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100. The Invention of Wings

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Public Library Librarian

Author:   Sue Monk Kidd

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, History

384 pages, published January 7, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Invention of Wings, which is based on real people, tells the story of two girls in early nineteenth century Charleston.  Hetty “Handful” Grimke is a slave who works in the wealthy Grimke household with dreams of freedom.  Sarah Grimke idolizes her father who is a judge and wants to follow in his footsteps but is subject to the restrictions and expectations of that era placed on women. On her eleventh birthday, Sarah is given ownership of Handful and she tries in vain to free her, but promises Handful’s slave mother that she will someday accomplish this mission.  Over the next 35 years, both Handful and Sarah endure disappointment, loss, sorrow, and betrayal, but continue courageously on and discover their destiny in the process. Sarah, along with her younger sister, Angelina, becomes an abolitionist and feminist.  

 

Quotes

“My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.”

 

“We ‘re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren ‘t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”

 

“I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.”

 

“I’d been wandering about in the enchantments of romance, afflicted with the worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations.”

 

“The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-com, and you never will outpace your grief.”

 

“It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.”

 

“A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost—don’t see it, don’t hear it, but it’s always hovering round on ready.”

 

“To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”

 

“If you must err, do so on the side of audacity.”

 

“I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all.”

 

“I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn’t choose.”

 

“How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.”

 

“I said, “Where’s all that delivering God’s supposed to do?”

He snorted. “You’re right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn’t have any hands and feet but ours.”

“That doesn’t say much for the Lord.”

“It doesn’t say much for us, either.”

 

“Her name was Mary, and there ends any resemblance to the mother of our Lord.”

 

“He that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life shall find it.” Do not fear to lose what needs to be lost.”

My Take

I had previously read The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and enjoyed it, but liked The Invention of Wings even more.  With layers of detail on the place, time and characters, Kidd creates a world that feels immediate and real.  She also tells a compelling story that is interwoven with historical details about the Antebellum South and the movement for Abolition and Women’s rights.  I highly recommend The Invention of Wings, especially the audio version.

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97. The Master Butchers Singing Club

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Boulder Public Library Librarian

Author:   Louise Erdrich

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction

388 pages, published February 4, 2003

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

My Take

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

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91. Euphoria

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Julie Horowitz

Author:   Lily King

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Anthropology

256 pages, published June 3, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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89. The Light Between Oceans

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   M.L. Stedman

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, Romance

343 pages, published July 31, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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72. The Traveler’s Gift: Seven Decisions that Determine Personal Success

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Adrienne Bulinski

Author:   Andy Andrews

Genre:  Fiction, Self-Improvement

227 pages, published April 30, 2005

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Traveler’s Gift weaves a business fable about a man named David Ponder who loses his job and money, but finds his way after he is magically transported into seven key points in history.  At each location, Ponder meets historical the following historical figures and learns these important lessons:

 

  1. Harry S. Truman:  The Buck Stops Here.   “I accept Responsibility for past.  I control my thoughts.  I control my emotions.  I am responsible for my success.  The buck stops here.”  Are you in control of your life?  Are you leading your ship or are you a passenger, allowing others to determine where you go.  Do you blame moments of the past for your current situation?  Do you allow the weather to determine how you feel?  Stop and take control over everything that matters.  Today.  You and only you should be in control over your success.

 

  1. King Solomon:  I Will Seek Wisdom.  “I will be a servant to others.  I will listen to the counsel of wise men. I will choose my friends with care.  I will seek wisdom.”  Do you read?  Remember, rich people have big libraries and poor people have big TVs.  Do you ask the advice of those you find to be wiser than you?  Do you hang out with people that can help you grow and not tear you down?  Do you help others or hinder them.  Never stop growing.

 

  1. Colonel Joshua Chamberlain:  I am a Person of Action.  (Chamberlain’s group of men were on the extreme left flank for the Union Army that was protecting Gettysburg.  Most of his men were dead or severely injured and they were out of ammunition.  They could not retreat as that would mean the South would advance and take Gettysburg.  They couldn’t sit there and wait either as that would mean sure defeat.  Chamberlain had no choice but to charge.  “I do not fear failure, for in my life, failure is a myth. Failure exists only for the person who quits.  I do not quit.  I am courageous. I am a leader.  I seize this moment.  I choose now.  I am a person of action.”  Act.  Do not hesitate.  Do not fill your mind with possibilities of negative outcomes.  Take action.

 

  1. Christopher Columbus:  I have a Decided Heart.  “I will not wait. I am passionate about my vision for the future.  My course has been charted.  My destiny is assured.  I have a decided heart.”  What could you discover if you were so passionate about your future?

 

  1. Anne Frank:  Today I Will Choose to be Happy.  “I will be grateful for the miracle of abundance.  I will greet each day with laughter.  I will smile at every person I meet. I am the possessor of a grateful spirit.  Today I will choose to be happy.”  Is being happy a choice?  Can you decide what kind of mood you are in?  Yes it is and you can.  Good things and bad things will come your way.  You can decide how these things affect you.  Be grateful and express gratitude.  Smile often, laugh with your friends and family.

 

  1. Abraham Lincoln:  I Will Greet This Day with a Forgiving Spirit.  “From this day forward, my history will cease to control my destiny.  I have forgiven myself.  My life has just begun.  I will forgive even those who do not ask for forgiveness.  I will forgive those who criticize me unjustly.  I will forgive myself.  I will greet this day with a forgiving spirit.”  How many hours have you lost due to resentment and anger?  How many relationships have been ruined as a result of your ability to say “I forgive you”?  How many opportunities went by the wayside because you couldn’t forgive the one person that matters most, you?  Holding on to anger towards another person is an incredible waste of time and energy.  Often times the other party has no idea of your feelings anyway!  Forgiveness is not something to be hoarded inside but rather should be given away whenever possible.  It has no value unless it is given away.  If and when you make a mistake, do not keep yourself down.  Own the errors of your ways and forgive yourself so that you can move forward and continue to grow.

 

  1. The Archangel Gabriel:  I Will Persist Without Exception.  “I will believe in the future that I do not see. That is faith. And the reward of this faith is to see the future that I believed. I will continue despite exhaustion. I focus on results. I am a person of great faith.  I will persist without exception.”  The last person Ponder meets is the Archangel Gabriel who shows him a picture and tells him the names of the children that he never had.  Ponder responds that they always wanted more children but did not think they could afford it.  Gabriel tells Ponder that they are in a warehouse filled the dreams and goals of the less courageous.  It’s a very somber moment.  There are no second chances.  Once an opportunity is missed, it is gone forever.  You will miss some, plenty actually.  But there will be many many more.  Be ready.

 

Quotes

“Life itself is a privilege, but to live life to the fullest- well, that is a choice.”

 

“Successful people make their decisions quickly and change their minds slowly. Failures make their decisions slowly and change their minds quickly.”

 

“You are where you are because of your thinking. Your thinking dictates your decisions. Decisions are choices.”

 

“I will not waste time on second thoughts. My life will not be an apology. It will be a statement.”

 

“As children, we were afraid of the dark.  Now as adults, we are afraid of the light. We are afraid to step out. We are afraid to become more.”

 

“My smile has become my calling card.  It is, after all, the most potent weapon I possess.”

 

“Every man of character will have that character questioned. Every man of honor and courage will be faced with unjust criticism, but never forget that unjust criticism has no impact whatsoever upon the truth. And the only sure way to avoid criticism is to do nothing and be nothing.”

 

“First we make a choice. Then our choices make us.”

 

“I possess the greatest power ever bestowed upon mankind, the power of choice.”

 

“The answer, of course, is that we are always and forever influenced by those with whom we associate. If a man keeps company with those who curse and complain—he will soon find curses and complaints flowing like a river from his own mouth. If he spends his days with the lazy—those seeking handouts—he will soon find his finances in disarray. Many of our sorrows can be traced to relationships with the wrong people.”

 

“A wise man will cultivate a servant’s spirit, for that particular attribute attracts people like no other. As I humbly serve others, their wisdom will be freely shared with me. Often, the person who develops a servant’s spirit becomes wealthy beyond measure.”

My Take

While the structure of The Traveler’s Gift seems a bit forced at times, there is a lot to like about this book.  Andrews tells his story and imparts his pearls of wisdom in a very reader friendly manner that is easy to follow and understand.  I agree with his life lessons and am glad to be reminded of them.  The Traveler’s Gift is a book that I wholeheartedly recommend.

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62. The Kingmakers Daughter

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Phillipa Gregory

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

417 pages, published August 14, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

The Kingmaker’s Daughter tells the intriguing story of Anne Neville, her sister Isabel, and their manipulative and influential father, the Earl of Warwick, one of the most powerful men in England during the Cousins’ Wars.  He continually uses his two daughters as pawns in his political games, but they grow up to be influential players in their own right.  At the court of Edward IV and his beautiful queen, Elizabeth Woodville, Anne grows from a charming child to become ever more fearful and desperate when her father makes war on his former friends.  The tide turns against her and she is left widowed and fatherless, with her mother in sanctuary and her sister married to the enemy.  Edward’s brother Richard rescues Anne from her sister’s house and she eventually ascends to the throne as queen. Having lost those closest to her, she must protect herself and her precious only child, Prince Edward, from a court full of rivals.

 

Quotes

“I would carry myself with much more dignity than her. I wouldn’t whisper with the king and demean myself as she did. I wouldn’t send out dishes and wave to people like she did. I wouldn’t trail all my brothers and sisters into court like she did. I would be much more reserved and cold. I wouldn’t smile at anyone, I wouldn’t bow to anyone. I would be a true queen, a queen of ice, without family or friends.”

 

“I have seen statues that would look stodgy beside her, I have seen painted Madonnas whose features would be coarse beside her pale luminous loveliness.”

 

“Richard looks into my eyes and once again I know us for the children that we were, who had to make our own destiny in a world we could not understand.”

 

“I sit on the bed and kick off my shoes, and he kneels before me and takes the riding boots, holding one open for my bare foot. I hesitate; it is such an intimate gesture between a young woman and a man. His smiling upward glance tells me that he understands my hesitation but is ignoring it. I point my toe and he holds the boot, I slide my foot in and he pulls the boot over my calf. He takes the soft leather ties and fastens the boot, at my ankle, then at my calf, and then just below my knee. He looks up at me, his hand gently on my toe. I can feel the warmth of his hand through the soft leather. I imagine my toes curling in pleasure at his touch.”

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58. Malice at the Palace

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Rhys Bowen

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Mystery

304 pages, published August 4, 2015

Reading Format:  E-Book on Overdrive

Summary 

Malice at the Palace follows the travails of Lady Georgiana Rannoch, a temporarily broke girl about London in the 1930’s who is thirty-fifth in line for the British throne. While her beloved Darcy is off on a mysterious mission, Georgiana receives a new assignment from the Queen.  The King’s youngest son George is to wed Princess Marina of Greece and Georgiana is to be her companion at the supposedly haunted Kensington Palace.  Things get complicated when Georgiana searches the Palace for a supposed ghost only to encounter an actual dead person, a society beauty said to have been one of Prince George’s mistresses.  After Darcy turns up, the investigation brings Georgiana and Darcy precariously close to the prince himself.

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48. A God in Ruins

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Kate Atkinson

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

468 pages, published May 1, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

A God in Ruins is a companion book to Life After Life, Kate Atkinson’s absorbing family drama which used the artifice of creating multiple lives for protagonist Ursula Todd set against the back drop of England during the first and second World Wars.  A God in Ruins dispenses with the multiple lives convention and shifts the focus to Teddy Todd, Ursula’s beloved younger brother.  At a very young age, Teddy becomes an RAF bomber pilot in World War II, is reported missing, presumed dead, but reappears at the end of the war having spent two years as a POW in Germany.  This is the story of Teddy’s war and his life after coming home, from his time as a young husband and father to his days as an elderly grandfather.  Teddy is particularly challenged by his unappreciative and angry daughter Viola who supplies much of the humor in the book.

 

Quotes

“Was I really such a terrible mother?’ she asked Bertie. ‘Why the past tense?’ Bertie said.”

 

“She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember.  An only child never is.”

 

“The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.”

 

“Moments left, Teddy thought.  A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was.  A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat.  A breath followed by a breath.  One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment.”

 

“The purpose of Art,” his mother, Sylvie, said—instructed even—“is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.”

 

“As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.”

 

“He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother’s arms.  The mysterious Sylvie.  Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away.  His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog, and his mouth had grown beaky with the extremity of age, opening and closing, a fish out of water.  Bertie could feel a continual tremor running through him, an electrical current, the faint buzz of life.  Or death, perhaps. Energy was gathering around him, the air was static with it.”

 

“What a good husband you are”, Nancy said afterward, “always taking your wife’s side rather than your mother’s.” “It’s the side of reason I am on”, Teddy said, “It just so happens that that’s where you’re always to be found and my mother rarely.”

“He didn’t make plans himself any more. There was now and it was followed by another now. If you were lucky.”

 

“Secrets had the power to kill a marriage, she said.  Nonsense, Sylvie said, it was secrets that could save a marriage.”

 

“Best always to praise rather than criticize.”

 

“If he hadn’t been the father of her children, Viola might have admired Dominic for the way he was so easily able to absolve himself of all obligation simply by asserting his right to self-fulfillment.”

 

“The “eat” part was easy.  The praying and loving were harder.”

 

“The more Viola forgot her mother, the more she missed her.”

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46. The Taming of the Queen

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Phillipa Gregory

Genre:  Historical Fiction

425 pages, published February 1, 2008

Reading Format:  Book

Summary 

The Taming of the Queen is the story of Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr, a thirty-year-old widow who is compelled to give up the love of her life when she is ordered to marry an old, obese, mercurial Henry.  Catherine appreciates the danger she faces.  The previous queen lasted sixteen months and the one before barely half a year.  But Henry adores his new bride and Catherine’s trust in him grows as she unites the royal family, creates a radical study circle at the heart of the court, and rules the kingdom as Regent.  An educated scholar with a mind of her own, Catherine becomes a leader of religious reform and the first woman to publish in English.  Catholic churchmen and rivals for power accuse Catherine of heresy and the king has signed a warrant for her arrest.

 

Quotes

 

“I have learned that the most precious thing is a place where you can be as you are, where someone can see you as your true self.”

 

“But this world is changing. Perhaps by the time you are old enough to marry the world will hear a woman’s voice. Perhaps she will not have to swear to obey in her wedding vows. Perhaps one day a woman will be allowed to both love and think.”

 

“I think my heart has broken, but I have offered the fragments to God.”

 

“If you are a reader, you are already halfway to being a writer,” she says. “For you have a love of words and pleasure from seeing them on a page. And if you are a writer, then you will find that you are driven to write. It is a gift that demands to be shared. You cannot be a silent singer.”

 

“I feel as if I can think only when I see the words flowing from the nib of my quill, that my thoughts make sense only when they are black ink on cream paper. I love the sensation of a thought in my head and the vision of the word on the page.”

 

“To assure someone that if enough nuns sing enough Masses then her dead child will go to heaven is trickery as low as passing a false coin as good. To buy a pardon from the pope, to force the pope to annul a marriage, to make him set aside kinship laws, to watch as he fleeces his cardinals, who charge the bishops, who rent to the priests, who seek their tithes from the poor – all these abuses would have to fall away if we agreed that a soul can come to God without any intervention. The crucifixion is the work of God. The church is the work of man.”

 

“Getting a woman into power is not the point—it’s getting a good woman into power who thinks and cares about what she does.”

 

“I listen with the air of an eager disciple as he propounds things that I have thought ever since I began my studies. Now he is glancing into books that I have read and hidden for my own safety, and he tells me the things that strike him as if they are a great novelty and I should learn them from him. Little Lady Jane Grey knows these opinions, Princess Elizabeth has read them; I taught them both myself. But now I sit beside the king and exclaim when he describes the blindingly obvious, I admire his discovery of the widely known, and I remark on his perception.”

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44. The End of the Affair

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Graham Greene

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

192 pages, published 1951

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

Set in London during and just after the Second World War, The End of the Affair examines the obsessions and jealousies within the relationships between three central characters:  writer Maurice Bendrix,  Sarah Miles,  and Sarah’s husband, civil servant Henry Miles.  The narrator of the book is Maurice, a rising writer during World War II in London based on Graham Greene, and focuses on his relationship with Sarah based on Greene’s lover at the time, Catherine Walston, to whom the book is dedicated.   While Maurice and Sarah fall in love rapidly, he soon realizes that the affair will end as quickly as it began as he cannot contain his all consuming jealousy and frustration that Sarah will not divorce Henry, her kind but boring husband. When a bomb blasts Maurice’s flat as he is with Sarah, he is nearly killed.  After this, Sarah breaks off the affair with no apparent explanation.  Maurice is still consumed with jealousy and hires a private detective to discover Sarah’s new lover.  Through her diary, Maurice learns that when Sarah thought Maurice was dead after the bombing, she made a promise to God not to see Maurice again if God allowed him to live again. After her sudden death from a lung infection, several miraculous events occur, bringing meaningfulness to Sarah’s faith.  By the last page of the book, Maurice may have come to believe in a God as well, though not to love Him.

 

Quotes

“It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.”

 

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

 

“I want men to admire me, but that’s a trick you learn at school–a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there’s something to admire.”

 

“My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust forever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.”

 

“I measured love by the extent of my jealousy.”

 

“I became aware that our love was doomed; love had turned into a love affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn’t settle to work. I would reconstruct what we had said to each other; I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make believe that love lasted I was happy; I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death; I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.”

 

“I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.”

My Take

The End of the Affair is the first book that I have read by iconic British writer Graham Greene and it did not disappoint.  I especially enjoyed listening to the Audio Book version narrated by Colin Firth (an actor I like quite a bit) who does a great job with the material.  Greene brings to life the misery, insecurity and jealousy that is the ugly underbelly of Maurice’s all consuming, obsessive love for Sarah.  A fascinating, albeit depressing, book that I can unreservedly recommend.

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