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123. The Financial Lives of the Poets

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:   Jess Walter

Genre:  Fiction, Satire, Humor

304 pages, published September 22, 2009

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Financial Lives of the Poets tells the story of Matt Prior, who gave up his business journalist job to start a blog called Poetfolio which conveyed financial news in the form of poems.  Needless to say, Poetfolio didn’t work out all that well and Matt is in danger of  losing everything else in his life, his wife, his house, his children until he discovers a way to save it all that seems too good to be true.  

 

Quotes

“But it’s not easy, realizing how we fucked it all up. And that turns out to be the hardest thing to live with, not the regret or the fear, but the realization that the edge is so close to where we live.”

 

“Among the world’s evils—fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation—smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kids’ school.”

 

“I don’t know what I expected – no maybe I do, Al Pacino from Scarface- but this drug dealer is more like Al Pacino at the beginning of The Godfather reasonably bemused, untouched by his

criminal world, sitting with Diane Keaton whispering about Luca Brazzi, not yet asleep with the fishes, or like Al Pacino from Glengarry Glen Ross, although actually, now that I think about it, he’s not like Al Pacino at all but more like Kevin Spacey from that film, and who’s ever been afraid of Kevin Spacey?”

 

“my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves)”

 

“Listen,” Richard says, „unless you’re about to inherit some money, what we’re talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt. You are bleeding out through your nose and your mouth and your eye sockets, from your financial asshole.”

See! Fiscal Ebola? My financial asshole is bleeding? This was exactly why I started poetfolio.com; there are money poets everywhere.”

 

“So I make one phone call, and just like that, we’re eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a guy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dead organisms pulled from the desert on yet another side of the world and you give this man a few sheets of green paper representing the abstract wealth of your home nation, and he gives you a perfectly reasonable facsimile of one of the staples of the diet of a people from yet another faraway nation.

And the mushrooms are fresh.”

My Take

After finishing Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walters’ best-selling and critically acclaimed 2012 book, I wanted to read more by this amazing author.  After a quick Amazon search, I zeroed in on The Financial Lives of the Poets, a satirical book about the financial crisis that Walter had written a few years earlier.  It did not disappoint. From the hilarious concept of “Poetfolio,” a website that delivers financial news in the form of poems, to great characters to his capture of the zeitgeist of 2008 financial meltdown era, Walters delivers a quick reading, fun book that has something interesting to say about our modern times.

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121. Little Bee

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Chris Cleave

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

266 pages, published February 16, 2010

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

My Take

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

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120. Hillbilly Elegy : A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Katy Fassett

Author:   J.D. Vance

Genre:  Memoir, Sociology, Public Policy

272 pages, published June 28, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Hillbilly Elegy is a memoir by J.D. Vance, a former Marine and Yale Law School Graduate, about his childhood growing up in a poor Appalachian town.  While for the most part a personal account of his unique challenges, his book also includes a broader, questioning look at the struggles of America’s white working class.   Drawing on his own story and a variety of  sociological studies, Vance burrows deep into working class life of Appalachia which has been on a downward trajectory for the past forty years.  In an effective style, Vance helps the reader to  understand when and how “hillbillies” lost faith in any hope of upward mobility and their shot at the American Dream.

 

Quotes

“Whenever people ask me what I’d most like to change about the white working class, I say, “The feeling that our choices don’t matter.”

 

“I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”

 

“What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.”

 

“Psychologists call it “learned helplessness” when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life.”

 

“If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.

 

“Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.”

 

“I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”

 

“We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents. Our kids perform poorly in school. We might get angry with them, but we never give them the tools—like peace and quiet at home—to succeed.”

 

“There is no group of Americans more pessimistic than working-class whites. Well over half of blacks, Latinos, and college-educated whites expect that their children will fare better economically than they have. Among working-class whites, only 44 percent share that expectation.”

 

“Religious folks are much happier. Regular church attendees commit fewer crimes, are in better health, live longer, make more money, drop out of high school less frequently, and finish college more frequently than those who don’t attend church at all.”

 

“Mamaw always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.”

 

“Efforts to reinvent downtown Middletown always struck me as futile. People didn’t leave because our downtown lacked trendy cultural amenities. The trendy cultural amenities left because there weren’t enough consumers in Middletown to support them.”

 

“Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.”

 

“People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”

 

“And a young man with every reason to work—a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way—carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself.”

 

“Despite its reputation, Appalachia—especially northern Alabama and Georgia to southern Ohio—has far lower church attendance than the Midwest, parts of the Mountain West, and much of the space between Michigan and Montana. Oddly enough, we think we attend church more than we actually do. In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South.”

 

“Pajamas? Poor people don’t wear pajamas. We fall asleep in our underwear or blue jeans. To this day, I find the very notion of pajamas an unnecessary elite indulgence, like caviar or electric ice cube makers.”

 

“To this day, being able to “take advantage” of someone is the measure in my mind of having a parent. For me and Lindsay, the fear of imposing stalked our minds, infecting even the food we ate. We recognized instinctively that many of the people we depended on weren’t supposed to play that role in our lives, so much so that it was one of the first things Lindsay thought of when she learned of Papaw’s death. We were conditioned to feel that we couldn’t really depend on people—that, even as children, asking someone for a meal or for help with a broken-down automobile was a luxury that we shouldn’t indulge in too much lest we fully tap the reservoir of goodwill serving as a safety valve in our lives.”

 

“I don’t believe in epiphanies. I don’t believe in transformative moments, as transformation is harder than a moment. I’ve seen far too many people awash in a genuine desire to change only to lose their mettle when they realized just how difficult change actually is.”

My Take

Hillbilly Elegy has become part of the zeitgeist after the election of Donald Trump as liberal America was desperate to understand what motivated all of the Trump voters.  This book is a fascinating look into a world that I knew little about, the struggling white working class of the Appalachia which includes parts of the Midwest and South.  While it is the personal story of J.D. Vance and how he went from a chaotic, unstable, poor childhood to Yale Law School, it is also a primer on how to choose a good life.  He rightly gives credit to his maternal grandparents, whom he called Mamaw and Papaw, and the island of steadiness and support that they provided during his childhood.  Vance makes a convincing argument that it doesn’t matter how many government programs you enact or how much you reform the schools if kids don’t have a certain level of stability and encouragement at home.  I agree with Vance’s message that is delivered in a highly readable and engrossing book and look forward to seeing what he produces in the future.

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118. Galatians for You

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  First Presbyterian Church

Author:   Timothy Keller

Genre:  Christian, Theology, Non-Fiction

199 pages, published February 12, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The first book in a series of expository guides to the Bible, Timothy Keller’s Galatians For You closely examines the text of Galatians and demonstrates how it relates to your own life.  

 

Quotes

“Our hearts love to manufacture glory for themselves.”

 

“But we need to realize that there are deeper harvests that happen even when we don’t meet with much outward success. We will find our own character changing deeply through ministry. Our consciences will be clear and our hearts happier, since we’re less self-indulgent. We’ll develop a less selfish and more satisfied character, which will serve us well when we are under pressure. We may not reap quickly, and we may not see all that we reap; but we can know that there is a great harvest for those who sow to please the Spirit.”

 

“Verse 20 is a restatement of verse 14: we need to live our lives “in line” with the truth of the gospel. Now that Christ’s life is my life, Christ’s past is my past. I am “in Christ” (v 17), which means that I am as free from condemnation before God as if I had already died and been judged, as if I had paid the debt myself. And I am as loved by God as if I had lived the life Christ lived. So “it is not me that lives, but Christ” is a triumphant reminder that, though “we ourselves are sinners”, in Christ we are righteous.”

 

“Now when I live my life and make my choices and do my work, I do so remembering who I am by faith in Christ, who loved me so much! The inner dynamic for living the Christian life is right here! Only when I see myself as completely loved and holy in Christ will I have the power to repent with joy, conquer my fears, and obey the One who did all this for me. Everything or Nothing? It’s worth remembering that Paul is still speaking to Peter here! And so he finishes by reminding Peter that the Christian life is about living in line with the gospel throughout the whole of life, for the whole of our lives. We must go on as Christians as we started as Christians. After all, if at any point and in any way “righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” (v 21). Christ will do everything for you, or nothing. You cannot combine merit and grace.”

 

“If justification is by the law in any way, Christ’s death is meaningless in history and meaningless to you personally. Imagine that your house were burning down but your whole family had escaped, and I said to you: Let me show you how much I love you! and ran into the house and died. What a tragic and pointless waste of a life, you would probably think. But now imagine that your house was on fire and one of your children was still in there, and I said to you: Let me show you how much I love you!, ran into the flames, and saved your child but perished myself. You would think: Look at how much that man loved us. If we could save ourselves, Christ’s death is pointless, and means nothing. If we realize we cannot save ourselves, Christ’s death will mean everything to us. And we will spend the life that He has given us in joyful service of Him, bringing our whole lives into line with the gospel.”

 

“The gospel comes and turns them all upside down. It says: You are in such a hopeless position that you need a rescue that has nothing to do with you at all. And then it says: God in Jesus provides a rescue which gives you far more than any false salvation your heart may love to chase.”

 

“Christians who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons, much less secure than non-Christians, because of the constant bulletins they receive from their Christian environment about the holiness of God and the righteousness they are supposed to have. Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce defensive assertion of their own righteousness and defensive criticism of others. They cling desperately to legal, pharisaical righteousness, but envy [and] jealousy and other … sin grow out of their fundamental insecurity.”

 

“Second, the gospel leads to emotional freedom. Anyone who believes that our relationship with God is based on keeping up moral behavior is on an endless treadmill of guilt and insecurity. As we know from Paul’s letters, he did not free Gentile believers from the moral imperatives of the Ten Commandments. Christians could not lie, steal, commit adultery and so on. But though not free from the moral law as a way to live, Christians are free from it as a system of salvation. We obey not in the fear and insecurity of hoping to earn our salvation, but in the freedom and security of knowing we are already saved in Christ. We obey in the freedom of gratitude. So both the false teachers and Paul told Christians to obey the Ten Commandments, but for totally different reasons and motives. And unless your motive for obeying God’s law is the grace-gratitude motive of the gospel, you are in slavery. The gospel provides freedom, culturally and emotionally. The “other gospel” destroys both.”

My Take

I read Galations for You as part of a Women’s Bible Study at my church.  The book and Keller’s questions interspersed throughout the text sparked some excellent conversations that allowed us to go deep into our faith.  I also appreciated Keller’s careful analysis of the seemingly contradictory concepts of being saved by accepting Christ rather than by “following legalistic biblical precepts,” but that the life of anyone who truly accepts Christ will necessarily reflect those precepts.  Good food for thought.

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116. Everything That Remains: A Memoir by the Minimalists

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Authors:   Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus

Genre:  Memoir, Self-Improvement

234 pages, published December 23, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Well known for their website on minimalism, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus ask the reader to consider the question of what if everything you ever wanted isn’t what you actually want?  On the corporate fast track in his late twenties, Millburn thought he had it all.  A wife, an executive position with the promise of upward mobility, a large house filled with designer furniture and objects, and a late model car.  After losing both his mother and his marriage in the same month, Millburn started questioning every aspect of the life he had built for himself, ditched almost all of his belongings and discovered a lifestyle known as minimalism.  Everything That Remains tells the story of Millburn’s journey with commentary provided by his best friend and fellow minimalist Nicodemus.  

 

Quotes

“The things you own end up owning you.”

 

“You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.”

 

“For me, minimalism has never been about deprivation. Rather, minimalism is about getting rid of life’s excess in favor of the essential.”

 

“We’re taught to work foolishly hard for a non-living entity, donating our most precious commodity—our time—for a paycheck.”

 

“A ROLEX WON’T GIVE YOU MORE TIME”

 

“Unless you contribute beyond yourself, your life will feel perpetually self-serving. It’s okay to operate in your own self-interest, but doing so exclusively creates an empty existence. A life without contribution is a life without meaning. The truth is that giving is living. We only feel truly alive when we are growing as individuals and contributing beyond ourselves. That’s what a real life is all about.”

 

“Now, before I spend money I ask myself one question: Is this worth my freedom? Like: Is this coffee worth two dollars of my freedom? Is this shirt worth thirty dollars of my freedom? Is this car worth thirty thousand dollars of my freedom? In other words, am I going to get more value from the thing I’m about to purchase, or am I going to get more value from my freedom?”

 

“The most important reason to live in the moment is nothing lasts forever. Enjoy the moment while it’s in front of you. Be present. Accept life for what it is: a finite span of time with infinite possibilities.”

 

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

 

“Truthfully, though, most organizing is nothing more than well-planned hoarding.”

 

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never feel you have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, you will end up feeling like a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”  —David Foster Wallace, This Is Water”

 

“Success = Happiness + Constant Improvement”

 

“a career is one of the most dangerous things you can have if you want to find fulfillment.”

 

“Happiness, as far as we are concerned, is achieved through living a meaningful life, a life that is filled with passion and freedom, a life in which we can grow as individuals and contribute to other people in meaningful ways. Growth and contribution: those are the bedrocks of happiness. Not stuff. This may not sound sexy or marketable or sellable, but it’s the cold truth. Humans are happy if we are growing as individuals and if we are contributing beyond ourselves. Without growth, and without a deliberate effort to help others, we are just slaves to cultural expectations, ensnared by the trappings of money and power and status and perceived success.”

 

“When purchasing gifts becomes the focal point of the season, we lose focus on what’s truly important.”

 

“Go without. This option is almost taboo in our culture. It seems radical to many people. Why would I go without when I could just buy a new one? Often this option is the best option, though. When we go without, it forces us to question our stuff, it forces us to discover whether or not we need it—and sometimes we discover life without it is actually better than before.”

 

“People often avoid the truth for fear of destroying the illusions they’ve built.”

 

“When I had the opportunity to meet Leo Babauta four months ago during a trip to San Francisco, he said there were three things that significantly changed his life: establishing habits he enjoyed, simplifying his life, and living with no goals.”

 

“Ultimately most of us come to believe there’s more value in a paycheck—and all the stuff that paycheck can buy us—than there is in life itself.”

 

“After a series of promotions—store manager at twenty-two, regional manager at twenty-four, director at twenty-seven—I was a fast-track career man, a personage of sorts. If I worked really hard, and if everything happened exactly like it was supposed to, then I could be a vice president by thirty-two, a senior vice president by thirty-five or forty, and a C-level executive—CFO, COO, CEO—by forty-five or fifty, followed of course by the golden parachute. I’d have it made then! I’d just have to be miserable for a few more years, to drudge through the corporate politics and bureaucracy I knew so well. Just keep climbing and don’t look down. Misery, of course, encourages others to pull up a chair and stay a while. And so, five years ago, I convinced my best friend Ryan to join me on the ladder, even showed him the first rung. The ascent is exhilarating to rookies. They see limitless potential and endless possibilities, allured by the promise of bigger paychecks and sophisticated titles. What’s not to like? He too climbed the ladder, maneuvering each step with lapidary precision, becoming one of the top salespeople—and later, top sales managers—in the entire company.10 And now here we are, submerged in fluorescent light, young and ostensibly successful. A few years ago, a mentor of mine, a successful businessman named Karl, said to me, “You shouldn’t ask a man who earns twenty thousand dollars a year how to make a hundred thousand.” Perhaps this apothegm holds true for discontented men and happiness, as well. All these guys I emulate—the men I most want to be like, the VPs and executives—aren’t happy. In fact, they’re miserable.  Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad people, but their careers have changed them, altered them physically and emotionally: they explode with anger over insignificant inconveniences; they are overweight and out of shape; they scowl with furrowed brows and complain constantly as if the world is conspiring against them, or they feign sham optimism which fools no one; they are on their second or third or fourth(!) marriages; and they almost all seem lonely. Utterly alone in a sea of yes-men and women. Don’t even get me started on their health issues.  I’m talking serious health issues: obesity, gout, cancer, heart attacks, high blood pressure, you name it. These guys are plagued with every ailment associated with stress and anxiety. Some even wear it as a morbid badge of honor, as if it’s noble or courageous or something. A coworker, a good friend of mine on a similar trajectory, recently had his first heart attack—at age thirty.  But I’m the exception, right?”

My Take

After taking and keeping a “no-buy” pledge last year (something everyone should try), I was interested in learning more about the concept and culture of minimalism.  Everything that Remains fulfilled that desire.  Millburn recounts his inspiring journey from an unhealthy, overweight, dissatisfied workaholic with a lot of stuff to a relaxed, content, fit person who enjoys and is fulfilled by the present.  This book made me think about the wisdom of always acquiring more and better things and challenged me to be happy with what I have or, even better, with a lot less than what I have.

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114. Reimagine Government, a 21st Century Solution

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Christopher Funk

Author:   Christopher Funk

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Public Policy

100 pages, published 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Reimagine Government casts a critical eye on our current political system and proposes another solution based on the rapid technological change that the United States and the world will experience during the next 20 years due primarily to information technology and artificial intelligence.  Funk argues that intelligent systems prospective ability to outperform their human counterparts means that we will finally have the means to solve some of our most intractable problems.  His main focus is what this paradigm shift will mean for our government and envisions a new form of government comprised of intelligent systems rather than human politicians.   Citizens would evaluate and vote for plans rather than candidates and the intelligent systems would implement the plans.

 

My Take

Full disclosure, Reimagine Government was written and self-published by my father, Chris Funk.  He asked me to read it prior to a weekend visit and I was happy to comply.  The reading style is easy.  It is not dense at all.  In the first part of the book, he identifies numerous problems facing our nation and the world.  While I did not agree with his take on the nature and scope of the problems (eg. I don’t think income inequality is per se a big problem), I think he did a good job with this section.  My disagreement with his thesis arose with his solution.  He advocates an all citizen vote for different plans to then be implemented by intelligent systems.  As an attorney with a great deal of admiration and belief in the United States Constitution, I would never voluntarily agree to scrap our founding document and trust the majority and the machines with our precious Constitutional rights.

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113. Escape to Cabo

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Pam Dupont

Author:   S. A. Lapoint

Genre:  Memoir, Crime

221 pages, published October 14, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Scott Frieze (aka S. A. Lapoint) had a comfortable life in Tuscon until he decided to act on his lifelong fantasy of robbing a bank.  He got away the first time, but during his second bank job, he was apprehended and thrown into the maw of our criminal justice system.  Escape to Cabo documents how he got there and his pre and post incarceration experience.

  
My Take

Escape to Cabo was assigned by my fellow book group member Pam Dupont in anticipation of a trip with our book group to her condo in San Jose del Cabo.  Pam had met the author while in Cabo and thought it would be fun to read this book before our journey.  She was right.  It was a fun read.

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112. The Rosie Effect

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Lisa Stock

Author:   Graeme Simsion

Genre:  Fiction, Humor

368 pages, published July 21, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Rosie Effect, which is the sequel to The Rosie Project, follows Don Tillman and Rosie Jarman after they marry and move to New York to study and work at Columbia.  The happy couple faces a new challenge when Rosie discovers she is pregnant.  Don, whose Asperger’s Syndrome makes him a unique and unforgettable character, decides to learn all that he can about becoming a father.  However, it doesn’t take long for his unusual research style to get him into trouble.

 

Quotes

“I thought you were happy about having a baby.’ I was happy in the way that I would be happy if the captain of an aircraft in which I was travelling announced that he had succeeded in restarting one engine after both had failed. Pleased that I would now probably survive, but shocked that the situation had arisen in the first place, and expecting a thorough investigation into the circumstances.”

 

“To the world’s most perfect woman.’ It was lucky my father was not present. Perfect is an absolute that cannot be modified, like unique or pregnant. My love for Rosie was so powerful that it had caused my brain to make a grammatical error.”

 

“It is generally accepted that people enjoy surprises: hence the traditions associated with Christmas, birthdays, and anniversaries. In my experience, most of the pleasure accrues to the giver. The victim is frequently under pressure to feign, at short notice, a positive response to an unwanted object or unscheduled event.”

 

“Watch some kids, watch them play. You’ll see they’re just little adults, only they don’t know all the rules and tricks yet.”

 

“before sharing interesting information that has not been solicited, think carefully about whether it has the potential to cause distress.”

 

“After the most basic physical requirements are satisfied, human happiness is almost independent of wealth. A meaningful job is far more important.”

 

“In marriage reason frequently had to take second place to Harmony”

 

“I watched as she took a second sip, imagining alcohol crossing the placental wall, damaging brain cells, reducing our unborn child from a future Einstein to a physicist who would fall just short of taking science to a new level. A child who would never have the experience described by Richard Feynman of knowing something about the universe that no one had before”

 

“One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich laying bricks in Siberia probably generated a higher level of happiness than one day in the life of a retired rock star in a Manhattan penthouse with all the beer he could drink. Work was crucial to sanity. Which was probably why George continued to perform on the cruise ship.”

 

“It was odd, paradoxical-crazy-that what Rosie seemed to value most about me, a highly organized person who avoided uncertainty and liked to plan in detail, was that my behavior generated unpredictable consequences. But if that was what she loved, I was not going to argue. What I was going to argue was that she should not abandon something she valued.”

 

“Rain Man! I had seen the film. I did not identify in any way with Rain Man, who was inarticulate, dependent, and unemployable. A society of Rain Men would be dysfunctional. A society of Don Tillmans would be efficient, safe, and pleasant for all of us.”

My Take

During the first year of my thousand book quest, I read The Rosie Project and really enjoyed it.  It was clever, light and fun and had a great character in the person of Don Tillman whose Asperger’s Syndrome made for some hilarious situations and dialogue.  In The Rosie Project, Don is looking for a wife and approaches the endeavor with his characteristic logical mind only to end up with the unlikely choice of Rosie Jarmon.  In The Rosie Effect, author Graeme Simsion relies upon a similar formula, but this time applies it to Don’s impending fatherhood.  It’s not quite as clever and fun as the first book, but it was still a treat to read it and there are truly some very funny moments that had me laughing.

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109. The 100-year-old man who climbed out the window and disappeared

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Lisa Stock

Author:   Jonas Jonasson

Genre:  Fiction, Humor, Foreign, Historical Fiction

384 pages, published September 11, 2012

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

As he prepares to celebrate his 100th birthday, Allan Karlsson does the unexpected.  Still in his slippers, he steps out of his nursing home window and into an incredible adventure.  He will find himself accidentally in possession of a small fortune, on the run from the mob and the police and on the way will make the acquaintance of a colorful cast of characters, including Sophia a former circus elephant.  We learn about Allan’s amazing life and his close encounters with the major players of the twentieth century, along with his key role in shaping our history, through a series of interspersed flashbacks.   

 

Quotes

“People could behave how they liked, but Allan considered that in general it was quite unnecessary to be grumpy if you had the chance not to.”

 

“When life has gone into overtime it’s easy to take liberties,”

 

“There are only two things I can do better than most people. One of them is to make vodka from goats’ milk, and the other is to put together an atom bomb.”

 

“Revenge is like politics, one thing always leads to another until bad has become worse, and worse has become worst.”

 

“Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway. Julius said that you could say the same of all epochs.”

 

“Allan admitted that the difference between madness and genius was subtle, and that he couldn’t with certainty say which it was in this case, but that he had his suspicions.”

 

“But God answered with silence. He did that sometimes, and Father Ferguson always interpreted it to mean that he should think for himself. Admittedly, it didn’t always work out well when the pastor thought for himself, but you couldn’t just give up.”

 

“Never try to out-drink a Swede, unless you happen to be a Finn or at least a Russian.”

 

“Allan Emmanuelle Karlsson closed his eyes and felt perfectly convinced that he would now pass away forever. It had been exciting, the entire journey, but nothing lasts forever, except possibly general stupidity.”

My Take

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared is a fun book that alternates between the present day, hilarious antics of a 100 year old man and his ragtag gang who are on the run from the police and his adventures through the 20th Century.  Through the inscrutable Allan Karlsson who specializes in the art of blowing things up and has perfected the art of making alcoholic beverages from goats milk, we meet Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Harry Truman Mao Tse-Tung , Francisco Franco, Charles de Gaulle and, best of all, Albert Einstein’s dim-witted half brother Harold.  Quirky and unique, this book is a fun and fast reading romp.

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108. The Bookman’s Tale

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Heather Ringoen

Author:   Charlie Lovett

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Mystery, Fiction

355 pages, published January 1, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Bookman’s Tale opens in 1995 in Hay-on-Wye, England. Newly widowed antiquarian bookseller Peter Byerly is perusing old books in a local shop when he discovers a mysterious portrait from the past century that looks just like his deceased wife Amanda.  As he follows the trail through the Victorian era and then to Shakespeare’s time, Peter talks to Amanda’s spirit, learns the truth about his own past, and discovers a book that might definitively prove Shakespeare was, indeed, the author of all his plays.  

 

Quotes

“The best way to learn about books, … is to spend time with them, talk about them, defend them.”

 

“He embraced the ache. It reminded him that Amanda was real. For the first time in his life, he knew exactly what he was aching for.”

 

“Like a subscription to a magazine, thought Peter. The period during which I am allowed to be happy has expired.”

 

My Take

I love books (obviously) and as a lover of books, I thought I would enjoy The Bookman’s Tale more than I did.  While there are some interesting aspects to the story, especially the parts that deal with the issue of whether Shakespeare was the author of the works attributed to him, those small sections were not enough to overcome the confusing and convoluted “mystery,” the one dimensional character development and the tedium involved in slogging through this book.

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