell you what the plot was.  I’ve enjoyed my previous readings of Michael Chabon (especially The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), but this book was a Super Dud.  By all means, skip.

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546. The Jane Austen Society

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Natalie Jenner

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

309 pages, published May 26, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Jane Austen Society takes place in the small village of Chawton, England (the final home of Jane Austen), just after the Second World War.  An unlikely group that includes the local town doctor and young teacher (both recently widowed), a bachelor farmer, the middle aged woman who stands to inherit the manor house and Austen’s cottage and her family’s lawyer (a spurned old flame), a Sotheby’s estate agent, and a glamorous Hollywood star come together in a quest to preserve Austen’s legacy and form the Jane Austen Society.

Quotes 

“Reading, she now understood, had been her own choice of rebellion.”

 

“And, yes, sadly, no one else can ever understand your loss. It belongs to you. It impacts only you. And guess what? They don’t need to understand.” Mimi paused. “But you do. You need to fully appreciate how this has changed you, so that you can indeed move on and live, but as this changed person, who might now want different things. Who might now want different people about them.”

 

“We love Jane Austen because her characters, as sparkling as they are, are no better and no worse than us. They’re so eminently, so completely, human. I, for one, find it greatly consoling that she had us all figured out.”

 

“Part of the comfort they derived from rereading was the satisfaction of knowing there would be closure—of feeling, each time, an inexplicable anxiety over whether the main characters would find love and happiness, while all the while knowing, on some different parallel interior track, that it was all going to work out in the end.”

 

“Jane Austen knew about money and power, too, Mimi reminded herself, in the specialness of her surroundings that night. Austin saw what lack of money meant for the women in her life, and this consuming fear was what was telegraphed most loudly in all her books, hidden behind the much more palatable workings of the marriage plot. Austin knew that no amount of charity or largesse from their male relatives could ever grant women real independence. Yet, through her genius – – a genius no amount of money or power could buy because it was all inside her head, completely her own – – she had accrued some small degree of autonomy by the end. Enough to work, live, and die on her own terms. It really was a most remarkable achievement, the legacy of those six books, revised and spurred on and cast soley by her own two hands, with no man with inevitably more power or money getting in the way.”

 

“Because—and he still did not understand how people like his brothers could not see this—inside the pages of each and every book was a whole other world.”

 

“The humanity—the love for people—mixed with seeing them for who they really are. Loving them enough to do that. Loving them in spite of that.”

 

“During the Great War, shell-shocked soldiers had been encouraged to read Jane Austen in particular—Kipling had coped with the loss of his soldier son by reading her books aloud to his family each night—Winston Churchill had recently used them to get through the Second World War.”

 

“Reading Jane Austen was making him identify with Darcy and the thunderclap power of physical attraction that flies in the face of one’s usual judgment.”

 

 “some of us are given too much to bear, and this burden is made worse by the hidden nature of that toll, a toll that others cannot even begin to guess at.”

 

“That there might be a place where people were not constantly competing against each other for their very sustenance, but were instead helping each other survive through war and injury and poverty and pain, seemed as much something out of a Jane Austen novel as anything else she could have hoped to find.”

 

“I always find it interesting how Jane Austen’s fans are always romantics to some degree – when I swear she wrote those books with a goose quill dipped in venom.”

 

“It’s no magic prescription, but it’s a start. Reading is wonderful, but it does keep us in our heads. It’s why I can’t read certain authors when I am in low spirits.”

 

“Frances had retreated into these familiar worlds of literature. Something about her favourite books gave her tremendous comfort, and even a strange feeling of control, although she could not quite put her finger on why. She just knew that she did not want to invest her time trying to figure out a new world, whom to like and whom to trust in it, and how to bear the author’s choices for tragedy and closure—or lack thereof.”

 

“Mimi shook her head sadly at the young widow. “Adeline, my father killed himself when I was very young, and it impacts me even as we sit here. It is a part of me, that awful, irrevocable act. And I am never going to be quite whole again because of it. You are not the problem: the loss is.”

 

“It had been nearly seven years, and for the longest time he thought he had been giving something to her by indulging his grief.”

 

“part of it was the heroism of Austen herself, in writing through illness and despair, and facing her own early death. If she could do it, Dr. Gray and Adeline each thought, then certainly, in homage if nothing else, they could, too.”

 

My Take

The Jane Austen Society is a delightful book.  Author Natalie Jenner seamlessly weaves the plots of several Jane Austen books, most notably Pride and Prejudice, into the lives of the charming characters in this work of historical fiction.  I loved spending time in the world of post World War II Chawton, England and was sad to see the book end, but gratified by the clever way everything worked out just right in the end.

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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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527. The Evening and the Morning

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ken Follett

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

913 pages, published September 15, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Evening and the Morning is a prequel to Ken Follett’s very popular Pillars of the Earth series which center on life in the medieval town of Kingsbridge, England.  Set in 997 CE, it starts with the pillaging of a coastal English town by the ruthless Vikings.  A young Edgar, who is a skilled boatmaker, survives along with his mother and two brothers.  They start over as farmers in the town that will become Kingsbridge. Around the same time, Lady Ragna, a Norman noblewoman comes to England to marry Wielf, the man she loves.   Finally, we follow the story of Aldred, a monk who dreams of transforming his humble abbey into a center of learning.  The lives of Edgar, Ragna and Aldred intertwine to illuminate life in England during the end of the Dark Ages.

Quotes 

“In dog philosophy it was always better to go somewhere than to be left behind.”

 

“Ma and Pa had taught their sons to keep themselves fresh by bathing at least once a year.”

 

“And so, Aldred thought, great ones sin with impunity while lesser men are brutally chastised.”

 

“And that would be sufficient, if we lived in a world that was ruled by laws.” Aldred sat on a stool, leaned forward, and spoke quietly. “But the man matters more than the law, as you know.”

 

“in the end there’s no way to get rich crops out of poor earth.”

 

 “Coming to Glastonbury was like visiting the grave of his youth.”

 

 “When the Roman Empire declined, Britain went backward. As the Roman villas crumbled, the people built one-room wooden dwellings without chimneys. The technology of Roman pottery—important for storing food—was mostly lost. Literacy declined. This period is sometimes called the Dark Ages, and progress was painfully slow for five hundred years. Then, at last, things started to change”

 

“In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Aldred felt he could spend his life trying to comprehend that mystery.”

 

My Take

Having thoroughly enjoyed The Pillars of the Earth trilogy, I looked forward to reading Ken Follett’s prequel to the series.  The Evening and the Morning did not disappoint.  Well developed and intriguing characters interwoven with historical events make for a captivating tale in the hands of the master storyteller Follett.  Well worth reading!

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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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