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174. The Cuckoo’s Calling

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Boulder Librarian

Author:   Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Suspense

455 pages, published April 30, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

While The Cuckoo’s Calling, a murder mystery and book one of a series featuring private detective Cormoran Strike, lists the author as Robert Galbraith, that is a pseudonym.  It is actually written by J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame.  The book opens with Detective Strike hired to investigate the death of supermodel Lula Landry (known to her friends as the Cuckoo) which has been ruled a suicide by the police.  After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator.  He is down to one client, has creditors on his back, has just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.  The Landry case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers.

 

Quotes 

“Seven and a half million hearts were beating in close proximity in this heaving old city, and many, after all, would be aching far worse than his.”

 

“Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawnmowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories.”

 

“You’re like everyone else, Strike; you want your civil liberties when you’ve told the missus you’re at the office and you’re at a lap-dancing club, but you want twenty-four-hour surveillance on your house when someone’s trying to force your bathroom window open. Can’t have it both ways.”

 

“Humans often assumed symmetry and equality where none existed.”

 

“In the inverted food chain of fame, it was the big beasts who were stalked and hunted.”

 

“The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.”

 

“When you are young, and beautiful, you can be very cruel.”

 

“There’s people who’d expect you to take a bullet for them and they don’t bother rememb’ring yuh name.”

 

“Couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself.”

 

“Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s traumatised memories;”

 

“I am become a name.”

 

My Take

When my son Nick was in Elementary School (he is currently a college student), he and I read all of the Harry Potter books together and we both loved living in the wildly inventive and fantastic world created by J.K. Rowling.  Based in modern day London, Rowling has created a different type of world in The Cuckoo’s Calling, one that I also enjoyed inhabiting during the almost 16 hours that I spent listening to the audio book version.  The Cuckoo’s Calling has everything you could want from a mystery/suspense/thriller:  compelling and real characters, a gritty plot that hums along at a rapid clip, an inside look at a world different from the one you inhabit, plenty of red herrings to keep you guessing and some surprise twists at the end.  It’s no surprise that I’m looking forward to reading book 2 in this series.

 

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170. The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Heather Bohart

Author:   Jennifer Ryan

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II

371 pages, published February 14, 2017

Reading Format:  E-Book on Overdrive

 

Summary

The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir is set during the early days of The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet II in the bucolic village of Chilbury, England.  With many of the village men off to war, the ladies who remain in the village decide to ‘carry on singing’ as part of the “The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir.”  As they do, the war rages around them as Dunkirk is evacuated and the German drop bombs on their village.  The ladies suffer more than their share of loss.  However, they keep hope alive and life goes on with romances, intrigue and a bizarre and hilarious switched at birth story.

 

Quotes 

“Human nature defeats me sometimes, how greed and spite can lurk so divisively around the utmost courage and sacrifice.”

 

“I took a deep breath of the syrupy sweetness of summer, suffused with bees and birds, and I thought to myself how beautiful this world can be. How lucky we are to be here, to be part of it, for however long we have.”

 

“And I realized that this is what it’s like to be an adult, learning to pick from a lot of bad choices and do the best you can with that dreadful compromise. Learning to smile, to put your best foot forward, when the world around you seems to have collapsed in its entirety, become a place of isolation, a sepia photograph of its former illusion.”

 

 

“…we spoke about dying. [Prim] told me how she’d nearly died of malaria. She said that she didn’t mind the thought of death. That realizing you’re going to die actually makes life better as it’s only then that you decide to live the life you really want to live.”

 

Then I looked out onto the horizon myself and realized that loss is the same wherever you go: overwhelming, inexorable, deafening. How resilient human beings are that we can learn slowly to carry on when we are left all alone, left to fill the void as best we can. Or disappear into it.”

 

“If we don’t think about our death until we die, how can we decide how we want to live?”

 

My Take

During my thousand book quest, I have read a lot of books that take place during World War II (The Nightingale, The Girl You Left Behind, Life After Life, Going Solo, A God in Ruins, The End of the Affair, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, The Zookeeper’s Wife ) and for the most part, I have really enjoyed them.  The world at war, with the potential of a complete takeover by the Nazis, automatically raises the stakes in any book.  In a similar fashion to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir gives us the perspective of the British home front when invasion by the Germans felt imminent.  Jennifer Ryan is a skilled writer, creating a world that is easy to inhabit and characters that you want to get to know better.

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169. The Simple Path to Wealth

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   JL Collins

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Personal Finance, Self Improvement, Economics

288 pages, published June 17, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Legendary Blogger JL Collins has written an easy to understand (but not simplistic) book about personal finance, money and investing that grew out of a series of letters to his daughter.  His premise is that since money is the single most powerful tool we have for navigating the complex world we live in, understanding it is critical.   Collins outlines an uncomplicated approach to money that is not only easy to understand and implement, it is more powerful than anything more complex or complicated.  Here are the topics he discusses:

Debt:   Why you must avoid it and what to do if you have it.

The importance of having F-you Money.

How to think about money, and the unique way understanding this is key to building your wealth.

Where traditional investing advice goes wrong and what actually works.

What the stock market really is and how it really works.

Why the stock market always goes up and why most people still lose money investing in it.

How to invest in a raging bull, or bear, market.

Specific investments to implement these strategies.

The Wealth Building and Wealth Preservation phases of your investing life and why they are not always tied to your age.

How your asset allocation is tied to those phases and how to choose it.

How to simplify the sometimes confusing world of 401(k), 403(b), TSP, IRA and Roth accounts.

TRFs (Target Retirement Funds), HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) and RMDs (Required Minimum Distributions).

What investment firm to use.

Why you should be very cautious when engaging an investment advisor and whether you need to at all.

Why and how you can be conned, and how to avoid becoming prey.

Why dollar cost averaging is not recommended.

What financial independence looks like and how to have your money support you.

What the 4% rule is and how to use it to safely spend your wealth.

The truth behind Social Security.

 

Quotes 

“There are many things money can buy, but the most valuable of all is freedom. Freedom to do what you want and to work for whom you respect.”

 

“I may not have owned a Mercedes, but I owned my freedom.  Freedom to choose when to leave a job and freedom from worry when the choice wasn’t mine.”

 

“Being independently wealthy is every bit as much about limiting needs as it is about how much money you have. It has less to do with how much you earn—high-income earners often go broke while low-income earners get there—than what you value. Money can buy many things, none of which is more important than your financial independence.

 

“It’s a big beautiful world out there. Money is a small part of it. But F-You Money buys you the freedom, resources and time to explore it on your own terms. Retired or not. Enjoy your journey.”

 

“It’s not hard. Stop thinking about what your money can buy. Start thinking about what your money can earn. And then think about what the money it earns can earn.”

 

“Three things saved us:  Our unwavering 50% savings rate. Avoiding debt. We’ve never even had a car payment. Finally embracing the indexing lessons Jack Bogle—the founder of The Vanguard Group and the inventor of index funds—perfected 40 years ago.”

 

“Look again at those people around you. For most, debt is simply a part of life. But it doesn’t have to be for you. You weren’t born to be a slave.”

 

“If your goal is financial independence, it is also to hold as little debt as possible. This means you’ll seek the least house to meet your needs rather than the most house you can technically afford.”

 

“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”

 

My Take

I have long been a reader of JL Collins’ blog and especially recommend reading his famous Stock Series, which provides the best explanation and analysis of investing in stocks that I have come across (and I have read a lot on this subject).  The Simple Path to Wealth is expands on the Stock Series and contains a lot of straightforward, easy to understand (but not always easy to do) advice on how to save and invest so that you can’t help but become wealthy (and it won’t take too long to do it).  I have given my 19 year old son and my teenaged niece and nephew this book to read and I will be ordering more copies to give away as high school and college graduation gifts.  While my husband and I are already basically retired, we could have gotten here a lot sooner by starting to follow the advice set forth in The Simple Path to Wealth when we first married 23 years ago.

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158. An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Barbara Brown Taylor

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Theology, Christian, Memoir

216 pages, published February 10, 2009

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor shares how she learned to encounter God beyond the walls of any church.  From simple practices such as walking, working, and getting lost to deep meditations on topics like prayer and pronouncing blessings, Taylor reveals practical ways to discover the sacred in the small things we do and see. Something as ordinary as hanging clothes on a clothesline becomes an act of devotion if we pay attention to what we are doing and take time to attend to the sights, smells, and sounds around us.  Making eye contact with the cashier at the grocery store becomes a moment of true human connection. Allowing yourself to get lost leads to new discoveries.  All of her methods share a common theme of taking the time to step outside your normal routine and thoughtfully contemplate the myriad blessings that surround each and every one of us.

 

Quotes 

“To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.”

 

“Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.”

 

“Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.”

 

“Who had persuaded me that God preferred four walls and a roof to wide-open spaces? When had I made the subtle switch myself, becoming convinced that church bodies and buildings were the safest and most reliable places to encounter the living God?”

 

“People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay. Whoever wrote this stuff believed that people could learn as much about the ways of God from paying attention to the world as they could from paying attention to scripture. What is true is what happens, even if what happens is not always right. People can learn as much about the ways of God from business deals gone bad or sparrows falling to the ground as they can from reciting the books of the Bible in order. They can learn as much from a love affair or a wildflower as they can from knowing the Ten Commandments by heart.”

 

“but I know that I have an easier time loving humankind than I do loving particular human beings.”

 

“Plato once said that pain restores order to the soul. Rumi said that it lops off the branches of indifference. “The throbbing vein / will take you further / than any thinking.”14 Whatever else it does, pain offers an experience of being human that is as elemental as birth, orgasm, love, and death. Because it is so real, pain is an available antidote to unreality—not the medicine you would have chosen, perhaps, but an effective one all the same. The next time you are in real pain, see how you feel about television shows, new appliances, a clean house, or your resumé. Chances are that none of these will do anything for you. All that will do anything for you is some cool water, held out by someone who has stopped everything else in order to look after you. An extra blanket might also help, a dry pillow, the simple knowledge that there is someone in the house who might hear you if you cried.”

 

“According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, “Grow, grow.”

 

“All I am saying is that anyone can do this. Anyone can ask and anyone can bless, whether anyone has authorized you to do it or not. All I am saying is that the world needs you to do this, because there is a real shortage of people willing to kneel wherever they are and recognize the holiness holding its sometimes bony, often tender, always life-giving hand above their heads. That we are able to bless one another at all is evidence that we have been blessed, whether we can remember when or not. That we are willing to bless one another is miracle enough to stagger the very stars.”

 

“The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.”

 

“To see takes time, like having a friend takes time. It is as simple as turning off the television to learn the song of a single bird. Why should anyone do such things? I cannot imagine—unless one is weary of crossing days off the calendar with no sense of what makes the last day different from the next. Unless one is weary of acting in what feels more like a television commercial than a life. The practice of paying attention offers no quick fix for such weariness, with guaranteed results printed on the side. Instead, it is one way into a different way of life, full of treasure for those who are willing to pay attention to exactly where they are.”

 

“No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it. The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.”

 

“Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.”

 

“The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.”

 

“What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.”

 

“Whatever I decided to do for a living, it was not what I did but how I did it that mattered.”

 

“You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Those most likely to befriend strangers, in other words, are those who have been strangers themselves. The best way to grow empathy for those who are lost is to know what it means to be lost yourself.”

 

“Since some people consider being human a liability, and “fully” would only make things worse, I should perhaps explain what I mean. To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that “I’m only human” does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality. “The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote Irenaeus of Lyons some two thousand years ago. One of the reasons I remain a Christian-in-progress is the peculiar Christian insistence that God is revealed in humankind—not just in human form but also in human being.”

 

My Take

An Alter in the World planted a wonderful idea in my brain, i.e., we should not just worship God in church, but should worship Him in everything that we encounter and experience, including nature, our bodies, work, suffering, and most of all in other people.  In a very accessible manner, Taylor relates how we can find God and joy in all things, especially in our humanness.  I got a lot out of this book and will keep it in mind for a future re-read.

 

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155. Everything Changes

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Jonathan Tropper

Genre:  Fiction, Humor

352 pages, published March 28, 2006

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Everything Changes tells the story of Zachary King.  In his appearance to the outside world, Zack has it all.  A steady, well-paying job, a rent-free luxurious Manhattan apartment, and an engagement to Hope, who is beautiful, smart, and from a wealthy family.  However, as the wedding day looms, Zack finds himself haunted by the memory of his best friend, Rael, killed in a car wreck two years earlier—and by his increasingly complicated feelings for Tamara, the beautiful widow Rael left behind.  When Norm, Zack’s unemployed,  freewheeling, Viagra-popping father, resurfaces after a twenty-year absence, looking to make amends, Zack begins to question everything in his life.

 

Quotes 

“You can never totally hate someone who sang you to sleep like that, can you? Who calmed you down and eased your fears. You can feel angry and betrayed, but some part of you will always love them for being there on those scary nights, for giving you a place to run to where your nightmares couldn’t follow, the one place where you could descend finally into slumber knowing, at least for the time being, that you were completely safe.”

 

“The really good liars, the true grandmasters of bullshit, are so damn convincing because they actually believe their own lies.”

 

“Few things are more pathetic than an unemployed man with a business card.”

 

“it’s a point of pride whenever you can point to the ways in which you’re avoiding your progenitor’s defective character. I’m not like him becomes your mantra,”

 

“Things have been going too well for me lately. I feel like I have some bad karma headed my way.” Tamara frowns at me as she leads me toward the dressing rooms. “That’s a pretty dire outlook on life,” she says. “What’s the point in working to be happy if you’re going to be constantly looking over your shoulder, wondering when it’s time to pay the bill?”

 

“The reason wisdom is meant to be imparted is because you acquire it only after it’s too late to apply to yourself.”

 

“I wake up like this, this sense that I’ve somehow been transported to an alternate universe where my life took a left instead of a right because of some seemingly insignificant yet cosmically crucial choice I’ve made, about a girl or a kiss or a date or a job or which Starbucks I went into…something.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and thoroughly enjoyed several books by Jonathan Tropper (The Book of Joe, This is Where I Leave You, and One Last Thing Before I Go), I had high hopes for Everything Changes.  I was not disappointed.  Tropper has a knack for creating colorful, sometimes eccentric (and always entertaining) characters that retain enough of their humanity that they seem like real people.  He then puts them in situations that combine pathos with the outlandish.  The result is often extremely humorous with an undercurrent of the poignant.  Everything Changes hits all of these notes and it was a pleasure to read.

 

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150. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Politics

480 pages, published April 18, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

A very timely book when I read it, Shattered is an insider’s account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Presidency during the 2016 election against Donald Trump.  How could she lose?  To Donald Trump of all people?  Hint:  it wasn’t just the James Comey revelations or Russian meddling.  Shattered takes the reader behind the scenes of a sure thing gone off the rails.  No explanation of defeat of this magnitude can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary’s campaign–the candidate herself.   Political writers Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have reconstructed the key decisions and unseized opportunities, the well-intentioned misfires and the hidden thorns that turned a winnable contest into a devastating loss.  It shows how Hillary herself made victory an uphill battle, how her difficulty articulating a vision irreparably hobbled her impact with voters, and how the campaign failed to internalize the lessons of populist fury from the hard-fought primary against Bernie Sanders.

 

Quotes

“She’d gone on the attack against a better-liked rival whose platform more closely mirrored the values of the party’s base, creating a boomerang effect on her personal standing.”

 

“Hillary’s campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: We’re not allowed to have nice things.”

 

“I don’t understand what’s happening with the country. I can’t get my arms around it,” Hillary confided. Moore just listened. “How do I get answers to this?” Hillary asked. It was a quandary that would plague her throughout the campaign. After nearly a year on the campaign trail, and hundreds of stops at diners, coffee shops, and high school gymnasiums and just as many roundtables with young professionals and millworkers, Hillary still couldn’t figure out why Americans were so angry or how she could bring the country together.”

 

“Running like an incumbent from the outset, Hillary had geared her whole campaign toward depriving any other Democrat of the institutional support necessary to mount a challenge, from donors to superdelegates. She wanted other Democrats to be afraid to run against her, or to support any would-be rivals.”

 

“But the idea burned into her mind as much as anything else was that she had lost because she’d hired people who put their own interests above getting her elected.”

 

“But more important, the scapegoating tone and tenor revealed that the Clintons were either living on another planet or at least having emotional and intellectual difficulty coming to terms with the reality that only Hillary was culpable and only Hillary could turn things around.”

 

“Nor was anyone empowered to both enforce Hillary’s will and tell her when she was wrong without fear of reprisal.”

 

“Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her.”

 

“All of the jockeying might have been all right, but for a root problem that confounded everyone on the campaign and outside it. Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.”

 

“the summer of 2008, years before her private e-mail server became a campaign issue, Hillary learned about the power of digital snooping. At the time, she was conducting an autopsy of her failed bid against Barack Obama, and she wanted an honest accounting of what had gone wrong. So she instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.”

 

“Mook was already operating inside a framework first developed for Hillary by David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s longtime strategist, who had put together a preliminary memo for Hillary in December 2013. As Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, Plouffe had despised Clinton; that he was now advising her was an important signal of just how completely she would co-opt the Democratic establishment even before she began running.”

 

“Hillary’s aides didn’t need to wonder why her economic message wasn’t breaking through. It wasn’t rocket science. She hadn’t told the truth to the public about her e-mails, and she was under federal investigation.”

 

“Running like an incumbent from the outset, Hillary had geared her whole campaign toward depriving any other Democrat of the institutional support necessary to mount a challenge, from donors to superdelegates. She wanted other Democrats to be afraid to run against her, or to support any would-be rivals.”

 

“After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress, ranging from one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery. Bill Clinton had campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office. The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.”

 

“There was a certain duality to Hillary’s vast political empire: while it was true that most of the voices inside and outside the campaign had something valuable to contribute, when taken together, they were cacophonous. Rarely did everyone agree on a particular course of action, and often the counsel Hillary got came with the baggage of the adviser’s agenda in maintaining good relations with the candidate or trying to make a rival look bad.”

 

“She believed her campaign had failed her—not the other way around—and she wanted “to see who was talking to who, who was leaking to who,”

 

“No, Schale explained, Trump’s numbers weren’t just big, they were unreal. In rural Polk County, smack-dab in the center of the state, Hillary would collect 3,000 more votes than Obama did in 2012—but Trump would add more than 25,000 votes to Mitt Romney’s total. In Pasco County, a swath of suburbs north of Tampa–St. Petersburg, Trump outran Romney by 30,000 votes. Pasco was one of the counties Schale was paying special attention to because the Tampa area tended to attract retirees from the Rust Belt—folks whose political leanings reflected those of hometowns in the industrial Midwest.”

 

“In the end, though, this was a winnable race for Hillary. Her own missteps—from setting up a controversial private e-mail server and giving speeches to Goldman Sachs to failing to convince voters that she was with them and turning her eyes away from working-class whites—gave Donald Trump the opportunity he needed to win.”

 

My Take

I have always had a keen interest in politics and having closely followed the twists and turns of the 2016 election, I very much looked forward to reading Shattered.  I was not disappointed.  Given unprecedented insider access to Hillary’s campaign, authors and political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes weave a compelling tale of the unfolding disaster.  While everyone I know was shocked on election night that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton (and it wasn’t even that close), after reading Shattered, this result does not seem all that unlikely.  Trump had his problems, but Hillary had them too.  And apparently hers were bigger.

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149. The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Economics, Finance, Personal Finance, Self Improvement

258 pages, published October 25, 1995

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Millionaire Next Door is a compilation of research on the profiles of American millionaires (i.e., U.S. households with net-worths exceeding one million dollars).  The authors compare the behavior of those they call UAWs (Under Accumulators of Wealth) and those who are PAWs (Prodigious Accumulator of Wealth).  A $250,000 per year doctor is an “Under Accumulator of Wealth” if his/her net worth is less than the product of their age and one tenth of his/her realized pretax income.  For example, a 50-year-old doctor earning $250,000 should have about $1.25 million in net worth (50*250,000*10%). If her net worth is lower, she is an “Under Accumulator.”  People are usually UAW’s because they are more focused on consuming their earnings than on saving them.  In comparison, PAW’s accumulate usually well over the product of their age and one tenth of his/her realized pretax income.  Living as a PAW is how most people end up as millionaires.  Most of the millionaire households profiled lived below their means, did not have extravagant lifestyles and spent little on purchases such things as cars, watches, clothing, and other luxury products/services.

 

Quotes

Whatever your income, always live below your means.”

 

“Wealth is not the same as income. If you make a good income each year and spend it all, you are not getting wealthier. You are just living high. Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend.”

 

“I am not impressed with what people own. But I’m impressed with what they achieve. I’m proud to be a physician. Always strive to be the best in your field…. Don’t chase money. If you are the best in your field, money will find you.”

 

“Good health, longevity, happiness, a loving family, self-reliance, fine friends … if you [have] five, you’re a rich man….”

 

“Wealth is more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and, most of all, self-discipline.”

 

“It’s easier to accumulate wealth if you don’t live in a high-status neighborhood.”

 

“If you’re not yet wealthy but want to be someday, never purchase a home that requires a mortgage that is more than twice your household’s total annual realized income.”

 

“Money should never change one’s values…. Making money is only a report card. It’s a way to tell how you’re doing.”

 

“it is very difficult for a married couple to accumulate wealth if one is a spendthrift. A household divided in its financial orientation is unlikely to accumulate significant wealth.”

 

“How can well-educated, high-income people be so naive about money? Because being a well-educated, high-income earner does not automatically translate into financial independence. It takes planning and sacrificing.”

 

“Most people will never become wealthy in one generation if they are married to people who are wasteful. A couple cannot accumulate wealth if one of its members is a hyperconsumer.”

 

“Have you ever noticed those people whom you see jogging day after day? They are the ones who seem not to need to jog. But that’s why they are fit. Those who are wealthy work at staying financially fit. But those who are not financially fit do little to change their status.”

 

“It’s amazing what you can do when you set your mind to it. You’ll be surprised how many sales calls you can make when you have no alternative except to succeed.”

 

“There is an inverse relationship between the time spent purchasing luxury items such as cars and clothes and the time spent planning one’s financial future.”

 

“The median (typical) household in America has a net worth of less than $15,000, excluding home equity. Factor out equity in motor vehicles, furniture, and such, and guess what? More often than not the household has zero financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. How long could the average American household survive economically without a monthly check from an employer?  Perhaps a month or two in most cases. Even those in the top quintile are not really wealthy. Their median household net worth is less than $150,000. Excluding home equity, the median net worth for this group falls to less than $60,000. And what about our senior citizens? Without Social Security benefits, almost one-half of Americans over sixty-five would live in poverty.

 

“America is still the land of opportunity. Over the past thirty years I have consistently found that 80 to 85 percent of millionaires are self-made.”

 

“Interestingly, self-employed people make up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires.”

 

“It is easier to purchase products that denote superiority than to actually be superior in economic achievement.”

 

“Mr. Denzi can teach us all something about accumulating wealth. Begin earning and investing early in your adult life. That will enable you to outpace the wealth accumulation levels of even the so-called gifted kids from your high school class. Remember, wealth is blind.”

 

“They became millionaires by budgeting and controlling expenses, and they maintain their affluent status the same way.”

 

My Take

When I was in my early 20’s, my Dad sat me down with an HP financial calculator and demonstrated to me what he called “the magic of compound interest.”  He showed me that if I started a regular program of saving and investing, I could grow my money to a sizable amount.  His advice clicked with me and after almost 30 years of following that simple formula, along with taking some calculated risks, I can happily report that this simple wealth accumulation system works.

The advice given to me by my father is the same advice supplied in The Millionaire Next Door, a classic in the personal finance world.  The basic message is that it is not what you make, but what you keep that matters.  The authors provide numerous examples of high earning professionals who have little to show financially after a lifetime of work.  On the flip side, more modest earners are able to build up sizeable net worths because they live below their means and regularly invest their savings.  This is an important message, especially to young people just starting out in life.  I encourage parents to give their kids a copy of this book, or at least share some of these basic principles with them.

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144. Room

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Emma Donoghue

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Sociology

321 pages, published September 13, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Room has a very interesting premise.  Five year old Jack has spent his entire life confined to a small room along with his Ma.  They have constructed an entire world within the confines of a very limited space.  At night, Ma shuts him in wardrobe, so he can be safe when Old Nick visits.  While Room is home to Jack, to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years.  Ma has created the best life she can for Jack, but she is psychologically on the edge and knows she needs to somehow free them before she has a complete breakdown.  She devises a bold escape plan which depends on the courage of Jack.  However, being free from Room is only the beginning of Ma’s struggle.

 

Quotes

“So they’re fake?” “Stories are a different kind of true.”

 

“Really, a novel does not exist, does not happen, until readers pour their own lives into it.”

 

“Jack. He’d never give us a phone, or a window. “Ma takes my thumbs and squeezes them. “We are people in a book, and he wont let anybody else read it.”

 

“Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.  “Huh?” “Scaredybrave.” “Scave.”

Word sandwiches always make her laugh but I wasn’t being funny.”

 

“People don’t always want to be with people. It gets tiring.”

 

“I bang my head on a faucet. “Careful.” Why do persons only say that after the hurt?”

 

“I think the sea’s just rain and salt.”

“Ever taste a tear?” asks Grandma.

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s the same as the sea.”

I still don’t want to walk in it if it’s tears.”

 

“It’s called mind over matter. If we don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

 

“The world is always changing brightness and hotness and soundness, I never know how it’s going to be the next minute.”

 

“[E]verywhere I’m looking at kids, adults mostly don’t seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don’t want to actually play with them, they’d rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there’s a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn’t even hear.”

 

“Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.”

 

“In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thin like butter all over the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there’s only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit….”

 

My Take

I listened to Room as an audio book and was captivated by the story.  Told from the perspective of a five year old boy who has never been outside a small room, Donahue has created an entire new world, creatively filled with routines and make believe devised by Ma to keep her and Jack sane and healthy,  inside that room.  Just as interesting is the escape plot hatched by Ma and Ma and Jack’s response to the outside world once they do escape.  It is interesting how Jack responds to all of the things we take for granted and compelling to see how Ma struggles to integrate back into a world she hasn’t lived in for more than seven years.  Room demonstrates the resilience of the human spirit and the extraordinary bond between a mother and her child as Ma and Jack move from one world to another.

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136. A Life in Parts

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Bryan Cranston

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir

271 pages, published October 11, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

A Life in Parts is the memoir of Bryan Cranston, star of Malcolm in the Middle and Breaking Bad.  Cranston landed his first role at seven, when his father cast him in a United Way commercial.  While he loved acting from a young age, after his father left the family, it took a back seat to survival.  A Life in Parts follows Cranston’s journey from an abandoned son to a successful television and movie star by recalling the many odd parts he’s played in real life—paperboy, farmhand, security guard, dating consultant, murder suspect, dock loader, lover, husband, father.  While Cranston starred in a soap opera, played the unforgettable Dentist Tim Whatley on Seinfeld, created the indelible dad Hal Wilkerson on Malcolm in the Middle, he will always be best remembered for his portrayal of Walter White, chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin, on Breaking Bad.  Cranston relates the grittiest details of his greatest role, explaining how he searched inward for the personal darkness that would help him create one of the most memorable performances ever captured on screen.  Finally, Cranston gives an in depth account of how he prepared, physically and mentally, for the challenging role of President Lyndon Johnson, a tour de force that won him a Tony to go along with his four Emmys.

Quotes

 “I will pursue something that I love — and hopefully become good at it, instead of pursuing something that I’m good at — but don’t love.”

 

“The greatest thing about youth is that you’re not yet battle-weary, so you’ll try anything.”

 

“Console the failure, but nurture the hunger.”

 

“The best teacher is experience. Find the educational in every situation.”

 

My Take

I found A Life in Parts to be a fascinating read.  Breaking Bad is my husband’s favorite show of all time and it is in my top five, so I was already a fan of Cranston’s when I started his memoir.  He takes the reader on a journey through his hardscrabble, chaotic life in which his clear sense that he wanted to be an actor and his devotion to always improving his craft carried him through many hard times and setbacks to the success that he enjoys today.  Even before he was famous, Cranston’s life provided lots of great content for a memoir.  It also doesn’t hurt that he is a very fine writer.  Even if you are not interested in being an actor, there are many lessons to be learned from Cranston’s work ethic.

 

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126. Commonwealth

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Ann Patchett

Genre:  Fiction

322 pages, published September 13, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Commonwealth opens on a Sunday afternoon in Southern California at the christening party for Franny Keating.  Bert Cousins shows up uninvited, kisses Franny’s mother Beverly and setting into motion the termination of his and Beverly’s marriages and the joining of two families.  From there, the book skips around time wise as we watch the six children grow up and see the four parents deal with their new lives.  When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.

 

Quotes

“Did you ever want to be a writer?” “No,” she said, and she would have told him. “I only wanted to be a reader.”

 

“Life, Teresa knew by now, was a series of losses. It was other things too, better things, but the losses were as solid and dependable as the earth itself.”

 

“He is fifteen and ten and five. He is an instant. He is flying back to her. He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back.”

 

“Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.”

 

“When Teresa was told that she had lost summers, she made a point to curse and weep, but she wondered silently if she hadn’t just been handed the divorce equivalent of a Caribbean vacation.”

 

“Field after field after field, and not an inch of space wasted on something as decorative and meaningless as a tree.”

 

“You could see just a trace of the daughter there, the way she held her shoulders back, the length of her neck. It was a crime what time did to women.”

 

“Lelia gave a dharma talk about letting go of self-definition: I can’t do this because of what happened to me in my childhood; I can’t do that because I am very shy; I could never go there because I’m afraid of clowns or mushrooms or polar bears. The group gave a gentle, collective laugh of self-recognition. Teresa found the talk helpful, as she had been having an extended interior dialogue during meditation about how septuagenarians from Torrance were fundamentally unsuited for Buddhism.”

My Take

Ann Patchett, a very fine writer, has some interesting things to say in her latest novel Commonwealth.  As a child whose parents divorced when I was five and who are each on their third marriage, I could very much relate to the splitting up and re-combining of families and all of the issues, problems and emotions that are created as a result.  Divorce is a very big deal to the lives of the children affected and it should not be done unless absolutely necessary.  Patchett captures the angst and tribulations of children of divorce in a unique voice that really resonated with me.  Patchett also has an insightful and humorous take on the expectations of upper class hangers on when they invade one of the character’s summer beach house. I definitely recommend this book.

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