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65. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Atul Gawande

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Medicine, Health, Public Policy

282 pages, published October 7, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

In Being Mortal, Gawande, a practicing surgeon, tackles the difficult issue of how medicine can not only improve life but also death.  While modern medicine has made amazing advances in the past few decades, it is still challenged when dealing with end of life issues where the interests of human spirit and dignity are often inadequately considered.  Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Doctors, committed to extending life, often impose devastating procedures that may extend the quantity of life, but also severely impact the quality.  Gawande argues that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families and offers examples of better models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly.  He also explores hospice and shows that a person’s last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.

Quotes

“In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence.  A seemingly happy life may be empty.  A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.  We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. Why would a football fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss?  Because a football game is a story.  And in stories, endings matter.”

“Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end.”

 

“Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.”

 

“It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, “Old age is a continuous series of losses.” Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.”

 

“Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It gave people—the young and the old—a way of life with more liberty and control, including the liberty to be less beholden to other generations. The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It’s been replaced by veneration of the independent self.”

 

“Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?”

 

“The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror. But if you do, it is not. Loyalty, said Royce, “solves the paradox of our ordinary existence by showing us outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and inside of ourselves the will which delights to do this service, and which is not thwarted but enriched and expressed in such service.” In more recent times, psychologists have used the term “transcendence” for a version of this idea. Above the level of self-actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they suggest the existence in people of a transcendent desire to see and help other beings achieve their potential.”

 

“You may not control life’s circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.”

 

“We’re always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up to this fantasy, we feel as if we somehow have something to apologize for.”

 

“A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”

 

“The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.”

 

“Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person’s life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.”

 

“People with serious illness have priorities besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys find that their top concerns include avoiding suffering, strengthening relationships with family and friends, being mentally aware, not being a burden on others, and achieving a sense that their life is complete.”

 

“Your chances of avoiding the nursing home are directly related to the number of children you have.”

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64. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Nassim Taleb

Genre:  Non Fiction, Public Policy

521 pages, published November 27, 2012

Reading Format:  Book

Summary 

In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan, writes about how some systems actually benefit from disorder.  Antifragile discusses how to gain from disorder and chaos while being protected from fragilities and adverse events. Taleb describes how “antifragile” systems benefit from adversity, uncertainty and stress, similar to human bones getting stronger when subjected to stress and tension.  Taleb posits that people, things and systems which are not antifragile will not survive.  Specifically, he looks at why the city state is better than the nation state, why debt is bad, and why almost everything modern is bound to fail.  Antifragile explores innovation, health, biology, medicine, life decisions, politics, foreign policy, urban planning, war, personal finance, and economic systems.

Quotes

“If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.”

 

“So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.”

 

“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.”

 

“This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”

 

“The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.”

 

“The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”

 

“Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow. What the French call “the caviar left,” la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance—not realizing the contradiction that they want others to avoid just such a lifestyle. It is not too different from the womanizing popes, such as John XII, or the Borgias. The contradiction can exceed the ludicrous as with French president François Mitterrand of France who, coming in on a socialist platform, emulated the pomp of French monarchs. Even more ironic, his traditional archenemy, the conservative General de Gaulle, led a life of old-style austerity and had his wife sew his socks.”

 

“Steve Jobs: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

 

“The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.”

 

“Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America’s asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.”

 

“Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.”

 

“The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.”

 

“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad.”

 

“Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the “victims” of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather. Finally, a thought. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.”

 

“The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom. He did not use the notion of the Procrustean bed, but he outlined it perfectly. His argument is that they repress children’s natural biophilia, their love of living things. But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children’s lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds–that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning . . . . Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.”

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61. Vegan Before Six

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mark Bittman

Genre:

288 pages, published April 30, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

Summary 

Vegan Before Six or VB6 as it is referred to was written by food writer Mark Bittman after his doctor told him to adopt a vegan diet or go on medication.  He didn’t want to do either, so he compromised and decided to become a “flexitarian” in which he focused on a vegan diet heavy in vegetables, fruits, and grains until 6:00 p.m.  After that time he would eat however he wanted in moderation. The results were quick and impressive.   Bittman lost 35 pounds and saw all of his blood numbers move in the right direction.  He also kept the weight off and his health continued to improve.

Quotes

“I live full-time in the world of omnivores, and I’ve never wanted to leave. But the Standard American Diet (yes, it’s SAD) got to me as it gets to almost everyone in this country.”

 

“Like pornography, junk [food] might be tough to define but you know it when you see it.”

 

“We spend a trillion dollars a year on food, but it’s only 9.4 percent of our expendable income, the lowest percentage of any country on record.”

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56. The 4 Hour Work Week

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Timothy Ferriss

Genre:  Non Fiction, Self Improvement

308 pages, published April 24, 2007

Reading Format:  Book

Summary 

In The 4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss focuses on “lifestyle design” and repudiation of the traditional “deferred” life plan in which people work long hours and take few vacations for decades and save money in order to relax after retirement.  He developed the ideas presented in The 4-Hour Workweek while working 14-hour days at his sports nutrition supplement company, BrainQUICKEN.  Issues addressed in the book include:  How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour;  How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs; How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist; How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent “mini-retirements”; What the crucial difference is between absolute and relative income; How to train your boss to value performance over presence; What automated cash-flow “muses” are and how to create one in 2 to 4 weeks; How to cultivate selective ignorance-and create time-with a low-information diet; How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50-80% off; and How to fill the void and create a meaningful life after removing work and the office.

 

Quotes

“By working only when you are most effective, life is both more productive and more enjoyable. It’s the perfect example of having your cake and eating it, too.”

 

“People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.”

 

“The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”

 

“If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.”

 

“To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.”

 

“The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is boredom.”

 

“Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitate to get in the way if you’re moving.”

 

“Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.”

 

“Focus on being productive instead of busy.”

 

“Life is too short to be small.”

 

“I’ll repeat something you might consider tattooing on your forehead: What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.”

 

“For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.”

 

“Slow Dance:

Have you ever watched kids, On a merry-go-round? Or listened to the rain, Slapping on the ground? Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight? Or gazed at the sun into the fading night? You better slow down. Don’t dance too fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. Do you run through each day, On the fly? When you ask: How are you? Do you hear the reply? When the day is done, do you lie in your bed, With the next hundred chores, Running through your head? You’d better slow down, Don’t dance too fast. Time is short, The music won’t last. Ever told your child we’ll do it tomorrow? And in your haste, Not see his sorrow? Ever lost touch, Let a good friendship die, Cause you never had time, To call and say Hi? You’d better slow down. Don’t dance so fast. Time is short. The music won’t last. When you run so fast to get somewhere, You miss half the fun of getting there. When you worry and hurry through your day, It is like an unopened gift thrown away. Life is not a race. Do take it slower. Hear the music, Before the song is over.”

 

“But you are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.”

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55. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Charles Duhigg

Genre:  Non Fiction, Self Improvement

286 pages, published February 28, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

In The Power of Habit, New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg explains why habits exist and how they can be changed by seeking to understanding human nature and its potential for transformation.   The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding that habits work through a Habit Loop, a neurological pattern that governs any habit.  It consists of three elements: a cue, a routine, and a reward.  Duhigg also looks at how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.  He show us that the right habits were essential to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Quotes

“Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.”

 

“Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.”

 

 “Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and become more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family.  They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed.  Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.”

 

“Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not.… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”

 

“Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.”

 

“As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.”

 

“Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”

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52. When Breath Becomes Air

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Paul Kalanithi

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

208 pages, published January 19, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer.  One day he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live.  Overnight, his imagined future was gone.  When Breath Becomes Air, which includes a Foreword by Dr. Abraham Verghese and an Epilogue by Kalanithi’s wife Lucy, tells the story of  Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student into a young neurosurgeon at Stanford, guiding patients toward a deeper understanding of death and illness, and finally into a patient and a new father to a baby girl, confronting his own mortality.  Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all.

 

Quotes

“I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything.”

 

“Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?” she asked. “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?”  “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”

 

“Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head:  ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’”

 

“Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”

 

“Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”

 

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”

 

“Grand illnesses are supposed to be life-clarifying. Instead, I knew I was going to die—but I’d known that before. My state of knowledge was the same, but my ability to make lunch plans had been shot to hell. The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I’d spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d write a book. Give me ten years, I’d get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?”

 

“Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”

 

“The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”

 

“The physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.”

 

“Don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it.  The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness.  Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end.  The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt.  Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”

 

“The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may feel differently. Two months after that, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.”

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51. The Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Shonda Rhimes

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir, Self-Improvement

336 pages, published November 10, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

On Thanksgiving Day, 2013, Shonda Rhymes, the uber-talented and successful creator of Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder, told her sister about some amazing invitations that she had received.  Her sister’s response, “Who cares?  You’re just going to say no anyway.  You never say yes to anything,” touched a nerve in Shonda and forced her to re-examine her approach to life.  She then decided to start saying yes, even when it scared her and took her far outside of her comfort zone.  The results were incredible.  She shared a box at the Kennedy Center with President Obama and the First Lady, posed for magazine covers, gave a commencement speech at her alma matter Dartmouth College, stopped everything when her children wanted to play, and most impressively, lost over 120 pounds.

 

Quotes

“Lucky implies I didn’t do anything. Lucky implies something was given to me. Lucky implies that I was handed something I did not earn, that I did not work hard for. Gentle reader, may you never be lucky. I am not lucky. You know what I am?  I am smart, I am talented, I take advantage of the opportunities that come my way and I work really, really hard.  Don’t call me lucky.  Call me a badass.”

 

“Losing yourself does not happen all at once.  Losing yourself happens one no at a time.”

 

“You can quit a job. I can’t quit being a mother. I’m a mother forever.  Mothers are never off the clock, mothers are never on vacation. Being a mother redefines us, reinvents us, destroys and rebuilds us. Being a mother brings us face-to-face with ourselves as children, with our mothers as human beings, with our darkest fears of who we really are.  Being a mother requires us to get it together or risk messing up another person forever.  Being a mother yanks our hearts out of our bodies and attaches them to our tiny humans and sends them out into the world, forever hostages.”

 

“You know what happens when all of your dreams come true? Nothing. I realized a very simple truth: that success, fame, having all my dreams come true would not fix or improve me, it wasn’t an instant potion for personal growth.”

 

“You just have to keep moving forward. You just have to keep doing something, seizing the next opportunity, staying open to trying something new. It doesn’t have to fit your vision of the perfect job or the perfect life. Perfect is boring, and dreams are not real. Just . . . DO.”

 

“They tell you:  Follow your dreams. Listen to your spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big. As a matter of fact, dream and don’t stop dreaming until your dream comes true.  I think that’s crap.  I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, powerful, engaged people?  Are busy doing.”

 

“There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It’s funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don’t want a baby? Don’t have one. I don’t want to get married? I won’t. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it.”

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49. Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Rolf Potts

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Travel

205 pages, published December 24, 2002

Reading Format:  Book

Summary 

Vagabonding is about taking time off from your normal life, from six weeks to four months to two years, to discover and experience the world on your own terms.   In this handbook, veteran travel writer Rolf Potts explains how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel.   Subjects he covers include:   determining your destination, paying for your travel time, adjusting to life on the road, working and volunteering overseas, handling travel adversities and re-assimilating back into ordinary life.

 

Quotes

“The more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that were too poor to buy your freedom.” 

 

“For all the amazing experiences that await you in distant lands, the meaningful part of travel always starts at home, with the personal investment in the wonders to come.”

 

“Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.  The least we can do is try to be there.”  Quoting Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”

 

“Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now.  Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.  From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.”

 

“The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home — and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.”

 

“For first-time vagabonders, this can be one of the hardest travel lessons to grasp, since it will seem that there are so many amazing sights and experiences to squeeze in. You must keep in mind, however, that the whole point of long-term travel is having the time to move deliberately through the world. Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time.  At home, you’re conditioned to get to the point and get things done, to favor goals and efficiency over moment-by-moment distinction.  On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule.”

 

“In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We’d love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.”

 

“Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle.”

 

“The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. As you begin to practice this openness, you’ll quickly discover adventure in the simple reality of a world that defies your expectations. More often than not, you’ll discover that “adventure” is a decision after the fact—a way of deciphering an event or an experience that you can’t quite explain.”

 

“Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions.”

 

“Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word. Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It’s just an uncommon way of looking at life—a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it.”

 

“having an adventure is sometimes just a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing new environment—not so much a physical challenge as a psychic one.”

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39. Life from Scratch: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Forgiveness

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by: Chris Guillebeau

Author: Sasha Martin

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Food

Info: 352 pages, published March 3, 2015

Format:  Book

Summary 

Life from Scratch is really two stories in one book. The first part of the book is a traditional memoir where Sasha Martin recounts her unconventional and difficult childhood with a free spirit, eccentric mother who had difficulty caring for Sasha and her siblings.  In the second part of the book, over the course of 195 weeks, Martin takes on the challenge of cooking and eating a meal from every country in the world.  She achieves her goal and makes peace with her mother, partially due to a shared love of creative cooking.

 

Quotes

“There are mysteries buried in the recesses of every kitchen — every crumb kicked under the floorboard is a hidden memory.  But some kitchens are made of more.  Some kitchens are everything.”

“Marcel Proust, the 20th Century novelist, knew how easy it is to bring the past to life:  When he bit into a tea-soaked madeleine, the shadows of his childhood took on color, snapping into full dimension.  If I put the right ingredients in my spice jars, I realized, they’d be portals to a bygone era.”

“And perhaps that’s been Mom’s secret all along:  her brutal common sense that slices through any and all notions of what “should” be.  From our living room kitchen back in Jamaica Plain to this global table, it’s been about getting our fill.  Not just of food, but of the intangible things we all need:  acceptance, love and understanding.”

“My first encounter with a baguette, torn still warm from its paper sheathing, shattered and sighed on contact. The sound stopped me in my tracks, the way a crackling branch gives deer pause; that’s what good crust does. Once I began to chew, the flavor unfolded, deep with yeast and salt, the warm humidity of the tender crumb almost breathing against my lips.”

“Happiness is not a destination: Being happy takes constant weeding, a tending of emotions and circumstances as they arise. There’s no happily ever after, or any one person or place that can bring happiness. It takes work to be calm in the midst of turmoil. But releasing the need to control it—well, that’s a start.”

“Once, I thought happiness was the sizzle in the pan. But it’s not. Happiness is the spice—that fragile speck, beholden to the heat, always and forever tempered by our environment.”

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38. Glitter and Glue

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by: 

Author:  Kelly Corrigan

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

Info:  240 pages, published February 4, 2014

Format:  Book

Summary 

When Kelly Corrigan was a teenager, her mother summarized the family dynamic as “Your father’s the glitter, but I’m the glue.”  This concept was meaningless to Kelly at the time, but took on significance as Kelly grew older and encountered the slings and arrows of life.  Glitter and Glue recounts Corrigan’s post-college adventure working as an au pair in Australia for the Tanner family who had just lost their wife and mother. While navigating the family dynamics, Kelly started hearing her mother’s voice everywhere.  During the time she spent with the Tanner kids she started reconsidering her relationship with her mother.

 

Quotes

“When I was growing up, my mom was guided by the strong belief that to befriend me was to deny me the one thing a kid really needed to survive childhood:  a mother.”

“I want her to know that I’ll take care of her, even when it’s not pretty or easy or cheap.  Of course I will.  The mother is the most essential piece on the board, the one you must protect.  Only she has the range.  Only she can move in multiple directions.  Once she’s gone, it’s a whole different game.”  

“I had thought a good mother would not elicit such comments, but now I see that a good mother is required to somehow absorb all this ugliness and find a way to fall back in love with her child the next day.”

“The only mothers who never embarrass, harass, dismiss, discount, deceive, distort, neglect, baffle, appall, inhibit, incite, insult, or age poorly are dead mothers, perfectly contained in photographs, pressed into two dimensions like a golden autumn leaf.”

“But now I see there’s no such thing as “a” woman, “one” woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should have figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all the Motherness blocking out everything else?”

“It’s easy to love kids who make you feel competent.”

“And it occurs to me that maybe the reason my mother was so exhausted all the time wasn’t because she was doing so much but because she was feeling so much.”

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