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163. Summer House with Swimming Pool

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Herman Koch

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense

387 pages, published January 26, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

When famous actor Ralph Meier winds up dead, the authorities begin to suspect Dr. Marc Schlosser, Ralph’s personal doctor and friend.  As the story unfolds, we learn that the real truth is a lot more complex than simple malpractice.  Still haunted by his eldest daughter’s rape during his family’s stay at Ralph’s extravagant beachfront summerhouse, one they shared with Ralph’s family, film director Stanley Forbes and Stanley’s younger girlfriend, Emmanuelle, Marc believes that the perpetrator of the rape could be either Ralph or Stanley.  Stanley, who is weirdly fixated on Marc’s daughters’ future fashion careers, seems like an obvious suspect.  However, Marc’s reasons for wanting Ralph dead become increasingly compelling as events start to unravel.

 

Quotes 

“There are times when you run back through your life, to see whether you can locate the point at which it could still have taken a different turn.”

 

“You get a stain on your pants. Your favorite pair of pants. You wash them ten times in a row at 160 degrees. You scrub and scour and rub. You bring in the heavy artillery. Bleaches. Abrasive cleaners. But the spot doesn’t go away. If you scrub and scour too long, it will only be replaced by something else. By a stretch of fabric that is thinner and paler. The paler cloth is the memory. The memory of the spot. Now there are two things you can do. You can throw the pants away, or you can walk around for the rest of your life with the memory of the stain. But the paler cloth reminds you of more than just the stain. It also reminds you of when the pants were still clean.”

 

“Free-ranging single men are like a house that has been empty too long. There must be something fishy about the house, the woman thinks. Up for sale for six months and it’s still vacant.”

 

“Life as a widow, she thinks, will always be like this. The friends will go on proposing toasts for months (for years!). To her. To their new center of attention. What she doesn’t know yet is that, after a few courtesy calls, it will all be over. The silence that will follow is the same silence that always falls after a life in the shadows.”

 

“Flippancy. A laughing matter. It’s like with funerals. They are, first and foremost, expected to be fun. There is laughter and drinking and bad language. To keep the whole thing from being too bourgeois. A bourgeois funeral is an artist’s worst nightmare.”

 

“An overburdened liver sounds different from a healthy one. An overburdened liver groans. It groans and begs. It begs for a day off.  A day to deal with the worst of the garbage.”

 

My Take

Best-selling Dutch author Herman Koch is a unique voice whose writing is a bit unnerving.  On the recommendation of a Boulder Librarian (who also recommended Summer House with Swimming Pool) I had previously read The Dinner.  While I found that book to be the superior read, Summer House has its captivating moments.  Koch takes you inside the warped psyche of Dr. Marc Schlosser.  Marc’s take on biology and human relations is sometimes ghoulish and creepy, but it is never boring.  If you liked The Dinner, you might want to give Summer House with Swimming Pool a try.

 

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161. Family Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Akhil Sharma

Genre:  Fiction

240 pages, published April 7, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

 

In Family Life, Akhil Sharma tells the story of the Mishra family.  It begins in India in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets and wait for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America.  America is everything that the Mishras could have imagined and more.  Older Birju studies hard and his work pays off with admittance to a selective charter school in New York.  However, before he can start, tragedy strikes and Birju is left in a brain-damaged state.  The family copes in different ways.  The father becomes an alcoholic, emotionally abandoning the family for solace at the bottom of a bottle.  The mother redoubles her focus on the older brother who is unable to respond to her.  Younger brother Ajay turns to writing and tries to match the academic achievement of his older brother.

Quotes 

“An elderly black man with gray hair said, “Every bottle should come with a warning: ‘This bottle may cause you to lose your job. This bottle may cause you to get a divorce. This bottle may cause you to become homeless.”

 

“I used to think my father had been assigned to us by the government.”

 

“During the coming days, the wealth of America kept astonishing me. The television had programming from morning till night. I had never been in an elevator before and when I pressed a button in the elevator and the elevator “started moving, I felt powerful that it had to obey me. In our shiny brass mailbox in the lobby, we received ads on colored paper. In India colored paper could be sold to the recycler for more money than newsprint. The sliding glass doors of our apartment building would open when we approached. Each time this happened, I felt that we had been mistaken for somebody important.”

 

“We have to keep trusting God. We can’t just trust God when he’s doing what we want. We have to trust him even when things are not as we would like them.”

 

“I had been nervous about not doing well in college. During my first class, I looked at the notes the boy next to me was taking. His supply and demand curves seemed more neatly drawn than mine. Nearly everyone appeared to have gone to preparatory schools and already knew such odd things as the fact that there was no inflation during the Middle Ages. Very few, however, were willing to work the way I did.  When I would come out of Firestone Library at two in the morning, walk past the strange statues scattered around campus, and then sit at my desk in my room till the trees in the yard appeared out of the darkness, I felt that I was achieving something, that every hour I worked was generating almost physical value, as if I could touch the knowledge I was gaining through my work.”

 

My Take

While I enjoyed Family Life, it did not fully deliver on the promise of the first 50 pages, getting bogged down in the mundane details of the Mishra’s day to day family life with a mentally impaired son.  Perhaps that is the point, but I found my interest flagging during this section of the book.  Sharma is a gifted writer, but I didn’t love this book.

 

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159. The Age of Miracles

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Karen Thompson Walker

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Young Adult

294 pages, published June 21, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The premise of The Age of Miracles is that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow.  While the days and nights grow longer and longer, the world’s environment, including gravity and electro magnestism, are hugely impacted.  When the worlds’ governments declare that they will keep the standard 24 hour daily calendar, even though days and nights no longer correspond to it, some people respond by becoming rebellious real-timers who are shunned and eventually ostracized.  In this dystopian future, we follow the life of middle schooler Julia as she tries to cope not just with the impact of the slowing, but all of the ups and downs of the ordinary landscape of her life.

 

Quotes 

“How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.”

 

“Some say that love is the sweetest feeling, the purest form of joy, but that isn’t right. It’s not love–it’s relief.”

 

“The only thing you have to do in this life is die,” said Mrs. Pinsky…”everything else is a choice.”

 

“Doesn’t every previous era feel like fiction once it’s gone?”

 

“We were, on that day, no different from the ancients, terrified of our own big sky.”

 

“This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall.”

 

“It was that time of life: Talents were rising to the surface, weaknesses were beginning to show through, we were finding out what kinds of people we would be. Some would turn out beautiful, some funny, some shy. Some would be smart, others smarter. The chubby ones would likely always be chubby. The beloved, I sensed, would be beloved for life. And I worried that loneliness might work that way, too. Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom.”

 

“Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”

 

“I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”

 

“Even beauty, in abundance, turns creepy.”

 

“And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.”

 

“I liked the idea, how the past could be preserved, fossilized, in the stars. I wanted to think that somewhere on the other end of time, a hundred light years from then, someone else, some distant future creature, might be looking back at a preserved image of me and my father at that very moment in my bedroom.”

 

“A man should enjoy things if he can; he should spend his final days in the sun. Mine will be spent by a reading lamp.”

 

“Seth and I used to like to picture how our world would look to visitors someday, maybe a thousand years in the future, after all the humans are gone and all the asphalt has crumbled and peeled away. We wondered what thise visitors would find here. We liked to guess at what would last. Here the indentations suggesting a vast network of roads. Here the deposits of iron where giant steel structures once stood, shoulder to shoulder in rows, a city. Here the remnants of clothing and dishware, here the burial grounds, here the mounds of earth that were once people’s homes.  But among the artifacts that will never be found – among the objects that will disintegrate long before anyone from elsewhere arrives – is a certain patch of sidewalk on a Californian street where once, on a dark afternoon in summer at the waning end of the year of the slowing, two kids knelt down together on the cold ground. We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew – our names, the date, and these words: We were here.”

 

My Take

The Age of Miracles has an interesting premise, i.e. what happens if the rotation of the earth begins to slow.  While Thompson explores the real world ramifications of a slowing, most of her book is focused on the life of Julia, a California middle schooler who is coping with ordinary issues that face many 12 and 13 years old:  the loss of friends as you move from one stage of growing up to the next, her parents’ estrangement, first love, social isolation, peer pressure, etc.  These issues are handled with a deft touch and you do feel compassion for Julia as she tries to navigate the difficult world of pre-teen angst while the real world is busy falling apart.  If found The Age of Miracles to be an enjoyable read, but without a great deal of lasting impact.

 

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157. One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   B.J. Novak

Genre:  Fiction, Short Stories, Humor

288 pages, published February 4, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

One More Thing is a collection of humorous, witty and sometimes surprisingly affecting short stories from B.J. Novak, an actor, writer, and director best known for his work on The Office (where he played Ryan the temp).  In one story, a boy wins a $100,000 prize in a box of Frosted Flakes, only to discover that claiming the winnings may break up his family.  A woman sets out to seduce motivational speaker Tony Robbins and asks Tony Robbins himself for help achieving this mission.  Author John Grisham contemplates an epic typo.  A new arrival in heaven, overwhelmed by infinite options, procrastinates over his long-ago promise to visit his grandmother.  One of my favorites is a retelling of the classic fable The Tortoise and the Hare in which a revenge minded hare is obsessed with scoring a rematch against the tortoise who ruined his life.

 

Quotes 

“…slow and steady wins the race, till truth and talent claim their place.”

 

“In the aftermath of an athletic humiliation on an unprecedented scale—a loss to a tortoise in a footrace so staggering that, his tormenters teased, it would not only live on in the record books, but would transcend sport itself, and be taught to children around the world in textbooks and bedtime stories for centuries; that hundreds of years from now, children who had never heard of a “tortoise” would learn that it was basically a fancy type of turtle from hearing about this very race—the hare retreated, understandably, into a substantial period of depression and self-doubt.”

 

“If you love something, let it go.

If you don’t love something, definitely let it go.

Basically, just drop everything, who cares.”

 

“Regret is just perfectionism plus time.”

 

“But nobody remembers how long anything takes; they only remember how good it was in the end.”

 

“You have infinite time here, and there are infinite things to do, but you still don’t end up doing much of it. You do what you love most, over and over.”

 

“It’s not always enough to be brave, I realized years later. You have to be brave and contribute something positive, too. Brave on its own is just a party trick.”

 

“I think it’s better to not know certain things. It gives the world an extra bit of mystery, which is important to us as human beings.”

 

“Being young was her thing, and she was the best at it. But every year, more and more girls came out of nowhere and tried to steal her thing.  One of these days I’m going to have to get a new thing, she thought to herself–but as quietly as she could, because she knew that if anyone caught her thinking this thought, her thing would be right over right then.”

 

“I was sad that summer was over. But I was happy that it was over for my enemies, too.”

 

“In my opinion, there are two types of perfect. The first is the type that seems so obvious and intuitive to you and everyone else that in a perfect world it would simply be considered standard; but, in reality, in our flawed world, what should be considered standard is actually so rare that it has to be elevated to the level of “perfect.” This is the type of perfect that makes you and most other people think, “Why isn’t everything like this? Why is it so hard to find …” a black V-neck cotton sweater, or a casual non-chain restaurant with comfortable booths, etc.—“that is just exactly the way everyone knows something like this should be?” “Perfect,” we all say with relief when we finally find something like this that is exactly as it should be. “Perfect. Why was this so hard to find?”

The other type of perfect is the type you never could have expected and then could never replicate.”

 

“All eyes are beautiful, I said, which is why it’s such an easy compliment.”

 

“It is an inside joke of history that all its most exciting adventures inevitably end their careers as homework. Beheadings, rebellions, thousand-year wars, incest on the royal throne, electricity, art, opera, dogs in outer space.”

 

My Take

My family and I love watching The Office, so I was interested to see what B.J. Novak (who was a creative force on that classic show in addition to playing the somewhat dodgy temp Ryan) would come up with.  I also had really enjoyed reading two books by Novak bestie Mindy Kaling.  While Novak’s stories are often entertaining and sometimes thought provoking, the collection is a bit uneven.  He tackles a wide variety of subjects, themes, tones, and narrative voices.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  Still, I am happy to have read this book, even if I didn’t enjoy it as much as Kaling’s work.

 

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151. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Bill Bryson

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Travel, Memoir, Humor

397 pages, published December 26, 2006

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

A Walk in the Woods is Bill Bryson’s memoir of his more than 500 miles of hiking the Appalachian Trail or AT as it is often referred to.  The AT stretches from Georgia to Maine and covers some of the most beautiful terrain in America–majestic mountains, silent forests, sparking lakes.  If you want to do a major hike in the U.S., it’s probably the place to go.  Bill Bryson introduces the reader to the history and ecology of the trail and to some of the other characters that he meets along the way.

 

Quotes

“Black bears rarely attack.  But here’s the thing. Sometimes they do.  All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn’t happen often, but – and here is the absolutely salient point – once would be enough.”

 

“I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrero’s book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me — they looked almost comically unagressive, like four guys who had gotten a Frisbee caught up a tree — but their numbers. Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties — I daresay it would even give a merry toot — and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.”

 

“To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.”

 

“You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.”

 

“Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.”

 

“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.”

 

“There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.”

 

“At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.”

 

“I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn’t walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. ‘Because I have a program for the treadmill,’ she explained. ‘It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.’ It hadn’t occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.”

 

“I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.”

 

“Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.”

 

“That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.”

 

“In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition–either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit–that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn’t all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and till fields.”

 

“But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods. I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn’t know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.”

 

My Take

I listened to A Walk in the Woods right before my husband Scot and I left to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain.  Fortunately for me, I was doing the “minimum Camino” of 5 days and 114 kilometers.  We also had a luggage transport service, so all we had to carry were day packs with water, jackets and a few other items.  Our hike was nothing like the grueling experience described by Bill Bryson.  While he didn’t make the case to me for the hard core experience of hiking the AT (I’m happy just doing the minimum Camino), I’m sure that heartier souls will be inspired by Bryson’s vivid descriptions and humor in this very readable book.

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146. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Boulder Librarian

Author:   Mary Roach

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Science, Medicine

320 pages, published 2003

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

I learned a lot from reading Stiff about a subject I didn’t even know would be interesting:  the use of the dead for cadavers and as test subjects (think crash test dummies) and the brain dead for organ donation.  For over two thousand years, cadavers have been involved in advancing the cause of science.  In this unique book, Mary Roach explores what happens to our bodies postmortem and it is a fascinating tale.

 

Quotes

 “The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften.  Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.”

 

“You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.”

 

“One young woman’s tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver’s hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. “The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish”, she wrote. “Did you choose the color? Did you think that I would see it? I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands. I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs I imagine. When I listen to a heart, I recall holding your heart.”

 

“It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you’d call her.”

 

“We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.”

 

“The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.”

 

“It’s the reason we say “pork” and “beef” instead of “pig” and “cow.” Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.”

 

“Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.”

 

“Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone.

They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.”

 

“Here’s the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. […] I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer control, or even participate in, anything that happens on earth. I spoke about this with funeral director Kevin McCabe, who believes that decisions concerning the disposition of a body should be mad by the survivors, not the dead. “It’s non of their business what happens to them whey the die,” he said to me. While I wouldn’t go that far, I do understand what he was getting at: that the survivors shouldn’t have to do something they’re uncomfortable with or ethically opposed to. Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased’s ashes into inner space, that’s fine. But if it is burdensome or troubling for any reason, then perhaps they shouldn’t have to.”

 

My Take

I always like learning about new things and I really learned about something new while reading Stiff.  Roach’s book gave me an appreciation for how important the use of human cadavers has been to understanding how the human body and disease work, as well as how to build better transportation options to protect the living.  We all owe a debt to those who came before us and donated their body to science and those who generously signed organ donation cards.

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142. The Good Girl

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mary Kubika

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

352 pages, published July 29, 2014

Reading Format:  Hoopla Audio Book

 

Summary

The Good Girl is a mystery/thriller with a big twist at the end.  One night, Mia Dennett enters a bar to meet her boyfriend.  When he doesn’t show, she makes a spur of the moment decision to leave with an enigmatic stranger.  At first Colin Thatcher seems like a safe one-night stand.  However, following Colin home will turn out to be the worst mistake of Mia’s life.

 

Quotes

“I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that’s quickly giving way to modern technology.”

 

“The goal with teenagers is simply getting through it alive, with no permanent damage.”

 

“Teenagers believe they’re invincible—nothing bad can happen. It isn’t until later that we realize that bad things do, in fact, happen.”

 

“As it was, being a bad mother was child’s play compared to being a good mother, which was an incessant struggle, a lose-lose situation 24 hours a day; long after the kids were in bed the torment of what I did or didn’t do during those hours we were trapped together would scourge my soul.”

 

“What did you want?” she asks. What I wanted was a dad. Someone to take care of my mother and me, so I didn’t have to do it myself. But what I tell her is Atari.”

 

“Having a best friend is a wonderful thing. There needs be no proofreading, no refinement, of the comments that come from my head.”

 

My Take

I enjoyed listening to The Good Girl, but didn’t love the book.  Not as gripping as Gone Girl, but The Good Girl is still worth a read, especially if you like the suspense/thriller genre.  It will be interesting to see what they do with the film version.

 

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130. Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   T. Harv Eker

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

212 pages, published February 15, 2005

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind is not your typical personal finance book.  Rather than focusing on procedures for getting rich, T. Harv Ecker (“Harv”) emphasizes that before you can achieve great wealth, you may need to change your mindset.  Harv states: “Give me five minutes, and I can predict your financial future for the rest of your life!” He does this by identifying your “money and success blueprint” and shows how rich people think and act differently than most poor and middle-class people.  According to Harv, we all have a personal money blueprints ingrained in our subconscious minds, and it is this blueprint, more than anything, that will determine our financial lives.  Harv then shows you how to reset your money blueprint to create natural and automatic success.

 

Quotes

“If you want to change the fruits, you will first have to change the roots. If you want to change the visible, you must first change the invisible.”

 

“When you are complaining, you become a living, breathing “crap magnet.””

 

“Recall that thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to actions, and actions lead to results. Everything begins with your thoughts—which are produced by your mind.”

 

“The purpose of our lives is to add value to the people of this generation and those that follow.”

 

“Money will only make you more of what you already are.”

 

“The number one reason most people don’t get what they want is that they don’t know what they want.”

 

“What you focus on expands.”

 

“If your motivation for acquiring money or success comes from a nonsupportive root such as fear, anger, or the need to “prove” yourself, your money will never bring you happiness.”

 

  1. Rich people believe “I create my life.” Poor people believe “Life happens to me.”
  2. Rich people play the money game to win. Poor people play the money game to not lose.
  3. Rich people are committed to being rich. Poor people want to be rich.
  4. Rich people think big. Poor people think small.
  5. Rich people focus on opportunities. Poor people focus on obstacles.
  6. Rich people admire other rich and successful people. Poor people resent rich and successful people.
  7. Rich people associate with positive, successful people. Poor people associate with negative or unsuccessful people.
  8. Rich people are willing to promote themselves and their value. Poor people think negatively about selling and promotion.
  9. Rich people are bigger than their problems. Poor people are smaller than their problems.
  10. Rich people are excellent receivers. Poor people are poor receivers.
  11. Rich people choose to get paid based on results. Poor people choose to get paid based on time.
  12. Rich people think “both”. Poor people think “either/or”.
  13. Rich people focus on their net worth. Poor people focus on their working income.
  14. Rich people manage their money well. Poor people mismanage their money well.
  15. Rich people have their money work hard for them. Poor people work hard for their money.
  16. Rich people act in spite of fear. Poor people let fear stop them.
  17. Rich people constantly learn and grow. Poor people think they already know.”

 

“Robert Allen said something quite profound: “No thought lives in your head rent-free.”

 

“It’s not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You have to be the right person in the right place at the right time.”

 

“The first element of change is awareness. You can’t change something unless you know it exists.”

 

“just realize that no amount of money can ever make you good enough. Money can’t make you something you already are.”

 

“How will I know when I’ve completed my mission?” The answer? “If you are still breathing, you are not done.”

 

“WEALTH PRINCIPLE: When the subconscious mind must choose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.”

 

My Take:   I found a lot of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind to be rather hokey.  For example, at the end of every chapter, Harv advises his readers to put their hands on their heads and repeat the mantra “I have a Millionaire Mind.”  Count me skeptical, but I don’t see that working for me.  I did, however, think he had some interesting insights into how certain people will never be wealthy, or will quickly lose their wealth should they somehow obtain some, because of a mindset that is anti-wealth.  I’ve observed this first hand among a few friends and family members.  If you are envious or resentful of rich people, it is highly unlikely that you will ever be rich yourself.   On a related note, my husband and I have noticed that it is very difficult for people to hold onto money when they did not play a part in earning that money in the first place.  I also found Harv’s observation that when you are complaining, you become a living, breathing “crap magnet” to be hilarious and true.

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125. The Undoing Project

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Michael Lewis

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Psychology, Biography, Economics, History, Public Policy

362 pages, published December 6, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Undoing Project highlights the research performed by Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky which focused on undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind systematically erred when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, and led to a new approach to government regulation. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.

 

Quotes

“When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice.”

 

“The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.”

 

“Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things.”

 

“Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.”

 

“It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” Amos said. “The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”

 

“It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what’s in them must be invented.”

 

“It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”

 

“Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”

 

“The way it feels to me,’ he said, ‘is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think.  And now I can think them.”

 

“Wall Street trading desks at the end of each year offer a flavor of the problem. If a Wall Street trader expects to be paid a bonus of one million dollars and he’s given only half a million, he feels himself to be, and behaves as if he is, in the domain of losses. His reference point is an expectation of what he would receive. That expectation isn’t a stable number; it can be changed in all sorts of ways. A trader who expects to be given a million-dollar bonus, and who further expects everyone else on his trading desk to be given million-dollar bonuses, will not maintain the same reference point if he learns that everyone else just received two million dollars. If he is then paid a million dollars, he is back in the domain of losses. Danny would later use the same point to explain the behavior of apes in experiments researchers had conducted on bonobos. “If both my neighbor in the next cage and I get a cucumber for doing a great job, that’s great. But if he gets a banana and I get a cucumber, I will throw the cucumber at the experimenter’s face.” The moment one ape got a banana, it became the ape next door’s reference point. The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person’s reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described.”

 

“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”

 

“There was what people called “present bias”—the tendency, when making a decision, to undervalue the future in relation to the present. There was “hindsight bias”—which he thought of as the tendency for people to look at some outcome and assume it was predictable all along.”

 

“Confirmation bias,” he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. “Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don’t even realize it is happening,” he said. A scout would settle on an opinion about a player and then arrange the evidence to support that opinion.”

 

““He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.”

My Take

I am a fan of Michael Lewis, having read Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, Coach, The Big Short, and The Blind Side as well as many of his blog entries on Slate.  I really enjoyed his writing and was therefore looking forward to The Undoing Project which focused on Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Israeli behavioral psychologists who studied how and why we make certain decisions.  While the book was interesting at times, there was a lot of meandering that was less than compelling.  It was definitely not a page turner.  I don’t regret reading it, but am reluctant to give it a big recommendation.

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121. Little Bee

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Chris Cleave

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

266 pages, published February 16, 2010

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Little Bee follows the stories of two very different women.  Little Bee is the name of a teenage girl from Nigeria who manages to sneak her way into England only to be discovered thrown into an asylum detention centre for several years.  Sarah O’Rourke is a magazine editor from Surrey with a young son and a troubled marriage.  When the lives of the two women intersect both in Nigeria and the UK both of their lives are dramatically altered.   

 

Quotes

“On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”

 

“I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us. ”

 

“I’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.”

 

“Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.”

 

“Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.”

 

“To be well in your mind you have first to be free.”

 

“Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.”

 

“Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.”

 

“There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly lost. First from my heart, then from my mind, and only finally from my life.”

 

“This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.”

 

“I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth).”

 

“There’s eight million people here pretending the others aren’t getting on their nerves. I believe it’s called civilization.”

 

“People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.”

 

“What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.”

My Take

Little Bee was an enjoyable read and opened my eyes to the plight of African refugees.  The author’s contrast of the lives of two women:  teenage “Little Bee,” an illegal refugee from Nigeria, and 30-something Sarah O’Rourke, successful magazine editor with a young son and unhappy marriage, and how they impact each other held my attention and deepened my interest in their stories.  Not the best book I’ve read this year, but certainly not the worst.

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