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478. The Nickel Boys

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Carl Moor

Author:   Colson Whitehead

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

213 pages, published July 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Audiobook

Summary

In 1960’s Tallahassee, a young black boy named Elwood Curtis , a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee is unjustly sent to an infamous juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy.  Struggling to survive, naïve and innocent Elwood becomes friends with a fellow Nickel boy named Turner who is street smart, a schemer and a survivor.  Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and ruined the lives of thousands of children.

Quotes 

“We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.”

 

“Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.”

 

“The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cured diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses – sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity – but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.”

 

“He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.”

 

“You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.”

 

“If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That’s how he saw it, how he’d always seen things.”

 

“If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.”

 

“Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.”

 

“It was easy to root for the winners. No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren’t running the course but running deep into their character—down into the cave to return to the light with what they found. By the time they got to Columbus Circle, the TV crews have split, the cone cups of water and Gatorade litter the course like daisies in a pasture, and the silver space blankets twist in the wind. Maybe they had someone waiting for them and maybe they didn’t. Who wouldn’t celebrate that?”

 

“The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change. He never listened, never saw what was plainly in front of him, and now he had been plucked from the world altogether.”

 

“To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one’s humanity.”

 

“Throw us in jail, and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and drag us out onto some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half-dead, and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.”

 

My Take

I had previously read The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, a book about blacks escaping slavery, and found it to be an interesting, but depressing book.  While The Nickel Boys is very similar, a depressing account of the inhumanity suffered by young black man, it is tighter and more engaging.

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477. Notes from a Small Island

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Bill Bryson

Genre:   Non Fiction, Travel, Foreign, Humor, Memoir, Essays

324 pages, published May 28, 1997

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Notes from a Small Island is author Bill Bryson’s take on the two decades that he spent living in the United Kingdom.

Quotes 

“I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, ‘Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!’ Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I’ll tell you that.”

 

“Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad – Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but’, people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays – every bit of it.  What a wondrous place this was – crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? (‘Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.’) What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners’ Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course.  How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state – in short, did nearly everything right – and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things – to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view.  All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.”

 

“The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.”

 

“Is it raining out?’ the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. ‘No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.”

 

“To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one’s mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright”

 

“…it occurred to me, not for the first time, what a remarkably small world Britain is. That is its glory, you see–that it manages at once to be intimate and small scale, and at the same time packed to bursting with incident and interest. I am constantly filled with admiration at this–at the way you can wander through a town like Oxford and in the space of a few hundred yards pass the home of Christopher Wren, the buildings where Halley found his comet and Boyle his first law, the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, the meadow where Lewis Carroll strolled; or how you can stand on Snow’s Hill at Windsor and see, in a single sweep, Windsor Castle, the playing fields of Eton, the churchyard where Gray wrote his “Elegy,” the site where The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed. Can there anywhere on earth be, in such a modest span, a landscape more packed with centuries of busy, productive attainment?”

 

“When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.”

 

“The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course, the British are all aware, in an abstract sort of way, that there is a substantial landmass called Europe nearby and that from time to time it is necessary to go over there to give old Jerry a drubbing or have a holiday in the sun, but it’s not nearby in any meaningful sense in the way that, say, Disney World is.”

 

“It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource.”

 

“I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York—and even New York can’t touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more courteous inhabitants than any other large city in the world.”

 

“One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to ‘bugger off’ to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.”

 

My Take

Like Bryson, I am a committed Anglophile and agree with him that London is the best city on earth.  I enjoyed his insights and witticisms as he recounted the twenty years he spent living in the UK.  Reading this book made me want to plan another trip that special place.

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

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Candace Owens

Genre:   Non Fiction, Memoir, Politics, Public Policy

240 pages, published September 15, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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468. Great Society: A New History

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Nick Reader

Author:   Amity Shlaes

Genre:   Non Fiction, Economics, History, Sociology, Politics

511 pages, published November 6, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Great Society, Amity Shlaes takes a critical look at the genesis, enactment and repercussions of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs.  Shlaes argues that Johnson’s Great Society gave rise to a silent majority of citizens who rejected what they saw as the federal government’s overreach.  Despite trillions in government spending kicked off by LBJ, poverty today remains as difficult to eradicate as ever.

Quotes 

“Reagan told the press that he opposed family assistance: “I believe the government is supposed to promote the general welfare,” Reagan said. “I don’t believe it is supposed to provide it.”

 

My Take

While not as persuasive or powerful a read as The Forgotten Man (Schlaes’ history of the Great Depression), Great Society does provide a lot of food for thought.  The hubris of LBJ, Richard Nixon and other leaders of the 1960’s and 1970’s, both in foreign and domestic policy, led to stagflation, rioting, despair, and national self-doubt.  I hope we never repeat the mistakes of this time period.

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467. The Henna Artist

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Lisa Stock

Author:  Alka Joshi

Genre:   Fiction, Cultural, Foreign

384 pages, published March 3, 2020

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

On the run from an abusive marriage during the 1950’s, 17 year old Lakshmi settles in the vibrant pink city of Jaipur, India.   Self taught, she becomes the city’s most highly requested henna artist and confidante to the wealthy women of the upper class.  When her ex-husband and younger sister show up, Lakshmi’s world is upended as she tries to keep her painstakingly cultivated independent life from falling apart.

Quotes 

“Success was ephemeral—and fluid—as I’d found out the hard way. It came. It went. It changed you from the outside, but not from the inside. Inside, I was still the same girl who dreamed of a destiny greater than she was allowed. Did I really need the house to prove I had skill, talent, ambition, intelligence?”

 

“Just then, my mother’s words echoed in my head: stretch your legs only as far as your bed. I was getting too far ahead of myself.”

 

“Hadn’t Gandhi-ji said, An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind?”

 

“there were three kinds of karma: the accumulated karma from all our past lives; the karma we created in this life; and the karma we stored to ripen in our future lives.”

 

“In India, individual shame did not exist. Humiliation spread, as easily as oil on wax paper, to the entire family, even to distant cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews. The rumormongers made sure of that. Blame lay heavily in my chest. Had I not deserted my marriage, Radha would not have suffered so much, and Maa and Pitaji would not have been so powerless against an entire village.”

 

My Take

In The Henna Artist, author Alka Joshi follows a familiar plot line:  Girl escaping a bad situation makes her way to the big city.  After working hard and keeping focused, she finds success.  All is threatened when her past catches up with her, but she prevails at the end.  Despite its familiarity, I really enjoyed the familiar story with its Indian twist.

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463. The Red Notebook

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Meris Delli-Bovi

Author:  Antoine Laurain

Genre:   Fiction, Romance, Foreign

159 pages, published April 7, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

When Parisian bookseller Laurent Letellier comes across an abandoned handbag on the street there is nothing in it to indicate who it belongs to.  However, there are all sorts of other things in it which bit by bit disclose the identity of the owner, especially a red notebook which contains the owner’s thoughts and musings.  Laurent spends the next week tracking down the mysterious and enigmatic owner of the bag.

Quotes 

“How many things do we feel obliged to do for the sake of it, or for appearances, or because we are trained to do them, but which weigh us down and don’t in fact achieve anything?”

 

”If there was one thing that defined adolescence it was hysterical laughter. You never laughed like that again. In adolescence the brutal realisation that the world and life were completely absurd made you laugh until you couldn’t catch your breath, whereas in later life it would only result in a weary sigh.”

 

That was exactly what Tabucchi was suggesting with his title (“La Nostalgie du Possible”) –that we can pass right by something very important: love, a job, moving to another city or another country. Or another life. ‘Pass by’ and at the same time be ‘so close’ that sometimes, while in that state of melancholy that is akin to hypnosis, we can, in spite of everything, manage to grab little fragments of what might have been. Like catching snatches of a far-off radio frequency. The message is obscure, yet by listening carefully you can still catch snippets of the soundtrack of the life that never was. You hear sentences that were never actually said, you hear footsteps echoing in places you’ve never been to, you can make out the surf on a beach whose sand you have never touched. You hear the laughter and loving words of a woman though nothing ever happened between you. The idea of an affiar with her had crossed your mind. Perhaps she would have liked that –probably, in fact– but nothing every happened. For some unknown reason, we never gave in to the exquisite vertigo that you feel when you move those few centimeters towards the face of the other for the first kiss.”

 

“Can you experience nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened? We talk of ‘regrets’ about the course of our lives, when we are almost certain we have taken the wrong decision; but one can also be enveloped in a sweet and mysterious euphoria, a sort of nostalgia for what might have been.”

 

“There, it was over. How was it so easy to disappear from someone else’s life? Perhaps it was with the same ease that you enter it. A chance meeting, a few words exchanged, and a relationship begins. A chance falling out, a few words exchanged and that same relationship is over.”

 

“A quote from Sacha Guitry came to mind: ‘Watching someone sleep is like reading a letter that is not addressed to you.”

 

“What I really need is a friend just like me; I’m sure I’d be my own best friend.”

 

“Do great things, Laure, be happy, or at least do your best to be. Life is fragile.”

 

“There’s nothing worse than being bored with a boring man.”

 

My Take

The Red Notebook, which is a romance where the protagonists only meet at the end of the story, is a delightful read.  While reading it, I felt as if I was right there with them in the streets, book shops and cafes of Paris.  That alone makes it worth reading.

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460. Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Vivek Murthy

Genre:   Non Fiction, Health, Psychology, Self Improvement, Public Policy

352 pages, published April 28, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Together, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy argues that loneliness is at the root of our current mental health and drug abuse crisis’s.  In response, he advocates social and community connection as a cure for loneliness.

Quotes 

“Like thousands of others, we survived the storm and the many dark days that followed because of the kindness of strangers who brought food, water, and comfort’.”

 

“To be real is to be vulnerable.”

 

“Intimate, or emotional, loneliness is the longing for a close confidante or intimate partner—someone with whom you share a deep mutual bond of affection and trust. Relational, or social, loneliness is the yearning for quality friendships and social companionship and support. Collective loneliness is the hunger for a network or community of people who share your sense of purpose and interests. These three dimensions together reflect the full range of high-quality social connections that humans need in order to thrive. The lack of relationships in any of these dimensions can make us lonely, which helps to explain why we may have a supportive marriage yet still feel lonely for friends and community.”

 

“Solitude, paradoxically, protects against loneliness.”

 

“What often matters is not the quantity or frequency of social contact but the quality of our connections and how we feel about them.”

 

“loneliness overlaps with and is often inherited with anxiety disorders or depression.”

 

“Loneliness is the subjective feeling that you’re lacking the social connections you need. It can feel like being stranded, abandoned, or cut off from the people with whom you belong—even if you’re surrounded by other people. What’s missing when you’re lonely is the feeling of closeness, trust, and the affection of genuine friends, loved ones, and community.”

 

“we need to more deeply appreciate the relationship between loneliness, social connection, and physical and emotional health.”

 

“Most of us are interacting with lonely people all the time, even if we don’t realize it.”

 

“We all need to know that we matter and that we are loved.”

 

“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one. You need one because you are human.”

 

“John Cacioppo helped us understand an additional way loneliness causes mental and physical exhaustion: it takes a toll on the quality of sleep. When we’re profoundly lonely, we tend to sleep lightly and rouse often, just as our ancestors did to prevent being overtaken by wolves or enemies.”

 

“When we become chronically lonely, most of us are inclined to withdraw, whether we mean to or not.”

 

My Take

I enjoyed reading Together and wholeheartedly agree with its message.  As illustrated in real time by the Covid pandemic, human beings are social creatures and we suffer when our opportunities for social interaction are diminished.

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459. Maybe in Another Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:   Taylor Jenkins Reid

Genre:   Fiction, Romance

342 pages, published July 7, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

29 year old Hannah Martin is at a crossroads in her life.  Spending her twenties bouncing from city to city and job to job, she returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to be close to her best friend Gabby.  Shortly after relocating, she meets up with ex-boyfriend Ethan at a bar with friends.  At the end of the evening Hannah has to decide whether to go home with Ethan or not.  At this point, the book follows the two differing paths that her life will take depending on that fateful decision.

Quotes 

“I know there may be universes out there where I made different choices and they led me somewhere else, led me to someone else. And my heart breaks for every single version of me that didn’t end up with you.”

 

“Life is long and full of an infinite number of decisions. I have to think that the small ones don’t matter, that I’ll end up where I need to end up no matter what I do.”

 

“When you sit there and wish things had happened differently, you can’t just wish away the bad stuff. You have to think about all the good stuff you might lose, too. Better just to stay in the now and focus on what you can do better in the future.”

 

“That’s what you do when you want something. You don’t look for reasons why it won’t work. You look for reasons why it will.”

 

“I think I have to believe that life will work out the way it needs to. If everything that happens in the world is just a result of chance and there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, that’s just too chaotic for me to handle. I’d have to go around questioning every decision I’ve ever made, every decision I will ever make. If our fate is determined with every step we take . . . it’s too exhausting. I’d prefer to believe that things happen as they are meant to happen.”

 

“Fate or not, our lives are still the results of our choices.”

 

“It doesn’t matter if we don’t mean to do the things we do. It doesn’t mean if it was an accident or a mistake. It doesn’t even matter if we think this is all up to fate. Because regardless of our destiny, we still have to answer for our actions. We make choices, big and small, every day of our lives, and those choices have consequences.”

 

“I’m just going to do my best and live under the assumption that if there are things in this life that we are supposed to do, if there are people in this world we are supposed to love, we’ll find them. In time. The future is so incredibly unpredictable that trying to plan for it is like studying for a test you’ll never take. I’m OK in this moment.”

 

“If you love someone, if you think you could make them happy for the rest of your life together, then nothing should stop you. You should be prepared to take them as they are and deal with the consequences. Relationships aren’t neat and clean. They’re ugly and messy, and they make almost no sense except to the two people in them. That’s what I think. I think if you truly love someone, you accept the circumstances; you don’t hide behind them.”

 

“You can only forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past once you know you’ll never make them again.”

 

“You don’t need to find the perfect thing all the time. Just find one that works, and go with it.”

 

“It’s very easy to rationalize what you’re doing when you don’t know the faces and the names of the people you might hurt. It’s very easy to choose yourself over someone else when it’s an abstract.”

 

“I don’t believe that being in love absolves you of anything. I no longer believe that all’s fair in love and war. I’d go so far as to say your actions in love are not an exception to who you are. They are, in fact, the very definition of who you are.”

 

My Take

Maybe in Another Life is the first book that I have read by Taylor Jenkins Reid and it was a fun chicklit escape.  In fact, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it and how quickly I sped through it.  It made me think a bit about the role that both chance and choice play in our life.  While not novel, the characters and plot more than hold your interest until the two satisfying conclusions.

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454. The Sympathizer

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Valerie Flores

Author:   Viet Thanh Nguyen

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign

371 pages, published April 7, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Set as the flashback in a coerced confession of a political prisoner, The Sympathizer tells the story of his escape from South Vietnam in the mid-70’s to his life in Los Angeles.  Unnamed, the narrator is the illegitimate child of a French father and a poor Vietnamese mother who, as an adult in exile becomes an undercover communist agent, reporting back to the Viet Cong.  The book tells the story of a life lived between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War.

Quotes 

“Nothing is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.”

 

“We don’t succeed or fail because of fortune or luck. We succeed because we understand the way the world works and what we have to do. We fail because others understand this better than we do.”

 

“While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored.”

 

“Americans on the average do not trust intellectuals, but they are cowed by power and stunned by celebrity.”

 

“It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends.”

 

“Now a guarantee of happiness—that’s a great deal. But a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness? Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket. Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.”

 

“Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.”

 

“I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.”

 

“She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.”

 

“Death would hurt only for a moment, which was not so bad when one considered how much, and for how long, life hurt.”

 

“Americans are a confused people because they can’t admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent.”

 

“Our country itself was cursed, bastardized, partitioned into north and south, and if it could be said of us that we chose division and death in our uncivil war, that was also only partially true. We had not chosen to be debased by the French, to be divided by them into an unholy trinity of north, center, and south, and to be turned over to the great powers of capitalism and communism for a further bisection, then given roles as the clashing armies of a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies.”

 

“Remember that the best medical treatment is a sense of relativism. No matter how badly you might feel, take comfort in knowing theres’s someone who feels much worse.”

 

“The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.”

 

My Take

Winner of the Pulitizer Prize and many other awards, The Sympathizer is a heavily acclaimed book.  While I often find there is an inverse correlation between the amount of honors and reading enjoyment, I did enjoy this book, which is equal parts amusing, horrific, informative and entertaining.  It also provides a unique perspective on the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, both in that country and ours.

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452. Shadow of Night

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:    Deborah Harkness

Genre:   Fiction, Fantasy, Romance

584 pages, published July 10, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Shadow of Night is book two of the All Souls trilogy by Deborah Harkness, an historian of science and medicine.  In this book, we follow witch Diana Bishop and vampire Matthew de Clairmont as they travel back in time to Elizabethan England.  While searching for the Book of Life, they encounter Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Walter Raleigh and Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia.

Quotes 

“Memories were short and history unkind. It was the way of the world.”

 

“Children needed love, a reliable source of comfort, and an adult willing to take responsibility for them.”

 

“With knot of one, the spell’s begun.

With knot of two, the spell be true.

With knot of three, the spell is free.

With knot of four, the power is stored.

With knot of five, the spell with thrive.

With knot of six, this spell I fix.”

 

“fine initium novum,’” Matthew said, gazing upon the land of his father as though he had, at last, come home. “‘In every ending there is a new beginning.”

 

“In every moment, for the rest of my life, I will be choosing you.”

 

“For storms will rage and oceans roar,

When Gabriel stands on sea and shore,

And as he blows his wondrous horn,

Old worlds die and new be born.”

 

“We don’t lock up books in this house,” Philippe said, “only food, ale, and wine. Reading Herodotus or Aquinas seldom leads to bad behavior.”

 

“Change is the only reliable thing in the world.”

 

“Sex and dominance. It’s what modern humans think vampire relationships are all about,” I said. “Their stories are full of crazed alpha-male vampires throwing women over their shoulders before dragging them off for dinner and a date.” “Dinner and a date?” Matthew was aghast. “Do you mean . . . ?” “Uh-huh. You should see what Sarah’s friends in the Madison coven read. Vampire meets girl, vampire bites girl, girl is shocked to find out there really are vampires. The sex, blood, and overprotective behavior all come quickly thereafter. Some of it is pretty explicit.” I paused. “There’s no time for bundling, that’s for sure. I don’t remember much poetry or dancing either.” Matthew swore. “No wonder your aunt wanted to know if I was hungry.” “You really should read this stuff, if only to see what humans think. It’s a public-relations nightmare. Far worse than what witches have to overcome.”

 

“Nightmares are like Master Harriot’s star glass. They are a trick of the light, one that makes something distant seem closer and larger than it really is.” “Oh.” Jack considered Matthew’s response. “So even if I see a monster in my dreams, it cannot reach me?” Matthew nodded. “But I will tell you a secret. A dream is a nightmare in reverse. If you dream of someone you love, that person will seem closer, even if far away.”

 

My Take

While Shadow of Night is the weakest entry in the All Souls Trilogy, it is still a fun romp through Elizabethan England with two very engaging characters.  My biggest complaint about this book (and all the books in the series) is its length and verbosity.  A little editing would go a long way.

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