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154. The Bookstore

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Debra Meyler

Genre:  Fiction

343 pages, published August 20, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Bookstore tells the story of Esme Garland, a young, impressionable and idealistic British woman who studying art history at Columbia University in New York.  Shortly after arriving in the States, Esme starts dating Mitchell van Leuven, who is everything Esme thinks she wants:  rich, handsome, confident and successful.  Unfortunately, Mitchell is also an arrogant  jerk who dumps Esme before she can tell him that she is pregnant.  Esme tries to go it alone, but Mitchell manages to worm his way back into her life.  We follow Esme on her rollercoaster relationship where the only source of stability in her life is her part-time job at a quirky book store populated by various unique and warm hearted characters.

 

Quotes

“Used books,” as if someone else has had the best of them and you get the sere husk, or the lees, as if a book isn’t the one thing, the one product, that is forever new. There’s no such thing as a used book. Or there’s no such thing as a book if it’s not being used.”

 

“One age might pass over what another prized, and the next age might then revere it”

 

“People write for ego gratification, not money.”

 

“Things didn’t seem promising initially. I arrived like everyone else did, after swearing that I wasn’t a spy or guilty of moral turpitude, and that I hadn’t got any snails. In the first, bewildering minutes outside JFK, on a Friday night in the rain, I stared out at veering yellow cabs, airport staff screaming abuse at cowboy operators, sleek limos nosing along the bedlam, the whole teetering on the brink of chaos. I thought, as many people do, This is impossible. I won’t be able to manage this. But then, we do manage- we manage to get into the city without being murdered, and wake up the next day still alive, and shortly afterwards we are striding down Broadway in the sun.”

 

“I think there is no difference between love and infatuation. If it works out, we call it love; if it doesn’t, we shrug our shoulders and say it was infatuation. It’s a hindsight word.”

 

“We’re high on the adrenaline of feeling, even though we know it’s fleeting and evanescence. And we’re getting worse — checking texts and emails and Facebook every five minutes, always searching for that next hit of feeling, that next morsel of approval.”

 

“Americans have all these classes that mean they just know odd things, so engineers know about William Blake and poets know about analytical geometry. She probably took one on Aristotle and the politics of gender.”

 

“When people say “to father,” they generally mean that one biological act—the act of begetting a child. It is different with the verb “to mother.” “To mother” implies care. A man’s act of fathering can easily be that one seed sown; a woman’s act of mothering can take up all the rest of her life.”

 

My Take

The Bookstore was an okay read, but nothing really special.  I liked it more when I first read it, but thinking back on it two months later (at the time of writing this review), I discover that it hasn’t worn well.  There was nothing unique or intriguing in it and I found it hard to relate to Esme and her choices.

 

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153. The Wish Granter

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   C. J. Redwine

Genre:  Fiction, Young Adult, Fantasy

432 pages, published February 14, 2017

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

 

Summary

The Wish Granter is a romantic, action-packed young adult fantasy novel loosely based on the tale of Rumpelstiltskin.  It centers on the story of Ari Glavan, who along with her brother Thad, are the bastard twins of Súndraille’s king.  Ari must take on the Wish Granter Alistair Teague, an evil fae, to save her brother’s soul.  Thad, who has traded his soul to save his people, sits on the throne of a kingdom whose streets are suddenly overrun with violence he can’t stop.  Growing up on the edges of society, Ari never wanted to be a proper princess and rebels against the royal expectations of her.  In her attempt to best Teague, Ari recruits Sebastian Vaughn, her brother’s new weapons master, to teach her how to fight.  With their souls and the kingdom on the line, it all comes down to an epic battle between Ari and Sebastian against the powerful Wish Granter.

 

Quotes

“Sometimes having courage means the hardest tasks fall onto your shoulders, and those leave the biggest scars.”

 

“There’s a restless, pent-up power in the sea, and you know if it ever decided to stop respecting its boundaries, it could destroy you. But it does respect its boundaries. It stays where it should, so its power feels safe. When you stand here, surrounded by mystery and beauty and power, you feel safe.”

 

“Coin didn’t protect you. It didn’t save you from your secrets. Only absolute power did that.”

  

My Take

I can’t remember how I found this book.  I think I was traveling and was scanning Overdrive for available books.  The Wish Granter was available for check out, had good reviews and I hadn’t read many fantasy books since starting my quest, so I decided to give it a read.  It was fine, but unlike the Twilight and Hunger Games books, I think I am too old for this series.  Maybe if I read while I was a teenager I would have enjoyed it more.  Recommended for the under 15 set.  Adults should find something better.

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152. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Sue Breen

Author:   Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, Romance, World War II

277 pages, published July 29, 2008

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Written as a series of letters, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society tells two stories.  The first takes place in 1946 Britain during the immediate aftermath of World War II.  London is emerging from the shadow of war and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. She finds it in a letter from a man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb.  As Juliet delves into her new subject, the second story of life on the Island of Guernsey, the only part of the UK occupied by the Germans during the war, takes shape and fascinates a curious Juliet.  Juliet is drawn into the eccentric world of this man and his friends and learns about the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which originated as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island.  Juliet begins a correspondence with the society’s members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, she travels to Guernsey, and what she finds will change her forever.

 

Quotes

“That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive – all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”

 

“Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.”

 

“Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.”

 

“I don’t want to be married just to be married. I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with.”

 

“Life goes on.” What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn’t. It’s death that goes on.”

 

“She is one of those ladies who is more beautiful at sixty than she could possibly have been at twenty. (how I hope someone says that about me someday)!”

 

“I kept trying to explain and he kept shouting until I began to cry from frustration. Then he felt remorseful, which was so unlike him and endearing that I almost changed my mind and said yes. But then I imagined a lifetime of having to cry to get him to be kind, and I went back to no again.”

“Have you ever noticed that when your mind is awakened or drawn to someone new, that person’s name suddenly pops up everywhere you go? My friend Sophie calls it coincidence, and Mr. Simpless, my parson friend, calls it Grace. He thinks that if one cares deeply about someone or something new one throws a kind of energy out into the world, and “fruitfulness” is drawn in.”

 

“All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged — after all, what’s good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it’s a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot. ”

 

“Friends, show me a man who hates himself, and I’ll show you a man who hates his neighbors more! He’d have to–you’d not grant anyone else something you can’t have for yourself–no love, no kindness, no respect!”

 

“If there is Predestination, then God is the devil.”

 

My Take

I really loved listening to the audio version of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a delightful book rich with colorful characters, especially protagonist Juliet Ashton.  The authors draw you into Juliet’s world and through her letters we can vicariously experience life on the island of Guernsey during and after World War II and life in post war London.  Juliet is intelligent, dedicated, witty, funny, but most importantly, she is kind hearted.  All of her traits permeate this book, making you wish that she was a real person you could know and befriend.  I recently learned that they are making a movie of this book starring Lily James (who was wonderful as both Cousin Rose on Downton Abbey and as Cinderella in the Disney live action movie version).  I think it was an excellent casting choice and I look forward to seeing the film version of one of my favorite books of the year.

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151. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Bill Bryson

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Travel, Memoir, Humor

397 pages, published December 26, 2006

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

A Walk in the Woods is Bill Bryson’s memoir of his more than 500 miles of hiking the Appalachian Trail or AT as it is often referred to.  The AT stretches from Georgia to Maine and covers some of the most beautiful terrain in America–majestic mountains, silent forests, sparking lakes.  If you want to do a major hike in the U.S., it’s probably the place to go.  Bill Bryson introduces the reader to the history and ecology of the trail and to some of the other characters that he meets along the way.

 

Quotes

“Black bears rarely attack.  But here’s the thing. Sometimes they do.  All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn’t happen often, but – and here is the absolutely salient point – once would be enough.”

 

“I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrero’s book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me — they looked almost comically unagressive, like four guys who had gotten a Frisbee caught up a tree — but their numbers. Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties — I daresay it would even give a merry toot — and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.”

 

“To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.”

 

“You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.”

 

“Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.”

 

“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.”

 

“There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.”

 

“At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.”

 

“I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn’t walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. ‘Because I have a program for the treadmill,’ she explained. ‘It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.’ It hadn’t occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.”

 

“I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.”

 

“Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.”

 

“That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.”

 

“In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition–either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit–that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn’t all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and till fields.”

 

“But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods. I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn’t know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.”

 

My Take

I listened to A Walk in the Woods right before my husband Scot and I left to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain.  Fortunately for me, I was doing the “minimum Camino” of 5 days and 114 kilometers.  We also had a luggage transport service, so all we had to carry were day packs with water, jackets and a few other items.  Our hike was nothing like the grueling experience described by Bill Bryson.  While he didn’t make the case to me for the hard core experience of hiking the AT (I’m happy just doing the minimum Camino), I’m sure that heartier souls will be inspired by Bryson’s vivid descriptions and humor in this very readable book.

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150. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Politics

480 pages, published April 18, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

A very timely book when I read it, Shattered is an insider’s account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Presidency during the 2016 election against Donald Trump.  How could she lose?  To Donald Trump of all people?  Hint:  it wasn’t just the James Comey revelations or Russian meddling.  Shattered takes the reader behind the scenes of a sure thing gone off the rails.  No explanation of defeat of this magnitude can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary’s campaign–the candidate herself.   Political writers Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have reconstructed the key decisions and unseized opportunities, the well-intentioned misfires and the hidden thorns that turned a winnable contest into a devastating loss.  It shows how Hillary herself made victory an uphill battle, how her difficulty articulating a vision irreparably hobbled her impact with voters, and how the campaign failed to internalize the lessons of populist fury from the hard-fought primary against Bernie Sanders.

 

Quotes

“She’d gone on the attack against a better-liked rival whose platform more closely mirrored the values of the party’s base, creating a boomerang effect on her personal standing.”

 

“Hillary’s campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: We’re not allowed to have nice things.”

 

“I don’t understand what’s happening with the country. I can’t get my arms around it,” Hillary confided. Moore just listened. “How do I get answers to this?” Hillary asked. It was a quandary that would plague her throughout the campaign. After nearly a year on the campaign trail, and hundreds of stops at diners, coffee shops, and high school gymnasiums and just as many roundtables with young professionals and millworkers, Hillary still couldn’t figure out why Americans were so angry or how she could bring the country together.”

 

“Running like an incumbent from the outset, Hillary had geared her whole campaign toward depriving any other Democrat of the institutional support necessary to mount a challenge, from donors to superdelegates. She wanted other Democrats to be afraid to run against her, or to support any would-be rivals.”

 

“But the idea burned into her mind as much as anything else was that she had lost because she’d hired people who put their own interests above getting her elected.”

 

“But more important, the scapegoating tone and tenor revealed that the Clintons were either living on another planet or at least having emotional and intellectual difficulty coming to terms with the reality that only Hillary was culpable and only Hillary could turn things around.”

 

“Nor was anyone empowered to both enforce Hillary’s will and tell her when she was wrong without fear of reprisal.”

 

“Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her.”

 

“All of the jockeying might have been all right, but for a root problem that confounded everyone on the campaign and outside it. Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.”

 

“the summer of 2008, years before her private e-mail server became a campaign issue, Hillary learned about the power of digital snooping. At the time, she was conducting an autopsy of her failed bid against Barack Obama, and she wanted an honest accounting of what had gone wrong. So she instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.”

 

“Mook was already operating inside a framework first developed for Hillary by David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s longtime strategist, who had put together a preliminary memo for Hillary in December 2013. As Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, Plouffe had despised Clinton; that he was now advising her was an important signal of just how completely she would co-opt the Democratic establishment even before she began running.”

 

“Hillary’s aides didn’t need to wonder why her economic message wasn’t breaking through. It wasn’t rocket science. She hadn’t told the truth to the public about her e-mails, and she was under federal investigation.”

 

“Running like an incumbent from the outset, Hillary had geared her whole campaign toward depriving any other Democrat of the institutional support necessary to mount a challenge, from donors to superdelegates. She wanted other Democrats to be afraid to run against her, or to support any would-be rivals.”

 

“After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress, ranging from one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery. Bill Clinton had campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office. The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.”

 

“There was a certain duality to Hillary’s vast political empire: while it was true that most of the voices inside and outside the campaign had something valuable to contribute, when taken together, they were cacophonous. Rarely did everyone agree on a particular course of action, and often the counsel Hillary got came with the baggage of the adviser’s agenda in maintaining good relations with the candidate or trying to make a rival look bad.”

 

“She believed her campaign had failed her—not the other way around—and she wanted “to see who was talking to who, who was leaking to who,”

 

“No, Schale explained, Trump’s numbers weren’t just big, they were unreal. In rural Polk County, smack-dab in the center of the state, Hillary would collect 3,000 more votes than Obama did in 2012—but Trump would add more than 25,000 votes to Mitt Romney’s total. In Pasco County, a swath of suburbs north of Tampa–St. Petersburg, Trump outran Romney by 30,000 votes. Pasco was one of the counties Schale was paying special attention to because the Tampa area tended to attract retirees from the Rust Belt—folks whose political leanings reflected those of hometowns in the industrial Midwest.”

 

“In the end, though, this was a winnable race for Hillary. Her own missteps—from setting up a controversial private e-mail server and giving speeches to Goldman Sachs to failing to convince voters that she was with them and turning her eyes away from working-class whites—gave Donald Trump the opportunity he needed to win.”

 

My Take

I have always had a keen interest in politics and having closely followed the twists and turns of the 2016 election, I very much looked forward to reading Shattered.  I was not disappointed.  Given unprecedented insider access to Hillary’s campaign, authors and political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes weave a compelling tale of the unfolding disaster.  While everyone I know was shocked on election night that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton (and it wasn’t even that close), after reading Shattered, this result does not seem all that unlikely.  Trump had his problems, but Hillary had them too.  And apparently hers were bigger.

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149. The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

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

258 pages, published October 25, 1995

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Millionaire Next Door is a compilation of research on the profiles of American millionaires (i.e., U.S. households with net-worths exceeding one million dollars).  The authors compare the behavior of those they call UAWs (Under Accumulators of Wealth) and those who are PAWs (Prodigious Accumulator of Wealth).  A $250,000 per year doctor is an “Under Accumulator of Wealth” if his/her net worth is less than the product of their age and one tenth of his/her realized pretax income.  For example, a 50-year-old doctor earning $250,000 should have about $1.25 million in net worth (50*250,000*10%). If her net worth is lower, she is an “Under Accumulator.”  People are usually UAW’s because they are more focused on consuming their earnings than on saving them.  In comparison, PAW’s accumulate usually well over the product of their age and one tenth of his/her realized pretax income.  Living as a PAW is how most people end up as millionaires.  Most of the millionaire households profiled lived below their means, did not have extravagant lifestyles and spent little on purchases such things as cars, watches, clothing, and other luxury products/services.

 

Quotes

Whatever your income, always live below your means.”

 

“Wealth is not the same as income. If you make a good income each year and spend it all, you are not getting wealthier. You are just living high. Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend.”

 

“I am not impressed with what people own. But I’m impressed with what they achieve. I’m proud to be a physician. Always strive to be the best in your field…. Don’t chase money. If you are the best in your field, money will find you.”

 

“Good health, longevity, happiness, a loving family, self-reliance, fine friends … if you [have] five, you’re a rich man….”

 

“Wealth is more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and, most of all, self-discipline.”

 

“It’s easier to accumulate wealth if you don’t live in a high-status neighborhood.”

 

“If you’re not yet wealthy but want to be someday, never purchase a home that requires a mortgage that is more than twice your household’s total annual realized income.”

 

“Money should never change one’s values…. Making money is only a report card. It’s a way to tell how you’re doing.”

 

“it is very difficult for a married couple to accumulate wealth if one is a spendthrift. A household divided in its financial orientation is unlikely to accumulate significant wealth.”

 

“How can well-educated, high-income people be so naive about money? Because being a well-educated, high-income earner does not automatically translate into financial independence. It takes planning and sacrificing.”

 

“Most people will never become wealthy in one generation if they are married to people who are wasteful. A couple cannot accumulate wealth if one of its members is a hyperconsumer.”

 

“Have you ever noticed those people whom you see jogging day after day? They are the ones who seem not to need to jog. But that’s why they are fit. Those who are wealthy work at staying financially fit. But those who are not financially fit do little to change their status.”

 

“It’s amazing what you can do when you set your mind to it. You’ll be surprised how many sales calls you can make when you have no alternative except to succeed.”

 

“There is an inverse relationship between the time spent purchasing luxury items such as cars and clothes and the time spent planning one’s financial future.”

 

“The median (typical) household in America has a net worth of less than $15,000, excluding home equity. Factor out equity in motor vehicles, furniture, and such, and guess what? More often than not the household has zero financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. How long could the average American household survive economically without a monthly check from an employer?  Perhaps a month or two in most cases. Even those in the top quintile are not really wealthy. Their median household net worth is less than $150,000. Excluding home equity, the median net worth for this group falls to less than $60,000. And what about our senior citizens? Without Social Security benefits, almost one-half of Americans over sixty-five would live in poverty.

 

“America is still the land of opportunity. Over the past thirty years I have consistently found that 80 to 85 percent of millionaires are self-made.”

 

“Interestingly, self-employed people make up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires.”

 

“It is easier to purchase products that denote superiority than to actually be superior in economic achievement.”

 

“Mr. Denzi can teach us all something about accumulating wealth. Begin earning and investing early in your adult life. That will enable you to outpace the wealth accumulation levels of even the so-called gifted kids from your high school class. Remember, wealth is blind.”

 

“They became millionaires by budgeting and controlling expenses, and they maintain their affluent status the same way.”

 

My Take

When I was in my early 20’s, my Dad sat me down with an HP financial calculator and demonstrated to me what he called “the magic of compound interest.”  He showed me that if I started a regular program of saving and investing, I could grow my money to a sizable amount.  His advice clicked with me and after almost 30 years of following that simple formula, along with taking some calculated risks, I can happily report that this simple wealth accumulation system works.

The advice given to me by my father is the same advice supplied in The Millionaire Next Door, a classic in the personal finance world.  The basic message is that it is not what you make, but what you keep that matters.  The authors provide numerous examples of high earning professionals who have little to show financially after a lifetime of work.  On the flip side, more modest earners are able to build up sizeable net worths because they live below their means and regularly invest their savings.  This is an important message, especially to young people just starting out in life.  I encourage parents to give their kids a copy of this book, or at least share some of these basic principles with them.

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148. The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Neil Gaiman

Genre:  Fiction, Fantasy, Horror

181 pages, published June 18, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Ocean at the End of the Lane opens with a middle-aged man returning to his childhood home in Sussex, England to attend a funeral.   Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother.  He hasn’t thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she’d claimed was an ocean) behind the dilapidated old farmhouse, the past comes flooding back.  It is a past too bizarre, frightening, and dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

 

Quotes

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”

 

“Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.”

 

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”

 

“Different people remember things differently, and you’ll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not.”

 

“Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

 

“That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together.”

 

“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters.”

 

“I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid, unshakeably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.”

 

“Nothing’s ever the same,” she said. “Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”

 

“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.”

 

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.”

 

My Take

Nominated and awarded multiple honors in the fantasy genre, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is creates a fantastical parallel world of monsters, one of whom eerily takes on human form, seen through the eyes of young English boy. Reading it, you are never quite sure how much of the book is the boy’s imagination and how much actually happened.  That juxtaposition of fantasy and reality, as well as the skilled pen of author Neil Gaiman, is what makes The Ocean at the End of the Lane an appealing read.

 

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147. The Boston Girl

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Anita Diamant

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction

320 pages, published December 9, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

 

Summary

The Boston Girl is a coming-of-age novel told from the perspective of 85 year old Addie Baum reflecting on her life to her to her twenty-two-year-old granddaughter.  Addie was born in 1900 to Jewish immigrant parents.  Growing up in the North End of Boston, Addie’s intelligence and curiosity take her to a world her parents can’t imagine – a world of short skirts, movies, celebrity culture and new opportunities for women.  Addie wants to finish high school and dreams of going to college.  She wants a career and to find true love.  The book follows her path to achieve all of these things.

 

Quotes

“When a shy person smiles, it’s like the sun coming out.”

 

“It was one of those perfect fall days when the air is cool enough to wake you up but the sun is also kissing your face.”

 

“I’m still embarrassed and mad at myself. But after seventy years, I also feel sorry for the girl I used to be. She was awfully hard on herself.”

 

“You should always be kind to people, Ava. You never know what sorrows they’re carrying around.”

 

“It took me until I was almost forty before I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

 

“When I look at my eighty-five-year-old face in the mirror today, I think, “You’re never going to look better than you do today, honey, so smile.” Whoever said a smile is the best face-lift was one smart woman.”

 

“it’s good to be smart, but kindness is more important.”

 

“Hiking is the same thing as walking, only hotter and twice as far as you want to go. But usually, you’re glad you went.”

 

“Don’t let anyone tell you things aren’t better than they used to be.”

 

“If you treat every question like you’ve never heard it before, your students feel like you respect them and everyone learns a lot more. Including the teacher.”

 

My Take

I had enjoyed The Red Tent, also by Anita Diamant, so I thought I would give The Boston Girl a read (actually a listen).  While not the most engrossing book, it did hold my interest and I was somewhat charmed by Addie Baum, the titular protagonist, and her evolvement from a meek immigrant child into a self actualized modern woman as she journeys through the twentieth century.  An easy and pleasant vacation read.

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146. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Boulder Librarian

Author:   Mary Roach

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Science, Medicine

320 pages, published 2003

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

I learned a lot from reading Stiff about a subject I didn’t even know would be interesting:  the use of the dead for cadavers and as test subjects (think crash test dummies) and the brain dead for organ donation.  For over two thousand years, cadavers have been involved in advancing the cause of science.  In this unique book, Mary Roach explores what happens to our bodies postmortem and it is a fascinating tale.

 

Quotes

 “The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften.  Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you.”

 

“You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.”

 

“One young woman’s tribute describes unwrapping her cadaver’s hands and being brought up short by the realization that the nails were painted pink. “The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish”, she wrote. “Did you choose the color? Did you think that I would see it? I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands. I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs I imagine. When I listen to a heart, I recall holding your heart.”

 

“It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H’s family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon’s scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones’ lives, but not to save a stranger’s life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you’d call her.”

 

“We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget.”

 

“The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan.”

 

“It’s the reason we say “pork” and “beef” instead of “pig” and “cow.” Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.”

 

“Here is the secret to surviving one of these [airplane] crashes: Be male. In a 1970 Civil Aeromedical institute study of three crashes involving emergency evacuations, the most prominent factor influencing survival was gender (followed closely by proximity to exit). Adult males were by far the most likely to get out alive. Why? Presumably because they pushed everyone else out of the way.”

 

“Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone.

They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.”

 

“Here’s the other thing I think about. It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. People who make elaborate requests concerning disposition of their bodies are probably people who have trouble with the concept of not existing. […] I imagine it is a symptom of the fear, the dread, of being gone, of the refusal to accept that you no longer control, or even participate in, anything that happens on earth. I spoke about this with funeral director Kevin McCabe, who believes that decisions concerning the disposition of a body should be mad by the survivors, not the dead. “It’s non of their business what happens to them whey the die,” he said to me. While I wouldn’t go that far, I do understand what he was getting at: that the survivors shouldn’t have to do something they’re uncomfortable with or ethically opposed to. Mourning and moving on are hard enough. Why add to the burden? If someone wants to arrange a balloon launch of the deceased’s ashes into inner space, that’s fine. But if it is burdensome or troubling for any reason, then perhaps they shouldn’t have to.”

 

My Take

I always like learning about new things and I really learned about something new while reading Stiff.  Roach’s book gave me an appreciation for how important the use of human cadavers has been to understanding how the human body and disease work, as well as how to build better transportation options to protect the living.  We all owe a debt to those who came before us and donated their body to science and those who generously signed organ donation cards.

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145. The Case for Christ

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  My Bible Study Group

Author:   Lee Strobel

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Christian, Theology

367 pages, published August 30, 1998

Reading Format:  Hoopla Audio Book

 

Summary

Retracing his own spiritual journey from atheism to faith, Lee Strobel, former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, searches for evidence that Jesus of Nazareth really is the Son of God.   As part of his investigation, he cross-examines a dozen experts with doctorates from schools like Cambridge and Princeton who are recognized authorities in their fields.  Strobel challenges them to defend the reliability of the New Testament and asks for evidence of Jesus’ existence outside the Bible.  He also delves into the question of whether the resurrection was an actual event.

 

Quotes

“Only in a world where faith is difficult can faith exist. I don’t have faith in two plus two equals four or in the noonday sun. Those are beyond question. But Scripture describes God as a hidden God. You have to make an effort of faith to find him. There are clues you can follow. “And if that weren’t so, if there were something more or less than clues, it’s difficult for me to understand how we could really be free to make a choice about him. If we had absolute proof instead of clues, then you could no more deny God than you could deny the sun. If we had no evidence at all, you could never get there. God gives us just enough evidence so that those who want him can have him. Those who want to follow the clues will.”

 

“if the gospels had been identical to each other, word for word, this would have raised charges that the authors had conspired among themselves to coordinate their stories in advance, and that would have cast doubt on them.”

 

“The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system. We’ve all seen what can happen when you merely overthrow an economic system and impose a new order. The whole communist dream was the have a ‘revolutionary man’ followed by the ‘new man.’ Trouble is, they never found the ‘new man.’ They got rid of the oppressors of the peasants, but that didn’t mean the peasants were suddenly free–they were just under a new regime of darkness. In the final analysis, if you want lasting change, you’ve got to transform the hearts of human beings. And that was Jesus’ mission.”

 

“Over and over Lapides would come upon prophecies in the Old Testament–more than four dozen major predictions in all. Isaiah revealed the manner of the Messiah’s birth (of a virgin); Micah pinpointed the place of his birth (Bethlehem); Genesis and Jeremiah specified his ancestry (a descendent of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, from the tribe of Judah, the house of David); the Psalms foretold his betrayal, his accusation by false witnesses, his manner of death (pierced in the hands and feet, although crucifixion hadn’t been invented yet), and his resurrection (he would not decay but would ascend on high)…”

 

“The Jews proposed the ridiculous story that the guards had fallen asleep. Obviously, they were grasping at straws. But the point is this: they started with the assumption that the tomb was vacant! Why? Because they knew it was!”

 

“Contrast that with the depiction of Jesus Christ in the gospels. They talk about someone who actually lived several decades earlier, and they name names—crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Caiaphas was the high priest, and the father of Alexander and Rufus carried his cross, for example. That’s concrete historical stuff. It has nothing in common with stories about what supposedly happened ‘once upon a time.”

 

“The theological truth is based on historical truth. That’s the way the New Testament talks. Look at the sermon of Peter in the second chapter of Acts. He stands up and says, ‘You guys are a witness of these things; they weren’t done in secret.  David’s tomb is still with us, but God has raised Jesus from the dead.  Therefore we proclaim him to be the Son of God.’ “Take away miracles and you take away the Resurrection, and then you’ve got nothing to proclaim.  Paul said that if Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, our faith is futile, it’s useless, it’s empty.”

 

“Back at my motel, I mentally played back my interview with Boyd. I felt the same way he did: If the Jesus of faith is not also the Jesus of history, he’s powerless and he’s meaningless. Unless he’s rooted in reality, unless he established his divinity by rising from the dead, he’s just a feel-good symbol who’s as irrelevant as Santa Claus.”

 

“So if someone were to say he was God, that wouldn’t have made any sense to them and would have been seen as clear-cut blasphemy. And it would have been counterproductive to Jesus in his efforts to get people to listen to his message.”

 

“believe in Jesus on the basis of the historical evidence, but my relationship with Jesus goes way beyond the evidence. I have to put my trust in him and walk with him on a daily basis.”

 

My Take

Reading The Case for Christ helped me meet one of my 2017 resolutions, to read 10 books on Christianity and faith.  While I have had doubts throughout my life about the existence of Jesus and God, I have always been a seeker of both.  I find that my faith is the strongest when I practice it on a regular basis and strive to learn more about Jesus and God.  Strobel’s book tackles the existence questions head on and offers persuasive empirical evidence that not only did Jesus exist, but that he was truly the son of God who was resurrected from the the dead.  I’m not sure the impact this book would have on a hard-core atheist, but for those open to hearing his arguments, Strobel makes a compelling and credible case for the existence of Jesus and God.

 

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