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410. The Sense of an Ending

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Terra McKinnish

Author:   Julian Barnes

Genre:   Fiction

163 pages, published May 29, 2012

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In The Sense of an Ending, we follow Tony Webster, a middle-aged British man, as he contends with forgotten parts of his past after receives a mysterious legacy and is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

Quotes 

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.”

 

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”

 

“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”

 

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”

 

“I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not,except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it,and how this affects our dealings with others.Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it;some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.”

 

“Yes, of course we were pretentious — what else is youth for?”

 

“We live in time – it holds us and molds us – but I never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing – until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”

 

“Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

 

“Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don’t you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.”

 

“Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that’s something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also—if this isn’t too grand a word—our tragedy.”

 

“The more you learn, the less you fear. “Learn” not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.”

 

“I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However…who said that thing about “the littleness of life that art exaggerates”? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.  But time…how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”

 

“And no, it wasn’t shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.”

 

“Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire – and desirability. You may go further and consider your own approaching death, which, despite what company you may muster, can only be faced alone. But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from the future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records – in words, sound, pictures – you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

 

“In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities:  if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian’s terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse – a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred – about my whole life.  All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.”

 

My Take

Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, The Sense of an Ending is a profound book with a lot to say about time, life, relationships, youthful hopes and middle age regret.  It is very well written and even has a bit of a twist at the end.

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409. Our Souls at Night

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Terra McKinish

Author:   Kent Haruf

Genre:   Fiction, Romance

179 pages, published May 26, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In the small town of Holt, Colorado, widow Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to her neighbor and widower Louis Waters to ask him is whether he would be interested spending time with her in her bed so they can each have someone to talk with.  While initially surprised, Louis agrees to try it out.  They share with each other their troubled pasts, their youthful aspirations and middle-age disappointments and compromises.  They both are happy to at last feel understood by another person.  However, their unusual arrangement results in the disapproval of their children, threatening the close bond they had formed.

Quotes 

“Who does ever get what they want? It doesn’t seem to happen to many of us if any at all. It’s always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings.”

 

“I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.”

 

“Who would have thought at this time in our lives that we’d still have something like this. That it turns out we’re not finished with changes and excitements. And not all dried up in body and spirit.”

 

“I made up my mind I’m not going to pay attention to what people think. I’ve done that too long—all my life. I’m not going to live that way anymore.”

 

“But we didn’t know anything in our twenties when we were first married. It was all just instinct and the patterns we’d grown up with.”

 

“Who would have thought at this time in our lives that we’d still have something like this.”

 

“Not like I was. I’ve come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We’re just in this physical body till we go back to spirit.”

 

My Take

Although it is a short book, Our Souls at Night has a big impact.  A beautiful story of a man and woman and their late in life attempt to find happiness and honesty.  A simply told, thoughtful and touching book.

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406. The Testaments

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Margaret Atwood

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia

422 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Testaments is a decades long awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale by acclaimed author Margaret Atwood.   In it, Atwood continues the story of Gilead, a dystopian future country that supplants the United States of America after a far right religious sect overthrows the government.   The Testaments picks up the story more than fifteen years after Handmaid’s Tale protagonist Offred was left in limbo with the testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.

Quotes 

“You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”

 

“And how easily a hand becomes a fist.”

 

“As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

 

“You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.”

 

“The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.”

 

“Once a story you’ve regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories.”

 

“The inventor of the mirror did few of us any favours: we must have been happier before we knew what we looked like.”

 

“But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.”

 

My Take

I read Margaret Atwood’s iconic The Handmaid’s Tale over 20 years and thoroughly enjoyed her dystopian tale of a future where a fundamentalist religious cult has seized power in the United States, rechristening the country Gilead, and imposed a new social order where many women are forced to be handmaids and bear the children of the elite male ruling class.  The Testaments is a sequel to that story and also contains some of the back story, explaining how Gilead came into being and worked its will.  Like its predecessor, it is a compelling read that I couldn’t put down.

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400. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Valerie Flores

Author:   Patrick Radden Keefe

Genre:    Nonfiction, Crime, History, Foreign

pages, published

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders.  Her children never saw her again.  In her early 20’s, I.R.A. terrorist Dolours Price planted bombs in London, targeting informers for execution.   Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein which was the I.R.A.’s political arm, negotiated the peace that led to the Good Friday accords by denying his I.R.A. past.   The stories of McConville, Price and Adams are just part of the horrific events in the brutal conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles.  In Say Nothing, Patrick Keefe relates these and other stories from this black period in Irish history.

Quotes 

“if you could just get people to talk, he believed, the most bitter antagonists could discover common ground.”

 

“The body is a fantastic machine,’ Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College interviews, recounting the grueling sequence of a hunger strike. ‘It’ll eat off all the fat tissue first, then it starts eating away at the muscle, to keep your brain alive.’ Long after Hughes and Price called an end to their strikes and attempted to reintegrate into society, the nursed old grudges and endlessly replayed their worst wartime abominations. In a sense, they never stopped devouring themselves.”

 

“There is a concept in psychology called ‘moral injury,’ notion, distinct from the idea of trauma, that relates to the ways in which ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they have done during wartime. Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct.”

 

“Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator. Should the state be accorded more leniency because, legally speaking, it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? Or, conversely, should we hold soldiers and cops to a higher standard than paramilitaries?”

 

“the violence intensified, grandiose funerals became routine, with rousing graveside orations and caskets draped in tricolor flags. People took to joking that there was no social life in Belfast anymore, apart from wakes.”

 

“Dating back to the Iliad, ancient Egypt and beyond, burial rites have formed a critical function in most human societies. Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruelest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty.”

 

“But even if your parents were ardent supporters of the IRA, there were reasons not to tell them that you had joined. If the police or the army broke down the door to interrogate them, the less they knew, the better.”

 

“We beat them with stones at first, and they had guns. Our people had to go and get guns. Wouldn’t they have been right stupid people to stand there? Our people got shotguns at first and then got better weapons. And then the British, who were supposed to protect us, came in and raided our homes. What way could you fight? So you went down and you blew them up.”

 

My Take

Say Nothing is a compelling book which takes an in depth look inside The Troubles in Northern Ireland.  Prior to reading it, I only vaguely knew about this period in Irish History.  I came away with a much better understanding of the who, what, where and why of that conflict and the importance of forgiveness before there can be peace.

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397. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    J.K. Rowling

Genre:    Fiction, Fantasy, Young Adult

734 pages, published September 28, 2002

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire takes place during Harry’s fifth year at Hogwart’s.  The book begins with a trip to the International Quidditch Cup where Harry and the Weasly family cheer on favorite player Victor Krum.  Krum then shows up at Hogwarts as part of the Durmstrang school (from Northern Europe) who, along with Beauxbatons (from France) are there to compete in the Tri-Wizard Cup.   Harry is also mysteriously entered as a contestant in the cup which will challenge Harry and the other entrants as they have never before been challenged.

Quotes 

“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”

 

“It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.”

 

“I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.”

 

“Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it.”

 

“Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.”

 

“Who’re you going with, then?” said Ron.

“Angelina,” said Fred promptly, without a trace of embarrassment.

“What?” said Ron, taken aback. “You’ve already asked her?”

“Good point,” said Fred. He turned his head and called across the common room, “Oi! Angelina!”

Angelina, who had been chatting with Alicia Spinnet near the fire, looked over at him.

“What?” She called back.

“Want to come to the ball with me?”

Angelina gave Fred a sort of appraising look.

“All right, then,” she said, and she turned back to Alicia and carried on chatting with a bit of a grin on her face.

“There you go,” said Fred to Harry and Ron, “piece of cake.”

 

“Anyone can speak Troll. All you have to do is point and grunt.”

 

“I’m never wearing them,” Ron was saying stubbornly. “Never.”  “Fine,” snapped Mrs. Weasley. “Go naked. And, Harry, make sure you get a picture of him. Goodness knows I could do with a laugh.”

 

My Take

Another creative and captivating Harry Potter book.  I was intrigued by the different schools (Durmstrang and Beauxbatons) that spend a year at Hogwarts participating in the Tri-Wizard tournament and their unique approach to magic.  I also appreciated the inclusion of the Cedric Diggory character (a real class act).  JK Rowling is a treasure.

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396. Broken Harbor

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Foreign

450 pages, published April 30, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In one of the half-abandoned luxury developments that populate Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children have been murdered.  Mick “Scorcherˮ Kennedy of the Dublin Murder Squad investigates the case and finds that all is not as it seems.

Quotes 

“Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.”

 

“Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who’ve been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you’re not looking, without you adding to the drama.”

 

“People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you’ve done in your life, and they still cared about you after all that: they’re not replaceable, you know?”

 

“But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone’s mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else’s hands, so it won’t weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.”

 

“I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.”

 

“If you think you’re a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you’ll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life.”

 

“One of the reasons I love Murder is that victims are, as a general rule, dead… I don’t make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me fore a sicko or- worse-a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don’t show up outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry, and you never have to worry about what it’ll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.”

 

My Take

Broken Harbor was the fifth book that I have read by Tana French (and the fourth in her Dublin Murder Squad series) since starting my thousand book quest.  Like The Witch Elm, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, Broken Harbor did not disappoint.  French is a gifted storyteller and her mysteries are much more about the human nature involved than whodunit.  A great read.

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395. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Valerie Flores

Author:   Lori Gottlieb

Genre:    Nonfiction, Memoir, Psychology, Self Improvement

432 pages, published April 2, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is written by Lori Gottlieb, a therapist in Los Angeles who also writes an advice column for the Atlantic.  Gottlieb takes you inside her practice, writing candidly about her patients and the way in which therapy can help them.  Her patients include a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys.  Gottlieb also reveals her own journey with a therapist following a devastating break up.

Quotes 

“We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.”

 

“Follow your envy – it shows you what you want.”

 

“We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists.”

 

“Above all, I didn’t want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion – an apt phrase, given John’s worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.”

 

“It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them.”

 

“The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won’t be loved by others. The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn’t it safer to stay where I am?”

 

“Happiness (t) = w0+ w1  γt−jCRj+ w2  γt−jEVj+ w3  γt−jRPEj Which all boils down to: Happiness equals reality minus expectations.”

 

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

 

“Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.”

 

“Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.”

 

“What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction—a type of physical appearance or a type of personality turns them on. But what underlies a person’s type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity. It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.”

 

“In the best goodbyes, there’s always the feeling that there’s something more to say.”

 

“What people don’t like to think about is that you can do everything right—in life or in a treatment protocol—and still get the short end of the stick.”

 

“The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, but vitality.”

 

“An interesting paradox of the therapy process: In order to do their job, therapists try to see patients as they really are, which means noticing their vulnerabilities and entrenched patterns and struggles. Patients, of course, want to be helped, but they also want to be liked and admired. In other words, they want to hide their vulnerabilities and entrenched patterns and struggles. That’s not to say that therapists don’t look for a patient’s strengths and try to build on those. We do. But while we aim to discover what’s not working, patients try to keep the illusion going to avoid shame—to seem more together than they really are. Both parties have the well-being of the patient in mind but often work at cross-purposes in the service of a mutual goal.”

 

“two hundred years ago, the philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe succinctly summarized this sentiment: “Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.”

 

“There’s no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn’t be ranked, because pain is not a contest.”

 

“But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.”

 

“You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn’t one of them.”

 

“But many people come to therapy seeking closure. Help me not to feel. What they eventually discover is that you can’t mute one emotion without muting the others. You want to mute the pain? You’ll also mute the joy.”

 

“With aging comes the potential to accrue many losses: health, family, friends, work, and purpose.”

 

“The second people felt alone, I noticed, usually in the space between things—leaving a therapy session, at a red light, standing in a checkout line, riding the elevator—they picked up devices and ran away from that feeling. In a state of perpetual distraction, they seemed to be losing the ability to be with others and losing their ability to be with themselves.”

 

“Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.”

 

“Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void—words,words,words—something important rises to the surface.”

 

“at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past.”

 

“peace. it does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. it means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.”

 

“Ultracrepidarianism: the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.”

 

“Therapy elicits odd reactions because, in a way, it’s like pornography. Both involve a kind of nudity. Both have the potential to thrill. And both have millions of users, most of whom keep their use private.”

 

“If the queen had balls, she’d be the king.” If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don’t recognize that “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” you may deprive yourself of joy.”

 

“Relationships in life don’t really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)–all of them evoke memories, conscious or not.”

 

“Anger is the go-to feeling for most people because it’s outward-directed—angrily blaming others can feel deliciously sanctimonious. But often it’s only the tip of the iceberg, and if you look beneath the surface, you’ll glimpse submerged feelings you either weren’t aware of or didn’t want to show: fear, helplessness, envy, loneliness, insecurity. And if you can tolerate these deeper feelings long enough to understand them and listen to what they’re telling you, you’ll not only manage your anger in more productive ways, you also won’t be so angry all the time.”

 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.  A former television producer and medical student, Gottlieb is a terrific writer and an excellent therapist.  She takes you inside the lives of her patients (a fascinating journey) and helps you understand how therapy works.  Highly recommended.

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392. Faithful Place

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Foreign

416 pages, published July 13, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In 1985, 19 year old Frank Mackey was from a dysfunctional family living in a poor part of Dublin in small flat named Faithful Place.  He and his girl, Rosie Daly, were all set to run away to London together, get married, get good jobs, and break away from the despair of their lives in Ireland.  However, on the winter night when they were supposed to leave, Rosie didn’t show.  Frank assumed that she’d given him the brush-off and gone to London on her own.  Frank left Faithful Place and never went home again.  22 years later, Rosie’s suitcase shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place.  Frank, now a Detective on Dublin’s Murder Squad is going home again where he must figure out what happened to Rosie and deal with his family demons.

Quotes 

“My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.”

 

“I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he’s not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he’s into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.”

 

“Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.”

 

“I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds?”

 

“We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.”

 

“You can be a rich scumbag just as easily as a poor scumbag, or you can be a decent human being either way. Money’s got nothing to do with it. It’s nice to have, but it’s not what makes you who you are.”

 

“Privately, I consider religion to be a load of bollocks, but when you have a sobbing five year old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and thoroughly enjoyed The Witch Elm, In the Woods, and The Likeness by the brilliant Irish writer Tana French, I was highly anticipating Faithful Place (the third book in Dublin Murder Squad series).  It did not disappoint.  French brings you into the time, place and motivations of her characters so completely that I felt like I was right there with them.  Additionally, her insight into the human condition adds a depth and richness that keep her books in your psyche long after you are finished reading them.

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390. Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Mike Brady

Author:   Ryan Holliday

Genre:    Nonfiction, Business, History, Politics, Biography

331 pages, published February 27, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Conspiracy tells the tale of Peter Theil, Paypal founder and billionaire investor, and the conspiracy he funded to exact revenge on Gawker Media.   In 2007, in a short blogpost on Valleywag, Gawker outed Peter Thiel as gay.  While Thiel’s sexuality had been known to close friends and family, he didn’t consider himself a public figure and was incensed that his privacy had been invaded.  It took almost a decade, but Thiel finally exacted his revenge.  He financed a lawsuit by Hulk Hogan who sued Gawker for invasion of privacy after they posted a videotape of him having sex with his best friend’s wife.  Hogan would end up with a $140 million dollar judgment against Gawker which had declare bankruptcy.  Only later would Thiel’s role in bringing down Gawker become public.

Quotes 

“It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he’s told: “There’s nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world.” Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a “high-agency person.” How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What’s the reaction to being told you can’t—that no one can? One type accepts it, wallows in it even. The other questions it, fights it, rejects it.”

 

“His path was in some ways traditional—Stanford to Stanford Law to judicial clerkship to high-powered law firm—but it was also marked by bouts of rebellion. At Stanford he created and published a radical conservative journal called The Stanford Review, then he wrote a book that railed against multiculturalism and “militant homosexuals” on campus, despite being both gay and foreign born. His friends thought he might become a political pundit. Instead he became a lawyer. Then one day, surprising even himself, he walked out of one of the most prestigious securities law firms in the world, Sullivan & Cromwell, after seven months and three days on the job. Within a few short years, Thiel formed and then sold PayPal, an online payments company, to eBay for $ 1.5 billion in July 2002, the month that Nick Denton registered the domain for his first site, Gizmodo. With proceeds of some $ 55 million, Thiel assembled an empire. He retooled a hedge fund called Clarium into a vehicle to make large, counterintuitive bets on global macro trends, seeding it with $ 10 million of his own money. In 2003, Thiel registered a company called Palantir with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2004, he would found it in earnest. The company would take antifraud technology from PayPal and apply it to intelligence gathering—fighting terrorism, predicting crime, providing military insights. It would take money from the venture capital arm of the CIA and soon take on almost every other arm of the government as clients.”

 

“You rush in to stamp out the sparks and end up fanning them into flames. This is the risk.”

 

“For all the claims that what Peter had done was personal and unethical and wrong, that he had made the world a worse place and horribly wronged a group of journalists, something surprising happened: Media actually did change. Because they knew they needed to.”

 

“The Count of Monte Cristo would put it better: “What a fool I was not to tear my heart out on the day when I resolved to avenge myself!” Ah, but what dangerous business this is. This artificial hardening is a dangerous crossroads, a bargain with our primal forces that not everyone escapes or can emerge from with clean hands. William James knew that every man is “ready to be savage in some cause.” The distinction, he said, between good people and bad people is “the choice of the cause.”

 

“Peter and a team of conspirators and a judge and a jury in Florida had spoken. They said: We don’t want to live in a world where the media can publish someone having sex—even if it’s just the “highlights”—simply because that person has talked about his sex life in public”

 

“We live in a world where only people like Peter Thiel can pull something so intentional and long-term off—and it’s not because, as Gawker has tried to make it seem, he’s rich. It’s because he’s one of the few who believes it can be done.”

 

“There is a moment in The Great Gatsby when Jay Gatsby introduces Nick Carraway to Meyer Wolfsheim, mentioning offhandedly that he is the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. The idea staggers Gatsby’s idealistic young friend. Of course, Carraway knew the series had been thrown. But “if I had thought of it at all,” he says, “I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain.” It was unbelievable to him then, as it is to us now, that a single person could have been responsible for changing the outcome of an event watched by some fifty million people. In real life, the 1919 World Series was fixed not by Wolfsheim, but with great skill and audacity by Arnold Rothstein, a Jewish gangster. A young lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army named Dwight Eisenhower eagerly followed the game as the scores came in via telegram, and like everyone else, never suspected a thing. He would remark years later that the revelation of the conspiracy that had thrown the series produced a profound change in his perspective about the world; it taught him never to trust in first appearances.”

 

“The essayist and investor Paul Graham, a peer and rival of Peter Thiel’s, has charted the trajectory of a start-up, with all its ups and downs. After the initial bump of media attention, the rush of excitement from the unexpected success, Graham says that the founders enter a phase where the novelty begins to wear off, and they quickly descend from their early euphoria into what he calls the “trough of sorrow.” A start-up launches with its investments, gets a few press hits, and then smacks right into reality. Many companies never make it out of this ditch. “The problem with the Silicon Valley,” as Jim Barksdale, the former CEO and president of Netscape, once put it, “is that we tend to confuse a clear view with a short distance.” Here, too, like the founders of a start-up, the conspirators have smacked into reality. The reality of the legal system. The defensive bulwark of the First Amendment. The reality of the odds. They have discovered the difference between a good plan and how far they’ll need to travel to fulfill it. They have trouble even serving Denton with papers. Harder has to request a 120-day extension just to wrap his head around Gawker’s financial and corporate structure. This is going to be harder than they thought. It always is. To say that in 2013 all the rush and excitement present on those courthouse steps several months earlier had dissipated would be a preposterous understatement. If a conspiracy, by its inherent desperation and disadvantaged position, is that long struggle in a dark hallway, here is the point where one considers simply sitting down and sobbing in despair, not even sure what direction to go. Is this even possible? Are we wrong? Machiavelli wrote that fortune—misfortune in fact—aims herself where “dikes and dams have not been made to contain her.” Clausewitz said that battle plans were great but ultimately subject to “friction”—delays, confusion, mistakes, and complications. What is friction? Friction is when you’re Pericles and you lay out a brilliant plan to defend Athens against Sparta and then your city is hit by the plague.”

 

“The line attributed to the management guru Peter Drucker is that culture eats strategy. It’s a truism that applies as much to conspiracies as it does to businesses. It doesn’t matter how great your plan is, it doesn’t matter who your people are, if what binds them all together is weak or toxic, so, too, will be the outcome—if you even get that far. But if the ties that bind you together are strong, if you have a sense of purpose and mission, you can withstand great trials.”

 

My Take

Conspiracy was a captivating page turner.  Even though you know how it ends, the book still manages to create a great deal of suspense and wonder as to how Thiel and Hogan are going to pull off a legal win.  While I had previously read Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday, I really preferred Conspiracy.  Holiday takes himself a bit too seriously at time, but he still manages to weave a compelling tale.

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389. American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Monica Hesse

Genre:   Nonfiction, Crime, Mystery

255 pages, published July 11, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Intrigued by a five-month arson spree across the rural coast of Virginia in Accomack County, Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse decided to check out the scene.  She discovered a compelling story of rural life in the age of Trump and the strange twists and turns that human nature can sometimes take.

Quotes 

“This was not the story of Accomack. This was the story of America. In 1910, back in the peak of the Eastern Shore’s wealth, more than 70 percent of Americans lived in rural counties. It was the norm, it was the standard. Now, rural counties contained only 15 percent of the nation’s population.”

 

“By the numbers, Accomack could look like a desolate place to live. The Opportunity Index, a nonprofit measurement of sixteen different indicators of success in every county in America, gives it a forty-three out of one hundred. But numbers can be misleading. To residents, statistics could not account for the deep feeling of belonging that came from being able to find your surname in three hundred-year-old county records. They couldn’t account for how clean the air felt and how orange the sun was setting over the Chesapeake Bay. How do you calculate fish fries in the backyard, kiddie pools in the front yard, and unfettered views of a thousand stars in the night sky? So much of life is intangible, and places don’t feel like they’re disappearing to the people who are living there.”

 

“In November of 2012, the Eastern Shore of Virginia was old. It was long. It was isolated. It was emptying of people but full of abandoned houses. It was dark. It was a uniquely perfect place to light a string of fires.”

 

“Here was a county that had almost burned down. Here was that county moving on. All of these fires could have happened only in Accomack, a place with empty, abandoned buildings, prominently signaling a fall from prosperity. Where else was there so much emptiness, so many places for someone to sneak around undetected? Except that maybe it could have happened in Iowa, heart of the heartland, where rural citizenry has been decreasing for the past century. Maybe in southern Ohio, where emptying factories led to emptying towns. Maybe in eastern Oregon, where rural counties had aged themselves almost out of existence. Maybe it could have happened anywhere.”

 

“Big-name crimes have a way of becoming big name not only because of the crimes themselves but because of the story they tell about the country at the moment. The infamous bank robbers of the 1930s — Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Frank “Jelly” Nash — were stealing money at a time when hardly anyone had any, when Dust Bowl poverty made such thefts seem, if not justified, then at least understandable. The 1920s jazz killers — women who murdered their husbands and blamed it on the music — did so in an era where the country was grappling with rapidly loosening morals and a newly liberated female populace, which had just gotten the vote.

And now here were arsons, happening in the type of rural environment that had been figuratively burning down for several decades, whether in the midwestern Rust Belt or the southern Bible Belt, or the hills of Appalachia.”

 

“It is the greatest tragedy and the greatest beauty of a relationship: that at some level, the person you are closest to will always be a total friggin’ mystery.”

 

“The trouble with being the type of person who would do anything for love was that you would do anything for love.”

 

“As economies change, as landscapes change, nostalgia is the only good America will never stop producing. We gorge on it ourselves and pass it down to generations.”

 

“But maybe rural America isn’t dying so much as it’s Shucker-ing: adjusting, adapting, becoming something new, getting a new outdoor sign and adding jalapeno hush puppies to the menu. I’d like to think that.”

 

My Take

American Fire is a page turner.  The primary reason for this is that Monica Hesse is a very talented writer.  She takes a subject and characters that could be a bit boring and brings them to life.  Even though you know who the arsonist is from the beginning of the book, you keep reading to find out why.  Her insight into the depressed coastal region of Virginia, like many of the rural areas in the U.S., makes for compelling reading and gives the reader a clearer picture of the disparities in our country and the impact that is having.

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