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331. Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Fumio Sasaki

Genre:  Non Fiction, Self Improvement

288 pages, published April 11, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Goodbye, Things, author Fumio Sasaki changed his life by reducing his possessions to the bare minimum.  He describes how right away he repeated remarkable benefits.  Without all his “stuff,” Sasaki finally felt true freedom, peace of mind, and appreciation for the present moment.

Quotes 

“Want to know how to make yourself instantly unhappy? Compare yourself with someone else.”

 

“Why do we own so many things when we don’t need them? What is their purpose? I think the answer is quite clear: We’re desperate to convey our own worth, our own value to others. We use objects to tell people just how valuable we are.”

 

“You can avoid buying more things simply by first asking yourself if it’s something that you actually need.”

 

“If it’s not a “hell, yes!” it’s a “no.”

 

“It’s often said that cleaning your house is like polishing yourself. I think that this is a golden rule. It isn’t just dust and dirt that accumulate in our homes. It’s also the shadows of our past selves that let that dust and dirt continue to build. Cleaning the grime is certainly unpleasant, but more than that, it’s the need to face our own past deeds that makes it so tough. But when we have fewer material possessions and cleaning becomes an easy habit, the shadows we now face will be of our daily accomplishments.”

 

“The glory of acquisition starts to dim with use, eventually changing to boredom as the item no longer elicits even a bit of excitement. This is the pattern of everything in our lives. No matter how much we wish for something, over time it becomes a normal part of our lives, and then a tired old item that bores us, even though we did actually get our wish. And we end up being unhappy.”

 

“When given too many choices, people tend to worry that there’s something better out there than what they decided on.”

 

“If you can’t make up your mind about an item, I suggest you go right ahead and discard it.”

 

“We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves. —FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD”

 

“Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have. —RABBI HYMAN SCHACHTEL”

 

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. —STEVE JOBS”

 

“When you’re aware of all the things that you own, you’re not only certain of where they are, you’re also sure about whether you have them or not.”

 

“Ask yourself which of your items would truly be necessary if you were to start with zero belongings. What if everything you owned was stolen? What if you had to move next week? Which items would you take with you? There are probably a lot of things we have sitting around in our homes for no particular reason. Think about starting from scratch, and it will become clear which items are essential.”

 

“a minimalist is a person who knows what is truly essential for him- or herself,”

 

“My feeling is that minimalists are people who know what’s truly necessary for them versus what they may want for the sake of appearance, and they’re not afraid to cut down on everything in the second category.”

 

“The qualities I look for in the things I buy are (1) the item has a minimalist type of shape, and is easy to clean; (2) its color isn’t too loud; (3) I’ll be able to use it for a long time; (4) it has a simple structure; (5) it’s lightweight and compact; and (6) it has multiple uses.”

 

“We can accumulate as much as we like, but without gratitude we’ll only end up being bored with everything we’ve obtained. Conversely, we can achieve true contentment with few possessions, just so long as we treat them with gratitude.”

 

“I’ve heard it said that the secret to a happy marriage is to simply talk a lot with your partner. One study showed that happily married couples talked with each other five more hours per week than couples that aren’t happy. If people are busy taking care of their possessions, quarreling over them, spending time in separate rooms, or watching a lot of TV, they’re naturally going to have less time for conversations.” 

My Take

In  Goodbye, Things, author Fumio Sasaki makes a strong case for the value of minimalism and provides some practical tips for downsizing your belongings to the things that you really use and value.  Much like Outer Order, Inner Calm by my personal guru Gretchin Rubin, Goodbye, Things has inspired me to continue my decluttering efforts and to be even more ruthless with my discards.

 

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327. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Heather Ringoen

Author:   Frederik Backman

Genre:  Fiction

372 pages, published June 16, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The protagonist of My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is Elsa, a quirky seven year old who is picked on at school and who is learning to adapt to her parents’ divorce.  Elsa’s closest friend and confidante is her 77 year old grandmother, a doctor who was always away traveling to war zones when raising her own daughter (Elsa’s mother) and who has very strong opinions matched by unpredictable actions.  Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother’s stories, in the Land of Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.  When Elsa’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa’s greatest adventure and begins and she learns to come to terms with her own life.

Quotes 

“People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.”

 

“We want to be loved,’ ” quotes Britt-Marie. “ ‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.’ ”

 

“Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details.”

 

“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”

 

“Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.”

 

“I want someone to remember I existed. I want someone to know I was here.”

 

“Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.”

 

“if you hate the one who hates, you could risk becoming like the one you hate.”

 

“People have to tell their stories, Elsa. Or they suffocate.”

 

“It’s strange how close love and fear live to each other.”

 

“Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups were generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy – space exploration, the UN, vaccines and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the ‘not-a-shit’ side as one can.” 

My Take

As a big fan of Frederik Backman (A Man Called Ove, Beartown, Britt-Marie Was Here), I was looking forward to reading My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry.  While a good read, I would classify it as lesser Backman, in the same vein as Britt-Marie Was Here; interestingly the Britt-Marie character has a relatively large role in Grandmother).  There are interesting characters and ideas, but on the whole it is not a compelling book.

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326. Come With Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Helen Schulman

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction

320 pages, published November 27, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Come With Me is set in modern day Palo Alto.  Amy Reed, a part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up run by Donny, her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old son, and her husband Dan, an unemployed print journalist, are struggling to hold onto their increasingly unaffordable lifestyle, their marriage and their family.  Donny, a genius and a junior at Stanford in his spare time has  developed an algorithm that may allow people access to their “multiverses”—all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously—to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives.   When Amy agrees to be Donny’s guinea pig, she gets a first hand view of what her life would look like if she had made different choices.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Come With Me is an okay read.  I liked parts of it, especially the futuristic passages,  but other parts felt a bit self-indulgent, very much like the main characters Amy and Dan.  The fundamental problem for me was that I did not like and had little interest in this couple, so whether their marriage would survive was ultimately a question I had no interest in finding the answer to.

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324. Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Margo Funk

Author:   Thomas Cathcart, Daniel Klein

Genre:  Non Fiction, Philosophy, Humor

200 pages, published May 1, 2007

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

An overview of the great philosophical traditions, schools, concepts, and thinkers as told with humor and jokes.

Quotes 

“Moses trudges down from Mt. Sinai, tablets in hand, and announces to the assembled multitudes: “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. The good news is I got Him down to ten. Thebad news is ‘adultery’ is still in.”

 

“Some have argued that because the universe is like a clock, there must be a Clockmaker. As the eighteenth-century British empiricist David Hume pointed out, this is a slippery argument, because there is nothing that is really perfectly analogous to the universe as a whole, unless it’s another universe, so we shouldn’t try to pass off anything that is just a part of this universe. Why a clock anyhow? Hume asks. Why not say the universe is analogous to a kangaroo? After all, both are organically interconnected systems. But the kangaroo analogy would lead to a very different conclusion about the origin of the universe: namely, that it was born of another universe after that universe had sex with a third universe. ”

 

“Sorting out what’s good and bad is the province of ethics. It is also what keeps priests, pundits, and parents busy. Unfortunately, what keeps children and philosophers busy is asking the priests, pundits and parents, “Why?”

 

“The optimist says, “The glass is half full.”

The pessimist says, “The glass is half empty.”

The rationalist says, “This glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”

 

“A man stumbles into a deep well and plummets a hundred feet before grasping a spindly root, stopping his fall. His grip grows weaker and weaker, and in his desperation he cries out, “Is there anybody up there?” He looks up, and all he can see is a circle of sky. Suddenly, the clouds part and a beam of bright light shines down on him. A deep voice thunders, “I, the Lord, am here. Let go of the root, and I will save you.” The man thinks for a moment and then yells, “Is there anybody else up there?” 

My Take

If you want to learn more about philosophy and philosophical traditions, this humor book is a fun way to do so.

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322. Find Her

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Lisa Gardner

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Crime

402 pages, published February 9, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Find Her is a crime thriller that tells the story of Flora Dane, a young woman who  was kidnapped while on spring break.  For 472 days, Flora was held captive and did what she needed to do to survive.  Once released, Flora turned into a vigilante avenger.  Hired to find another abducted young woman, Flora finds herself ensnared again with her potential murder or release leading to a taut climax.

Quotes 

“Survivors make it because they learn to adapt. Adaptation is coping. Coping is strength.”

 

“Because it’s one thing to survive. It is much, much harder to truly live.”

 

“There’s no rewind, or erasing, or unmaking. The things that happened, they are you, you are them. You can escape, but you can’t get away. Just the way it is.”

 

“IN A DETECTIVE’S WORLD there was one true blight on society, and it wasn’t the master criminal; after all, superpredators were few and far between. It was the media.”

 

“I don’t know who I am,” I say. “No one does. Everyone spends their lives figuring that out, even people who’ve never been kidnapped.”

 

“You know about trauma bonding, right?” the agent asked abruptly. “Forget kidnapping victims, you see it all the time with battered women. They’re isolated, at the mercy of their dominating spouse, going through intense spells of abject terror followed by even more emotionally draining periods of soul-wrenching apologies. The trauma itself creates a powerful bonding element. The things these two have gone through together, how could anyone else ever understand? It becomes one more thing that makes a woman stay, even after her husband has beat the crap out of her again.” 

My Take

Find Her is a quick, captivating read.  I had previously read Lisa Gardner’s novella The Fourth Man and can definitely recommend Find Her over that short book which was just okay.  In Find Her, Gardner creates a compelling protagonist in Flora and hooks you into Flora’s world and experiences through lots of interesting details on survival and recovery.

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318. The Kiss Quotient

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Helen Hoang

Genre:  Fiction, Romance

336 pages, published June 5, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Kiss Quotient tells the story of an unlikely romance between Stella Lane, a beautiful Economist with Asperger’s, and Michael Phan, a male escort with a heart of gold and a talent for designing clothes, whom Stella hires to give her lessons in sex.

Quotes 

“I don’t want just a night or a week or a month with you. I want you all the time. I like you better than calculus, and math is the only thing that unites the universe.”

 

“She didn’t know how to be semi-interested in something. She was either indifferent . . . or obsessed.”

 

“Everything about him pleased her. Not just his looks, but his patience and his kindness. He was good. He was an obsession waiting to happen.”

 

“This crusade to fix herself was ending right now. She wasn’t broken. She saw and interacted with the world in a different way, but that was her. She could change her actions, change her words, change her appearance, but she couldn’t change the root of herself. At her core, she would always be autistic. People called it a disorder, but it didn’t feel like one. To her, it was simply the way she was.”

 

“He exhaled sharply, and his brow creased in puzzlement. “You don’t like French kissing?” “It makes me feel like a shark getting its teeth cleaned by pilot fish.” It was weird and far too personal. 

My Take

I downloaded the audio version of The Kiss Quotient after discovering it was a GoodReads award winner for the Romance category.  While there was some romance, it was more like soft core porn and more than a bit embarrassing to listen to if others were around.  A bit cheesy and formulaic, but also enjoyable in parts.

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315. Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Clare Telleen

Author:   Kate Atkinson

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

332 pages, published November 1, 1999

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Behind the Scenes at the Museum is Kate Atkinson’s debut novel, a story of family heartbreak and happiness. Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets.

Quotes 

“In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.”

 

“Patricia embraces me on the station platform. ‘The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,’ she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. ‘Nonsense, Patricia,’ I tell her as I climb on board my train. ‘The past’s what you take with you.”

 

“Sometimes I would like to cry. I close my eyes. Why weren’t we designed so that we can close our ears as well? (Perhaps because we would never open them.) Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?”

 

“But I know nothing; my future is a wide-open vista, leading to an unknown country – The Rest Of My Life.”

 

 

 

“Slattern! What a wonderful new word. ‘Slattern,’ I murmur appreciatively to Patricia.

‘Yes, slattern,’ Bunty says firmly. ‘That’s what she is.’  ‘Not a slut like you then?’ Patricia says very quietly. Loud enough to be heard, but too quiet to be believed.”

 

 “shop-bought cakes are a sign of sluttish housewifery.” 

My Take

I picked up Behind the Scenes at the Museum after enjoying Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and A God in Ruins.  It wasn’t as good as those efforts, but still offered interesting insights into the human condition.

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313. Elevation

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Fantasy, Novella

146 pages, published October 30, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In Elevation, Stephen King tells a supernatural story about Scott Carey, an ordinary man who has steadily been losing weight but whose appearance hasn’t changed.  Scott weighs the same in his clothes and out of them, no matter how heavy they are.  Scott is engaged in a battle with the lesbians next door whose dog regularly poops on Scott’s lawn.  Both are trying to launch a new restaurant, but the people of Castle Rock want no part of a gay married couple, and the place is in trouble. When Scott finally understands the prejudices they face–including his own—he tries to help.  They become friends and are with Scott as he approaches zero weight and all that entails.

Quotes 

“Everyone should have this, he thought, and perhaps, at the end, everyone does. Perhaps in their time of dying, everyone rises.”

 

“Everything leads to this, he thought. To this elevation. If it’s how dying feels, everyone should be glad to go.”

“He thought he had discovered one of life’s great truths (and one he could have done without): the only thing harder than saying goodbye to yourself, a pound at a time, was saying goodbye to your friends.”

 

“life is what we make it and acceptance is the key to all our affairs.”

 

“Why feel bad about what you couldn’t change? Why not embrace it?”

 

“He used to say what you deserve has nothing to do with where you finish.”

 

“Gravity is the anchor that pulls us down into our graves.”

 

“Then his lungs seemed to open up again, each breath going deeper than the one before. His sneakers (not blinding white Adidas, just ratty old Pumas) seemed to shed the lead coating they had gained. His previous lightness of body came rushing back. It was what Milly had called the following wind, and what pros like McComb no doubt called the runner’s high. Scott preferred that. He remembered that day in his yard, flexing his knees, leaping, and catching the branch of the tree. He remembered running up and down the bandstand steps. He remembered dancing across the kitchen floor as Stevie Wonder sang “Superstition.” This was the same. Not a wind, not even a high, exactly, but an elevation. A sense that you had gone beyond yourself and could go farther still.” 

My Take

My Take:   While Elevation is lesser Steven King, it is still an engaging, page turning story.

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305. The Dogs of Riga

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Henning Mankell

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

326 pages, published April 13, 2004

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Dogs of Riga is the second book in the Kurt Wallander Detective series and takes place in Sweden during 1991.  A few days after Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off, a life raft washes up on a beach containing two dead men, dressed in expensive suits.  In his pursuit of a solution to this case, Wallander finds himself in Riga, Latvia where he is plunged into a world of corruption and intrigue.

Quotes 

“He was so excessively polite that Wallendar suspected he had endured many humiliations in his life.”

 

“The experience he’d gained during his years in the police force had given him this unambiguous answer: there are no murderers. Only ordinary people who commit murder.”

 

“I’m a religious man,” he said. “I don’t believe in a particular God, but even so one can have a faith, something beyond the limits of rationality. Marxism has a large element of built-in faith, although it claims to be a science and not merely an ideology. This is my first visit to the West: until now I have only been able to go to the Soviet Union or Poland or the Baltic states. In your country I see an abundance of material things. It seems to be unlimited. But there’s a difference between our countries that is also a similarity. Both are poor. You see, poverty has different

faces. We lack the abundance that you have, and we don’t have the freedom of choice. In your country I detect a kind of poverty, which is that you do not need to fight for your survival. For me the struggle has a religious dimension, and I would not want to exchange that for your abundance.” “I know paradise has many gates, just as hell does. One has to learn to distinguish between them, or one is lost.”

 

“We live in an age when the mice are hunting the cats…nobody knows who are the mice and who the cats.” 

My Take

Having just read the short Wallander book An Event in Autumn and enjoyed it, I was looking forward to another installment featuring the cynical Swedish inspector.  I liked The Dogs of Riga and appreciated the strong writing by Henning Mankell as well as the interesting locale of Latvia (I place I knew little about).  However, I wasn’t captivated by it.  I’ll try another Wallander and see if I like the next one better.

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293. The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Alli Angulo

Author:   Florence Williams

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Psychology, Health, Environment

304 pages, published October 20, 2005

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In The Nature Fix, Florence Williams investigates the science behind nature’s positive effects on the brain.  In her quest to discover the beneficial impact of nature, Williams’s research takes her to Korea, Finland, and California.  She discovers that the natural world has incredible powers to improve health, promote reflection and innovation, and strengthen our relationships.

Quotes 

“Annie Dillard once said, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”

 

“Here are some of the essential take-homes: we all need nearby nature: we benefit cognitively and psychologically from having trees, bodies of water, and green spaces just to look at; we should be smarter about landscaping our schools, hospitals, workplaces and neighborhoods so everyone gains. We need quick incursions to natural areas that engage our senses. Everyone needs access to clean, quiet and safe natural refuges in a city. Short exposures to nature can make us less aggressive, more creative, more civic minded and healthier overall. For warding off depression, lets go with the Finnish recommendation of five hours a month in nature, minimum. But as the poets, neuroscientists and river runners have shown us, we also at times need longer, deeper immersions into wild spaces to recover from severe distress, to imagine our futures and to be our best civilized selves.”

 

“We don’t experience natural environments enough to realize how restored they can make us feel, nor are we aware that studies also show they make us healthier, more creative, more empathetic and more apt to engage with the world and with each other. Nature, it turns out, is good for civilization.”

 

“We don’t experience natural environments enough to realize how restored they can make us feel, nor are we aware that studies also show they make us healthier, more creative, more empathetic and more apt to engage with the world and with each other. Nature, it turns out, is good for civilization.”

 

“Beginning in the early 1980s, Stephen and Rachel Kaplan at the University of Michigan noticed that psychological distress was often related to mental fatigue. They speculated that our constant daily treadmill of tasks was wearing out our frontal lobes.”

 

“people are happiest when they are well enmeshed in community and friendships, have their basic survival needs met, and keep their minds stimulated and engaged, often in the service of some sort of cause larger than themselves.”

 

“Among his dozens of influential studies are those showing that exercise causes new brain cells to grow, especially in areas related to memory, executive function and spatial perception. Before Kramer’s work, no one really believed physical activity could lead to such clear and important effects. Now people everywhere are routinely told that exercise is the single best way to prevent aging-related cognitive decline. Kramer’s studies helped change the way the profession”

 

“The difference in joy respondents felt in urban versus natural settings (especially coastal environments) was greater than the difference they experienced from being alone versus being with friends, and about the same as doing favored activities like singing and sports versus not doing those things. Yet, remarkably, the respondents, like me, were rarely caught outside. Ninety-three percent of the time, they were either indoors or in vehicles.”

 

“The idea of solvitur ambulando (in walking it will be solved) has been around since St. Augustine, but well before that Aristotle thought and taught while walking the open-air parapets of the Lyceum. It has long been believed that walking in restorative settings could lead not only to physical vigor but to mental clarity and even bursts of genius, inspiration (with its etymology in breathing) and overall sanity. As French academic Frederic Gros writes in A Philosophy of Walking, it’s simply “the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found.” Jefferson walked to clear his mind, while Thoreau and Nietzsche, like Aristotle, walked to think. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” wrote Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. And Rousseau wrote in Confessions, “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.” 

My Take

The Nature Fix confirmed something that I have long suspected to be true.  There are significant psychic and physical benefits to spending time in nature and the absence of time in the great outdoors can have deleterious effects on human beings.  And the more time spent outside, the better.  Not groundbreaking, but a good reminder to spend time in nature every day.

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