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420. Midnight Sun

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Jo Nesbø

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

273 pages, published February 16, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Midnight Sun tells the story of Jon, a hitman for Oslo’s biggest crime lord The Fisherman, who is on the run after he betrays his boss.  Jon flees to a small, isolated town in the mountains of Norway that is so far north the sun never sets.  While seeking sanctuary from a local religious sect, Jon falls in love with Lea, a bereaved mother and her young son, Knut.

However, the Fisherman’s men are closing in.

Quotes 

“I shut my eyes and concentrated on the sun, and on feeling it warm my skin. On pleasure. Hedon. The Greek god. Or idol, as he should probably be called seeing as I was on hallowed ground. It’s pretty arrogant, calling all other gods, apart from the one you’ve come up with, idols. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Every dictator’s command to his subjects, of course. The funny thing was that Christians couldn’t see it themselves. They didn’t see the mechanism, the regenerative, self-fulfilling, self-aggrandising aspect which meant that a superstition like this could survive for two thousand years, and in which the key–salvation–was restricted to those who were fortunate enough to have been born in a space of time which was a merest blink of the eye in human history, and who also happened to live on the only little bit of the planet that ever got to hear the commandment and were able to formulate an opinion about the concise sales pitch (“Paradise?”).”

 

“You couldn’t see anything, you were just getting on with your life, and then one day you could just physically feel that you’d got caught in the gravitational field, and then you were lost, you got sucked into a black hole of hopelessness and infinite despair. And in there everything was the mirror image of the way it was outside. You’d keep asking yourself if there was any reason to have any hope, if there was any good reason not to despair. It was a hole in which you just had to let time run its course, put on a record by another depressed soul, the angry man of jazz, Charles Mingus, and hope you emerged on the other side, like some fucking Alice popping out of her rabbit hole. But according to Finkelstein and the others, that might be exactly what it was like, that there was a sort of mirror-image wonderland on the other side of the black hole. I don’t know, but it strikes me that it’s as good and reliable a religion as any other.”

 

“I felt I was about to say something, that the words were on their way, I just wasn’t quite sure which ones they were going to be. And when they arrived it was as if they had arranged themselves, that I wasn’t in charge of them, yet they were still born of the clearest logic.”

 

“He rubbed his chin. “Then you have to believe that living as a Christian is in itself good. That renunciation, not succumbing to sin, has a value for human beings even in this earthly life. On a similar theme, I’ve read that sportsmen find the pain and effort of training meaningful in itself, even if they never win anything. If heaven didn’t actually exist, then at least we have a good, secure life as Christians, where we work, live happily, accept the possibilities God and nature give us, and look after each other. Do you know what my father—also a preacher—used to say about Læstadianism? That if you only counted the people the movement had saved from alcoholism and broken homes, that alone would justify what we do, even if we were preaching a lie.” He paused for a minute. “But it’s not always like that. Sometimes it costs more than it should to live according to Scripture. The way it did for Lea…The way I, in my delusion, forced Lea to live.” There was a faint tremor in his voice. “It took me many years to realise it, but no one should be forced by their father to live in a marriage like that, with a man they hate, a man who had taken them by force.” He raised his head and looked at the crucifix above us. “Yes, I remain convinced that it was right according to Scripture, but sometimes salvation can have too high a price.”

 

“He designed churches. Because he was good at it, he said, not because he believed in the existence of any gods. It was a way of making a living. But he said he wished he believed in the God they paid him to build churches for. That might have made the job feel more meaningful.”

 

My Take

I had previously read The Snowman by Jo Nesbø and really enjoyed it.  So I thought I would give Midnight Sun a read.  Okay, but not nearly as good.  I recommend skipping it.

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419. Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Scott Adams

Genre:   Nonfiction, Psychology, Self Improvement, Politics

256 pages, published November 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Loserthink is famed Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams take on why people make bad decisions, like letting your ego have too much control, thinking with words instead of reasons, failing to imagine alternative explanations, and making too much of coincidences.

Quotes 

“If bad memories are keeping you from being happy, try crowding out the destructive memories with new and interesting thoughts. Stay busy, in mind and body, and time is on your side.”

 

“There are three important things to know about human beings in order to understand why we do the things we do. Humans use pattern recognition to understand their world. Humans are very bad at pattern recognition. And they don’t know it.”

 

“The best solution to a problem is often unrelated to who is at fault. It is loserthink to believe otherwise.”

 

“If you can’t imagine any other explanation for a set of facts, it might be because you are bad at imagining things.”

 

“If all you know is how many times someone hit a target, it is loserthink to judge how accurate they are. You also need to know how many times they missed.”

 

“Never be yourself if you can make yourself into something better through your conscious actions. You are what you do.”

 

“It is helpful to think of your mind as having limited shelf space. If you fill that space with negative thoughts, it will set your mental filters to negativity and poor health, and there will be no space left for healthy, productive, and uplifting thoughts. You can control your mental shelf space—to a degree—by manipulating your physical surroundings. In the case of pharmaceutical commercials, it means changing the channel so you are not bombarded with unhealthy thoughts that can wreck your mind and body over time. I will pause here to note that science is solidly on my side.  So is nearly every self-help guru.”

  

My Take

During my reading quest, I had previously read Scott Adams’ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big:  Kind of the Story of My Life and Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.  I preferred both of these books to Loserthink.  It’s not a bad book and has some interesting ideas.  It’s just not nearly as good as Adams’ previous efforts.

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418. Honolulu

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Alan Brennert

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

439 pages, published May 24, 2011

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In the book Honolulu, author Alan Brennert tells the story of Jin, a young girl who leaves behind her family in Japanese occupied Korea to journey to Honolulu in 1914 as a picture bride.  We follow Jin’s ups and downs through the decades, from a disastrous first marriage, to living in the red light district, to starting a family and successful business, to finally traveling back to Korea.  Through this character we see the metamorphosis of the Hawaiian islands during the 20th century.

Quotes 

“Hawai’i is not truly the idyllic paradise of popular songs–islands of love and tranquility, where nothing bad ever happens. It was and is a place where people work and struggle, live and die, as they do the world over.”

 

“Quoting an old proverb: “An empty cart rattles loudly.” she said. meaning, One who lacks substance boasts loudest.”

 

“A road need not be paved in gold to find treasures at its end.”

 

“When we are young, we think life will be like a supo: one fabric, one weave, one grand design. But in truth, life turns out to be more like the patchwork cloths-bits and pieces, odds and ends-people, places, things we never expected, never wanted, perhaps.”

 

“Hawai’i has often been called a melting pot, but I think of it more as a ‘mixed plate’—a scoop of rice with gravy, a scoop of macaroni salad, a piece of mahi-mahi, and a side of kimchi. Many different tastes share the plate, but none of them lose their individual flavor, and together they make up a uniquely ‘local’ cuisine. This is also, I believe, what America is at its best—a whole greater than the sum of it’s parts.”

 

“Old Korean adage, “Even jade has flaws.” Or, in other words: Nothing in life is ever perfect.”

 

“Summer in Honolulu brings the sweet smell of mangoes, guava, and passionfruit, ripe for picking; it arbors the streets with the fiery red umbrellas of poincianta trees and decorates the sidewalks with the pink and white puffs of blossoming monkeypods. Cooling trade winds prevail all summer, bringing what the old Hawaiians called makani ‘olu’ ‘olu— “fair wind”.”

 

“She laughed at that, and finally accepted the gift. “Thank you,” she said, bowing, “for your kampana.” This was a Buddhist term that spoke of when “good people’s hearts are moved” to do a compassionate act.

 

“In that panic I convinced myself that this was all my fault; had I not come here under false pretenses, the lie that was my photograph? Did my husband not have the right to be disappointed in me? And I had been callow and stupid to criticize him. I thought of the night a week before when he praised the meal I had cooked and had allowed me to sit and eat with him. He was not a bad man; I was a bad wife. I would have to become a better one, that was all. It was the only way I could walk back into that little bungalow: to embrace the illusion that I could somehow change the situation, that I had some say over it. To admit that I had no say—that was too terrifying to contemplate. And so I sat there on the ground, weaving an illusion from strands of desperation, until at last I got up and started the long walk back to my husband’s house.”

 

“Legend holds that seesaws became popular with girls because on the upswing they were able to catch a glimpse of the world beyond their cloistered walls.”

 

“I liked the fact that the happiest night of my life was followed by a day like any other. It seemed to say that such happiness, so long denied, was now a part of my everyday life.”

 

“Korean clothes, both men’s trousers and women’s skirts, were of one size, with waistbands that could be tightened or loosened as needed. Koreans know that the human body is always changing—so why try to make one’s body fit into some garment of arbitrary size? But Americans seemed quick to bow to the tyranny of a fitted garment—and just as quick to cheat that fit when they could not live up to its restrictions.”

 

My Take

I had previously read Molokai by Alan Brennert and, having enjoyed that story, had high hopes for Honolulu.  I was not disappointed.  Brennert creates characters whom you care about while weaving in historical details.  It was also interesting to read about the evolution of the Hawaiian islands from the perspective of a young Korean woman brought there in the early 20th century as a picture bride.  I also learned a bit about Korean during that same time period when it was occupied by the Japanese.  If you have a trip to Hawaii planned, I encourage you to read this book.

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417. A Town Like Alice

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Noelle Mayne

Author:    Nevil Shute

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

372 pages, published 1950

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

A Town Like Alice follows the story of Jean Paget, a young British woman who spends World War II trying to survive in Malaya as she and a group of women and children are marched around the country by the Japanese.  Back in London after the war, Paget inherits a large sum of money from a distant relative.  She heads back to Malaya to build a well for the village that saved her and then to Australia to search for Joe Harmon, a soldier she met during the war that she mistakenly thought had been killed after stealing chickens for Jean and her fellow refugees.  She eventually finds Joe and helps him build Willstown, a small, desolute town in the Australian outback, into a town like Alice Springs.

Quotes 

“She looked at him in wonder. “Do people think of me like that? I only did what anybody could have done.”  “That’s as it may be,” he replied. “The fact is, that you did it.”

 

“It’s no good going on living in the ashes of a dead happiness.”

 

“it was so beautiful’, he said. ‘the Three Pagodas Pass must be one of the loveliest places in the world. you’ve got this broad valley with the river running down it, and the jungle forest, and the mountains….we used to sit by the river and watch the sun setting behind the mountains, sometimes, and say what a marvelous place it would be to come to for a holiday. However terrible a prison camp may be, it makes a difference if its beautiful.”

 

“You don’t feel any different as you get older. Only, you can’t do so much.”

 

“It was a gambler’s action, but his whole life had probably been made up of gambles; it could hardly be otherwise in the outback.”

 

“Most jobs are interesting when you are learning them,’ I said.”

  

My Take

I really liked this well written, classic book which was first published in 1950.  I appreciated the pluck, common sense and all around goodness of the two main characters, Jean and Joe.  I also really enjoyed seeing how Jean and Joe were able to transform their tiny settlement of Willstown into a burgeoning town by figuring out what the population needed and then methodically providing it.

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416. Do You Mind If I Cancel? (Things That Still Annoy Me)

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Gary Janetti

Genre:   Nonfiction, Humor, Memoir, Essays

159 pages, published October 22, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Do You Mind If I Cancel?  is a humorous memoir of essays by Gary Janetti, a television writer and producer for some of the most popular television comedies of all time.

Quotes 

“Let’s see, what else? Don’t go into debt over clothes. Hug your dogs while you have them. Know that you can skip most anything. You will fall in love eventually. Remember that. Also, the things you like aren’t weird. Don’t worry about being normal. It’s an awful thing to aspire to.”

“You will derive much satisfaction in later life simply by shooting looks at people.”

 

“This is also very important. Never take the first table they offer you in a restaurant. Don’t even start walking with the host until you know where you’re going. “What table were you thinking of giving us?” always lets them know you mean business right off the bat. Never sit by the door, near a waiter station, or across from the bathroom. Always take the seat facing out to the room. If there is a booth available you definitely want that.”

 

“I’d go through the swinging doors into the kitchen, hunch over the trash can and begin shoveling the uneaten food into my mouth as fast as I could. When the door would once again swing open I’d look up, frozen in fear, with half a baked potato sticking out of my mouth and when I’d see it was just another waiter I’d resume my pose over the trash can and continue frantically shoveling it down my throat. Raccoons had more dignity than I did.”

 

My Take

I gave this book a rare 4 ½ stars because there were parts of it that were so funny that I couldn’t stop laughing.  In fact, I laughed so hard that my sides actually hurt.  That is a rare thing and should be rewarded.

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415. Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   John Ortberg

Genre:   Nonfiction, Christian, Theology

208 pages, published April 22, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Soul Keeping is an in depth exploration of the state of your soul and has prescriptions for how to improve it.  By trying to buy your way to happiness and focus on the material concerns of the world, your soul will pay the price.  In this practical and spiritual book, author John Ortberg helps you to discover your soul, which is the most important connection to God.

Quotes 

“You must arrange your days so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God.”

“Many Christians expend so much energy and worry trying not to sin. The goal is not to try to sin less.  In all your efforts to keep from sinning, what are you focusing on? Sin. God wants you to focus on him.  To be with him. “Abide in me.” Just relax and learn to enjoy his presence.  Every day is a collection of moments, 86,400 seconds in a day.  How many of them can you live with God? Start where you are and grow from there. God wants to be with you every moment.”

 

“Being right is actually a very hard burden to be able to carry gracefully and humbly. That’s why nobody likes to sit next to the kid in class who’s right all the time. One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.”

 

“If your soul is healthy, no external circumstance can destroy your life. If your soul is unhealthy, no external circumstance can redeem your life.”

 

“Your soul is what integrates your will (your intentions), your mind (your thoughts and feelings, your values and conscience), and your body (your face, body language, and actions) into a single life. A soul is healthy — well-ordered — when there is harmony between these three entities and God’s intent for all creation. When you are connected with God and other people in life, you have a healthy soul.”

 

“Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

 

“If you ask people who don’t believe in God why they don’t, the number one reason will be suffering. If you ask people who believe in God when they grew most spiritually, the number one answer will be suffering.”

 

“In the Bible, God never gives anyone an easy job. God never comes to Abraham, or Moses, or Esther and says, “I’d like you to do me a favor, but it really shouldn’t take much time. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.” God does not recruit like someone from the PTA. He is always intrusive, demanding, exhausting. He says we should expect that the world will be hard, and that our assignments will be hard.”

 

“The soul integrates the will and mind and body. Sin disintegrates them. In sin, my appetite for lust or anger or superiority dominates my will. My will, which was made to rule my body, becomes enslaved to what my body wants. When I flatter other people, I learn to use my mouth and my face to conceal my true thoughts and intentions. This always requires energy: I am disintegrating my body from my mind. I hate, but I can’t admit it even to myself, so I must distort my perception of reality to rationalize my hatred: I disintegrate my thoughts from the reality. Sin ultimately makes long-term gratitude or friendship or meaning impossible. Sin eventually destroys my capacity even for enjoyment, let alone meaning. It distorts my perceptions, alienates my relationships, inflames my desires, and enslaves my will. This is what it means to lose your soul.”

 

“For the soul to be well, it needs to be with God.”

 

“A very simple way to guard your soul is to ask yourself, “Will this situation block my soul’s connection to God?” As I begin living this question I find how little power the world has over my soul. What if I don’t get a promotion, or my boss doesn’t like me, or I have financial problems, or I have a bad hair day? Yes, these may cause disappointment, but do they have any power over my soul? Can they nudge my soul from its center, which is the very heart of God? When you think about it that way, you realize that external circumstances cannot keep you from being with God. If anything, they draw you closer to him.”

 

“A paradox of the soul is that it is incapable of satisfying itself, but it is also incapable of living without satisfaction. You were made for soul-satisfaction, but you will only ever find it in God. The soul craves to be secure. The soul craves to be loved. The soul craves to be significant, and we find these only in God in a form that can satisfy us. That’s why the psalmist says to God, “Because your love is better than life . . . my soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods.” Soul and appetite and satisfaction are dominant themes in the Bible — the soul craves because it is meant for God. “My soul, find rest in God.”

 

“I was operating on the unspoken assumption that my inner world would be filled with life, peace, and joy once my external world was perfect.”

 

“A soul without a center feels constantly vulnerable to people or circumstances.”

 

“The best place to start doing life with God is in small moments.”

 

“The soul seeks God with its whole being. Because it is desperate to be whole, the soul is God-smitten and God-crazy and God-obsessed. My mind may be obsessed with idols; my will may be enslaved to habits; my body may be consumed with appetites. But my soul will never find rest until it rests in God.”

 

“We will always take the most care of that which we value most deeply.”

 

“The soul was not made to run on empty. But the soul doesn’t come with a gauge. The indicators of soul-fatigue are more subtle: • Things seem to bother you more than they should. Your spouse’s gum-chewing suddenly reveals to you a massive character flaw. • It’s hard to make up your mind about even a simple decision. • Impulses to eat or drink or spend or crave are harder to resist than they otherwise would be. • You are more likely to favor short-term gains in ways that leave you with high long-term costs. Israel ended up worshiping a golden calf simply because they grew tired of having to wait on Moses and God. • Your judgment is suffering. • You have less courage. “Fatigue makes cowards of us all” is a quote so ubiquitious that it has been attributed to General Patton and Vince Lombardi and Shakespeare. The same disciples who fled in fear when Jesus was crucified eventually sacrificed their lives for him. What changed was not their bodies, but their souls.”

 

“Here’s the deal: The more you think you’re entitled to, the less you will be grateful for. The bigger the sense of entitlement, the smaller the sense of gratitude. We wonder why in our world we keep getting more and more and more and keep being less and less and less grateful.”

 

“The “with God” life is not a life of more religious activities or devotions or trying to be good. It is a life of inner peace and contentment for your soul with the maker and manager of the universe. The “without God” life is the opposite. It is death. It will kill your soul.”

 

“Our problem is that this world does not teach us to pay attention to what matters. We circulate résumés that chronicle what we have accomplished, not who we have become. The advertisements we watch, the conversations we hold, the criteria by which we are judged, and the entertainment we consume all inflame our desire to change our situation, while God waits to redeem our souls.”

 

“Despite the rise of the mental health profession, people are becoming increasingly vulnerable to depression. Why? Martin Seligman, a brilliant psychologist with no religious ax to grind, has a theory that it’s because we have replaced church, faith, and community with a tiny little unit that cannot bear the weight of meaning. That’s the self. We’re all about the self. We revolve our lives around ourselves.”

 

“We’re generally quite good at doing something, but we’re really bad at doing nothing.”

 

“Good habits are enormously freeing — we accomplish good things almost on autopilot. One study from Duke University found that more than 40 percent of the actions people take every day aren’t decisions, but habits. Good habits free us, but when sin becomes a habit, our souls lose their freedom.”

 

“The alternative to soul-acceptance is soul-fatigue. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the body. When we stay up too late and rise too early; when we try to fuel ourselves for the day with coffee and a donut in the morning and Red Bull in the afternoon; when we refuse to take the time to exercise and we eat foods that clog our brains and arteries; when we constantly try to guess which line at the grocery store will move faster and which car in which lane at the stoplight will move faster and which parking space is closest to the mall, our bodies grow weary. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the mind. When we are bombarded by information all day at work . . . When multiple screens are always clamoring for our attention . . . When we carry around mental lists of errands not yet done and bills not yet paid and emails not yet replied to . . . When we try to push unpleasant emotions under the surface like holding beach balls under the water at a swimming pool . . . our minds grow weary. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the will. We have so many decisions to make. When we are trying to decide what clothes will create the best possible impression, which foods will bring us the most pleasure, which tasks at work will bring us the most success, which entertainment options will make us the most happy, which people we dare to disappoint, which events we must attend, even what vacation destination will be most enjoyable, the need to make decisions overwhelms us. The sheer length of the menu at Cheesecake Factory oppresses us. Sometimes college students choose double majors, not because they want to study two fields, but simply because they cannot make the decision to say “no” to either one. Our wills grow weary with so many choices.”

 

“I am so wrapped up in the hurt I have received that I do not notice the hurt I inflict.”

 

“When evangelist Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth, died in 2007, she chose to have engraved on her gravestone words that had nothing to do with her remarkable achievements. It had to do with the fact that as long as we are alive, God will be working on us, and then we will be free. She had been driving one day along a highway through a construction site, and there were miles of detours and cautionary signs and machinery and equipment. She finally came to the last one, and this final sign read, “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” That’s what is written over Ruth Graham’s grave: “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” Construction today. Freedom tomorrow.”

 

My Take

I read Soul Keeping as part of my women’s bible study and found it to be one of the best bible study books that I have read in the past 10 years.  Ortberg is a gifted writer and makes a lot of good, thought provoking points.  I also appreciated that he shared a number of personal details, vulnerably opening himself up to the reader.  I came away from reading this book with some valuable takeaways.

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414. This Is How You Lose the Time War

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:   Amal El-Mohtar

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction

209 pages, published July 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

This Is How You Lose the Time War is written from by two authors, Amal-El Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and is told from the perspectives of Red and Blue, two time-traveling agents from warring futures who are working their way through the past.  Red and Blue begin to exchange letters which leads them to fall in love.

Quotes 

“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.  I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”

 

“Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.”

 

“And everyone is alive, somewhere in time.”

 

“But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.  I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.”

 

“Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.”

 

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.”

 

“It’s amazing how much blue there is in the world if you look. You’re different colors of flame. Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.”

 

“Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.”

 

My Take

While there are some beautiful and poetic parts of This Is How You Lose the Time War, I just couldn’t get into this book.  The plot (what there was of one) was difficult to follow and I often didn’t know what was going on.  However, it may just be me.  There are many others who really like this book.

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414. Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson, Valerie Flores

Author:   Adrienne Brodeur

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir

256 pages, published October 15, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Wild Game is an interesting and unique memoir.  Adrienne Brodeur begins her story on a hot July night on Cape Cod when and her mother Malabar woke her at midnight to tell her 14 year old daughter “Ben Souther just kissed me.”  With these words, the magnetic, complicated, larger than life Malabar started a years long affair and dragged Adrienne in as her accomplice and confidante.

Quotes 

“Loneliness is not about how many people you have around. It’s about whether or not you feel connected. Whether or not you’re able to be yourself.”

 

“Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it. For years and years, my job was to pile on sand – fistfuls, shovelfuls, bucketfuls, whatever the moment necessitated – in an effort to keep my mother’s secret buried.”

 

“I know that no one’s story is simple. And no single story tells the whole truth.”

 

“I turned to memory, knowing full well that it is revisionist and that each time we remember something, we alter it slightly, massaging our perspective and layering it with new understanding in order to make meaning in the present.”

 

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. —SøREN KIERKEGAARD”

 

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —ANAïS NIN”

 

“As any magician knows, it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.”

 

“My mother had narrowed her vision and chosen happiness, and I had willingly signed on, both of us ignoring the dangers of the new terrain.”

 

“Blink, and you’ll miss your treasure. Blink again, and you’ll realize that the truth you thought was completely hidden, has materialized some ungainly part of it revealed under new conditions.”

 

“All I knew at that moment was I felt lucky. My mother had chosen me , and, together, we were embarking on a great adventure.”

 

“If there was one truth that I’d learned from all my reading, it was this: Happy endings do not apply to everyone. Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene. This time, that someone was me.”

 

“I knew only what pleased my mother; I didn’t have a moral compass. It would be years before I understood the forces that shaped who she was and who I became and recognized the hurt that we both caused.”

 

“Here was my choice: I could continue down the well-trod path upon which I’d been running for so very long and pass along the inheritance like a baton, as blithely as I did my light hair and fair skin. My daughter could do her best to outrun it…

Or I could slow down, catch my breath, and look mindfully for a new path. There had to be another way and I owed it to my daughter to find it.”

 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Wild Game, a compelling page turning memoir.  Author Adrienne Brodeur tells a fascinating story of the many years she spent since the age of fourteen as her mother’s accomplice in hiding an affair with her stepfather’s best friend.  Brodeur paints a fascinating portrait of her mother Malabar whose unparalleled narcissism almost ruins her daughter’s life.  Highly recommended.

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413. Daisy Jones & The Six

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee

Author:   Taylor Jenkins Reid

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Music

355 pages, published March 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Daisy Jones & The Six is a fictional account of a band whose album Aurora came to define the late seventies rock ‘n’ roll era.   Led by the brooding Billy Dunne and headlined by the adventuresome and reckless Daisy, the band briefly have their moment in the sun but come crashing to earth when internal tensions prove to much to overcome.

Quotes 

“I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else’s muse.

I am not a muse.

I am the somebody.

End of fucking story.”

 

“I used to think soul mates were two of the same. I used to think I was supposed to look for somebody that was like me. I don’t believe in soul mates anymore and I’m not looking for anything. But if I did believe in them, I’d believe your soul mate was somebody who had all the things you didn’t, that needed all the things you had. Not somebody who’s suffering from the same stuff you are.”

 

“She had written something that felt like I could have written it, except I knew I couldn’t have. I wouldn’t have come up with something like that. Which is what we all want from art, isn’t it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you? It’s like they are introducing you to a part of yourself.”

 

“Men often think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people.”

 

“You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end. You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.”

 

“I think you have to have faith in people before they earn it. Otherwise it’s not faith, right?”

 

“You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you’re getting signs about anything and everything.”

 

“Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.”

 

“But knowing you’re good can only take you so far. At some point, you need someone else to see it, too. Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself.”

 

“But loving somebody isn’t perfection and good times and laughing and making love. Love is forgiveness and patience and faith and every once in a while, it’s a gut punch. That’s why it’s a dangerous thing, when you go loving the wrong person. When you love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. You have to be with someone that deserves your faith and you have to be deserving of someone else’s. It’s sacred.”

 

“Passion is…it’s fire. And fire is great, man. But we’re made of water. Water is how we keep living. Water is what we need to survive.”

 

“You can’t control another person. It doesn’t matter how much you love them. You can’t love someone back to health and you can’t hate someone back to health and no matter how right you are about something, it doesn’t mean they will change their mind.”

 

“Love and pride don’t mix.”

 

“But at some point, you have to recognize that you have no control over anybody and you have to step back and be ready to catch them when they fall and that’s all you can do. It feels like throwing yourself to sea. Or, maybe not that. Maybe it’s more like throwing someone you love out to sea and then praying they float on their own, knowing they might well drown and you’ll have to watch.”

 

“I believe you can break me

But I’m saved for the one who saved me

We only look like young stars

Because you can’t see old scars”

 

“It is what I have always loved about music. Not the sounds or the crowds or the good times as much as the words — the emotions, the stories, the truth — that you can let flow right out of your mouth.

 

“I wish someone had told me that love isn’t torture. Because I thought love was this thing that was supposed to tear you in two and leave you heartbroken and make your heart race in the worst way. I thought love was bombs and tears and blood. I did not know that it was supposed to make you lighter, not heavier. I didn’t know it was supposed to take only the kind of work that makes you softer. I thought love was war. I didn’t know it was supposed to… I didn’t know it was supposed to be peace.”

 

“It’s funny. At first, I think you start getting high to dull your emotions, to escape from them. But after a while you realize that the drugs are what are making your life untenable, they are actually what are heightening every emotion you have. It’s making your heartbreak harder, your good times higher. So coming down really does start to feel like rediscovering sanity. And when you rediscover your sanity, it’s only a matter of time before you start to get an inkling of why you wanted to escape it in the first place.”

 

“It scared me that the only thing between this moment of calm and the biggest tragedy of my life was me choosing not to do it.”

 

“I’m not perfect. I’ll never be perfect. I don’t expect anything to be perfect. But things don’t have to be perfect to be strong. So if you’re waiting around, hoping that something’s going to crack, I just… I have to tell you it’s not gonna be me. And I can’t let it be Billy. Which means it’s gonna be you.”

 

“When people asked me for my autograph, I used to write, “Stay Solid, Daisy J.” But when it was a young girl – which wasn’t often but it did happen from time to time – I used to write, “Dream big, little bird. Love, Daisy”

 

“If I’ve given the impression that trust is easy – with your spouse, with your kids, with anybody you care about – if I’ve made it seem like it’s easy to do….then I’ve misspoken. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But you have nothing without it. Nothing meaningful at all. That’s why I chose to do it. Over and over and over. Even when it bit me in the ass. And I will keep choosing it until the day I die”

 

My Take

I really enjoyed Daisy Jones & The Six, especially the audio version which has multiple narrators who do a terrific job bringing this story of a 70’s rock band to vibrant life.  Listening to it, I really felt like I was there as the band went on a wild ride that burned bright but ultimately led to their dissolution.  The book also has a lot of interesting things to say about love, trust, soul mates and the creative process.  Highly recommended.

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412. The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Marina Keegan

Genre:   Nonfiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Essays, Memoir

208 pages, published April 8, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Opposite of Loneliness is a collection of essays written by Marina Keegan , a talented young writer whose title essay captured the world’s attention in 2012.   Tragically, five days after her graduation from Yale, Keegan died in a car crash.  The 22 year old had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker.  The essays and stories included in The Opposite of Loneliness give voice to the struggles young people confront as they try to figure out their place in the world.

Quotes 

“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life.”

 

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over.”

 

“We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.”

 

“We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not loose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

 

“I want enough time to be in love with everything . . .”

 

“I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There’s less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting to involved.”

 

“And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short.”

 

“something about the stillness or my state of mind reminded me of the world’s remarkable capacity to carry on in every place at once.”

 

“We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves.”

 

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating from college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

 

“I will live for love, and the rest will take care of itself.”

 

“I blame the Internet. Its inconsiderate inclusion of everything.Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning.  At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don’t want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO.”

 

“The middle of the universe is tonight, is here, And everything behind is a sunk cost.”

 

My Take

While I enjoyed reading some of the essays in The Opposite of Loneliness, it is really written for a younger generation than me.  Keegan is also a bit uneven.  Some of her work is quite good, but other essays not so much.

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