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181. God. Gifts. You. Your Unique Calling and Design

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   First Presbyterian Church in Boulder

Author:   Shirley Davis

Genre:  Non- Fiction, Christian, Theology, Self-Improvement

170 pages, published August 29, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

God. Gifts. You.  is a bible study and assessment of spiritual gifts written by Shirley Davis, a staff member at First Presbyterian Church in Boulder (my home church) who focuses on community building.  In addition to verses from scripture relating to spiritual gifts and calling, the study includes a detailed self-assessment to help you discover your gifts.  Shirley also helps you understand God’s plan for you and how to use your gifts for His glory.

 

 

My Take

I read God. Gifts. You.  as part of a Bible Study at First Presbyterian Church in Boulder.  The self-assessment confirmed some things that I already knew (I have the gifts of hospitality and administration) and surprised me in other ways (I have the gift of encouragement).  More importantly, it started me thinking about how I am using my spiritual gifts in my one and only life and how could I use them in the future.  This is a great resource if you want to know yourself better and/or you are not sure what God is calling you to do.

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173. Your Money and Your Brain

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Jason Zweig

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Personal Finance, Psychology, Economics

352 pages, published August 1, 2007

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Your Money and Your Brain explores what happens inside our brains when we think about money?  The answer is quite a lot, actually, and some of it isn’t good for our financial health.  Author Jason Zweig, a veteran financial journalist, explains why smart people make stupid financial decisions and what they can do to avoid these mistakes.  Zweig’s investigation touches on the latest research in neuroeconomics, a new discipline that combines psychology, neuroscience, and economics to better understand financial decision making.  He shows why we often misunderstand risk and why we tend to be overconfident about our investment decisions.

 

Quotes 

“The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The Intelligent Investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.”

 

“The alluring, long-shot chance of a huge gain is the grease that lubricates the machine of innovation.”

  

My Take

In Your Money and Your Brain, Author Jason Zweig explores many different aspects of how our brain has evolved to deal with risk, gain, loss, greed and fear.  When we allow the reptilian amygdala portion brain to control our investing decisions, we get into trouble by doing things like selling after the market has taken a huge drop, thereby locking in our losses.  In the same manner as JL Collins explains in The Simple Path to Wealth, Zweig describes how a simple buy and hold strategy with index funds is the best way to outsmart your counterproductive inclinations.  Anyone who has ever looked back on a financial decision and marveled at their own stupidity will benefit from reading this book.

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171. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Robin Sloan

Genre:  Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery

288 pages, published October 2, 2012

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Hoopla

 

Summary

The Great Recession finds protagonist Clay Jannon working in the San Francisco bookshop known as Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.  Clay soon discovers that there is more to Mr. Penumbra and his bookstore than meets the eye.   There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything, instead “checking out” obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the enigmatic Mr. Penumbra.  A curious Clay and his archetypical friends (including a love interest who works for Google) embark on an adventure to discover the secrets hidden inside Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

 

Quotes 

“After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:  A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.”

 

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines — it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”

 

“…this is exactly the kind of store that makes you want to buy a book about a teenage wizard. This is the kind of store that makes you want to be a teenage wizard.”

 

“Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who’s going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?”

 

“But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn’t be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.”

 

“You know, I’m really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.”

 

“I’ve never listened to an audiobook before, and I have to say it’s a totally different experience. When you read a book, the story definitely takes place in your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes.”

 

“Let me give you some advice: make friends with a millionaire when he’s a friendless sixth-grader.”

 

“So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula.”

 

“Have you ever played Maximum Happy Imagination?”

“Sounds like a Japanese game show.”

Kat straightens her shoulders. “Okay, we’re going to play. To start, imagine the future. The good future. No nuclear bombs. Pretend you’re a science fiction writer.”

Okay: “World government… no cancer… hover-boards.”

“Go further. What’s the good future after that?”

“Spaceships. Party on Mars.”

“Further.”

“Star Trek. Transporters. You can go anywhere.”

“Further.”

“I pause a moment, then realize: “I can’t.”

Kat shakes her head. “It’s really hard. And that’s, what, a thousand years? What comes after that? What could possibly come after that? Imagination runs out. But it makes sense, right? We probably just imagine things based on what we already know, and we run out of analogies in the thirty-first century.”

 

“… nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment – maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.”

  

My Take

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore was an entertaining audio book (I especially enjoyed the voice of narrator Ari Fliakos).  The characters are engaging, there is an appealing fantasy oriented plot and there is a nice little romantic connection between the main character and a charming girl from Google.  However, while it was enjoyable to listen to at the time, once finished, it fades quickly, leaving not much to remember.   A far superior book in this genre is Ready Player One.

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167. Sweet Tooth

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Ian McEwan

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction

378 pages, published November 13, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

In 1972, Cambridge student Serena Frome’s beauty, intelligence and staunch anti-Communism make her an ideal recruit for the UK’s intelligence service MI5.  Once there, Serena becomes a part of operation “Sweet Tooth,” the intelligence agency’s efforts to manipulate the cultural conversation by funding writers whose politics align with those of the government.

Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, recruits Tom Haley, a promising young writer and they begin a tempestuous love affair.   With Serena fearing that Tom will discover her role in his financing, Sweet Tooth finishes with an unexpected twist.

 

Quotes 

“Love doesn’t grow at a steady rate, but advances in surges, bolts, wild leaps, and this was one of those.”

 

“There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.”

 

“By degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives.”

 

“Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.”

 

“My needs were simple.   I didn’t bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them. Generally, I preferred people to be falling in and out of love, but I didn’t mind so much if they tried their hand at something else. It was vulgar to want it, but I liked someone to say ‘Marry me’ by the end.”

 

“I was irritated by the way he conflated his own shifting needs with an impersonal destiny. I want it, therefore…it’s in the stars!”

 

“And feeling clever, I’ve always thought, is just a sigh away from being cheerful.”

 

“What I took to be the norm — taut, smooth, supple — was the transient special case of youth. To me, the old were a separate species, like sparrows or foxes.”

 

“Four or five years – nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.”

 

“Everyone knew as much as they needed to know to be happy.”

 

“Here were the luxury and priviledge of the well-fed man scoffing at all hopes and progress for the rest. [He] owed nothing to a world that nurtured him kindly, liberally educated him for free, sent him to no wars, brought him to manhood without scary rituals or famine or fear of vengeful gods, embraced him with a handsome pension in his twenties and placed no limits on his freedom of expression. This was an easy nihilism that never doubted that all we had made was rotten, never thought to pose alternatives, never derived hope from friendship, love, free markets, industry, technology, trade, and all the arts and sciences.”

 

My Take

Having previously read Atonement, Amsterdam, On Chesil Beach, The Children Act, Saturday and Nutshell, I am a big fan of the brilliant English writer Ian McEwan.  While not his best work, Sweet Tooth is still a very interesting book with a compelling female lead character (Serena Frome) who delivers an inside look at the Cold War mentality in Britain during the early 1970’s.  McEwan also has a lot to say about the pleasures and purposes of reading (something I can relate to) and some fascinating asides on logical math problems.

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166. The Darlings

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Christina Alger

Genre:  Fiction

347 pages, published February 16, 2012

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Darlings tells the story of an elite New York family dealing with a financial scandal that threatens all of them in different ways.  When he married Merrill Darling, attorney Paul Ross became part of the wealthy Darling family.  He has grown comfortable with their luxurious lifestyle and feels compelled to keep it going after his high flying law firms implodes in 2007.  Against his better judgment, Paul accepts a job as General Counsel at his father in law’s hedge fund.  When the manager of the fund’s primary investment apparently commits suicide and is revealed to be a Bernie Madoff type, all the wheels start to come off for the Darlings.  Paul must decide whether save himself while betraying his wife and in-laws or protect the family business at all costs.

 

Quotes 

“The greatest strength you can have is to know your own strengths. You’ve got to figure out what you’re good at and make the most of it.”

 

“How inexplicable and enviable, never to want to be anywhere other than where you already are.”

 

“To be jealous of money is uninspired … You can only be jealous of someone who has something that you can never have. More style, for example, or wit. Money is easily earned.”

 

“You’re perfect. To me you are. You always will be. When you’re small you think that about your parents. When you’re old, you think that about your kids. You’ll see.”

 

“Diving in is no fun, but it’s a hell of a lot better than drowning.”

 

“And what should he have known? Well, who could answer that? Thought he was closer to all the players than anyone, he still couldn’t identify who was responsible and who wasn’t. Really responsible, not just “look the other way” responsible. They all were, in some larger sense. And yet, while he knew this was a wholly indefensible position, he felt that somehow none of them were, either. Just like the guys at Lehmen, or Bear Stearns, or AIG. Just like the guys at Delphic. It became a game, a contest; the only rules that governed were what made you money and what didn’t. All Paul did was hang the hell on and try not to get thrown.”

 

“The constant mental fight made him irritable. He had never had a temper before. Some days, he felt as if his entire body were a raw nerve, its membrane receptive even to the smallest passing slight.”

 

“And all women wanted something. Ines felt strongly that women were rarely friends with one another unless they could get something out of it. Female friendships were like strategic alliances: Each party had to bring something to the table in order to maintain equity.”

 

My Take

The Darlings is a fast reading page turner that I had a hard time putting down.  Cristina Alger takes you inside the privileged world of New York City.  While most of her focus is on the financial sector, she also offers a glimpse inside high powered law firms, the newspaper industry and leisure in the Hamptons for the millionaires and billionaires.  It would have been a more satisfying novel, and earned a higher score from me, if it had fleshed out and developed the side characters a bit more.  However, even with that deficiency, I recommend reading it.  Perfect escapism.

 

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162. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Jamie Ford

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, Romance, World War II

290 pages, published January 27, 2009

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is set in World War II era Seattle and tells the story of two star-crossed lovers (well actually friends who love each other):  Henry Lee, a 13 year old Chinese kid whose father is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American , and Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American girl whose parents are proud to be American but are becoming increasingly worried after war breaks out with Japan.  Both Henry and Keiko are “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary school where the two outcasts find each other while working together in the school cafeteria.  When the internment of American-Japanese families begins, Henry and Keiko are torn apart.  Fate separates them until forty years later, when newly widowed Henry contemplates finding his first true love.

 

Quotes 

“The hardest choices in life aren’t between what’s right and what’s wrong but between what’s right and what’s best.”

 

“He’d do what he always did, find the sweet among the bitter.”

 

“Henry was learning that time apart has a way of creating distance- more than mountains and time zone separating them. Real distance, the kind that makes you ache and stop wondering. Longing so bad that it begins to hurt to care so much.”

 

“I had my chance.’ He said it, retiring from a lifetime of wanting. ‘I had my chance, and sometimes in life, there are no second chances. You look at what you have, not what you miss, and you move forward.”

 

“But choosing to lovingly care for her was like steering a plane into a mountain as gently as possible. The crash is imminent; it’s how you spend your time on the way down that counts.”

 

“I try not to live in the past, he thought, but who knows, sometimes the past lives in me.”

 

“The waitress brought a fresh pot of tea, and Marty refilled his father’s cup and poured a cup for Samantha. Henry in turn filled Marty’s. It was a tradition Henry cherished—never filling your own cup, always filling that of someone else, who would return the favor.”

 

My Take

The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is a quick and enjoyable read that does a fine job of demonstrating the staggering impact of the World War II internment on the Japanese families who were forced to abandon their homes, businesses and lives.  The characters are engaging and provide a sweet lens through which to view a historical atrocity.

 

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148. The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Neil Gaiman

Genre:  Fiction, Fantasy, Horror

181 pages, published June 18, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Ocean at the End of the Lane opens with a middle-aged man returning to his childhood home in Sussex, England to attend a funeral.   Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother.  He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the dilapidated old farmhouse, the past comes flooding back.  It is a past too bizarre, frightening, and dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

 

Quotes

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

 

“Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.”

 

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”

 

“Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.”

 

“Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

 

“That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.”

 

“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters.”

 

“I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.”

 

“Nothing’s ever the same,” she said. “Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”

 

“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.”

 

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”

 

My Take

Nominated and awarded multiple honors in the fantasy genre, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is creates a fantastical parallel world of monsters, one of whom eerily takes on human form, seen through the eyes of young English boy. Reading it, you are never quite sure how much of the book is the boy’s imagination and how much actually happened.  That juxtaposition of fantasy and reality, as well as the skilled pen of author Neil Gaiman, is what makes The Ocean at the End of the Lane an appealing read.

 

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147. The Boston Girl

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Anita Diamant

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction

320 pages, published December 9, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

 

Summary

The Boston Girl is a coming-of-age novel told from the perspective of 85 year old Addie Baum reflecting on her life to her to her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter.  Addie was born in 1900 to Jewish immigrant parents.  Growing up in the North End of Boston, Addie’s intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can’t imagine – a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture and new opportunities for women.  Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college.  She wants a career and to find true love.  The book follows her path to achieve all of these things.

 

Quotes

“When a shy person smiles, it’s like the sun coming out.”

 

“It was one of those perfect fall days when the air is cool enough to wake you up but the sun is also kissing your face.”

 

“I’m still embarrassed and mad at myself. But after seventy years, I also feel sorry for the girl I used to be. She was awfully hard on herself.”

 

“You should always be kind to people, Ava. You never know what sorrows they’re carrying around.”

 

“It took me until I was almost forty before I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

 

“When I look at my eighty-five-year-old face in the mirror today, I think, “You’re never going to look better than you do today, honey, so smile.” Whoever said a smile is the best face-lift was one smart woman.”

 

“it’s good to be smart, but kindness is more important.”

 

“Hiking is the same thing as walking, only hotter and twice as far as you want to go. But usually, you’re glad you went.”

 

“Don’t let anyone tell you things aren’t better than they used to be.”

 

“If you treat every question like you’ve never heard it before, your students feel like you respect them and everyone learns a lot more. Including the teacher.”

 

My Take

I had enjoyed The Red Tent, also by Anita Diamant, so I thought I would give The Boston Girl a read (actually a listen).  While not the most engrossing book, it did hold my interest and I was somewhat charmed by Addie Baum, the titular protagonist, and her evolvement from a meek immigrant child into a self actualized modern woman as she journeys through the twentieth century.  An easy and pleasant vacation read.

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145. The Case for Christ

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  My Bible Study Group

Author:   Lee Strobel

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Christian, Theology

367 pages, published August 30, 1998

Reading Format:  Hoopla Audio Book

 

Summary

Retracing his own spiritual journey from atheism to faith, Lee Strobel, former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, searches for evidence that Jesus of Nazareth really is the Son of God.   As part of his investigation, he cross-examines a dozen experts with doctorates from schools like Cambridge and Princeton who are recognized authorities in their fields.  Strobel challenges them to defend the reliability of the New Testament and asks for evidence of Jesus’ existence outside the Bible.  He also delves into the question of whether the resurrection was an actual event.

 

Quotes

“Only in a world where faith is difficult can faith exist. I don’t have faith in two plus two equals four or in the noonday sun. Those are beyond question. But Scripture describes God as a hidden God. You have to make an effort of faith to find him. There are clues you can follow. “And if that weren’t so, if there were something more or less than clues, it’s difficult for me to understand how we could really be free to make a choice about him. If we had absolute proof instead of clues, then you could no more deny God than you could deny the sun. If we had no evidence at all, you could never get there. God gives us just enough evidence so that those who want him can have him. Those who want to follow the clues will.”

 

“if the gospels had been identical to each other, word for word, this would have raised charges that the authors had conspired among themselves to coordinate their stories in advance, and that would have cast doubt on them.”

 

“The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system. We’ve all seen what can happen when you merely overthrow an economic system and impose a new order. The whole communist dream was the have a ‘revolutionary man’ followed by the ‘new man.’ Trouble is, they never found the ‘new man.’ They got rid of the oppressors of the peasants, but that didn’t mean the peasants were suddenly free–they were just under a new regime of darkness. In the final analysis, if you want lasting change, you’ve got to transform the hearts of human beings. And that was Jesus’ mission.”

 

“Over and over Lapides would come upon prophecies in the Old Testament–more than four dozen major predictions in all. Isaiah revealed the manner of the Messiah’s birth (of a virgin); Micah pinpointed the place of his birth (Bethlehem); Genesis and Jeremiah specified his ancestry (a descendent of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, from the tribe of Judah, the house of David); the Psalms foretold his betrayal, his accusation by false witnesses, his manner of death (pierced in the hands and feet, although crucifixion hadn’t been invented yet), and his resurrection (he would not decay but would ascend on high)…”

 

“The Jews proposed the ridiculous story that the guards had fallen asleep. Obviously, they were grasping at straws. But the point is this: they started with the assumption that the tomb was vacant! Why? Because they knew it was!”

 

“Contrast that with the depiction of Jesus Christ in the gospels. They talk about someone who actually lived several decades earlier, and they name names—crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Caiaphas was the high priest, and the father of Alexander and Rufus carried his cross, for example. That’s concrete historical stuff. It has nothing in common with stories about what supposedly happened ‘once upon a time.”

 

“The theological truth is based on historical truth. That’s the way the New Testament talks. Look at the sermon of Peter in the second chapter of Acts. He stands up and says, ‘You guys are a witness of these things; they weren’t done in secret.  David’s tomb is still with us, but God has raised Jesus from the dead.  Therefore we proclaim him to be the Son of God.’ “Take away miracles and you take away the Resurrection, and then you’ve got nothing to proclaim.  Paul said that if Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, our faith is futile, it’s useless, it’s empty.”

 

“Back at my motel, I mentally played back my interview with Boyd. I felt the same way he did: If the Jesus of faith is not also the Jesus of history, he’s powerless and he’s meaningless. Unless he’s rooted in reality, unless he established his divinity by rising from the dead, he’s just a feel-good symbol who’s as irrelevant as Santa Claus.”

 

“So if someone were to say he was God, that wouldn’t have made any sense to them and would have been seen as clear-cut blasphemy. And it would have been counterproductive to Jesus in his efforts to get people to listen to his message.”

 

“believe in Jesus on the basis of the historical evidence, but my relationship with Jesus goes way beyond the evidence. I have to put my trust in him and walk with him on a daily basis.”

 

My Take

Reading The Case for Christ helped me meet one of my 2017 resolutions, to read 10 books on Christianity and faith.  While I have had doubts throughout my life about the existence of Jesus and God, I have always been a seeker of both.  I find that my faith is the strongest when I practice it on a regular basis and strive to learn more about Jesus and God.  Strobel’s book tackles the existence questions head on and offers persuasive empirical evidence that not only did Jesus exist, but that he was truly the son of God who was resurrected from the the dead.  I’m not sure the impact this book would have on a hard-core atheist, but for those open to hearing his arguments, Strobel makes a compelling and credible case for the existence of Jesus and God.

 

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143. Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Matthew Diffee

Genre:  Humor, Cartoon

240 pages, published May 26, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

From award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee (editor of The Rejection Collection), Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People is an insightful, often hilarious collection cartoons that will appeal to anyone who is beautiful and intelligent.

 

 

My Take

Finally, a book that’s not for everyone!  All kidding aside, this book was a bit of a cheat since it did not take me long to get through it.  However, I did enjoy it and found myself chuckling throughout.  A fun diversion.

 

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