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216. State of Wonder

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Julie Horowitz

Author:  Ann Patchett

Genre:  Fiction, Foreign

353 pages, published June 7, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary

State of Wonder chronicles the journey of Dr. Marina Singh into the insect-infested Amazon jungle in attempt to find out what happened to her longtime professional colleague Anders Eckman.  Anders, who was sent to Brazil by his pharmaceutical company employer to track down Dr. Annick Swenson, is presumed dead after contracting a mysterious illness.  Marina must find Dr. Swenson, who was her professor in medical school, and report on the status Dr. Swenson’s research on a drug that will allow women to maintain lifelong fertility.  Along the way, Marina will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice.

 

Quotes 

“Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”

 

“Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don’t know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it’s not. It’s a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.”

 

“Everyone knows everything eventually.”

 

“No one tells the truth to people they don’t actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.”

 

“In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.”

 

“There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.”

 

“It is said the siesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.”

 

“The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived. That is how one respects indigenous people. If you pay any attention at all you’ll realize that you could never convert them to your way of life anyway. They are an intractable race. Any progress you advance to them will be undone before your back is turned. You might as well come down here to unbend the river. The point, then, is to observe the life they themselves have put in place and learn from it.”

 

“Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one’s partner on both the left and the right.”

“Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand. If you don’t have the starch to stand up in class and admit what you don’t understand, then I don’t have the time to explain it to you. If you don’t have a policy against nonsense you can wind up with a dozen timid little rabbits lined up in the hall outside your office, all waiting to whisper the same imbecilic question in your ear.”

 

My Take

This was my second time reading State of Wonder (by the wonderful novelist Ann Patchett), although this time I listened to the audio version.  With respect to this book, I must say that Gretchen Rubin’s axiom “the best reading is re-reading,” certainly is true.  The voice work by Hope Davis (an actress that I have always liked) brings State of Wonder to life in a way that I didn’t get with the book.  This time around, I particularly enjoyed the character of Dr. Annick Swenson, an extremely self-confident, domineering woman who charts her own path with little regard to the impact on others. She has most of the best lines of the book and it was a treat to once again visit the Amazon jungle in my second reading of State of Wonder.

 

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215. Lincoln in the Bardo

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Author:  George Saunders

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

343 pages, published February 14, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Set in a graveyard during a single night in February 1862 and narrated by a variety of characters stuck in a limbo type existence, Lincoln in the Bardo is a unique literary experience.  It is near the beginning of the Civil War and President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son Willie dies and is buried in a Georgetown cemetery.  A grieving Lincoln returns to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body.  Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory in a graveyard populated by a bizarre set of ghosts.  Within this transitional state, called a bardo in Tibetan tradition, a epic struggle ensures over Willie’s soul.

 

Quotes 

“His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help, or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.”

 

“Strange, isn’t it? To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the products of one’s labors ultimately forgotten?”

 

“Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now we must lose them.”

 

“What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory.”

 

“Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realize how unspeakably beautiful all of this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure, and saw that I was on the bring of squandering a wondrous gift, the gift of being allowed, every day, to wander this vast sensual paradise, this grand marketplace lovingly stocked with every sublime thing.”

 

“When a child is lost there is no end to the self-torment a parent may inflict. When we love, and the object of our love is small, weak, and vulnerable, and has looked to us and us alone for protection; and when such protection, for whatever reason, has failed, what consolation (what justification, what defense) may there possibly be?”

 

“His mind was freshly inclined to sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in the world one must try to remember that all were suffering (non content all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone, and given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.

All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be.

It was the nature of things.

Though on the surface is seemed every person was different, this was not true.

At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end; the many loses we must experience on the way to that end.

We must try to see one another in this way.

As suffering limited beings-

Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.

His sympathy extended to all in this instant, blundering in its strict logic, across all divides.”

 

“Oh, the pathos of it! – haggard, drawn into fixed lines of unutterable sadness, with a look of loneliness, as of a soul whose depth of sorrow and bitterness no human sympathy could ever reach. The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world.”

 

My Take

While Lincoln in the Bardo has received numerous awards (Man Booker Prize (2017), Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction (2018), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Historical Fiction (2017), Waterstones Book of the Year Nominee (2017), Gordon Burn Prize Nominee for Longlist (2017)), I liked it, but did not love it.  First of all, the book is a serious downer with its focus on grief and loss.  George Saunders has some eloquent things to say on these subject and does so in a very inventive and creative manner (hence all of the awards).  However, I found it difficult to really get into this book and didn’t mind at all when I finished.

 

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211. The Little Paris Bookshop

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Author:  Nina George

Genre:  Fiction, Romance, Foreign

392 pages, published June 23, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In The Little Paris Bookshop, we hear the story of Monsieur Jean  Perdu who operates an unusual bookstore on floating barge on the Seine River in Paris.  Perdu, who calls himself a literary apothecary, has the uncanny knack of recommending precisely the right book for his varied clientele. The only person he can’t seem to heal through literature is himself.  After almost 20 years, he’s still haunted by heartbreak.  Manon, his one true love, left him with only a letter, which he has never opened.  When he finally does read it, he pulls up his anchor and begins an adventure of self-discovery and a quest to heal his broken heart.

Quotes 

“Books are more than doctors, of course. Some novels are loving, lifelong companions; some give you a clip around the ear; others are friends who wrap you in warm towels when you’ve got those autumn blues. And some…well, some are pink candy floss that tingles in your brain for three seconds and leaves a blissful voice. Like a short, torrid love affair.”

 

“Reading—an endless journey; a long, indeed never-ending journey that made one more temperate as well as more loving and kind.”

 

“Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper.”

 

“We are loved if we love, another truth we always seem to forget. …Loving requires so much courage and so little expectation.”

 

“We cannot decide to love. We cannot compel anyone to love us. There’s no secret recipe, only love itself. And we are at its mercy–there’s nothing we can do.”

 

“All the love, all the dead, all the people we’ve known. They are the rivers that feed our sea of souls. If we refuse to remember them, that sea will dry up too.”

 

“I like being alive, even if it’s occasionally a real struggle and fairly pointless in the grand scheme of things.”

 

“Kästner was one reason I called my book barge the Literary Apothecary,” said Perdu. “I wanted to treat feelings that are not recognized as afflictions and are never diagnosed by doctors. All those little feelings and emotions no therapist is interested in, because they are apparently too minor and intangible. The feeling that washes over you when another summer nears its end. Or when you recognize that you haven’t got your whole life left to find out where you belong. Or the slight sense of grief when a friendship doesn’t develop as you thought, and you have to continue your search for a lifelong companion. Or those birthday morning blues. Nostalgia for the air of your childhood. Things like that.”

 

“Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess. She lets nothing disrupt her rule. She smothers one desire after another: the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love. She stops us from living as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do.”

 

“We are immortal in the dreams of our loved ones. And our dead live on after their deaths in our dreams.”

 

“You only really get to know your husband when he walks out on you.”

 

“Saudade”: a yearning for one’s childhood, when the days would merge into one another and the passing of time was of no consequence. It is the sense of being loved in a way that will never come again. It is a unique experience of abandon. It is everything that words cannot capture.”

 

“All of us preserve time. We preserve the old versions of the people who have left us. And under our skin, under the layer of wrinkles and experience and laughter, we, too, are old versions of ourselves. Directly below the surface, we are our former selves: the former child, the former lover, the former daughter.”

 

“We turn peculiar when we don’t have anyone left to love.”

 

“Some fathers cannot love their children. They find them annoying. Or uninteresting. Or unsettling. They’re irritated by their children because they’ve turned out differently than they had expected. They’re irritated because the children were the wife’s wish to patch up the marriage when there was nothing left to patch up, her means of forcing a loving marriage where there was no love. And such fathers take it out on the children. Whatever they do, their fathers will be nasty and mean to them.” “Please stop.” “And the children, the delicate, little, yearning children,” Perdu continued more softly, because he was terribly moved by Max’s inner turmoil, “do everything they can to be loved. Everything. They think that it must somehow be their fault that their father cannot love them. But Max,” and here Perdu lifted Jordan’s chin, “it has nothing to do with them.”

 

“…having a child is like casting off your own childhood forever. It’s as if it’s only then that you really grasp what it means to be a man. You’re scared too that all your weaknesses will be laid bare, because fatherhood demands more than you can give…. I always felt I had to earn your love, because I loved you so, so much.”

 

“His father would presumably have signed up without hesitation to the three things that made you really “happy” according to Cuneo’s worldview. One: eat well. No junk food, because it only makes you unhappy, lazy and fat. Two: sleep through the night (thanks to more exercise, less alcohol and positive thoughts). Three: spend time with people who are friendly and seek to understand you in their own particular way. Four: have more sex—but that was Samy’s addition, and Perdu saw no real reason to tell his father that one.”

 

“Jeanno, women can love so much more intelligently then us men! They never love a man for his body, even if they can enjoy that too —- and how.” Joaquin sighed with pleasure. “But women love you for your character, your strength, your intelligence. Or because you can protect a child. Because you’re a good person, you’re honorable and dignified. They never love you as stupidly as men love women. Not because you’ve got especially beautiful calves or look so good in a suit that their business partners look on jealously when they introduce you. Such women do exist, but only as a cautionary example to others.”

 

My Take

While I enjoyed reading The Little Paris Bookshop (the name is a bit of a misnomer; it should have been titled the Literary Apothecary), it started to drag a bit at the end.  However, author Nina George has some great insights about reading, love and human nature which ultimately made it a worthwhile read.  I also enjoyed the adventure of traveling on a literary barge down the Seine outside of Paris.

 

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207. Men Without Women

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Author:   Haruki Murakami

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Genre:  Fiction, Short Stories, Foreign

240 pages, published May 9, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Men Without Women is a collection of short stories from Japanese author Haruki Murakami.  All of the stories take place in Japan and, as the title instructs, all have a theme of men without women.

 

Quotes 

“Once you’ve become Men Without Women loneliness seeps deep down inside your body, like a red-wine stain on a pastel carpet.”

 

“Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.”

 

“There were two types of drinkers:  those who drank to enhance their personalities, and those who sought to take something away.”

 

“Here’s what hurts the most,” Kafuku said. “I didn’t truly understand her–or at least some crucial part of her. And it may well end that way now that she’s dead and gone. Like a small, locked safe lying at the bottom of the ocean. It hurts a lot.”  Tatsuki thought for a moment before speaking.  “But Mr. Kafuku, can any of us ever perfectly understand another person? However much we may love them?”

 

“But he doubted the dead could think or feel anything. In his opinion, that was ones of the great things about dying.”

 

My Take

While I enjoyed a few of the stories in Men Without Women, overall the book did not do it for me.  It was a bit of a slog to finish it (never a good sign), especially as the quality level of the stories declined precipitously towards the end of the book.  More than once, I wondered what point the author was trying to make.  This will probably be my only experience with Haruki Murakami.

 

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206. The Alice Network

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Kate Quinn

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II

520 pages, published June 6, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Alice Network tells two parallel stories.  The first takes place in 1947 and focuses on college girl and American Charlie St. Clair who is pregnant, unmarried, and at a crossroads in her life.  She travels to England to enlist the help of the grizzled and standoffish former English spy Eve Gardiner in a desperate bid to find her cousin Rose who disappeared during World War II.  Also along for the ride is Eve’s assistant Finn, a handsome, and magnetic Scottish ex-con who Charlie finds her falling for.  The second story spotlights Eve’s time during World War I when she was part of the “Alice Network,” a group of female spies stationed primarily in France.  We follow the trio’s journey as they uncover the truth about Rose and Eve’s past during both of the World Wars and come to terms with themselves and each other.

 

Quotes 

“What did it matter if something scared you, when it simply had to be done?”

 

‘To tell the truth, much of this special work we do is quite boring. I think that’s why women are good as it. Our lives are already boring. We jump an Uncle Edward’s offer because we can’t stand the thought of working in a file room anymore, or teaching a class full of runny-nosed children their letters. Then we discover this job is deadly dull as well, but at least there’s the enlivening thought that someone might put a Luger to the back of our necks. It’s still better than shooting ourselves, which we know we’re going to do if we have to type one more letter or pound one more Latin verb into a child’s ivory skull.”

 

“Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage.”

 

“It is facile to condemn the French for giving in to the Nazis too easily when many French citizens would have still borne the horrendous scars of the first occupation, would have clearly remembered having to stand back while German sentries robbed them of everything but the nearly inedible ration bread because the only alternative was to be arrested, beaten, or shot. The French survived not one but two brutal occupations in a span of less than forty years, and deserve more credit for their flinty endurance than they receive.”

 

“You think there are no idiots in the intelligence business, that your superiors are all brilliant men who understand the game? […] This business is rife with idiots. They play with lives and they play badly, and when people like you die as a result, they shrug and as ‘Risks have to be taken in wartime.’ You’d really march yourself into a firing squad for that kind of fool?”

 

My Take

While The Alice Network is an enjoyable read in the spy/World War genre, I found The Nightingale to be a much better book.  The characters fell a bit flat and the plot could have been more intriguing.  Not a bad book by any means.  There is just better material about World War I and II out there.

 

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204. The Girls

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Author:   Emma Cline

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Crime

355 pages, published June 14, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Girls takes place in Northern California during the tumultuous latter part of the 1960s.   Protaganist Evie Boyd, a young teenager at loose ends after her parents’ divorce is whose desperate need for acceptance draws her to a group of girls and their charismatic leader who entice her into their cult.  Things start to unravel and Evie comes close to committing heinous violence, ala Manson Family style.

Quotes 

“That was part of being a girl–you were resigned to whatever feedback you’d get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn’t react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they’d backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.”

 

“Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of live. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like ‘sunset’ and ‘Paris.’ Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus.”

 

“Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed.”

 

“I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to ‘make it home safe.”

 

“At that age, I was, first and foremost, a thing to be judged, and that shifted the power in every interaction onto the other person.”

 

“I waited to be told what was good about me. […] All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”

 

 “I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.”

 

My Take

The Girls is an intriguing, but very disturbing, book.  It explores how young teenager Evie Boyd gets sucked into a cult because Suzanne, one of the older members, notices her and gives her attention.  It also shows how easy it is for our innate sense of right and wrong to blur so much that we justify monstrous actions.  As the parent of a sixteen year old girl, my takeaway from this book is to love my daughter unconditionally, be interested in her life and know who her friends are and how she spends her time.

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203. Spoonbenders

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Author:   Daryl Gregory

Genre:  Fiction, Humor

416 pages, published June 27, 2017

Reading Format:  Audiobook

Summary

Spoonbenders tells the story of the Telemachus family.  Teddy Telemachus is a charming con man with a gift for sleight of hand and some shady underground associates. In need of money, Teddy tricks his way into a classified government study about telekinesis and its possible role in intelligence gathering. There he meets the lovely Maureen McKinnon, a genuine psychic with enormous power.  The two marry, have three gifted children, and become the Amazing Telemachus Family, performing astounding feats across the country. Irene is a human lie detector. Frankie can move objects with his mind. And Buddy, the youngest, can see the future.  Decades later, the Telemachuses are not so amazing. Irene is a single mom ability always discern whether someone is telling the truth makes it hard to hold down a job, let alone have a relationship. Frankie’s in serious debt to his dad’s old mob associates.  Buddy has completely withdrawn into himself and inexplicably begun digging a hole in the backyard.  Irene’s son Matty has just had his first out-of-body experience.  The problems are resolved with some twists, turns, affection and humor.

 

Quotes 

“The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by.  How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest? To even make it into the finals? Never mind that memory rigged the game, airbrushed the flaws from its contestants, while the present had to shuffle into the spotlight unaided, all pockmarked with mundanities and baggy with annoyances.”

 

“Then they were off again, across the unbroken sprawl of Chicagoland, a single city made up of interlocking strip malls, decorated at random intervals by WELCOME TO signs with defiantly rural names—River Forest, Forest Glen, Glenview—and enough dales and groves and elms and oaks to populate Middle Earth. The flatlanders had been especially determined to tag every bump of land with a “Heights” or “Ridge.” Pity the poor hobbit trying to find anything to climb in the town of Mount Prospect.”

 

“They piled into Irene’s Festiva, a car that won the award for most ironic distance between name and driving experience.”

 

“Smocks were the official uniform of those hanging on to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder; a parachute that would never open.”

 

“Belief that one was hard to fool was the one quality shared by all suckers.”

 

“Broke up. With Led, her almost husband and with other boyfriends, the phrase felt right; she broke them off from her, let them fall away like the spent stage of an Apollo rocket. She was stronger without them and never looked back.”

 

“Duty eats free will for breakfast.”

 

“Everything he knows about the whirlpool of past and future tells him that the universe does not owe you anything, and even if it did, it would never pay up.”

 

“I can’t believe this is allowed by state law. You can’t just put a pile of shaved beef—” “Italian beef,” she said. “Italian beef on top of a sausage—” “Italian sausage.” “Right, and then they just let you eat it?” “In Chicago,” she said, “meat is a condiment.”

 

“You know why I’m raising you kids to be Cubs fans?” Buddy shakes his head. “Any mook can be a fan of a winning team,” Dad says. “It takes character to root for the doomed. You show up, you watch your boys take their swings, and you watch ’em go down in flames—every damn day. You think Jack Brickhouse is an optimist? No-siree. He may sound happy, but he’s dying inside. There’s no seat in Wrigley Field for a God damn Pollyanna. You root-root-root for the home team, and they lose anyway. It teaches you how the world works, kid. Sure, start every spring with your hopes and dreams, but in the universe in which we live, you will be mathematically eliminated by Labor Day. Count on it.”

 

“The thing about skeletons was, you never knew how much space they were taking up in the closet until you got rid of them.”

 

“She’d discovered a fact of modern life by standing at a cash register for hours: mindless work could nevertheless fill up your mind, like radio static. If she stayed busy—pushing canned goods down the chute with her left hand while busily ten-keying the prices with her right, making small talk, sorting cash—then she didn’t have to think about what day it was, what time certain flights landed, or how she was going to die alone.”

 

“He lit the cigarette and inhaled gratefully.

“You want one?”

“No thanks. Had a touch of the cancer a few years ago.”

“What kind?”

“Prostate.”

“I’m not asking you to smoke it in your ass.”

 

My Take

I found Spoonbenders to be a very enjoyable audiobook.  Author Daryl Gregory has a great writing style and has created a rag tag family, some with psychic powers and some without, of eccentrics.  Their ups and downs and quests for love and acceptance hold your attention in this pleasant and humorous diversion.

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201. Career of Evil

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Robert Galbraith (pseudonym for J.K. Rowling)

Genre:  Fiction, Crime, Thriller, Suspense

492 pages, published October 20, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Career of Evil is the third book in the Cormoran Strike crime thriller series, written by J.K. Rowling under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.  Private Detective Strike returns with his assistant Robin Ellacott, in a mystery based around soldiers returning from war.  When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin Ellacott, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman’s severed leg.  Strike surmises that there are four people from his past who he thinks could be responsible.  With the police focusing on the one suspect Strike does not think is the perpetrator, he and Robin take matters into their own hands, and delve into the dark and twisted worlds of the other three men.

 

Quotes 

“The story, like all the best stories, split like an amoeba, forming an endless series of new stories and opinion pieces and speculative articles, each spawning its own counter chorus.”

 

“Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know. How many times had he and Charlotte split? How many times had their relationship fallen to pieces, and how many times had they tried to reassemble the wreckage? There had been more cracks than substance by the end: they had lived in a spider’s web of fault lines, held together by hope, pain and delusion.”

 

“You could find beauty nearly anywhere if you stopped to look for it, but the battle to get through the days made it easy to forget that this totally cost-free luxury existed.”

 

“He possessed a finely honed sense for the strange and the wicked. He had seen things all through his childhood that other people preferred to imagine happened only in films.”

 

“Nobody who had not lived there would ever understand that London was a country unto itself. They might resent it for the fact that it held more power and money than any other British city, but they could not understand that poverty carried its own flavour there, where everything cost more, where the relentless distinctions between those who had succeeded and those who had not were constantly, painfully visible.”

 

“Being sworn at by random people was the price you paid for living in London.”

 

“Hell’s built on regret.”

 

“This, he thought, was how women roped you in. They added you to lists and forced you to confirm and commit. They impressed upon you that if you didn’t show up a plate of hot food would go begging, a gold-backed chair would remain unoccupied, a cardboard place name would sit shamefully upon a table, announcing your rudeness to the world.”

 

“Strike knew how deeply ingrained was the belief that the evil conceal their dangerous predilections for violence and domination. When they wear them like bangles for all to see, the gullible populace laughs, calls it a pose, or finds it strangely attractive.”

 

“Those who did not know the ocean well forgot its solidity, its brutality.”

 

My Take

Career of Evil is the third book in J.K. Rowling’s series based on Detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott.  I had previously enjoyed The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm, mostly because of the character development and relationship of Strike and Robin, rather than the central crime/mystery.  I found the same to be true with Career of Evil, although I found it to be a slightly lesser book than the first two installments.  However, I still recommend it and plan on reading the fourth book in the series when it is published.

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200. The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Marianne Boeke

Author:   Douglas Adams

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Humor

193 pages, published June 23, 1997

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Right before the Earth is to be destroyed to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.  Together, Arthur and Ford journey through space aided by a galaxyful of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed, ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian (formerly Tricia McMillan), Zaphod’s girlfriend, whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; and Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he’s bought over the years.

 

Quotes 

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

 

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

 

“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

 

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”

 

“A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”

 

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

 

“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”

 

“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”

 

“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”

“Why, what did she tell you?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”

 

“For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.”

 

“So this is it,” said Arthur, “We are going to die.”

“Yes,” said Ford, “except… no! Wait a minute!” He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur’s line of vision. “What’s this switch?” he cried.

“What? Where?” cried Arthur, twisting round.

“No, I was only fooling,” said Ford, “we are going to die after all.”

 

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

 

My Take

While preparing the summary for this book, I was reminded of the reasons that it didn’t really do it for me (it seemed better suited for the geeky teenage boy cohort).  However, while pulling out some quotes (which, more often than not, were very clever), I found myself liking the book a bit better.  What can I say, a mixed bag.

 

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198. The Child in Time

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Ian McEwan

Genre:  Fiction

263 pages, published November 2, 1999

Reading Format:  E-Book

 

Summary

Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children’s books, must deal with the unthinkable when his only child, three-year-old Kate, is snatched from him in a supermarket. The tragedy breaks up his marriage to Julie and leaves Stephen bereft.  Stephen and Julie struggle to deal with their horrific loss and grasp at an opportunity to continue to live.

 

Quotes 

“For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?”

 

“It was not always the case that a large minority comprising the weakest members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of work and of many constraints on their behaviour and were able to devote much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not a natural occurrence. There was a time when children were treated like small adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource.”

 

“Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.”

 

“…children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.”

 

My Take

While I am a big fan of Ian McEwan (having enjoyed Atonement, The Children Act, Saturday, Amsterdam, Nutshell and Sweet Tooth), I am not a big fan of The Child in Time.  This book took me longer to finish than any other book that I have read during my quest.  I found it to be a slog and only finished it because I wanted the reading credit.  While there are many others who love this book, I suggest you try Atonement, Saturday or Nutshell for some great McEwan reading.

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