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338. A Virtuous Woman

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Kaye Gibbons

Genre:  Fiction

167 pages, published November 5, 1997

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

When Jack Stokes met Ruby Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty.  Ruby was the daughter of a Carolina gentry family and was a newly widowed after disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter.  Jack was a skinny tenant farmer with nothing to his name but his pride.  This unlikely pair created a special bond with each other and a remarkable marriage.

Quotes 

“It took me a long time to learn that mistakes aren’t good or bad,

they’re just mistakes, and you clean them up and go on.”

 

“Oh, it’s no crime to want and need somebody to love and to be loved by and to go and do what you need to do to have that, but its certainly a pity when you want it so badly you’ll let it be anybody.”

 

“You have to be so careful. You can’t ever just throw words out. They have to land somewhere.”

 

“And half the job of finding peace is finding understanding. Don’t you believe it to be so?” 

My Take

I read this book a while ago and I must say that it really didn’t stick with me.  It’s not bad, just not great.  Gibbons is a skilled writer, but I just didn’t care that much about the relationship between Ruby and Jack.

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337. Still Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Jojo Moyes

Genre:  Fiction, Romance

469 pages, published October 23, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Still Me is the third installment in the story of Louisa Clark.  Having recovered from the devasting loss of Will Traynor (chronicled in Me Before You) and still in thrall to her new romance with paramedic Sam Fielding (chronicled in After You), Louisa accepts a job to serve as a companion to Agnes, the much younger, new wife of uber wealthy New Yorker Leonard Gopnik.  Louisa tries to have it all, an adventure in New York while holding onto her transatlantic relationship with Sam whom she left behind in Britain.  When she meets Joshua Ryan, a man who reminds her of first love Will Traynor, Louisa must make decisions that will impact the rest of her life.

Quotes 

“I thought about how you’re shaped so much by the people who surround you, and how careful you have to be in choosing them for this exact reason, and then I thought, despite all that, in the end maybe you have to lose them all in order to truly find yourself.”

 

“Books are what teach you about life. Books teach you empathy. But you can’t buy books if you barely got enough to make rent. So that library is a vital resource! You shut a library, Louisa, you don’t just shut down a building, you shut down hope.”

 

“All this nonsense about women having it all. We never could and we never shall. Women always have to make the difficult choices. But there is a great consolation in simply doing something you love.”

 

“You always have one foot in two places. You can never be truly happy because, from the moment you leave, you are two selves, and wherever you are one half of you is always calling to the other.”

 

“If someone likes you, they will stay with you; if they don’t like you enough to stay with you, they aren’t worth being with anyway.”

 

“you can hang on to your hurt out of some misplaced sense of pride, or you can just let go and relish whatever precious time you have.”

 

“You had to seize the day. You had to embrace opportunities as they came. You had to be the kind of person who said yes.” 

My Take

I’m big fan of Jojo Moyes, especially her books featuring the down to earth, very likeable, irreverent Louisa Clark.  While not quite as good as the first two in the series (Me Before You and After You), I still really enjoyed this fun, escapist read.  Perfect for the beach.

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335. The Immortalists

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Chloe Benjamin

Genre:  Fiction

346 pages, published January 9, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Immortalists opens in 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side.  The four adolescent Gold children seek out a mystical woman to hear their fortunes.  When she tells each of them the date when they will die, her prophecy irrevocably defines and alters their lives.   Youngest child Simon, who has the soonest death date in his 20’s and who is coming to terms with his homosexuality, escapes to San Francisco.  Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy.  Eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11.  Bookish Varya becomes a noted longevity researcher.

Quotes 

“She understands, too, the loneliness of parenting, which is the loneliness of memory—to know that she connects a future unknowable to her parents with a past unknowable to her child.”

 

“Most adults claim not to believe in magic, but Klara knows better. Why else would anyone play at permanence–fall in love, have children, buy a house–in the face of all evidence there’s no such thing?”

 

“When Klara plucks a coin from inside someone’s ear or turns a ball into a lemon, she hopes not to deceive but to impart a different kind of knowledge, an expanded sense of possibility. The point is not to negate reality, but to peel back its scrim, revealing reality’s peculiarities and contradictions. The very best magic tricks, the kind Klara wants to perform, do not subtract from reality. They add.”

 

“In New York, he would live for them, but in San Francisco, he could live for himself. And though he does not like to think about it, though he in fact avoids the subject pathologically, he allows himself to think it now: What if the woman on Hester Street is right, and the next few years are his last? The mere thought turns his life a different color; it makes everything feel urgent, glittering, precious.”

 

“But Varya disagreed. She knew that stories did have the power to change things: the past and the future, even the present. She had been an agnostic since graduate school, but if there was one tenant of Judaism with which she agreed, it was this: the power of words. They weaseled under door cracks and through keyholes. They hooked into individuals and wormed through generations.”

 

“Character is fate—that’s what he said. They’re bound up, those two, like brothers and sisters. You wanna know the future?” She points at Varya with her free hand. “Look in the mirror.”

 

“In a way, I see religion as a pinnacle of human achievement. In inventing God, we’ve developed the ability to consider our own straits—and we’ve equipped Him with the kind of handy loopholes that enable us to believe we only have so much control. The truth is that most people enjoy a certain level of impotence. But I think we do have control—so much that it scares us to death. As a species, God might be the greatest gift we’ve ever given ourselves. The gift of sanity.” 

My Take

While I found the main premise of The Immortalists to be fascinating, i.e. how would you act if you knew the date of your death, I felt like the book could have done a bit more with it.  Still, it was well written and with compelling enough characters to keep me interested throughout.

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333. Asymmetry

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:    Frank and Lisanne

Author:   Lisa Halliday

Genre:  Fiction

277 pages, published February 6, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Told in three distinct sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations:  inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, Folly tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer.   The second section, Madness is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. The final section is an NPR interview with Ezra Blazer.

Quotes 

“I once heard a filmmaker say that in order to be truly creative a person must be in possession of four things: irony, melancholy, a sense of competition, and boredom.”

 

“But then even someone who imagines for a living is forever bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes—she can even hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view—but there’s no getting around the fact that she’s always the one holding the mirror. And just because you can’t see yourself in a reflection doesn’t mean no one can.”

“Some of us wage wars. Others write books. The most delusional ones write books. We have very little choice other than to spend our waking hours trying to sort out and make sense of the perennial pandemonium. To forge patterns and proportions where they don’t actually exist. And it is this same urge, this mania to tame and possess—this necessary folly—that sparks and sustains love.”

 

“for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.”

 

“We ride too high on deceptive notions of power and security and control and then when it all comes crashing down on us the low is made deeper by the high. By its precipitousness, but also by the humiliation you feel for having failed to see the plummet coming. . . . Lulled by years of relative peace and prosperity we settle into micromanaging our lives with our fancy technologies and custom interest rates and eleven different kinds of milk, and this leads to a certain inwardness, an unchecked narrowing of perspective, the vague expectation that even if we don’t earn them and nurture them the truly essential amenities will endure forever as they are. We trust that someone else is looking after the civil liberties shop, so we don’t have to. Our military might is unmatched and in any case the madness is at least an ocean away. And then all of a sudden we look up from ordering paper towels online to find ourselves delivered right into the madness. And we wonder: How did this happen? What was I doing when this was in the works? Is it too late to think about it now? . . .”

 

“This is because my mind is always turning over this question of how I’m going to feel later, based on what I’m doing now. Later in the day. Later in the week. Later in a life starting to look like a series of activities designed to make me feel good later, but not now. Knowing I’ll feel good later makes me feel good enough now.”

 

“the more time you spend writing things down the less time you spend doing things you don’t want to forget.”

 

“As soon as you are born the sand starts falling and only by demanding to be remembered do you stand a chance of it being upturned again and again.”

 

“The older you get,” he explained, “the more you have to do before you can go to bed. I’m up to a hundred things.”

 

“the music made her more desperate than ever to do, invent, create—to channel all her own energies into the making of something beautiful and unique to herself—but it also made her want to love. To submit to the loving of someone so deeply and well that there could be no question as to whether she were squandering her life, for what could be nobler than dedicating it to the happiness and fulfillment of another?” 

My Take

I wasn’t sure what to make of Asymmetry.  While she is a gifted writer, Halliday has a unique style that takes a little getting used to.  Nevertheless, I still captivated by parts of Asymmetry, especially the first part of the book which chronicles the relationship between a talented, but somewhat aimless young woman and a much older and much more accomplished man.  The second part, which focuses on an Iraqi American detained at Heathrow Airport was much less interesting.  While Asymmetry was not one of my favorites of the year, I would read more from this author.

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329. The Great Alone

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:   Kristin Hannah

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

435 pages, published February 6, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Great Alone takes place in 1974 Alaska when 13 year old Leni Albright moves there with her father, Ernt, an impulsive and unstable former Vietnam POW, and her mother Cora, whose alternating deferral to and taunting of Ernt causes even more trouble for this already troubled family.  The Albrights move to Alaska for yet another “fresh start” and attempt to make a go of it with little in the way of resources or knowledge necessary to survive.  When Ernt’s mental state deteriorates and her family begins to fracture, Leni must make difficult decisions in order to survive.

Quotes 

“Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.”

 

“All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.”

 

“You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

 

“Everyone up here had two stories : the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you. No one cared if you had an old car on your deck, let alone a rusted fridge. Any Life that could be imagined could be lived up here.”

 

“A girl was like a kite; without her mother’s strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.”

 

“How will I stop loving him, Mama? Will I …. forget ?

Mama sighed.

Ah. That. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn’t. If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe , a faded version, but he’s part of you now. And you are part of him.”

 

“You have a child, so you know. You are my heart, baby girl. You are everything I did right. And I want you to know I would do it all again, every wonderful terrible second of it. I would do years and years of it again for one minute with you.”

 

“All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.”

 

“They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.”

 

“Leni saw suddenly how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst?”

 

“Did adults just look at the world and see what they wanted to see, think what they wanted to think? Did evidence and experience mean nothing?”

 

“It’s like his back is broken, Mama had said, and you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.” 

My Take

As a big fan of Kristin Hannah, having previously really enjoyed Winter Garden and The Nightingale, I was looking forward to reading The Great Alone.  I liked it, but not nearly as much as her previous books which were more gripping page turners.  The characters and the plot in The Great Alone were not quite as compelling as Hannah’s previous efforts.  Still a good, just not great, read.

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327. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Heather Ringoen

Author:   Frederik Backman

Genre:  Fiction

372 pages, published June 16, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The protagonist of My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is Elsa, a quirky seven year old who is picked on at school and who is learning to adapt to her parents’ divorce.  Elsa’s closest friend and confidante is her 77 year old grandmother, a doctor who was always away traveling to war zones when raising her own daughter (Elsa’s mother) and who has very strong opinions matched by unpredictable actions.  Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother’s stories, in the Land of Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal.  When Elsa’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa’s greatest adventure and begins and she learns to come to terms with her own life.

Quotes 

“People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.”

 

“We want to be loved,’ ” quotes Britt-Marie. “ ‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.’ ”

 

“Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details.”

 

“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”

 

“Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.”

 

“I want someone to remember I existed. I want someone to know I was here.”

 

“Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.”

 

“if you hate the one who hates, you could risk becoming like the one you hate.”

 

“People have to tell their stories, Elsa. Or they suffocate.”

 

“It’s strange how close love and fear live to each other.”

 

“Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups were generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy – space exploration, the UN, vaccines and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the ‘not-a-shit’ side as one can.” 

My Take

As a big fan of Frederik Backman (A Man Called Ove, Beartown, Britt-Marie Was Here), I was looking forward to reading My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry.  While a good read, I would classify it as lesser Backman, in the same vein as Britt-Marie Was Here; interestingly the Britt-Marie character has a relatively large role in Grandmother).  There are interesting characters and ideas, but on the whole it is not a compelling book.

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326. Come With Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Helen Schulman

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction

320 pages, published November 27, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Come With Me is set in modern day Palo Alto.  Amy Reed, a part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up run by Donny, her college roommate’s nineteen-year-old son, and her husband Dan, an unemployed print journalist, are struggling to hold onto their increasingly unaffordable lifestyle, their marriage and their family.  Donny, a genius and a junior at Stanford in his spare time has  developed an algorithm that may allow people access to their “multiverses”—all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously—to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives.   When Amy agrees to be Donny’s guinea pig, she gets a first hand view of what her life would look like if she had made different choices.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Come With Me is an okay read.  I liked parts of it, especially the futuristic passages,  but other parts felt a bit self-indulgent, very much like the main characters Amy and Dan.  The fundamental problem for me was that I did not like and had little interest in this couple, so whether their marriage would survive was ultimately a question I had no interest in finding the answer to.

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322. Find Her

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Lisa Gardner

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Crime

402 pages, published February 9, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Find Her is a crime thriller that tells the story of Flora Dane, a young woman who  was kidnapped while on spring break.  For 472 days, Flora was held captive and did what she needed to do to survive.  Once released, Flora turned into a vigilante avenger.  Hired to find another abducted young woman, Flora finds herself ensnared again with her potential murder or release leading to a taut climax.

Quotes 

“Survivors make it because they learn to adapt. Adaptation is coping. Coping is strength.”

 

“Because it’s one thing to survive. It is much, much harder to truly live.”

 

“There’s no rewind, or erasing, or unmaking. The things that happened, they are you, you are them. You can escape, but you can’t get away. Just the way it is.”

 

“IN A DETECTIVE’S WORLD there was one true blight on society, and it wasn’t the master criminal; after all, superpredators were few and far between. It was the media.”

 

“I don’t know who I am,” I say. “No one does. Everyone spends their lives figuring that out, even people who’ve never been kidnapped.”

 

“You know about trauma bonding, right?” the agent asked abruptly. “Forget kidnapping victims, you see it all the time with battered women. They’re isolated, at the mercy of their dominating spouse, going through intense spells of abject terror followed by even more emotionally draining periods of soul-wrenching apologies. The trauma itself creates a powerful bonding element. The things these two have gone through together, how could anyone else ever understand? It becomes one more thing that makes a woman stay, even after her husband has beat the crap out of her again.” 

My Take

Find Her is a quick, captivating read.  I had previously read Lisa Gardner’s novella The Fourth Man and can definitely recommend Find Her over that short book which was just okay.  In Find Her, Gardner creates a compelling protagonist in Flora and hooks you into Flora’s world and experiences through lots of interesting details on survival and recovery.

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320. The Witch Elm

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lynn McInnes

Author:   Tana French

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Crime

528 pages, published October 9, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The protagonist in The Witch Elm is a modern day Dubliner named Toby, a carefree twenty something with a job at an art gallery, a nice flat and the perfect girlfriend.  Toby’s idyllic life is shattered when he is attacked in his home and left for dead.  During his recovery, he moves into the family home to take care of his Uncle Hugo who is dying of cancer.  While there, a long decomposed body is found inside the hollow of a large wych elm tree on the property.  As  Toby and his family begin to uncover the mystery, layers and layers of duplicity are revealed that has Toby questioning his own sanity.

Quotes 

“But we’re so desperate, aren’t we, to believe that bad luck only happens to people who deserve it.”

 

“The thing is, I suppose,” he said, “that one gets into the habit of being oneself. It takes some great upheaval to crack that shell and force us to discover what else might be underneath.”

 

“I knew straightaway, from his smile, that he wasn’t a doctor; I’d already got the hang of the doctors’ smiles, firm and distancing, expertly calibrated to tell you how much time was left in the conversation.”

 

“Once the fear took hold, I was fucked. I’d never known anything like it could exist: all-consuming, ravenous, a whirling black vortex that sucked me under so completely and mercilessly that it truly felt like I was being devoured alive, bones splintered, marrow sucked.”

 

“I’ve never got the self-flagellating middle-class belief that being poor and having a petty crime habit magically makes you more worthy, more deeply connected to some wellspring of artistic truth, even more real.”

 

“Faye had always been sweet, flaky but sweet, unlikely to ask about your problems but deeply concerned about them if you reminded her they existed.”

 

“The wych elm’s whole crown was gone, only the trunk left, thick stubs of branches poking out obscenely. It should have looked pathetic, but instead it had a new, condensed force: some great malformed creature, musclebound and nameless, huddled in the darkness waiting for a sign.” 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed the many hours of reading that I spent with The Witch Elm and discovered a deep appreciation for the writing talent of Tana French.  Her characters are so multi-dimensional and so thoroughly fleshed out that you feel as if you are living your life right alongside of them.  While the book excels as a character study, there is also a fascinating mystery at its heart that keeps you reading long after it is time to turn off the bedside light.  Highly recommended.

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318. The Kiss Quotient

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Helen Hoang

Genre:  Fiction, Romance

336 pages, published June 5, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Kiss Quotient tells the story of an unlikely romance between Stella Lane, a beautiful Economist with Asperger’s, and Michael Phan, a male escort with a heart of gold and a talent for designing clothes, whom Stella hires to give her lessons in sex.

Quotes 

“I don’t want just a night or a week or a month with you. I want you all the time. I like you better than calculus, and math is the only thing that unites the universe.”

 

“She didn’t know how to be semi-interested in something. She was either indifferent . . . or obsessed.”

 

“Everything about him pleased her. Not just his looks, but his patience and his kindness. He was good. He was an obsession waiting to happen.”

 

“This crusade to fix herself was ending right now. She wasn’t broken. She saw and interacted with the world in a different way, but that was her. She could change her actions, change her words, change her appearance, but she couldn’t change the root of herself. At her core, she would always be autistic. People called it a disorder, but it didn’t feel like one. To her, it was simply the way she was.”

 

“He exhaled sharply, and his brow creased in puzzlement. “You don’t like French kissing?” “It makes me feel like a shark getting its teeth cleaned by pilot fish.” It was weird and far too personal. 

My Take

I downloaded the audio version of The Kiss Quotient after discovering it was a GoodReads award winner for the Romance category.  While there was some romance, it was more like soft core porn and more than a bit embarrassing to listen to if others were around.  A bit cheesy and formulaic, but also enjoyable in parts.

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