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321. Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Terra McKinnish

Author:   Trevor Noah

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Humor

304 pages, published November 15, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Born a Crime is a memoir by comedian Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, about his childhood and young adult years in South Africa.  The book focuses on the impact of his sacrificial and religious mother, Patricia Noah, a black Xhosa woman whose desire for a baby led her to become pregnant by a white Swiss father at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison.   Noah lived through a time of transformation in South Africa and saw the end of apartheid during his teenage years.  We see a mischievous young boy grow up to become a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist alongside a fearless mother determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.

Quotes 

“Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”

 

“Nelson Mandela once said, ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’ He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, ‘I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.”

 

“We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.”

 

“Trevor, remember a man is not determined by how much he earns. You can still be a man of the house and earn less than your woman. Being a man is not what you have, it’s who you are. Being more of a man doesn’t mean your woman has to be less than you.”

 

“Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.”

 

“I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. “What if…” “If only…” “I wonder what would have…” You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.”

 

“Learn from your past and be better because of your past,” she would say, “but don’t cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter.”

 

“The world doesn’t love you. If the police get you, the police don’t love you. When I beat you, I’m trying to save you. When they beat you, they’re trying to kill you.”

 

“The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”

 

“I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother, her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don’t hold onto the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass kicking your mom gave you or the ass kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It’s better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of what happened and that’s ok. But after a while, the bruises fade and they fade for a reason. Because now, it’s time to get up to some shit again.”

 

“Comfort can be dangerous. Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling.”

 

“My grandmother always told me that she loved my prayers. She believed my prayers were more powerful, because I prayed in English. Everyone knows that Jesus, who’s white, speaks English. The Bible is in English. Yes, the Bible was not written in English, but the Bible came to South Africa in English so to us it’s English. Which made my prayers the best prayers because English prayers get answered first. How do we know this? Look at white people. Clearly they’re getting through to the right person. Add to that Matthew 19:14. “Suffer little children to come unto me,” Jesus said, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” So if a child is praying in English? To White Jesus? That’s a powerful combination right there.”

 

 “We live in a world where we don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others because we don’t live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off.

If we could see one another’s pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place.”

 

“Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It’s a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either love or hate them, but that’s not how people are.”

 

“The name Hitler does not offend a black South African because Hitler is not the worst thing a black South African can imagine. Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler. If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium’s King Leopold would come way before Hitler. If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson.”

 

“Nearly one million people lived in Soweto. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them were black—and then there was me. I was famous in my neighborhood just because of the color of my skin. I was so unique people would give directions using me as a landmark. “The house on Makhalima Street. At the corner you’ll see a light-skinned boy. Take a right there.”

 

“A dog is a great thing for a kid to have. It’s like a bicycle but with emotions.”

  

“The dogs left with us and we walked. I sobbed the whole way home, still heartbroken. My mom had no time for my whining. “Why are you crying?!”  “Because Fufi loves another boy.”  “So? Why would that hurt you? It didn’t cost you anything. Fufi’s here. She still loves you. She’s still your dog. So get over it.”  Fufi was my first heartbreak. No one has ever betrayed me more than Fufi. It was a valuable lesson to me. The hard thing was understanding that Fufi wasn’t cheating on me with another boy. She was merely living her life to the fullest. Until I knew that she was going out on her own during the day, her other relationship hadn’t affected me at all. Fufi had no malicious intent.  I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love. I was lucky to learn that lesson at such a young age. I have so many friends who still, as adults, wrestle with feelings of betrayal. They’ll come to me angry and crying and talking about how they’ve been cheated on and lied to, and I feel for them. I understand what they’re going through. I sit with them and buy them a drink and I say, “Friend, let me tell you the story of Fufi.” 

My Take

I loved Born a Crime.  At turns funny and poignant, it was continuously interesting and entertaining.  I learned a lot about South Africa and the impact of Apartheid from this book.  In addition to being a gifted comedian, Trevor Noah is a gifted writer and tells an engrossing tale of growing up in a repressive system where he did not easily fit in with any group.  However, the unconditional love, discipline and encouragement of his mother along with his own skills and ambition propelled Noah to an amazing and compelling life.  I highly recommend the audio version of this book which is read (at times hilariously) by the author.

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319. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen Greenblatt

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Philosophy

356 pages, published September 4, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Swerve tells the story of the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a poem containing dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.  The copying and translation of this ancient book inspired Renaissance figures including artist Botticelli, shaped the thought of Galileo, Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and influenced writers Montaigne, Shakespeare and Thomas Jefferson.

Quotes 

“What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.”

 

“The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear. Even the dreaded plague, in Lucretius’ account—and his work ends with a graphic account of a catastrophic plague epidemic in Athens—is most horrible not only for the suffering and death that it brings but also and still more for the “perturbation and panic” that it triggers.”

 

“The quintessential emblem of religion and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.  Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.”

 

“The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.”

 

“In short, it became possible – never easy, but possible – in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.”

 

“books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.”

 

“We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment’s peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.”

 

“I am,” Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, “an Epicurean.”

 

“The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views.” 

My Take

While there are lots of interesting ideas in The Swerve, I found it pretty dense and a little boring to plough through.  It would have benefited from a more engaging writing style.

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317. The Outsider

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Suspense

561 pages, published May 22, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

When an eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park, all the evidence, from eyewitnesses to fingerprints to DNA, point to Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls.  Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney arrest him with what seems to be a bulletproof case.  When Maitland’s alibi checks out, the authorities start to questions their rush to judgment, but have no answers as to how the two contradictory circumstances are possible.

Quotes 

“If you can’t let go of the past, the mistakes you’ve made will eat you alive.”

 

“I believe there’s another dozen thoughts lined up behind each one I’m aware of.”

 

“I would like to believe in God,” she said, “because I don’t want to believe we just end, even though it balances the equation—since we came from blackness, it seems logical to assume that it’s to blackness we return. But I believe in the stars, and the infinity of the universe. That’s the great Out There. Down here, I believe there are more universes in every fistful of sand, because infinity is a two-way street.”

 

“Dreams are the way we touch the unseen world,”

 

“My tongue runs like a supermarket conveyor belt on payday.”

 

“Money was no cure for sorrow, Alec reflected, but it did allow one to grieve in relative comfort.”

 

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ ” 

My Take

The Outsider is quintessential Stephen King.  You get to affectionately know a cast of characters comprised of normal people in a normal town that have to deal with something completely abnormal.  King, a master storyteller, delivers the goods once again.

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314. The Nix

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Nancy Sissom

Author:   Nathan Hill

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

640 pages, published August 30, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Nix is a wide ranging, humorous novel about a son, the mother who left him as a child, and how his search to uncover the secrets of her life leads him to understand his own.

Quotes 

“Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.”

 

“if you make the easy choice every day, then it becomes a pattern, and your patterns become your life.”

 

“The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky. There’s a certain essential lack of courage among people who seem to be good at everything.”

 

“The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.”        

 

“What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.”

 

“Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.”

 

“about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.”

 

“That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice. It was the difference between loving something out of duty—because the movement required it of you—and loving something you actually loved. Love—real, genuine, unasked-for love—made room for more of itself, it turned out. Love, when freely given, duplicates and multiplies.”

 

“Think about it. Why does one eat a snack? Why is a snack necessary? The answer—and we’ve done a million studies on this—is because our lives are filled with tedium and drudgery and endless toil and we need a tiny blip of pleasure to repel the gathering darkness. Thus, we give ourselves a treat. “But here’s the thing,” Periwinkle continues, his eyes all aglow, “even the things we do to break the routine become routine. Even the things we do to escape the sadness of our lives have themselves become sad. What this ad acknowledges is that you’ve been eating all these snacks and yet you are not happy, and you’ve been watching all these shows and yet you still feel lonely, and you’ve been seeing all this news and yet the world makes no sense, and you’ve been playing all these games and yet the melancholy sinks deeper and deeper into you. How do you escape?” “You buy a new chip.” “You buy a missile-shaped chip! That’s the answer. What this ad does is admit something you already deeply suspect and existentially fear: that consumerism is a failure and you will never find any meaning there no matter how much money you spend. So the great challenge for people like me is to convince people like you that the problem is not systemic. It’s not that snacks leave you feeling empty, it’s that you haven’t found the right snack yet. It’s not that TV turns out to be a poor substitute for human connection, it’s that you haven’t found the right show yet. It’s not that politics are hopelessly bankrupt, it’s that you haven’t found the right politician yet. And this ad just comes right out and says it. I swear to god it’s like playing poker against someone who’s showing his cards and yet still bluffing by force of personality.”

 

“And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly at your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.”

 

“It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”

 

“We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.”

 

“Blaming his students for being uninspired was so much easier than doing the work required to inspire them.”

 

“Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.”

 

“Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.”

 

“You have to be careful,” Pwnage said, “with people who are puzzles and people who are traps. A puzzle can be solved but a trap cannot. Usually what happens is you think someone’s a puzzle until you realize they’re a trap. But by then it’s too late. That’s the trap.”

 

“But you cannot endure this world alone, and the more Samuel’s written his book, the more he’s realized how wrong he was. Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar.”

 

“Eventually, all debts must be repaid.”

 

“Steak and chicken have too much baggage these days. Was it free-range? Antibiotic-free? Cruelty-free? Organic? Kosher? Did the farmer wear silken gloves to caress it to sleep every night while singing gentle lullabies? You can’t order a fucking hamburger anymore without embracing some kind of political platform.”

 

“In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what’s usually ignored is the fact that each man’s description was correct. What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind—it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.” 

My Take

While The Nix is a long book, I was engrossed throughout and thoroughly enjoyed all of the characters and author Nathan Hill’s commentary on the times we live in.  I found the metaphors he used around video games to be particularly inspired.  I also highly recommend the Audiobook which had great narration.

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313. Elevation

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Fantasy, Novella

146 pages, published October 30, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

My Take

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

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311. Educated

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tara Westover

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

334 pages, published February 20, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Educated is a memoir by Tara Westover, a remarkable woman who grew up in large family from a very small town in Idaho.  Her parents were Mormon survivalists and believed that public education was an indoctrination scheme by the Socialist government.  Consequently, Tara never went to school until she got into BYU after obtaining a GED and taught herself enough math to perform sufficiently well on the SAT.  She would go on to ultimately receive a PhD from Cambridge University.   Educated is her story of that journey and the pain she had to endure at the hands of her parents and a few siblings who actively tried to undermine all of her efforts and, in the case of her brother Shawn, physically abused her to keep her in her place.

Quotes 

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”

 

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”

 

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.”

 

“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I’m fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I’m not falling apart. I’m just lazy. Why it’s better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I’m not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.”

 

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”

 

“It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune.”

 

“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”

 

“There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.”

 

“Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.”

 

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”

 

“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”

 

“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”

 

“The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.  You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.

I call it an education” 

My Take

Educated is an extremely well written, fascinating book that gives the reader an inside look at life growing up inside a Mormon fundamentalist, survivalist family in an isolated Idaho town.  Raised by tyrannical, crazy father who denied her any type of education and a mother who refused to protect her from an abusive older brother, it is truly remarkable that Tara Westover would go on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University in the UK.  While her story is incredibly impressive, I often grew frustrated by her continual, and I mean continual, efforts over many, many years to be a part of a family that so betrayed her.  When she finally, finally realizes that what she seeks is not possible, my response was, “well, it’s about time!”  Still, I highly recommend Educated, an engrossing book.

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308. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mark Manson

Genre:  Non Fiction, Self Improvement, Psychology, Happiness

224 pages, published September 13, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In this original take on a self-help guide, prolific blogger Mark Manson provides the reader with his take on how to truly become a better, happier person.  Manson eschews positivity and affirmations.  Manson argues that because humans are flawed and limited, we should get to know our limitations and accept them.  Once we embrace our fears, faults, and uncertainties, and start confronting painful truths, then we can find the courage, perseverance, honesty, responsibility, curiosity, and forgiveness we seek and need to be happy.

Quotes 

“Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”

 

“Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.  Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable.”

 

“Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.”

 

“Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.”

 

“The act of choosing a value for yourself requires rejecting alternative values. If I choose to make my marriage the most important part of my life, that means I’m (probably) choosing not to make cocaine-fueled hooker orgies an important part of my life. If I’m choosing to judge myself based on my ability to have open and accepting friendships, that means I’m rejecting trashing my friends behind their backs. These are all healthy decisions, yet they require rejection at every turn. The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X.”

 

“This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes.”

 

“You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.”

 

“But a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.”

 

“The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.”

 

“It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.”

 

“There is a simple realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerges. This is the realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances. We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond. Whether we consciously recognize it or not, we are always responsible for our experiences. It’s impossible not to be. Choosing to not consciously interpret events in our lives is still an interpretation of the events of our lives.”

 

“To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action.”

 

“We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.”

 

“Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other—in other words, they’re using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.”

 

“Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.”

 

“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”

 

“Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves. This exposure to different cultural values and metrics then forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life and to consider that perhaps it’s not necessarily the best way to live.”

 

“Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.”

 

“Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.”

 

“Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.”

 

“Everybody enjoys what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy, and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when they walk into the room. Everybody wants that. It’s easy to want that. A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.”

 

“Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.”

 

“The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies—that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as “Your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things” and “The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.” This vegetable course will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid accepting it. But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations.”

 

“People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.”

 

“I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others.”

 

“Commitment gives you freedom because you’re no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous. Commitment gives you freedom because it hones your attention and focus, directing them toward what is most efficient at making you healthy and happy. Commitment makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you ever stress about chasing more, more, more again? Commitment allows you to focus intently on a few highly important goals and achieve a greater degree of success than you otherwise would.”

 

“Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.”

 

“If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at no point does that child ever stop and think, “Oh, I guess walking just isn’t for me. I’m not good at it.”

 

“Because here’s something that’s weird but true: we don’t actually know what a positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of our lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting and demotivating. Don’t trust your conception of positive/negative experiences. All that we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesn’t. And that’s not worth much.”

 

“this is what’s so dangerous about a society that coddles itself more and more from the inevitable discomforts of life: we lose the benefits of experiencing healthy doses of pain, a loss that disconnects us from the reality of the world around us.”

 

“We are so materially well off, yet so psychologically tormented in so many low-level and shallow ways. People relinquish all responsibility, demanding that society cater to their feelings and sensibilities. People hold on to arbitrary certainties and try to enforce them on others, often violently, in the name of some made-up righteous cause. People, high on a sense of false superiority, fall into inaction and lethargy for fear of trying something worthwhile and failing at it.”

 

“Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.”

 

“My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.

The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world.”

 

“Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks. You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet.”

My Take

While I never use the “f” word and not a big fan of its constant use in this book, I was still very impressed with many of the sentiments and ideas articulated by Mark Manson.  Like 12 Rules for Life:  An Antidote to Chaos and The Happiness Project, this book is chock full of excellent advice on how to live a better life.

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306. Warlight

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Michael Ondaatje

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II

304 pages, published June 7, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Using a shifting time narrative, Warlight tells the story of Nathaniel as he attempts to piece together and make sense of the story of his past.  Also present in this shadowy novel are his sister unforgiving sister Rachel, his Mother Rose (a British spy during and after World War II) and the enigmatic characters nicknamed the Moth and the Darter by Nathaniel and his sister.  All is not as it seems as this novel of intrigue, familial relationships, search for meaning and forgiveness.

Quotes 

“Mahler put the word schwer beside certain passages in his musical scores. Meaning “difficult.” “Heavy.” We were told this at some point by The Moth, as if it was a warning. He said we needed to prepare for such moments in order to deal with them efficiently, in case we suddenly had to take control of our wits. Those times exist for all of us, he kept saying. Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence. It was a strange warning to be given, to accept that nothing was safe anymore. “ ‘Schwer,’ ” he’d say, with his fingers gesturing the inverted commas, and we’d mouth the word and then the translation, or simply nod in weary recognition. My sister and I got used to parroting the word back to each other—“schwer.”

 

“When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.”

 

“I suppose we choose whatever life we feel safest in;”

 

“We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here. But who did I hurt to get here? Who guided me to something better? Or accepted the few small things I was competent at? Who taught me to laugh as I lied? And who was it made me hesitate about what I had come to believe.”

 

“a person who, as the line went, would live in many places and die everywhere.”

 

“You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing.”

 

“the lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out”

 

“We find ourselves in a “collage” in which nothing has moved into the past and no wounds have healed with time, in which everything is present, open and bitter, in which everything coexists contiguously….”

 

“Is this how we discover the truth, evolve? By gathering together such unconfirmed fragments?…Will all of them who have remained incomplete and lost to me become clear and evident when I look back?”

 

“Our heroes do not usually, after a certain age, teach or guide us anymore. They choose instead to protect the last territory where they find themselves. Adventurous thought is replaced with almost invisible needs. Those who once mocked the traditions they fought against with laughter now provide only the laughter, not the mockery.”

 

“Roman history, Nathaniel. You need to read it. It is full of emperors who cannot tell even their children what catastrophe is about to occur, so they might defend themselves. Sometimes there is a necessity for silence.” 

My Take

Warlight is a beautifully written novel by author and poet Michael Ondaatje, who also wrote The English Patient, another mesmerizing book.  While I enjoyed the story of Nathaniel, a young British boy who slowly discovers that his mother was a famed British spy, I was even more captivated by the self discovery Nathaniel engages in as the truth unfolds in a variety of ways.  It was also a treat to read Ondaatje’s lovely, poetic writing.

 

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305. The Dogs of Riga

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Henning Mankell

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

326 pages, published April 13, 2004

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

My Take

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

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304. Citizens of London: The Americans who Stood with Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Nichole Birkhold

Author:   Lynne Olson

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, World War II, Foreign

496 pages, published February 2, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Citizens of London tells the behind-the-scenes story of how the United States forged its wartime alliance with Britain.  It is told from the perspective of three key Americans stationed in London: Edward R. Murrow (a wartime correspondent and the head of CBS News in Europe), Averell Harriman (a millionaire who ran FDR’s Lend-Lease program in London) and John Winant (the shy, idealistic U.S. ambassador to Britain).  Each man formed close ties with Winston Churchill, including becoming romantically involved with members of the prime minister’s family.  The book chronicles the dramatic personal journeys of these remarkable men who, determined to save Britain from Hitler, helped convince a cautious Franklin Roosevelt and reluctant American public to back the British at a critical time.

Quotes 

“The fondness of Britons for the uninhibited pilots was reciprocated by most of the Americans. Even those who had no real interest in aiding the British cause when they first enlisted in the RAF found themselves admiring the bravery and determination of the public in standing up to Hitler. “They were, without a shadow of a doubt, the most courageous people that I have ever known,” said one American. “Although their cities were in shambles, I never heard one Briton lose faith.” Another U.S. pilot declared: “To fight side by side with these people was the greatest of privileges.” After the war, Bill Geiger, who’d been a student at California’s Pasadena City College before he came to Britain, recalled the exact moment when he knew that the British cause was his as well. Leaving a London tailor’s shop, where he had just been measured for his RAF uniform, he noticed a man working at the bottom of a deep hole in the street, surrounded by barricades. “What’s he doing?” Geiger asked a policeman. “Sir,” the bobby replied, “he’s defusing a bomb.” Everyone standing there—the bobby, pedestrians, the man in the hole—was “so cool and calm and collected,” Geiger remembered. He added: “You get caught up in that kind of courage, and then pretty soon you say, ‘Now I want to be a part of this. I want to be part of these people. I want to be a part of what I see here and what I feel here.’ ”

 

“In a small town in southern England, another convoy of American tanks and trucks came to a brief stop in front of a row of houses, watched by a crowd of townspeople. Suddenly, a woman emerged from a house carrying bowls of strawberries and cream. She handed one to a young lieutenant named Bob Sheehan, kissed his forehead, and whispered, “Good luck. Come back safe.” Galvanized by her gesture of kindness, other townspeople disappeared into their houses and moments later brought out tea and lemonade for the hot, thirsty GIs.”

 

“Indeed, in the midst of the devastation, most Londoners demonstrated a dogged determination to live as normal a life as possible: it was their way of thumbing their nose at Hitler. Each morning, millions of people left their shelters or basements and, despite the constant disruption of the train and Underground systems, went to work as usual, many hitchhiking or walking ten or more miles a day. Their commutes, which frequently involved long detours around collapsed buildings, impassable streets, and unexploded bombs, could take hours. Of the staff at Claridge’s, Ben Robertson noted after a particularly violent raid: “Everyone was red-eyed and tired, but they were all there.” The head waiter’s house had been demolished during the night, but he had shown up, as had the woman who cleaned Robertson’s room. “She was buried three hours in the basement of her house,” another maid told Robertson. “Three hours! And she got to work this morning as usual.”

 

“we’re inclined to say what we think, even when we have not thought very much.”

 

“In Europe, Murrow observed to his wife, people were dying and “a thousand years of civilization [were] being smashed” while America remained on the sidelines. How could one possibly be objective or neutral about that?”

 

“There was no bombing of the U.S. mainland, no civilian casualties, no destruction of millions of homes. Indeed, while the standard of living plummeted for the vast majority of Britons during the war, many if not most Americans lived better than ever before.”

 

“Adding to this uninhibited atmosphere was the heady new sense of freedom and independence experienced by young British women. Having grown up in a society in which few women worked outside the home or went to college, they had been expected to remain primly in life’s background and to demand little more than the satisfaction of having served their husbands and raised their children. That staid and predictable existence was shattered, however, when Britain declared war on Germany. Hundreds of thousands of women, even debutantes like Pamela who had never so much as boiled an egg, signed up for jobs in defense industries or enlisted in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and other military units. As one former deb recalled, “It was a liberation, it set me free.” Women began wearing slacks. They appeared in public without stockings. They smoked, they drank, and they had sex outside marriage—more often and with fewer qualms and less guilt than their mothers and grandmothers. The few American women in the capital were infected with a similar sense of freedom. “London was a Garden of Eden for women in those years,” recalled Time-Life correspondent Mary Welsh, “a serpent dangling from every tree and street lamp, offering tempting gifts, companionship, warm if temporary affections.”

 

“[Ed Murrow]would remark during a BBC broadcast: “It is difficult to explain the meaning of cold to people who are warm, the meaning of privation to people who have wanted only for luxuries…It is almost impossible to substitute intelligence for experience.”

 

“As they left, Anglican vicars in the area pinned a notice from their bishop to the front doors of their evacuated churches. Addressed to “our United States allies,” the notice read in part: “This church has stood for several hundred years. Around it has grown a community which has lived in these houses and tilled these fields ever since there was a church. This church, this churchyard in which their loved ones lie at rest; these homes, these fields are as dear to those who have left them as are the homes and graves which you, our Allied, have left behind you. They hope to return one day, as you hope to return to yours, to find them waiting to welcome them home.”

 

“MAY 10, THE day that Roosevelt issued his nonresponse to Churchill’s plea for U.S. belligerency, German bombers returned to London. As devastating as the previous raids had been, none came close to the savagery and destructiveness of this new firestorm. By the next morning, more than two thousand fires were raging out of control across the city, from Hammersmith in the west to Romford in the east, some twenty miles away. The damage to London’s landmarks was catastrophic. Queen’s Hall, the city’s premier concert venue, lay in ruins, while more than a quarter of a million books were incinerated and a number of galleries destroyed at the British Museum. Bombs smashed into St. James’s Palace, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and Parliament. The medieval Westminster Hall, though badly damaged, was saved, but not so the House of Commons chamber, the scene of some of the most dramatic events in modern British history. Completely gutted by fire, the little hall, with its vaulted, timbered ceiling, was nothing but a mound of debris, gaping open to the sky. Every major railroad station but one was put out of action for weeks, as were many Underground stations and lines. A third of the streets in greater London were impassable, and almost a million people were without gas, water, and electricity. The death toll was even more calamitous: never in London’s history had so many of its residents—1,436—died in a single night.”

 

“AN ESTIMATED 1,100 Londoners were killed during the April 16 raids—the most devastating night of the Blitz thus far. But it held that distinction for only three days; on April 19, German bombers hit London again, killing more than 1,200 persons. Almost half a million London residents lost their homes in the two attacks.”

 

“In being able to learn from his mistakes and grow, Eisenhower “was transformed from a mere person into a personage.”

 

“In its first ten months of operation, the Eighth lost 188 heavy bombers and some 1,900 crewmen; those numbers would skyrocket over the next year and a half. By the end of the conflict, the U.S. air operations in Europe would suffer more fatalities—26,000—than the entire Marine Corps in its protracted bloody campaigns in the Pacific. “To fly in the Eighth Air Force in those days,” recalled Harrison Salisbury, “was to hold a ticket to a funeral. Your own.” The savagery of the air war was not due solely to the ferocity of German defenses. Early in the war, when the Air Force brass in Washington were touting the advantages of high-altitude flying, they failed to realize that the extreme atmospheric conditions experienced by the crews could kill as effectively as a Messerschmitt or Focke-Wulf. “There are apparently little things that one doesn’t think about prior to getting into operations,” commented Dr. Malcolm Grow, the Eighth’s chief medical officer. Little things like oxygen deprivation, which could cause unconsciousness and death in a matter of minutes, or extensive frostbite, caused by several hours of exposure to temperatures of 50 to 60 degrees below zero. Until early 1944, more airmen were hospitalized for frostbite than for combat injuries.”

 

“In early 1941, the United States was a fifth-rate military power, its armed forces ranking seventeenth in size compared to other world forces. Long starved of financial support by Congress and the White House, the Army had little more than 300,000 men (most of them just drafted), compared to Germany’s 4 million and Britain’s 1.6 million. Not a single armored division existed, and draftees were training with broomsticks for rifles and sawhorses for antitank guns. The Army was in such bad shape, according to one military historian, that it would not have been able to “repel raids across the Rio Grande by Mexican bandits.” Although the Navy was in better condition, nearly half its vessels dated back to World War I. The Army Air Corps, meanwhile, could boast only about two thousand combat aircraft.” 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed Citizens of London, a terrific book that transports the reader to London and the United Kingdom during World II.  I gained a new perspective on the conflict and increased my appreciation for the brave and unflinching Britons who could not be cowed by Hitler despite immeasurable suffering.  It was disappointing to read how reluctantly America came to the aid of this crucial ally, but encouraging to see how wholeheartedly we did once we committed to fighting in this terrible war.  The four men at the center of the book (Churchill, Harriman, Winant, and Murrow) are fascinating characters who were truly indispensable men of their time.  Highly recommended.

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