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498. Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung

Genre:    Non Fiction, Personal Finance, Economics, Self Improvement

336  pages, published  July 9, 2019

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Quit Like a Millionaire is part memoir, part handbook on how to retire early.  Written by husband and wife Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung, the two explain how they retired at the age of 31 with a million dollars.  They did it without doing anything extraordinary like selling a company or buying a hot stock.  Rather, their method of living on a lot less than you earn and steadily investing the savings is accessible to anyone.  They also never bought a house (a decision they passionately advocate for) and spend a lot of their retirement traveling the world.

Quotes 

“The more stuff people owned, the unhappier and more stressed they tended to be. Conversely, the less stuff people owned and the more they spent on experiences like travel or learning new skills, the happier and more content they were.”

 

“One of the biggest lies we´ve been sold is that following our passion is the key . Statistically, following your passion will lead to unemployment or underemployment.”

 

“Whenever someone did you a favor or lent you something, you were expected to repay them, either through political favors or with money. Over time, it became ingrained in the national psyche that being in debt to someone gives them power over you”

 

“The idea of relying on the government was laughable. The government’s job isn’t to help you! Their job is to find new and creative ways of making your life immeasurably worse.”

 

My Take

I really enjoyed Quit Like a Millionaire.  Kristy Shen has an incredibly inspiring story.  Both her parents survived the cultural revolution in China and she was born into an impoverished household.  As a young child, she would look for toys in garabage dumps filled with medical waste.  Things changed when her family immigrated to Canada.  She still grew up without any extras, but along the way figured out how to save and invest so that she and her husband could retire at age 31 to travel the world.  They have a great blog called Millenial Revolution that is worth checking out.

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496. The Last American Man

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Elizabeth Gilbert

Genre:   Non Fiction, Biography, Nature

241 pages, published  December 23, 2009

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Elizabeth Gilbert

Genre:   Non Fiction, Biography, Nature

241 pages, published  December 23, 2009

Reading Format:   Book

Quotes 

“I live in nature where everything is connected, circular. The seasons are circular. The planet is circular, and so is the planet around the sun. The course of water over the earth is circular coming down from the sky and circulating through the world to spread life and then evaporating up again. I live in a circular teepee and build my fire in a circle. The life cycles of plants and animals are circular. I live outside where I can see this. The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost site of that. I don’t live inside buildings because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn’t flow, and where life stops. I don’t want to live in a dead place. People say that I don’t live in a real world, but it’s modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they have stepped outside the natural circle of life.

 

Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes. They wake up every morning in a box of their bedrooms because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them it was time to get up. They eat their breakfast out of a box and then they throw that box away into another box. Then they leave the box where they live and get into another box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken into little cubicle boxes where a bunch of people spend their days sitting and staring at the computer boxes in front of them. When the day is over, everyone gets into the box with wheels again and goes home to the house boxes and spends the evening staring at the television boxes for entertainment. They get their music from a box, they get their food from a box, they keep their clothing in a box, they live their lives in a box.

 

Break out of the box! This not the way humanity lived for thousands of years.”

 

“Show up for your own life, he said. Don’t pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle-feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant-gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you’ve been given is your own humanity, which is about conciousness, so honor that consciousness.

Revere your senses; don’t degrade them with drugs, with depression, with wilful oblivion. Try to notice something new everyday, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you’re not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like; notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet fell like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is – your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbours, and this planet. Don’t pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge.”

 

“He told me that one of the reasons people are so unhappy is they don’t talk to themselves. He said you have to keep a conversation going with yourself throughout your life to see how you’re doing, to keep your focus, to remain your own friend. He told me that he talked to himself all the time, and that it helped him to grow stronger and better everyday.”

 

“only those who live in the wilderness can recognize the central truth of existence, which is that death lives right beside us at all times, as close and as relevant as life itself, and that this reality is nothing to fear but is a sacred truth to be praised.”

 

 “Clever, ambitious, and always in search of greater efficiency, we Americans have, in two short centuries, created a world of push button, round the clock comfort for ourselves. The basic needs of humanity – food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, transportation, and even sexual pleasure – no longer need to be personally laboured for or ritualised or even understood. All these things are available to us now for mere cash. Or credit. Which means that nobody needs to know how to do anything any more, except the one narrow skill that will earn enough money to pay for the conveniences and services of modern living.

 

But in replacing every challenge with a short cut we seem to have lost something and Eustace isn’t the only person feeling that loss. We are an increasingly depressed and anxious people – and not for nothing. Arguably, all these modern conveniences have been adopted to save us time. But time for what? Having created a system that tends to our every need without causing us undue exertion or labour, we can now fill those hours with…?”

 

“Not making a living,’ he wrote, on his first trip to Alaska, ‘just living.”

 

“We are not alien visitors to this planet, after all but natural residents and relatives of every living entity here. This earth is where we came from and where we’ll all end up when we die, and during the interim, it is our home, And there’s no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don’t at least marginally understand our home.”

 

“Revere your senses; don’t degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Try to notice something new every day, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you’re not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like, notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet feel like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is – your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbors, and this planet. Don’t pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge. You can never become a real man if you have a careless and destructive attitude, Eustace said, but maturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night.”

 

“Only through constant focus can you become independent. Only through independence can you know yourself. And only through knowing yourself will you be able to ask the key question of your life: What is is that I am destined to accomplish, and how can I make it happen?”

 

“Train them to pay attention to their choices. (“Reduce, Reuse and Recycle are good ideas,” he would lecture, “but those three concepts should only be the last resort. What you really need to focus on are two other words that also begin with R- Reconsider and Refuse. Before you even acquire the disposable good, ask yourself why you need this consumer product. And then turn it down. Refuse it. You can.”)”

 

“On this day, Eustace was heating iron rods to fix a broken piece on his antique mower. He had a number of irons cooking in his forge at the same time and, distracted by trying to teach me the basics of blacksmithing, he allowed several of them to get too hot, to the point of compromising the strength of the metal. When he saw this, he said, “Damn! I have too many irons in the fire.”  Which was the first time I had ever heard that expression used in its proper context. But such is the satisfaction of being around Eustace; everything suddenly seems to be in its proper context. He makes true a notion of frontier identity that has long since passed most men of his generation, most of whom are left with nothing but the vocabulary.”

 

 “Think of the many articles one can find every year in the Wall Street Journal describing some entrepreneur or businessman as being a “pioneer” or a “maverick” or a “cowboy.” Think of the many times these ambitious modern men are described as “staking their claim” or boldly pushing themselves “beyond the frontier” or even “riding into the sunset.” We still use this nineteenth-century lexicon to describe our boldest citizens, but it’s really a code now, because these guys aren’t actually pioneers; they are talented computer programmers, biogenetic researchers, politicians, or media monguls making a big splash in a fast modern economy.

 

But when Eustace Conway talks about staking a claim, the guy is literally staking a goddamn claim. Other frontier expressions that the rest of us use as metaphors, Eustace uses literally. He does sit tall in the saddle; he does keep his powder dry; he is carving out a homestead. When he talks about reining in horses or calling off the dogs or mending fences, you can be sure that there are real horses, real dogs or real fences in the picture. And when Eustace goes in for the kill, he’s not talking about a hostile takeover of a rival company; he’s talking about really killing something.”

 

“The problem was that, while the classic European coming-of-age story generally featured a provincial boy who moved to the city and was transformed into a refined gentleman, the American tradition had evolved into the opposite. The American boy came of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills. There, he shed his cosmopolitan manners and became a robust and proficient man. Not a gentleman, mind you, but a man.”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man

 

“..there’s no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don’t at least marginally understand our home. That is the understanding we need to put our lives in some bigger metaphysical context. Instead, Eustace sees a chilling sight- a citizenry so removed from the rhythm of nature that we march through our lives as mere sleepwalkers, blinded, deafened, and senseless. Robotically existing in sterilized surroundings that numb the mind, weaken the body, and atrophy the soul.”

 

“Over the course of the summer, he taught the children to eat foods they had never known, to sharpen and use knives, to carve their own spoons, to make knots and play Indian games and- every time they cut a branch off a living tree- to cut away a small lock of their own hair, to leave as an offering of thanks.”

 

“Where it gets tricky is our deciding what we want Eustace Conway to be, in order to fulfill our notions of him, and then ignoring what doesn’t fit into our first-impression romantic image. My initial reaction on witnessing Eustace Conway’s life was relief. When I first heard of his life and his adventures, all I could think was Thank God. Thank God somebody in America was still living this way. Thank God there was at least one genuine mountain man, frontiersman, pioneer, maverick out there. Thank God there was one truly resourceful and independent wild soul left in this country. Because, at some deep emotional level, Eustace’s existence signified to me that somehow it’s still true, that we Americans are, against all other available evidence, a nation where people grow free and wild and strong and brave and willful, instead of lazy and fat and boring and unmotivated.”

 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Last American Man written by the talented writer Elizabeth Gilbert (made famous by her memoir Eat, Pray, Love).  Her subject, the anachronistic and fascinating Eustace Conway, who lives and preaches his ethos of living in complete harmony with nature seems out place in our modern, technological world.  However, his message resonated with me and made me contemplate how I live my life and the changes I could make to be more in synch with the natural world.

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495. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

  1. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Daniel H. Pink

Genre:   Non Fiction, Psychology, Business, Self Improvement

242  pages, published  December 29, 2009

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In Drive, Author Daniel Pinkwater explores the question of motivation.  He demonstrates that money is not always the best method.  Rather, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Quotes 

“Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”

 

 “Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.”

 

“Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one’s sights and pushing toward the horizon.”

 

“The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.”   TOM KELLEY General Manager, IDEO”

 

“The monkeys solved the puzzle simply because they found it gratifying to solve puzzles. They enjoyed it. The joy of the task was its own reward.”

 

“While complying can be an effective strategy for physical survival, it’s a lousy one for personal fulfillment. Living a satisfying life requires more than simply meeting the demands of those in

control. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement. The former might get you through the day, but only the latter will get you through the night.”

 

“I say, ‘Get me some poets as managers.’ Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obligated to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world runs. Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow’s new business leaders.”  –Sidney Harman, CEO Multimillionaire of a stereo components company”

 

“People can have two different mindsets, she says. Those with a “fixed mindset” believe that their talents and abilities are carved in stone. Those with a “growth mindset” believe that their talents and abilities can be developed. Fixed mindsets see every encounter as a test of their worthiness. Growth mindsets see the same encounters as opportunities to improve.”

 

“As Carol Dweck says, “Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you were not willing to value things and commit yourself to working toward them.”

 

“The problem with making an extrinsic reward the only destination that matters is that some people will choose the quickest route there, even if it means taking the low road. Indeed, most of the scandals and misbehavior that have seemed endemic to modern life involve shortcuts.”

 

“One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom. But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow.”

 

“we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness. When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy.”

 

“Children who are praised for “being smart” often believe that every encounter is a test of whether they really are. So to avoid looking dumb, they resist new challenges and choose the easiest path. By contrast, kids who understand that effort and hard work lead to mastery and growth are more willing to take on new, difficult tasks.”

 

“coffee-then-nap combination known as the “nappuccino.”

 

“When the reward is the activity itself–deepening learning, delighting customers, doing one’s best–there are no shortcuts.”

 

“Management isn’t about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices,” he told me. It’s about creating conditions for people to do their best work.”

 

“Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others–sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on–can sometimes have dangerous side effects.”

 

“We leave lucrative jobs to take low-paying ones that provide a clearer sense of purpose.”

 

“For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation—the drive do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing—is essential for high levels of creativity.”

 

My Take

I found Drive  to be an engaging book that gave me a lot to think about.  Author Daniel Pink is spot on when he observes that money only partially motivates human beings.  Instead, we need to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another to put forward our best efforts and do our best work.  I saw this firsthand with my kids.  My husband and I did not closely monitor their schoolwork.  Rather, we set high expectations, talked often about the importance of doing their best, explained the real world consequences of poor or exemplary performance and left the rest to them.  Over time, they both became internally motivated and achieved impressive results.

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493. Atomic Habits

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   James Clear

Genre:    Nonfiction, Self-Improvement, Psychology

319 pages, published  October 17, 2018

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In Atomic Habits, author James Clear provides readers with solid, well researched advice on how to better adopt healthy habits and rid yourself of bad ones.  He advocates adopting systems rather than relying on willpower.

Quotes 

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”

 

“The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.”

 

“The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it. If you’re proud of how your hair looks, you’ll develop all sorts of habits to care for and maintain it. If you’re proud of the size of your biceps, you’ll make sure you never skip an upper-body workout. If you’re proud of the scarves you knit, you’ll be more likely to spend hours knitting each week. Once your pride gets involved, you’ll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.”

 

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

 

“You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”

 

“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.”

 

“Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.”

 

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”

 

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.”

 

“All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”

 

“Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.”

 

“Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.”

 

 “The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.”

 

 “Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.”

 

“When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.”

 

“Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.”

 

“Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”

 

“We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: The close. The many. The powerful.”

 

“If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.”

 

 “You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.”

 

 “The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.”

 

“It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”

 

“When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.”

 

“In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption”

 

“True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.”

 

“With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits, the focus is on who you wish to become.”

 

 “Good habits can make rational sense, but if they conflict with your identity, you will fail to put them into action.”

 

“Over the long run, however, the real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-image gets in the way. This is why you can’t get too attached to one version of your identity. Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.”

 

“Your actions reveal how badly you want something. If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don’t really want it. It’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself. Your actions reveal your true motivations.”

 

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.”

 

“Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.”

 

“Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change. This pattern shows up everywhere. Cancer spends 80 percent of its life undetectable, then takes over the body in months. Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks. Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes”

 

“This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.”

 

“The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.”

 

“Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.”

 

“Emotions drive behavior. Every decision is an emotional decision at some level. Whatever your logical reasons are for taking action, you only feel compelled to act on them because of emotion. In fact, people with damage to emotional centers of the brain can list many reasons for taking action but still will not act because they do not have emotions to drive them. This is why craving comes before response. The feeling comes first, and then the behavior.”

 

“Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.”

 

“Happiness is simply the absence of desire.- When you observe a cue, but do not desire to change your state, you are content with the current situation. Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure, but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.

As Caed Budris says, “Happiness is the space between on desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.”

 

“Becoming the type of person you want to become — someone who lives by a stronger standard, someone who believes in themselves, someone who can be counted on by the people that matter to them — is about the daily process you follow and not the ultimate product you achieve.”

 

“Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit. This is a distinguishing feature between winners and losers. Anyone can have a bad performance, a bad workout, or a bad day at work. But when successful people fail, they rebound quickly. The breaking of a habit doesn’t matter if the reclaiming of it is fast. I think this principle is so important that I’ll stick to it even if I can’t do a habit as well or as completely as I would like. Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle with our habits. The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.”

 

“You do it because it’s who you are and it feels good to be you. The more a habit becomes part of your life, the less you need outside encouragement to follow through. Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.”

 

“Getting 1 percent better every day counts for a lot in the long-run.”

 

“We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.”

 

My Take

Like The Happiness Project, Atomic Habits is a transformative book, full of extremely useful, actionable advice.  Author James Clear makes a compelling case that adopting positive systems and habits can transform our lives.  I especially appreciated his exploration of the role that identity plays in whether or not we succeed in positive habit formation.  For example, if you are trying to quit smoking instead of saying “No thanks, I’m trying to quit” when offered a cigarette, you should say “No thanks, I’m not a smoker.” The more you say, “I’m the type of person who _________,” the more you identify as that type of person and the more likely that you will be that type of person.  Well worth a read.

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492. The Book of Longings

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Sue Monk Kidd

Genre:    Fiction, Historical Fiction, Theology, Christian

416 pages, published April 21, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The Book of Longings is a new take on the story of Jesus Christ.  It is told from the perspective of Ana who was raised in a wealthy family in Sepphoris with ties to the ruler of Galilee.  Ana longs to be a writer and rebels against the stifling expectations and oppression of her family and culture.  Author Sue Monk Kidd engages in poetic license and has Ana marrying Jesus and then making her home with his brothers, James and Simon, and their mother, Mary. Ana and Jesus are separated for several years and are reunited just before the crucifixion.  Ana then carries on, chronicling Jesus’ story and reaching her potential in a small artists’ colony.

Quotes 

“When I tell you all shall be well, I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.”

 

“Anger is effortless. Kindness is hard. Try to exert yourself.”

 

“Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.”

 

“Each of us must find a way to love the world. You have found yours.”

― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

 

“Why should we contain God any longer in our poor and narrow conceptions, which are so often no more than grandiose reflections of ourselves? Let us set him free.”

 

“Your moment will come because you’ll make it come.”

 

“It does the world no good to return evil for evil. I try now to return good to them instead.”

 

“Your moment will come, and when it does, you must seize it with all the bravery you can find.”

 

“Life will be life and death will be death.”

 

“Her mind was an immense feral country that spilled its borders.”

 

“Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it.”

 

“You think with your head. You know with your heart.”

 

“I went to stand beside him and looked in the same direction as he, and it seemed for an instant I saw the world as he did, orphaned and broken and staggeringly beautiful, a thing to be held and put back right.”

 

“It’s always a marvel when one’s pain doesn’t settle into bitterness, but brings forth kindness instead.”

 

“When I was finally able to read the Scriptures for myself, I discovered (behold!) there were women.”

 

My Take

I had previously read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings and enjoyed both books, so I was interested in her latest effort.  It’s a good book, not a great one.  Kidd offers a unique perspective on Christianity by imagining Jesus with a wife, but does seem to be accurate with a lot of the other historical details in her story.  Her main character Ana provides an compelling portal to view the life, death and resurrection Jesus.

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485. Uprooted

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   Naomi Novik

Genre:   Fiction, Fantasy

435 pages, published May 19, 2014

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The protagonist of Uprooted is Agnieszka, a village girl who is selected by “The Dragon,” a magical wizard who every ten years chooses a girl to take to his tower.  The Dragon, who protects the villagers against the malevolent and encroaching Wood, trains Agnieszka in his magical ways and enlists her help in fighting the Wood.

Quotes 

“You intolerable lunatic,” he snarled at me, and then he caught my face between his hands and kissed me.”

 

“truth didn’t mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn’t come and listen.”

 

“I’m glad,” I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn’t that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn’t, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn’t.”

 

“I was a glaring blot on the perfection. But I didn’t care: I didn’t feel I owed him beauty.”

 

“I don’t want more sense!” I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. “Not if sense means I’ll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that’s worth holding on to?”

 

“I don’t want more sense!” I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. “Not if sense means I’ll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that’s worth holding on to?”

 

“I leaned against his side, his irritation oddly comforting. After a moment he grudgingly put his arm around me. The deep quiet was already settling back upon the grove, as if all the fire and rage we’d brought could make only a brief interruption in its peace.”

 

“You’ve been inexpressibly lucky,” he said finally. “And inexpressibly mad, although in your case the two seem to be the same thing”

 

“His name tasted of fire and wings, of curling smoke, of subtlety and strength and the rasping whisper of scales.”

 

“Those the walkers carried into the Wood were less lucky. We didn’t know what happened to them, but they came back out sometimes, corrupted in the worst way: smiling and cheerful, unharmed. They seemed almost themselves to anyone who didn’t know them well, and you might spend half a day talking with one of them and never realize anything was wrong, until you found yourself taking up a knife and cutting off your own hand, putting out your own eyes, your own tongue, while they kept talking all the while, smiling, horrible. And then they would take the knife and go inside your house, to your children, while you lay outside blind and choking and helpless even to scream. If someone we loved was taken by the walkers, the only thing we knew to hope for them was death, and it could only be a hope.”

 

My Take

While a lot of people love Uprooted, I am not a fan.  It had way too many action sequences, was often disjointed (incomprehensively jumping from one thing to another) and failed to develop the main characters or their relationship.  A bit of a slog to get through it.

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481. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Deidre Farrell

Author:   Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

Genre:   Nonfiction, Business

464 pages, published September 8, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In No Rules Rules, Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings and business writer Erin Meyer explore the unique culture behind one of the world’s most innovative and successful companies.  Launched in 1998 as an online DVD rental service, Netflix has reinvented itself multiple times. Along the way, the company adopted several counterintuitive, radical management principles. Hastings built a corporate culture focused on freedom, responsibility and innovation.  At Netflix, there are no vacation or expense policies, pay is overmarket with no bonuses, adequate performance gets a generous severance, hard work is irrelevant, you don’t try to please your boss, but give candid feedback instead.

Quotes 

“The Fearless Organization, she explains that if you want to encourage innovation, you should develop an environment where people feel safe to dream, speak up, and take risks. The safer the atmosphere, the more innovation you will have.”

 

“A fast and innovative workplace is made up of what we call “stunning colleagues”—highly talented people, of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, who are exceptionally creative, accomplish significant amounts of important work, and collaborate effectively. What’s more, none of the other principles can work unless you have ensured this first dot is in place.”

 

“even when other team members were exceptionally talented and intelligent, one individual’s bad behavior brought down the effectiveness of the entire team. In dozens of trials, conducted over month-long periods, groups with one underperformer did worse than other teams by a whopping 30 to 40 percent.”

 

“it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.”

 

“A fast and innovative workplace is made up of what we call “stunning colleagues”—highly talented people, of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, who are exceptionally creative, accomplish significant amounts of important work, and collaborate effectively.”

 

“Humility is important in a leader and role model. When you succeed, speak about it softly or let others mention it for you. But when you make a mistake say it clearly and loudly, so that everyone can learn and profit from your errors. In other words, “Whisper wins and shout mistakes.”

 

“If you have a team of five stunning employees and two adequate ones, the adequate ones will sap managers’ energy, so they have less time for the top performers, reduce the quality of group discussions, lowering the team’s overall IQ, force others to develop ways to work around them, reducing efficiency, drive staff who seek excellence to quit, and show the team you accept mediocrity, thus multiplying the problem.”

 

“TALENT DENSITY: TALENTED PEOPLE MAKE ONE ANOTHER MORE EFFECTIVE”

 

“I recommend instead focusing first on something much more difficult: getting employees to give candid feedback to the boss. This can be accompanied by boss-to-employee feedback. But it’s when employees begin providing truthful feedback to their leaders that the big benefits of candor really take off.”

 

“Steve Jobs said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

 

“Only say about someone what you will say to their face.”

 

“TELL THE EMPEROR WHEN HE HAS NO CLOTHES…The higher you get in an organization, the less feedback you receive, and the more likely you are to ‘come to work naked’ or make another error that’s obvious to everyone but you.”

 

“My performance would ultimately be judged, not on whether any individual bet failed, but on my overall ability to use those chips to move the business forward. Jack made it clear that at Netflix you don’t lose your job because you make a bet that doesn’t work out. Instead you lose your job for not using your chips to make big things happen or for showing consistently poor judgment over time.”

 

My Take

Surprisingly for a business book, No Rules Rules was a captivating read.  The dynamic, unique culture (which focuses on empowering individual employees) at Netflix is very different from mainstream corporate America, but it works.  This book was a page turner and I highly recommend it.

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Ask Again, Yes

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mary Beth Keane

Genre:   Fiction

390 pages, published May 28, 2019

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Ask Again, Yes is a work of fiction about two neighboring families in a suburban town outside of New York City, the bond between their children, a tragedy that echos over four decades, the daily intimacies of marriage, and the power of forgiveness.

Quotes 

“She’d learned that the beginning of one’s life mattered the most, that life was top-heavy that way.”

“The thing is, Peter, grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing any better than kids do. That’s the truth.”

 

“They’d both learned that a memory is a fact that has been dyed and trimmed and rinsed so many times that it comes out looking almost unrecognizable to anyone else who was in that room or anyone who was standing on the grass beneath that telephone pole.”

 

“We repeat what we don’t repair,”

 

“…and sometimes when he watched her – searching for something in her bag, or peeling an apple with her knuckle guiding the blade – he felt a shiver of panic that he’d almost not met her.”

“There was no predicting where life would go. There was no real way for a person to try something out, see if he liked it – the words he’d chosen when he told his uncle Patsy that he’d gotten into the police academy – because you try it and try it and try it a little longer and next thing it’s who you are.”

 

“This was the great shock of America, winters that would cut the face off a person, summers that were as thick and as soggy as bogs.”

 

“She did remember some things, but those memories were of a poor quality, like someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens.”

 

“And he’d figured out that the fun was often not the thing itself—the party, the keg stand, the naked running into the duck pond—but the endless talking about it after, the reliving and describing, and laughing about it in front of people who wished they’d been there. Used to be he was one of the kids listening, one of the kids who missed everything, but now, since college, since Kate, he was in the stories.”

 

My Take

Mary Beth Keane is a gifted writer and it was a pleasure to read Ask Again, Yes.  She creates such multi-dimensional characters that when the book is over, you feel that you really know these people.  I also found her exploration of the themes of acceptance and forgiveness to be thought provoking and powerful.  I will read her again.

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476. Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Candace Owens

Genre:   Non Fiction, Memoir, Politics, Public Policy

240 pages, published September 15, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Blackout, political activist and social media star Candace Owens tells the story of her personal evolution from left-wing Democrat to freedom loving Republican.  She also expands on her theme that Democrats can only win by keeping blacks in their place on the “Democrat Plantation.”  Owens elucidates the myriad ways that liberal policies and ideals are actually harm African Americans and hinder their ability to rise above poverty, live independent and successful lives, and be an active part of the American Dream.

Quotes 

“My challenge to every American is simple: reject the Left’s victim narrative and do it yourself. Because we will never realize the true potential that this incredible country has to offer—in the land of the free and the home of the brave—if we continue to be shackled by the great myth of government deliverance.”

 

“Leftism is defined as any political philosophy that seeks to infringe upon individual liberties in its demand for a higher moral good.”

 

“The personality complex of a liberal savior is one that fascinates me, as I believe it to be centered on extreme narcissism. I imagine them to be addicted to the feeling of accomplishment that is derived from helping someone inferior to them.”

 

“We so often hear the expression “freedom is not free,” but what exactly does that mean? It means that freedom isn’t a young woman in an open field with her head tilted toward the sun. It’s more likely a young woman sitting at home, studying, even though she’d much rather be out with her friends. It’s a young man, getting accepted into a highly ranked university on the basis of his outstanding academic performance. Freedom is personal responsibility. It’s the sacrifices we make personally so that we may afford our lives certain privileges. Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

 

“World War II. And just a little more than two decades before then marked the start of World War I, battles fought among men whose average age was twenty-four but reached as low as just twelve years. Fast-forward to today and students are demanding safe spaces on college campuses because they view it as a form of torture to be exposed to opposing viewpoints.”

 

“Conservatism then is about sense and survival. Leftism is the plaything of a society with too much time on its hands.”

 

“Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police,” Mac Donald wrote. “In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.”

 

“For those who believe that cop killings are simply due to excessive force, Cesario’s report contradicts that notion as well, revealing that between 90 and 95 percent of civilians who were killed by police officers were violently attacking either the cop or another person when they were killed. And while the media loves to report that blacks are repeatedly gunned down when their cell phone or another item is mistaken for a gun, these incidents are rare.”

 

“Our internal conflict is understandable—why shouldn’t the government, after years of slavery and Jim Crow, not eliminate black debt by subsidizing black housing, and otherwise funding black lives? The answer is simple: because a painkiller cannot eliminate cancer. No short-term fix, no Band-Aid over the deeply infected wound, will ever fix the underlying problems that plague our community.”

 

“It is unfathomable that black parents would continue to put their children’s future at risk by pledging allegiance to abysmal public schools when the option to drastically improve their educational circumstances sits before them. It is even more unfathomable that liberals would ask them to. Is it not ironic that the same people who claim the American workforce is racist and that black Americans have a harder time securing jobs and moving up the corporate ladder would at the same time do all they can to prevent workplace preparedness by advocating against the best available paths for education? It is too often the case that those with the loudest voices against school choice are the very same Democrats who send their own kids to private schools. Their astounding hypocrisy is evidence of a more sinister intention, I believe. Perhaps Democrats simply understand that uneducated black children transform into uneducated adults, and uneducated adults are far more easily controlled by mass propaganda than those who think critically for themselves.”

 

“Johnson lowered poverty rates in the black community, yes, but not by supporting black-owned businesses or addressing racist hiring practices and the racial income gap. Instead, he passed a series of bills that essentially distributed checks to struggling black families, thereby giving them the fish instead of showing them how to fish on their own.”

 

“What is more, when the funds do run dry, blacks, having never learned how the dollars were earned, will be left in the position of once again needing to beg the government for survival. Handouts absent hard work render men weak, and with depleted self-esteem; they stifle the entrepreneurial spirit, by removing our innate senses of drive and aspiration. Poverty and despair become the life of the man who is given a fish but never learns to cast his own line. And though many will sympathize, prosperity will never be won until we become our own lifeline.”

 

“We cannot rely on a hopelessly inefficient and burdensome government to fix what we ourselves refuse to do.”

 

“Johnson’s legislation essentially crystallized a long-term pact between blacks and the Democrat Party that still exists today, lending credence to his alleged statement that he would “have those niggers voting Democrat for the next two hundred years.” There is some uncertainty about whether Johnson actually made that bold claim, but even if he did not, a quote attributed to the president by numerous historians and publications lays bare the actual intention behind his historic civil rights legislation: These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.”

 

“And so, because instead of learning about free markets, capitalism, and entrepreneurship, today’s curriculum overemphasizes the role that others play in our success. Students are being systematically disempowered, trained to resent the success of others. And that creates a self-fulling prophecy of sorts. We can never attain what we resent, just as we will never achieve what we loathe. If money and success become the objects of our loathing and resentment, then we can be certain they will never be within our grasp. Our subconscious mind will reject its opportunity seeking to prevent us from becoming that which we have been conditioned to hate.”

 

My Take

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474. The Yellow House

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Julie Horowitz

Author:   Sarah M. Broom

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Cultural

376 pages, published August 13, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In The Yellow House, writer Sarah M. Broom tells the stories of her large family of twelve children that lived in and out of mother Ivory Mae’s shotgun house in New Orleans East.  Broom starts in the late 1800’s and concludes with life in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Quotes 

“Distance lends perspective, but it can also shade, misinterpret.”

 

“The mythology of New Orleans—that it is always the place for a good time; that its citizens are the happiest people alive, willing to smile, dance, cook, and entertain for you; that it is a progressive city open to whimsy and change—can sometimes suffocate the people who live and suffer under the place’s burden, burying them within layers and layers of signifiers, making it impossible to truly get at what is dysfunctional about the city.”

 

“Dresses you might wear for special occasions she wore every day. In this way she and Joseph were alike. They dressed to be seen, which is how it came to be that they built up a reputation for floor showing, as Uncle Joe calls it. “Yeah, we knew we looked good.” They danced wherever there was a floor—a bar or a ball. The sidewalk, sometimes. “We used to go in clubs and start dancing from the door. For a poor man I used to dress my can off,” he says. “That’s what used to get me in so much trouble and thing with the ladies.” He and his baby sister, Ivory, would swing it out, jitterbugging and carrying on. Ivory was always fun and always light on her feet. She was especially gifted at being led and men generally loved this quality in her.”

 

“Zora Neale Hurston said, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

 

“The house’s disappearance from the landscape was not different from my father’s absence. His was a sudden erasure for my mother and siblings, a prolonged and present absence for me, an intriguing story with an ever-expanding middle that never drew to a close. The house held my father inside of it, preserved; it bore his traces. As long as the house stood, containing these remnants, my father was not yet gone. And then suddenly, he was.”

 

“When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.”

 

“For the longest time, I couldn’t bear to hear his voice. This is such a difficult thing to write, to be that close to someone who you cannot bear to look at, who you are afraid of, who you are worried will hurt you, even inadvertently, especially because you are his family and you will allow him to get away with it.”

 

“That was the story coming out of city hall, the small-print narrative on the full-page advertisements that appeared in glossy local magazines. Except none of these projections would ever come true. New Orleans would not hold steady, not in the least. The city’s population reached its apex in 1960. But no one knew that then.”

 

My Take

Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for non fiction, The Yellow House provides the reader with a unique point of view on New Orleans during the past 40 years and the lives of a large African American family that lived just outside the city in New Orleans East.  While I enjoyed the book, it was a bit meandering and verbose at times.

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