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62. The Kingmakers Daughter

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Phillipa Gregory

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

417 pages, published August 14, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

The Kingmaker’s Daughter tells the intriguing story of Anne Neville, her sister Isabel, and their manipulative and influential father, the Earl of Warwick, one of the most powerful men in England during the Cousins’ Wars.  He continually uses his two daughters as pawns in his political games, but they grow up to be influential players in their own right.  At the court of Edward IV and his beautiful queen, Elizabeth Woodville, Anne grows from a charming child to become ever more fearful and desperate when her father makes war on his former friends.  The tide turns against her and she is left widowed and fatherless, with her mother in sanctuary and her sister married to the enemy.  Edward’s brother Richard rescues Anne from her sister’s house and she eventually ascends to the throne as queen. Having lost those closest to her, she must protect herself and her precious only child, Prince Edward, from a court full of rivals.

 

Quotes

“I would carry myself with much more dignity than her. I wouldn’t whisper with the king and demean myself as she did. I wouldn’t send out dishes and wave to people like she did. I wouldn’t trail all my brothers and sisters into court like she did. I would be much more reserved and cold. I wouldn’t smile at anyone, I wouldn’t bow to anyone. I would be a true queen, a queen of ice, without family or friends.”

 

“I have seen statues that would look stodgy beside her, I have seen painted Madonnas whose features would be coarse beside her pale luminous loveliness.”

 

“Richard looks into my eyes and once again I know us for the children that we were, who had to make our own destiny in a world we could not understand.”

 

“I sit on the bed and kick off my shoes, and he kneels before me and takes the riding boots, holding one open for my bare foot. I hesitate; it is such an intimate gesture between a young woman and a man. His smiling upward glance tells me that he understands my hesitation but is ignoring it. I point my toe and he holds the boot, I slide my foot in and he pulls the boot over my calf. He takes the soft leather ties and fastens the boot, at my ankle, then at my calf, and then just below my knee. He looks up at me, his hand gently on my toe. I can feel the warmth of his hand through the soft leather. I imagine my toes curling in pleasure at his touch.”

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57. Joyland

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Thiller

283 pages, published June 4, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

Joyland takes place in 1973 at a North Carolina amusement park which was the site of a vicious murder of a young woman in the “Haunted House.”  Devin Jones, a student at the University of New Hampshire, takes a summer job at Joyland in North Carolina and is told by the resident fortune teller that he will meet two children that summer, a girl with a red hat and a boy with a dog, and that one of them has The Sight.  Jones becomes close to Annie, a single mother, and her disabled son Mike.  Devin finds that he has a talent for “wearing the fur,” Joyland-talk for portraying Howie the Happy Hound, Joyland’s mascot.  One day, he saves a young girl in a red hat from choking on a park hot dog.  Devin later discovers that Mike is the child with “The Sight.”  Devin and his friends start investigating a string of unsolved murders that they believe are related to the Joyland murder.  It all comes together on a dark and stormy night at Joyland.

Quotes

“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”

 

“This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy.  Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wake up nights.”

 

“All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I’m blue — when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day — I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn’t always a butcher’s game. Sometimes the prizes are real.  Sometimes they are precious.”

 

“I’m not sure anybody ever gets completely over their first love, and that still rankles.  Part of me still wants to know what was wrong with me.  What I was lacking.”

 

“When you’re twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It’s only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you’ve been looking at the map upside down, and not until you’re forty are you entirely sure. By the time you’re sixty, take it from me, you’re fucking lost.”

 

“My father had taught me – mostly by example – that if a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems.”

 

“The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life.”

 

“Young women and young men grow up, but old women and old men just grow older and surer they’ve got right on their side.”

 

“Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down – a thing not always easy to do. “Son, do you know what history is?”  “Uh…stuff that happened in the past?”  “Nope,” he said, trying on his canvas change-belt. “History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever growing pile of crap.  Right now, we’re standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we’ll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come.  That’s why your folks’ clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example.  And, as someone who’s destined to buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving.”

 

“We could see other fires–great leaping bonfires as well as cooking fires–all the way down the beach to the twinkling metropolis of Joyland. They made a lovely chain of burning jewelry.  Such fires are probably illegal in the twenty-first century; the powers that be have a way of outlawing many beautiful things made by ordinary people.  I don’t know why that should be, I only know it is.”

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55. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Charles Duhigg

Genre:  Non Fiction, Self Improvement

286 pages, published February 28, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

In The Power of Habit, New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg explains why habits exist and how they can be changed by seeking to understanding human nature and its potential for transformation.   The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding that habits work through a Habit Loop, a neurological pattern that governs any habit.  It consists of three elements: a cue, a routine, and a reward.  Duhigg also looks at how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.  He show us that the right habits were essential to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Quotes

“Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.”

 

“Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage.”

 

 “Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and become more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family.  They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed.  Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.”

 

“Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not.… Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.”

 

“Willpower isn’t just a skill. It’s a muscle, like the muscles in your arms or legs, and it gets tired as it works harder, so there’s less power left over for other things.”

 

“As people strengthened their willpower muscles in one part of their lives—in the gym, or a money management program—that strength spilled over into what they ate or how hard they worked. Once willpower became stronger, it touched everything.”

 

“Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”

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54. A Man Called Ove

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Christy DeMeyer

Author:   Frederik Backman

Genre:  Fiction

337 pages, published July 15, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

A Man Called Ove takes place in a small town in Sweden and tells the story of Ove, a 59 year old widower who is a cranky curmudgeon who spends his days patrolling the neighborhood for minor violations.  Ove is a man of rigid values and has little patience for those who don’t measure up to his standards. When a lively immigrant family from Iran moves in next door, Ove’s impervious exterior begins to crack open and we learn his back story which has brought him to such a place of sadness.  We also learn about the fundamental decency and integrity of the man and the extent of the impact he has had.

 

Quotes

“Men are what they are because of what they do.  Not what they say.”

 

“Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about.”

 

“This was a world where one became outdated before one’s time was up.  An entire country standing up and applauding the fact that no one was capable of doing anything properly anymore. The unreserved celebration of mediocrity.  No one could change tires. Install a dimmer switch.  Lay some tiles. Plaster a wall.  File their own taxes. These were all forms of knowledge that had lost their relevance.”

 

“Now you listen to me,” says Ove calmly while he carefully closes the door.  “You’ve given birth to two children and quite soon will be squeezing out a third.  You’ve come here from a land far away and most likely you fled war and persecution and all sorts of other nonsense.  You’ve learned a new language and got yourself an education and you’re holding together a family of obvious incompetents.  And I’ll be damned if I’ve seen you afraid of a single bloody thing in this world before now….I’m not asking for brain surgery. I’m asking you to drive a car. It’s got an accelerator, a brake and a clutch. Some of the greatest twits in world history have sorted out how it works. And you will as well.”  And then he utters seven words, which Parvaneh will always remember as the loveliest compliment he’ll ever give her.  “Because you are not a complete twit.”

 

“We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people.  Time to say things to them.  And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like ‘if’.”

 

“Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn’t.”

 

“And time is a curious thing. Most of us only live for the time that lies right ahead of us.  A few days, weeks, years.  One of the most painful moments in a person’s life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead. And when time no longer lies ahead of one, other things have to be lived for.  Memories, perhaps.”

 

“Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it’s often one of the great motivations for the living.  Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury.  Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis.  Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival.  We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves.  For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by.  And leave us there alone.”

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52. When Breath Becomes Air

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Paul Kalanithi

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

208 pages, published January 19, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer.  One day he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live.  Overnight, his imagined future was gone.  When Breath Becomes Air, which includes a Foreword by Dr. Abraham Verghese and an Epilogue by Kalanithi’s wife Lucy, tells the story of  Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student into a young neurosurgeon at Stanford, guiding patients toward a deeper understanding of death and illness, and finally into a patient and a new father to a baby girl, confronting his own mortality.  Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all.

 

Quotes

“I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything.”

 

“Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?” she asked. “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?”  “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”

 

“Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head:  ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’”

 

“Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”

 

“Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”

 

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”

 

“Grand illnesses are supposed to be life-clarifying. Instead, I knew I was going to die—but I’d known that before. My state of knowledge was the same, but my ability to make lunch plans had been shot to hell. The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I’d spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d write a book. Give me ten years, I’d get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?”

 

“Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”

 

“The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”

 

“The physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.”

 

“Don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it.  The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness.  Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end.  The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt.  Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”

 

“The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may feel differently. Two months after that, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.”

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51. The Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Shonda Rhimes

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir, Self-Improvement

336 pages, published November 10, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

On Thanksgiving Day, 2013, Shonda Rhymes, the uber-talented and successful creator of Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away With Murder, told her sister about some amazing invitations that she had received.  Her sister’s response, “Who cares?  You’re just going to say no anyway.  You never say yes to anything,” touched a nerve in Shonda and forced her to re-examine her approach to life.  She then decided to start saying yes, even when it scared her and took her far outside of her comfort zone.  The results were incredible.  She shared a box at the Kennedy Center with President Obama and the First Lady, posed for magazine covers, gave a commencement speech at her alma matter Dartmouth College, stopped everything when her children wanted to play, and most impressively, lost over 120 pounds.

 

Quotes

“Lucky implies I didn’t do anything. Lucky implies something was given to me. Lucky implies that I was handed something I did not earn, that I did not work hard for. Gentle reader, may you never be lucky. I am not lucky. You know what I am?  I am smart, I am talented, I take advantage of the opportunities that come my way and I work really, really hard.  Don’t call me lucky.  Call me a badass.”

 

“Losing yourself does not happen all at once.  Losing yourself happens one no at a time.”

 

“You can quit a job. I can’t quit being a mother. I’m a mother forever.  Mothers are never off the clock, mothers are never on vacation. Being a mother redefines us, reinvents us, destroys and rebuilds us. Being a mother brings us face-to-face with ourselves as children, with our mothers as human beings, with our darkest fears of who we really are.  Being a mother requires us to get it together or risk messing up another person forever.  Being a mother yanks our hearts out of our bodies and attaches them to our tiny humans and sends them out into the world, forever hostages.”

 

“You know what happens when all of your dreams come true? Nothing. I realized a very simple truth: that success, fame, having all my dreams come true would not fix or improve me, it wasn’t an instant potion for personal growth.”

 

“You just have to keep moving forward. You just have to keep doing something, seizing the next opportunity, staying open to trying something new. It doesn’t have to fit your vision of the perfect job or the perfect life. Perfect is boring, and dreams are not real. Just . . . DO.”

 

“They tell you:  Follow your dreams. Listen to your spirit. Change the world. Make your mark. Find your inner voice and make it sing. Embrace failure. Dream. Dream and dream big. As a matter of fact, dream and don’t stop dreaming until your dream comes true.  I think that’s crap.  I think a lot of people dream. And while they are busy dreaming, the really happy people, the really successful people, the really interesting, powerful, engaged people?  Are busy doing.”

 

“There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It’s funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don’t want a baby? Don’t have one. I don’t want to get married? I won’t. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it.”

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48. A God in Ruins

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Kate Atkinson

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

468 pages, published May 1, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

A God in Ruins is a companion book to Life After Life, Kate Atkinson’s absorbing family drama which used the artifice of creating multiple lives for protagonist Ursula Todd set against the back drop of England during the first and second World Wars.  A God in Ruins dispenses with the multiple lives convention and shifts the focus to Teddy Todd, Ursula’s beloved younger brother.  At a very young age, Teddy becomes an RAF bomber pilot in World War II, is reported missing, presumed dead, but reappears at the end of the war having spent two years as a POW in Germany.  This is the story of Teddy’s war and his life after coming home, from his time as a young husband and father to his days as an elderly grandfather.  Teddy is particularly challenged by his unappreciative and angry daughter Viola who supplies much of the humor in the book.

 

Quotes

“Was I really such a terrible mother?’ she asked Bertie. ‘Why the past tense?’ Bertie said.”

 

“She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember.  An only child never is.”

 

“The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.”

 

“Moments left, Teddy thought.  A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was.  A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat.  A breath followed by a breath.  One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment.”

 

“The purpose of Art,” his mother, Sylvie, said—instructed even—“is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.”

 

“As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn’t really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.”

 

“He was a baby once, she thought. New and perfect, cradled in his mother’s arms.  The mysterious Sylvie.  Now he was a feathery husk, ready to blow away.  His eyes were half open, milky, like an old dog, and his mouth had grown beaky with the extremity of age, opening and closing, a fish out of water.  Bertie could feel a continual tremor running through him, an electrical current, the faint buzz of life.  Or death, perhaps. Energy was gathering around him, the air was static with it.”

 

“What a good husband you are”, Nancy said afterward, “always taking your wife’s side rather than your mother’s.” “It’s the side of reason I am on”, Teddy said, “It just so happens that that’s where you’re always to be found and my mother rarely.”

“He didn’t make plans himself any more. There was now and it was followed by another now. If you were lucky.”

 

“Secrets had the power to kill a marriage, she said.  Nonsense, Sylvie said, it was secrets that could save a marriage.”

 

“Best always to praise rather than criticize.”

 

“If he hadn’t been the father of her children, Viola might have admired Dominic for the way he was so easily able to absolve himself of all obligation simply by asserting his right to self-fulfillment.”

 

“The “eat” part was easy.  The praying and loving were harder.”

 

“The more Viola forgot her mother, the more she missed her.”

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24. The Nightingale

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Summer Youngs  

Author:  Kristin Hannah

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II

Info:  440 pages, published February 3, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

The Nightingale tells the tale of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, and their experiences in rural France during World War II.  After her husband Antoine joins the French army at the start of the war, Vianne is left to manage on her own with her daughter Sophie and soon finds herself billeting a German officer with a softer side in her home.  Vianne eventually starts to shelter Jewish children after their parents are deported to a concentration camp and even adopts three-year-old Ari, the son of her best friend Rachel.  Vianne’s younger and bolder sister Isabelle joins the French Resistance and becomes the Nightengale, an integral part of the underground network that leads Allied soldiers through the Pyrenees to safety in Spain.  As the war progresses, the sisters’ relationship and strength are tested.  With life changing in unbelievably horrific ways, Vianne and Isabelle will find themselves facing frightening situations and responding in ways they never thought possible as bravery and resistance take different forms in each of their actions.

 

Quotes

“Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.”

“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”

“Today’s young people want to know everything about everyone. They think talking about a problem will solve it. I come from a quieter generation. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention.”

“But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.”

“I am a mother and mothers don’t have the luxury of falling apart in front of their children, even when they are afraid, even when their children are adults.”

“Tante Isabelle says it’s better to be bold than meek. She says if you jump off a cliff at least you’ll fly before you fall.”

“She wanted to bottle how safe she felt in this moment, so she could drink of it later when loneliness and fear left her parched.”

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

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21.  Why Not Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:  Mindy Kaling

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir, Humor

Info:  240 pages, published September 15, 2015

Reading Format:  Audiobook

Summary 

In Why Not Me?, Kaling, writer and actor on “The Office” and “The Mindy Project,” shares a series of essays that provide hilarious details from her personal and professional life, from new friendships to beauty tips.  A follow up to her earlier Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, which is also very funny and covers her childhood and young adult years, Why Not Me? focuses on Kaling’s Hollywood career and adult personal life. 

 

Quotes

“Who is the beauty icon who inspires you most?  Is it Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Halle Berry?  Mine is Nofestreau because that vampire taught me my number one and number two favorite beauty tricks.  Avoid the sun at all costs and always try to appear shrouded in shadows.”

“People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you’re succeeding. People do not get scared when you’re failing. It calms them. But when you’re winning, it makes them feel like they’re losing or, worse yet, that maybe they should’ve tried to do something too, but now it’s too late. And since they didn’t, they want to stop you. You can’t let them.”

“the best kind of laughter is laughter born of a shared memory.” 

“People don’t say “Give me your honest opinion” because they want an honest opinion. They say it because it’s rude to say “Please tell me I’m amazing.”

“People talk about confidence without ever bringing up hard work. That’s a mistake. I know I sound like some dour older spinster on Downton Abbey who has never felt a man’s touch and whose heart has turned to stone, but I don’t understand how you could have self-confidence if you don’t do the work… I have never, ever, ever, met a high confident person and successful person who is not what a movie would call a ‘workaholic.’ Because confidence is like respect; you have to earn it.”

“Work hard, know your shit, show your shit, and then feel entitled. Listen to no one except the two smartest and kindest adults you know, and that doesn’t always mean your parents. If you do that, you will be fine.”

“As I got older, I got craftier and less obvious, but I’ve always put a lot of energy and effort into people liking me. That’s why I’ve never understood the compliment “effortless.” People love to say: “She just walked into the party, charming people with her effortless beauty.” I don’t understand that at all. What’s so wrong with effort, anyway? It means you care. What about the girl who “walked into the party, her determination to please apparent on her eager face”? Sure, she might seem a little crazy, and, yes, maybe everything she says sounds like conversation starters she found on a website, but at least she’s trying. Let’s give her a shot!” 

“I want to say one last thing, and it’s important. Though I am a generally happy person who feels comfortable in my skin, I do beat myself up because I am influenced by a societal pressure to be thin. All the time. I feel it the same way anybody who picks up a magazine and sees Keira Knightley’s elegantly bony shoulder blades poking out of a backless dress does. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen my shoulder blades once. Honestly, I’m dubious that any part of my body could be so sharp and firm as to be described as a “blade.” I feel it when I wake up in the morning and try on every single pair of my jeans and everything looks bad and I just want to go back to sleep. But my secret is: even though I wish I could be thin, and that I could have the ease of lifestyle that I associate with being thin, I don’t wish for it with all of my heart. Because my heart is reserved for way more important things.” 

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19. After You

Rating: ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by: 

Author:  JoJo Moyes 

Genre:  Fiction, Romance, Humor

Info:  400 pages, published September 24, 2015

Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

After You is the sequel to the best-selling book Me Before You, a tearjerker that I thoroughly enjoyed.  The sequel catches up with Louisa “Lou” Clark, coping with the aftermath of the death of Will Traynor, the invalid she fell in love with after caring for him during the last six months of his life.  

Lou is working a menial job as an airport barmaid and struggling to live her life without Will.  She ends up in a church basement with the members of the Moving On support group and discovers a new love interest in paramedic Sam Fielding, a strong, sensitive almost perfect man.  Along the way she develops a bond with Will’s daughter whom he never knew about.

 

Quotes

“There’s only one response (to losing someone).  You Live.  You throw yourself into everything and try not to think about the bruises.”

“That’s life. We don’t know what will happen. That’s why we have to take our chances when we can.”

“Life is short, right? We both know that. Well, what if you’re my chance? What if you are the thing that’s actually going to make me happiest?”

“You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they’re not living, breathing people any more.It’s not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places, and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead.  It’s just something you learn to accommodate.  Like adapting around a hole. I don’t know. It’s like you become … a doughnut instead of a bun”  

“You don’t have to let that one thing be the thing that defines you.”

“Mum, you’re not going to get divorced, are you?” Her eyes shot open. “Divorced? I’m a good Catholic girl, Louisa. We don’t divorce. We just make our men suffer for all eternity.” She waited just for a moment, and then she started to laugh.”

“None of us move on without a backward look. We move on always carrying with us those we have lost.  What we aim to do in our little group is ensure that carrying them is not a burden, something that feels impossible to bear, a weight keeping us stuck in the same place. We want their presence to feel like a gift.”

“No. Really. I’ve thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they’re not living, breathing people anymore. It’s not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It’s just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a hole. I don’t know. It’s like you become . . . a doughnut instead of a bun.”

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