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136. A Life in Parts

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Bryan Cranston

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir

271 pages, published October 11, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

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

Quotes

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

 

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

 

“Console the failure, but nurture the hunger.”

 

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

 

My Take

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

 

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135: The Interestings

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Meg Wolitzer

Genre:  Fiction

468 pages, published April 9, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

During the summer of Nixon’s resignation, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts meet, become bonded as friends and dub themselves “the Interestings,” based on their self assessment that they are all the most interesting people.  The bond remains strong for several of this group as we follow their lives from angsty teenage years to middle age.  The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to make a life during your twenties, thirties and especially beyond that.  Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle as a therapist.  Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician and son of a famous folk singer, stops playing the guitar after a childhood betrayal and becomes a design engineer.  Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become incredibly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding.  How their success plays out among their friends makes this book interesting.

 

Quotes

“But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.”

 

“People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.”

 

“Part of the beauty of love was that you didn’t need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn’t necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.”

 

“She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.”

 

“But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.”

 

“Ordinary father-daughter love had a charge to it that generally was both permitted and indulged. There was just something so beautiful about the big father complementing the tiny girl. Bigness and tininess together at last – yet the bigness would never hurt the tininess! It respected it. In a world in which big always crushes tiny, you wanted to cry at the beauty of big being kind of and worshipful of and being humbled by tiny. You couldn’t help but think of your own father as you saw your little girl with hers.”

 

“And specialness – everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren’t talented. So what are they supposed to do – kill themselves?”

 

“We are all here, on this earth for only one go around. And everyone thinks their purpose is to just find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is to find what other people need.”

 

“Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.”

 

“The child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.”

 

“Dennis was present, still present, and this, she thought as she stayed landed against him, was no small talent.”

 

“But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live.”

 

“After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.”

 

“If someone said ‘diametrically,’ could ‘opposed’ be far behind?”

 

“Everyone simply had to wait patiently in order to lose the people they loved one by one, all the while acting as if they weren’t waiting for that at all.”

 

“Jealousy was essentially “I want what you have,” while envy was “I want what you have, but I also want to take it away so you can’t have it.”

 

“When do I stop? When I’m twenty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tell s you how long you should keep doing something before you give up forever.”

 

“The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.”

 

“You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children’s books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife’s work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing.”

 

“The love between a brother and sister just over a year apart in age held fast. It wasn’t twinship, and it wasn’t romance, but it was more like a passionate loyalty to a dying brand.”

 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to The Interestings and at the end felt like I had spent quality time inside the lives of the four main characters whose lives intersect and develop in a changing New York City.  The Interestings explores the meaning of talent, the nature of envy, the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can impact a friendship and a life.

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129. Moonglow

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Nancy Sissom

Author:   Michael Chabon

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction

430 pages, published November 22, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

In 1989, after the publication of his first novel, writer Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California to visit his terminally ill grandfather.  Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten.  That week of revelations is the foundation for the semi-autobiographical novel Moonglow which explores the lasting impact of keeping of secrets and telling lies.

 

Quotes

Was it even possible to forgive the dead? Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner? I had made a promise to someone who would never see it kept. I wanted to respect my grandfather’s wish, and it would have been no trouble to evade my mother’s question. Keeping secrets was the family business. But it was a business, it seemed to me, that none of us had ever profited from.”

 

“I remember my mother telling me, when she was in the midst of settling my grandfather’s estate, that fifty percent of a person’s medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. My grandfather’s history of himself was distributed even more disproportionately: Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days.”

 

“She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.”

 

“My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane.”

 

“The rocket was beautiful. In conception it had been shaped by an artist to break a chain that had bound the human race ever since we first gained consciousness of earth’s gravity and all it’s analogs in suffering, failure and pain. It was at once a prayer sent heavenward and the answer to that prayer: Bear me away from this awful place.”

 

“The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.”

 

“They wring their hands, should I do this, should I do that. They get seventeen different opinions. Then they do what they planned to do all along. If you give advice, they only blame you when it turns out bad.”

 

“He was tired of shouldering the weight of other people’s bad decisions along with his own.”

 

“When at last his moment came, he rose and stood, the only mourner at his end of the room, a solitary tower imprisoning an anonymous sorrow. First he wished for a Redeemer whose arrival he did not expect and a redemption he knew to be impossible. Then he told God all the nice things God seemed to need to hear about Himself. Finally, he wished for peace as it was conventionally understood, which he supposed was unobjectionable if no more likely than the coming of a messiah. At any rate, as Uncle Ray once explained to him, if you examined the language, the concluding lines of the kaddish might have been interpreted as a wish that God and everyone else would just, for once, leave the speaker and all his fellow Jews alone.”

 

“Smoke had left the eye sockets of houses with black eyebrows of astonishment.”

 

“One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion. That was a foxhole night, bitter cold. The 5th Panzer Army was making its last great push west. You had to hand it to those Indo-Europeans, my grandfather thought, rolling through Vellinghausen. Confusion shown on the faces of the townspeople. War confused civilians every bit as surely as it did the armies who got lost in its fogs. It confounded conquest with liberation, anger with heartache, hunger with gratitude, hatred with awe. The 53rd Combat Engineers looked pretty confused, too. They were milling around at the edge of town, contemplating the long stretch of road between and beautiful downtown Berlin, trying to figure out if they ought to mine it or clear it of mines.”

 

“She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack.”

 

“I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the cliches and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the cliches and conventions of the young.”

My Take

While Moonglow is receiving a lot of critical acclaim (including a National Book Critics Circle Award Nomination for Fiction), I found it to be an uneven book.  Although certain sections and characters were interesting and held my attention, other parts of the book felt like a slog.  This was disappointing since I had really enjoyed reading Chabon’s 2001 book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  In contrast, by the time I finished Moonglow, I was glad to be done so that I could move onto a new book.

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128. The Wine Region of the Rioja

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Laurel and Warner Andrews

Author:   Ana Fabiano

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Travel, History

304 pages, published September 22, 2009

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Rioja is a region in northern Spain which produces some of the world’s best wines.  The Wine Region of the Rioja takes you on a journey through the history, culture, geography and people of this beautiful part of the world. Filled with gorgeous photographs, this is the only wine book endorsed by the Riojan government.  To write this book, Ana Fabiano dug into Castilian books, conducted interviews with local experts, and spoke with generations of winemakers.  The result is a book that provides a historical overview of the area along with up-to-the-moment information on each valley, including its bodegas (what the Spanish call tasting rooms), grape varietals, wines, and producers. To enhance enjoyment of these wonderful wines from the Rioja, Fabiano provides a food section with recipes and pairings.

 

My Take

I was lent this book by friends prior to a trip to Spain.  Our plan was to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela and then reward ourselves with four days in the Rioja wine region (wine countries are my husband Scot’s favorite place to vacation).   Reading The Wine Region of the Rioja, I learned a lot about the area, its wine, its history, its food and its people.

This book was a very good introduction and helped me plan the bodegas (tasting rooms) that we wanted to visit.  I enjoyed reading this book and it enhanced our trip.  If you plan to visit the beautiful Rioja, then give it a read before you go.  for anyone looking to find out more about the wine region of the Rioja. Highlights some of the more famous bodegas, as well as provides a brief history of the area.

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126. Commonwealth

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Ann Patchett

Genre:  Fiction

322 pages, published September 13, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

My Take

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

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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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124. Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-Town Obituary Writer

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:   Heather Lende

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir, Advice, Happiness

176 pages, published April 28, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Find the Good is written by Heather Lend, an obituary writer from a small town in Alaska, and conveys her thoughts on how to live a meaningful, well-lived life.  Her theme is to find the good.  Lende remarks that we can choose to see any event–starting a new job or being laid off from an old one, getting married or getting divorced–as an opportunity to find the good.  As she says, “We are all writing our own obituary every day by how we live. The best news is that there’s still time for additions and revisions before it goes to press.”

 

Quotes

“The world is full of happiness, and plenty to go round, if you are only willing to take the kind that comes your way.”

“I have a friend who says we spend the first half of our life building it and the second half preventing it from falling apart. I’d rather be under construction when I die.”

 

“You don’t have to sing in a choir to see that a group of committed people who care about something that makes life a little brighter, and work hard at it, can accomplish more together than alone, but it helps.”

 

“When our mothers die, we are on our own; there is no one to call for help, no one to blame, and no one left who has a copy of your grandmother’s recipe for the traditional Christmas coffee cake, which you can’t find anywhere.”

My Take

I picked up Find the Good from the audio book shelf of my beloved Boulder Library.  It is a quick read written by someone with a unique perspective (an Alaska obituary writer) with some nuggets of wisdom.  I enjoyed listening to it, but after finishing, it faded quickly.  Hence, the ☆☆1/2 rating.

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122. The Chemist

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:   Stephanie Meyer

Genre:  Fiction, Romance, Thriller

512 pages, published November 8, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Chemist by Stephenie Meyer of Twilight fame is an action/adventure tale that tells the story of Alex, an ex CIA agent and torturer specializing in chemical cocktails to make her subjects talk, who is on the run from her former employers who must take one more case to clear her name and save her life.  Along the way, Alex hooks up with Daniel, a loveable school teacher, and his brother Kevin, a former Black Ops agent.  Intrigue and a love story ensue.  

 

Quotes

“I’ve never been drawn to someone the way I am to you, and I have been from the very first moment I met you. It’s like the difference between…between reading about gravity and then falling for the first time.”

 

“She earched for something to say, something that would make the world a little less dark and scary for him.  “Pop-Tart?” she offered.”

 

“Sometimes you cling to a mistake simply because it took so long to make.”

My Take

The Chemist is a popcorn thriller/action book. Not great literature, but readable enough (although the torture scenes are too drawn out and graphic for my taste).  The Twilight series was such a page-turning guilty pleasure for me that I felt compelled to check out Meyer’s other two books:  The Host and The Chemist.  Unfortunately, The Chemist is the weakest link.  Clocking in at 512 pages, your time is better spent elsewhere.

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119. The Problem of Pain

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   C.S. Lewis

Genre:  Christian, Theology, Non-Fiction

176 pages, published 1940

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

For centuries people have tried to answer the existential question: If God is good and all-powerful, why does he allow human beings to suffer pain? And why do animals suffer when they neither deserve pain nor can be improved by it?  C.S. Lewis, one of the twentieth century’s greatest Christian thinker, endeavors to answer this tough questions and make his case for God.   

 

Quotes

“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

 

“To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.”

 

“We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.”

 

“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself”

 

“The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.”

 

“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”

 

“His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. There is no limit to His power.

If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prifex to them the two other words, ‘God can.’ It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”

 

“Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved… Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all.”

 

“The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.”

 

“For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”

 

“The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.  Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it — made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”

 

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”

 

“All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”

 

“My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else.”

 

“Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.  If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is ‘nothing better’ now to be had.”

 

“The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love”, and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. “Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest “well pleased”.”

 

“Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”

 

“Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved.”

 

“Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.”

 

“We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the “intolerable compliment.” Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.”

 

“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.”

My Take

When I listened to the audiobook version of The Problem of Pain, I had just finished reading two books about St. Paul (I Live, No Longer I and Galations for You).  Since a large part of Pauline theology discussed in these books deals with how we approach human suffering, I was receptive to the message of The Problem of Pain, i.e. human suffering is necessary to bring us closer to God.  When everything is going well in my life, my thoughts only sometimes turn to God.  It is only when the world is crashing down do I really implore God for help.  As C.S. Lewis so eloquently explains, if we handle it correctly, the suffering that we necessarily experience as human beings can help mold us into better people.  In The Problem of Pain, Lewis implores us to take a hard look at how we are living our lives and consider whether our actions are bringing us closer to God.

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115. The Snowman

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  

Author:   Jo Nesbø

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Suspense

383 pages, published May 10, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

In The Snowman, internationally acclaimed crime writer Jo Nesbø tells the tale of Harry Hole, a troubled police investigator in modern day Oslo, Norway as he tries to track down a serial killer who murders unfaithful women during the first snowfall of winter and leaves a snowman as his calling card.  As his investigation deepens, Hole discovers that he has become a pawn in an increasingly terrifying game with a sinister killer.

 

Quotes

“Evil is not a thing. It cannot take possession of you. It’s the opposite; it’s a void, an absence of goodness. The only thing you can be frightened of here is yourself.”

 

“Good stories are never about a string of successes but about spectacular defeats,” Støp had said. “Even though Roald Amundsen won the race to the South Pole, it’s Robert Scott the world outside Norway remembers. None of Napoleon’s victories is remembered like the defeat at Waterloo. Serbia’s national pride is based on the battle against the Turks at Kosovo Polje in 1389, a battle the Serbs lost resoundingly. And look at Jesus! The symbol of the man who is claimed to have triumphed over death ought to be a man standing outside the tomb with his hands in the air. Instead, throughout time Christians have preferred the spectacular defeat: when he was hanging on the cross and close to giving up. Because it’s always the story of the defeat that moves us most.”

 

“What is worse? Taking the life of a person who wants to live or taking death from a person who wants to die.”

 

“We’re capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.”

 

“if every baby was a perfect miracle, life was basically a process of degeneration.”

My Take

While The Snowman has a certain level of creepiness to it, I was very quickly hooked into this story of a diabolical serial killer set against the unique backdrop of Norway.  Nesbø is a master of twists and there is no shortage of them in The Snowman.  I was also impressed by the character development and motivation in the story, especially of the protagonist Harry Hole.  If you like mysteries and crime thrillers, then The Snowman is worth checking out.

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