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365. Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Matt Taibbi

Genre:  Non Fiction, Politics, Public Policy

352 pages, published January 17, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus is a collection of 25 pieces written for Rolling Stone magazine, plus 2 original essays, by correspondent Matt Taibbi.  Taibbi tells the story of the 2016 Presidential election with specific focus on the Republican primary.  He can’t believe that Trump is winning and is even more aghast when Trump actually wins the Presidency.  Taibbi explores how a repeatedly disappointed and disaffected electorate became mad as hell and how the old institutions may no longer be relevant.

Quotes 

“It will go down someday as the greatest reality show ever conceived. The concept is ingenious. Take a combustible mix of the most depraved and filterless half-wits, scam artists and asylum Napoleons America has to offer, give them all piles of money and tell them to run for president. Add Donald Trump. And to give the whole thing a perverse gravitas, make the presidency really at stake. It’s Western civilization’s very own car wreck. Even if you don’t want to watch it, you will. It’s that awesome of a spectacle.”

 

“Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame.”

 

“The final insult to all of this is that when Trump secured the nomination, media companies looked down at their bottom lines and realized that, via the profits they made during his run—Trump is “good for business,” CBS president Les Moonves infamously confessed—they had been made accomplices to the whole affair. —”

“How Giuliani is not Trump’s running mate no one will ever understand. Theirs is the most passionate love story since Beavis and Butthead.”

 

“America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now the stupid wants out of its cage, and Trump is urging it on.”

 

“Even in his books, where he’s allegedly trying to string multiple thoughts together, Trump wanders randomly from impulse to impulse, seemingly without rhyme or reason. He doesn’t think anything through. (He’s brilliantly cast this driving-blind trait as “not being politically correct.”)”

 

“Lots of people have remarked on the irony of this absurd caricature of a spoiled rich kid connecting so well with working-class America. But Trump does have something very much in common with everybody else. He watches TV. That’s his primary experience with reality, and just like most of his voters, he doesn’t realize that it’s a distorted picture.”

 

“He steps to the lectern and does his Mussolini routine, which he’s perfected over the past months. It’s a nodding wave, a grin, a half-sneer, and a little U.S. Open–style applause back in the direction of the audience, his face the whole time a mask of pure self-satisfaction. “This is unbelievable, unbelievable!” he says, staring out at a crowd of about 4,000 whooping New Englanders with snow hats, fleece and beer guts. There’s a snowstorm outside and cars are flying off the road, but it’s a packed house.”

 

“Sixty million people were announcing that they preferred one reality to another. Inherent in this decision was the revolutionary idea that you can choose your own set of facts.”

 

“The Republicans already lost virtually the entire black vote (scoring just 4 percent and 6 percent of black voters the last two elections). Now, by pushing toward the nomination a candidate whose brilliant plan to “make America great again” is to build a giant wall to keep out Mexican rapists, they’re headed the same route with Hispanics. That’s a steep fall for a party that won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote as recently as 2004.”

 

“In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections are about a lot of things, but at the highest level, they’re about money. The people who sponsor election campaigns, who pay the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the candidates’ charter jets and TV ads and 25-piece marching bands, those people have concrete needs. They want tax breaks, federal contracts, regulatory relief, cheap financing, free security for shipping lanes, antitrust waivers and dozens of other things. They mostly don’t care about abortion or gay marriage or school vouchers or any of the social issues the rest of us spend our time arguing about. It’s about money for them, and as far as that goes, the CEO class has had a brilliantly winning electoral strategy for a generation. They donate heavily to both parties, essentially hiring two different sets of politicians to market their needs to the population. The Republicans give them everything that they want, while the Democrats only give them mostly everything. They get everything from the Republicans because you don’t have to make a single concession to a Republican voter. All you have to do to secure a Republican vote is show lots of pictures of gay people kissing or black kids with their pants pulled down or Mexican babies at an emergency room. Then you push forward some dingbat like Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin to reassure everyone that the Republican Party knows who the real Americans are. Call it the “Rove 1-2.” That’s literally all it’s taken to secure decades of Republican votes, a few patriotic words and a little over-the-pants rubbing. Policywise, a typical Republican voter never even asks a politician to go to second base. While we always got free trade agreements and wars and bailouts and mass deregulation of industry and lots of other stuff the donors definitely wanted, we didn’t get Roe v. Wade overturned or prayer in schools or balanced budgets or censorship of movies and video games or any of a dozen other things Republican voters said they wanted.”

 

“Meanwhile the pessimism of Trump’s revolution is intentional, impassioned, ascendant. They placed a huge bet on America’s worst instincts, and won. And the first order of business will be to wipe out a national idea in which they never believed. Welcome to the end of the dream.” 

My Take

Really more of a screed than a book.  However, at times Taibbi has something interesting things to say.  For political junkies only.

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357. The Likeness

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime

466 pages, published May 1, 2009

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Likeness is book two in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series.  It starts six months after the end of In the Woods (book one).  After the events that occurred in the previous book, Detective Cassie Maddox has transferred out of the Dublin Murder Squad with no plans to go back.  She is pulled back in when the victim in a grisly crime scene looks exactly like Cassie and carries ID identifying herself as Alexandra Madison, an alias Cassie once used as an undercover cop. Cassie goes undercover must discover not only who killed this girl, but, more important, who she was.

Quotes 

“There’s a Spanish proverb,” he said, “that’s always fascinated me. “Take what you want and pay for it, says God.'” “I don’t believe in God,” Daniel said, “but that principle seems, to me, to have a divinity of its own; a kind of blazing purity. What could be simpler, or more crucial? You can have anything you want, as long as you accept that there is a price and that you will have to pay it.”

 

“I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack.”

 

“Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.”

 

“Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can’t have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it’s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that’s worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.”

 

“Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It’s because they’re held here so lightly: they haven’t yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever.”

 

“Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world – we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.”

 

“But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.”

 

“It took my breath away, that evening. If you’ve ever dreamed that you walked into your best-loved book or film or TV program, then maybe you’ve got some idea how it felt: things coming alive around you, strange and new and utterly familiar at the same time; the catch in your heartbeat as you move through the rooms that had such a vivid untouchable life in your mind, as your feet actually touch the carpet, as you breathe the air; the odd, secret glow of warmth as these people you’ve been watching for so long, from so far away, open their circle and sweep you into it.”

 

“It was-this always seems to shock people all over again- a happy childhood. For the first few months I spent a lot of time at the bottom of the garden, crying till I threw up and yelling rude words at the neighborhood kids who tried to make friends. But children are pragmatic, they come alive and kicking out of a whole lot worse than orphanhood, and I could only hold out so long against the fact that nothing would bring my parents back and against the thousand vivid things around me, Emma-next-door hanging over the wall and my new bike glinting red in the sunshine and the half-wild kittens in the garden shed, all fidgeting insistently while they waited for me to wake up again and come out to play. I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you’ve lost. ”

 

“The idea was flawed, of course,” he said irritably. “Innately and fatally flawed. It depended on two of the human race’s greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature. Both of which are all well and good in literature, but the purest fantasy outside the covers of a book. Our story should have stopped that night with the cold cocoa, the night we moved in: and they all lived happily ever after, the end. Inconveniently, however, real life demanded that we keep on living.”

 

“That kind of friendship doesn’t just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.”

 

“Look at all the old wars, centuries ago: the king led his men into battle. Always. That was what the ruler was: both on a practical level and on a mystical one, he was the one who stepped forwards to lead his tribe, put his life at stake for them, become the sacrifice for their safety. If he had refused to do that most crucial thing at that most crucial moment, they would have ripped him apart- and rightly so: he would have shown himself to be an impostor, with no right to the throne. The king was the country; how could he possibly expect it go into battle without him? But now… Can you see any modern president or prime minister on the front line, leading his men into the war he’s started? And once that physical and mystical link is broken, once the ruler is no longer willing to be the sacrifice for his people, he becomes not a leader but a leech, forcing others to take his risks while he sits in safety and battens on their losses. War becomes a hideous abstraction, a game for bureaucrats to play on paper; soldiers and civilians become mere pawns, to be sacrificed by the thousand for reasons that have no roots in any reality. As soon as rulers mean nothing, war means nothing; human life means nothing. We’re ruled by venal little usurpers, all of us, and they make meaninglessness everywhere they go.” 

My Take

Having thoroughly enjoyed two previous Tana French books (The Witch Elm and In the Woods), I had high hopes for The Likeness.  It did not disappoint.  French is such a master storyteller and has such affection for her characters that it is impossible not to become completely absorbed in the story.  Some interesting twists, but this book is worth reading for the quality of the writing rather than the puzzle of its central mystery.

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331. Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Fumio Sasaki

Genre:  Non Fiction, Self Improvement

288 pages, published April 11, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Goodbye, Things, author Fumio Sasaki changed his life by reducing his possessions to the bare minimum.  He describes how right away he repeated remarkable benefits.  Without all his “stuff,” Sasaki finally felt true freedom, peace of mind, and appreciation for the present moment.

Quotes 

“Want to know how to make yourself instantly unhappy? Compare yourself with someone else.”

 

“Why do we own so many things when we don’t need them? What is their purpose? I think the answer is quite clear: We’re desperate to convey our own worth, our own value to others. We use objects to tell people just how valuable we are.”

 

“You can avoid buying more things simply by first asking yourself if it’s something that you actually need.”

 

“If it’s not a “hell, yes!” it’s a “no.”

 

“It’s often said that cleaning your house is like polishing yourself. I think that this is a golden rule. It isn’t just dust and dirt that accumulate in our homes. It’s also the shadows of our past selves that let that dust and dirt continue to build. Cleaning the grime is certainly unpleasant, but more than that, it’s the need to face our own past deeds that makes it so tough. But when we have fewer material possessions and cleaning becomes an easy habit, the shadows we now face will be of our daily accomplishments.”

 

“The glory of acquisition starts to dim with use, eventually changing to boredom as the item no longer elicits even a bit of excitement. This is the pattern of everything in our lives. No matter how much we wish for something, over time it becomes a normal part of our lives, and then a tired old item that bores us, even though we did actually get our wish. And we end up being unhappy.”

 

“When given too many choices, people tend to worry that there’s something better out there than what they decided on.”

 

“If you can’t make up your mind about an item, I suggest you go right ahead and discard it.”

 

“We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves. —FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD”

 

“Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have. —RABBI HYMAN SCHACHTEL”

 

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. —STEVE JOBS”

 

“When you’re aware of all the things that you own, you’re not only certain of where they are, you’re also sure about whether you have them or not.”

 

“Ask yourself which of your items would truly be necessary if you were to start with zero belongings. What if everything you owned was stolen? What if you had to move next week? Which items would you take with you? There are probably a lot of things we have sitting around in our homes for no particular reason. Think about starting from scratch, and it will become clear which items are essential.”

 

“a minimalist is a person who knows what is truly essential for him- or herself,”

 

“My feeling is that minimalists are people who know what’s truly necessary for them versus what they may want for the sake of appearance, and they’re not afraid to cut down on everything in the second category.”

 

“The qualities I look for in the things I buy are (1) the item has a minimalist type of shape, and is easy to clean; (2) its color isn’t too loud; (3) I’ll be able to use it for a long time; (4) it has a simple structure; (5) it’s lightweight and compact; and (6) it has multiple uses.”

 

“We can accumulate as much as we like, but without gratitude we’ll only end up being bored with everything we’ve obtained. Conversely, we can achieve true contentment with few possessions, just so long as we treat them with gratitude.”

 

“I’ve heard it said that the secret to a happy marriage is to simply talk a lot with your partner. One study showed that happily married couples talked with each other five more hours per week than couples that aren’t happy. If people are busy taking care of their possessions, quarreling over them, spending time in separate rooms, or watching a lot of TV, they’re naturally going to have less time for conversations.” 

My Take

In  Goodbye, Things, author Fumio Sasaki makes a strong case for the value of minimalism and provides some practical tips for downsizing your belongings to the things that you really use and value.  Much like Outer Order, Inner Calm by my personal guru Gretchin Rubin, Goodbye, Things has inspired me to continue my decluttering efforts and to be even more ruthless with my discards.

 

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325. Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Kay Lynn Hartman

Author:   Dani Shapiro

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

272 pages, published January 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Inheritance, serial memoirist Dani Shapiro writes about her discovery (through an over the counter genetic test that she took on a lark) that the man she thought was her biological father was not.  Shapiro takes the reader with her as she pieces together the hidden story of her own life and discovers new insights about her past and present identity.

Quotes 

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

 

“It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself.”

 

“There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”

 

“Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?”

 

“The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.”

 

“What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens – that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube – formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine – at least not in the physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village – and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life.”

 

“After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: “You can say, “This is impossible, terrible.’ Or you can say, ‘This is beautiful, wonderful.’ You can imagine that you’re in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.” 

My Take

Inheritance is a book that really grew on me and that is in no small part due to the quality of the writing.  When I first started it, I found the author Dani Shapiro to be a bit overwrought in response to discovering that her biological father was a sperm donor.  However, as I got deeper into the book, I was able to relate more to her identity crisis.  I was also able to her speak at a Boulder Book Store author event and found her to be eloquent, empathetic and very moving.

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318. The Kiss Quotient

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Helen Hoang

Genre:  Fiction, Romance

336 pages, published June 5, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

My Take

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

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196. The Boy on the Bridge

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   M.R. Carey

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Young Adult

392 pages, published May 2, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Boy on the Bridge is the second book in the Hungry Plague series (a prequel to the first which was The Girl With All the Gifts) and takes place in a world ravaged by the highly contagious Cordyceps fungus that turns its victims into zombies (called “hungries” in the book) and is spread by biting.  The main character is fifteen year old Stephen Greaves, a scientific genius who invents a chemical blocker to hide human pheromones from the hungries’ senses.  Like Melanie in The Girl With All the Gifts, Stephen is surrounded by adults who mostly treat him with contempt, caution, or outright loathing.  Stephen is unnerved by physical contact, untrue statements, and uncertainty, and approaches challenges with a mechanical, scientific interest.  He and Samrina Khan, the only person Stephen has bonded with, are part of a ten member crew on board the heavily armed mobile laboratory Rosalind Franklin.  They are on a desperate mission to develop a cure for infected humans.

 

Quotes 

“He had already learned to read, but now he learned the pleasure of stories which is like no other pleasure—the experience of slipping sideways into another world and living there for as long as you want to.”

 

“If everyone always knows what they’re doing and acts in a perfectly rational way, how did most of world history happen?”

 

“To go mad, to lose your mind, which is the only thing that’s really yours because it’s really you … That would be an inexpressibly terrible thing. And at the same time it would be nothing, because you yourself would be unable, from within that damaged state, to recognise or reflect on it.”

 

“She is an anomaly. Anomalies explode old theories and engender new ones. They are dangerous and glorious.”

 

“It rains on the just and the unjust. Nothing you can do but turn your collar up.”        

 

“You shouldn’t kill a man without being aware of the possibilities, the futures, you’re snuffing out. The younger the target, the more of those possible futures there are. Killing a child is like killing a vast multitude.”

 

“The world is information. An endless torrent. Whatever escapes you becomes something you will never completely understand.”

 

“Things don’t end, after all. They only change, and you keep changing with them.”

 

“Loyalty is just the wheels on the bus … meaning that it keeps things moving but it’s neutral when it comes to the direction they move in.”

 

My Take

After really enjoying The Girl With All the Gifts, I was looking forward to reading its prequel, The Boy on the Bridge.  Unfortunately, M.R. Carey’s second entry in the Hungry Plague series falls well short of his first effort.  What’s missing from The Boy on the Bridge is the element of surprise from the first book where it is slowly revealed how the dystopian world operates.  The Girl With All the Gifts also featured a much more compelling relationship between the two main characters.  Interesting at times, but not enough to recommend it.

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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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