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530. Klara and the Sun

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Kazuo Ishiguro

Genre:  Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction

304 pages, published March 2, 2021

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Klara and the Sun is set in the near future and is told from the perspective of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities.  When she is purchased to serve as a friend to fourteen year old Josie who suffers from a potentially terminal illness, Klara learns that her role may be different from what she expected.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Klara and the Sun is the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and it does not disappoint.  In the same vein as his earlier dystopian novel Never Let Me Go (a book I also really enjoyed), Ishiguro creates a fascinating world not too dissimilar to our current one, but different enough to make you think about the horror of the changes society has decided to accept.  Klara and the Sun explores compelling themes such as what does it mean to be a human, what is our purpose on this earth and what is love.  One of the best books that I have read in a long while.  Highly recommended.

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321. Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Terra McKinnish

Author:   Trevor Noah

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Humor

304 pages, published November 15, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Born a Crime is a memoir by comedian Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, about his childhood and young adult years in South Africa.  The book focuses on the impact of his sacrificial and religious mother, Patricia Noah, a black Xhosa woman whose desire for a baby led her to become pregnant by a white Swiss father at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison.   Noah lived through a time of transformation in South Africa and saw the end of apartheid during his teenage years.  We see a mischievous young boy grow up to become a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist alongside a fearless mother determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.

Quotes 

“Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”

 

“Nelson Mandela once said, ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.’ He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, ‘I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.”

 

“We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited.”

 

“Trevor, remember a man is not determined by how much he earns. You can still be a man of the house and earn less than your woman. Being a man is not what you have, it’s who you are. Being more of a man doesn’t mean your woman has to be less than you.”

 

“Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.”

 

“I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. “What if…” “If only…” “I wonder what would have…” You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.”

 

“Learn from your past and be better because of your past,” she would say, “but don’t cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter.”

 

“The world doesn’t love you. If the police get you, the police don’t love you. When I beat you, I’m trying to save you. When they beat you, they’re trying to kill you.”

 

“The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”

 

“I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother, her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don’t hold onto the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass kicking your mom gave you or the ass kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It’s better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of what happened and that’s ok. But after a while, the bruises fade and they fade for a reason. Because now, it’s time to get up to some shit again.”

 

“Comfort can be dangerous. Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling.”

 

“My grandmother always told me that she loved my prayers. She believed my prayers were more powerful, because I prayed in English. Everyone knows that Jesus, who’s white, speaks English. The Bible is in English. Yes, the Bible was not written in English, but the Bible came to South Africa in English so to us it’s English. Which made my prayers the best prayers because English prayers get answered first. How do we know this? Look at white people. Clearly they’re getting through to the right person. Add to that Matthew 19:14. “Suffer little children to come unto me,” Jesus said, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” So if a child is praying in English? To White Jesus? That’s a powerful combination right there.”

 

 “We live in a world where we don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others because we don’t live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off.

If we could see one another’s pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place.”

 

“Growing up in a home of abuse, you struggle with the notion that you can love a person you hate, or hate a person you love. It’s a strange feeling. You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad, where you either love or hate them, but that’s not how people are.”

 

“The name Hitler does not offend a black South African because Hitler is not the worst thing a black South African can imagine. Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler. If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium’s King Leopold would come way before Hitler. If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson.”

 

“Nearly one million people lived in Soweto. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them were black—and then there was me. I was famous in my neighborhood just because of the color of my skin. I was so unique people would give directions using me as a landmark. “The house on Makhalima Street. At the corner you’ll see a light-skinned boy. Take a right there.”

 

“A dog is a great thing for a kid to have. It’s like a bicycle but with emotions.”

  

“The dogs left with us and we walked. I sobbed the whole way home, still heartbroken. My mom had no time for my whining. “Why are you crying?!”  “Because Fufi loves another boy.”  “So? Why would that hurt you? It didn’t cost you anything. Fufi’s here. She still loves you. She’s still your dog. So get over it.”  Fufi was my first heartbreak. No one has ever betrayed me more than Fufi. It was a valuable lesson to me. The hard thing was understanding that Fufi wasn’t cheating on me with another boy. She was merely living her life to the fullest. Until I knew that she was going out on her own during the day, her other relationship hadn’t affected me at all. Fufi had no malicious intent.  I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love. I was lucky to learn that lesson at such a young age. I have so many friends who still, as adults, wrestle with feelings of betrayal. They’ll come to me angry and crying and talking about how they’ve been cheated on and lied to, and I feel for them. I understand what they’re going through. I sit with them and buy them a drink and I say, “Friend, let me tell you the story of Fufi.” 

My Take

I loved Born a Crime.  At turns funny and poignant, it was continuously interesting and entertaining.  I learned a lot about South Africa and the impact of Apartheid from this book.  In addition to being a gifted comedian, Trevor Noah is a gifted writer and tells an engrossing tale of growing up in a repressive system where he did not easily fit in with any group.  However, the unconditional love, discipline and encouragement of his mother along with his own skills and ambition propelled Noah to an amazing and compelling life.  I highly recommend the audio version of this book which is read (at times hilariously) by the author.

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240. The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Gretchen Rubin

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir, Happiness, Self Improvement

301 pages, published December 29, 2009

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The genesis of The Happiness Project was author Gretchen Rubin’s epiphany that she was happy with her life, but perhaps not as happy as she could be.  This led her to dedicate a year to her happiness project and, through research and experience, discover if there were things she could to make herself happier.  Every month, she covered a new topic including Order, Exercise and Sleep, Friendship, Children, Marriage, and Money to name a few.  Along the way, she developed her Twelve Personal Commandments, Four Splendid Truths and Secrets of Adulthood.  They are listed below.

 

Twelve Personal Commandments

 

Be Gretchen

Let it go

Act the way I want to feel

Do it now

Be polite and fair

Enjoy the process

Spend out

Identify the problem

Lighten up

Do what ought to be done

No calculation

There is only love

 

Four Splendid Truths

 

  1. To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right in an atmosphere of growth.
  2. One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.
  3. The days are long, but the years are short.
  4. You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy.

 

Secrets of Adulthood

 

  • The best reading is re-reading.
  • Outer order contributes to inner calm.
  • The opposite of a great truth is also true.
  • You manage what you measure.
  • By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished.
  • People don’t notice your mistakes and flaws as much as you think.
  • It’s nice to have plenty of money.
  • Most decisions don’t require extensive research.
  • Try not to let yourself get too hungry.
  • It’s important to have family rituals.
  • If you can’t find something, clean up.
  • Someplace, keep an empty shelf.
  • Turning the computer on and off a few times often fixes a glitch.
  • It’s okay to ask for help.
  • You can choose what you do; you can’t choose what you LIKE to do.
  • Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy.
  • What you do EVERY DAY matters more than what you do ONCE IN A WHILE.
  • You don’t have to be good at everything.
  • Soap and water removes most stains.
  • It’s important to be nice to EVERYONE.
  • You know as much as most people.
  • Over-the-counter medicines are very effective.
  • Eat better, eat less, exercise more.
  • What’s fun for other people may not be fun for you–and vice versa.
  • People actually prefer that you buy wedding gifts off their registry.
  • Houseplants and photo albums are a lot of trouble.
  • If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough.
  • If we have habits that work for us, we’re much more likely to be happy, healthy, productive, and creative.
  • Save and spend wisely.
  • Stop procrastinating, make consistent progress.
  • Engage more deeply—with other people, with God, with yourself, with the world.
  • Doing a little work makes goofing off more fun.

 

Quotes 

“The belief that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish is misguided. It’s more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted. No one is careful of his feelings or tries to keep his spirits high. He seems self-sufficient; he becomes a cushion for others. And because happiness seems unforced, that person usually gets no credit.”

 

“I grasped two things: I wasn’t as happy as I could be, and my life wasn’t going to change unless I made it change.”

 

“I knew I wouldn’t discover happiness in a faraway place or in unusual circumstances; it was right here, right now— as in the haunting play “The Blue Bird,” where two children spend a year searching the world for the Blue Bird of Happiness, only to find it waiting for them when they finally return home.”

 

“Of course it’s not enough to sit around wanting to be happy; you must make the effort to take steps toward happiness by acting with more love, finding work you enjoy, and all the rest. But for me, asking myself whether I was happy had been a crucial step toward cultivating my happiness more wisely through my actions. Also, only through recognizing my happiness did I really appreciate it. Happiness depends partly on external circumstances, and it also depends on how you view those circumstances.

 

“According to current research, in the determination of a person’s level of happiness, genetics accounts for about 50 percent; life circumstances, such as age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, income, health, occupation, and religious affiliation, account for about 10 to 20 percent; and the remainder is a product of how a person thinks and acts.”

 

“I had everything I could possibly want — yet I was failing to appreciate it. Bogged down in petty complaints and passing crises, weary of struggling with my own nature, I too often failed to comprehend the splendor of what I had.”

 

“As I turned the key and pushed open the front door, as I crossed the threshold, I thought how breathtaking, how fleeting, how precious was my ordinary day Now is now. Here is my treasure.”

 

“To eke out the most happiness from an experience, we must anticipate it, savor it as it unfolds, express happiness, and recall a happy memory.”

 

“In fact, in what’s known as “rosy prospection,” anticipation of happiness is sometimes greater than the happiness actually experienced.”

 

“you have to do that kind of work for yourself. If you do it for other people, you end up wanting them to acknowledge it and to be grateful and to give you credit. If you do it for yourself, you don’t expect other people to react in a particular way.”

 

“I knew I wouldn’t discover happiness in a faraway place or in unusual circumstances; it was right here, right now— as in the haunting play “The Blue Bird,” where two children spend a year searching the world for the Blue Bird of Happiness, only to find it waiting for them when they finally return home.”

 

“Studies show that each common interest between people boosts the chances of a lasting relationship and also brings about a 2 percent increase in life satisfaction.”

 

“Happiness,” wrote Yeats, “is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn’t goal attainment but the process of striving after goals-that is, growth-that brings happiness.”

 

“Enthusiasm is a form of social courage.”

 

“There is only love.”

 

“One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.”

 

“Happy people generally are more forgiving, helpful, and charitable, have better self-control, and are more tolerant of frustration than unhappy people, while unhappy people are more often withdrawn, defensive, antagonistic, and self-absorbed. Oscar Wilde observed, “One is not always happy when one is good; but one is always good when one is happy.”

 

“Both money and health contribute to happiness mostly in the negative; the lack of them brings much more unhappiness than possessing them brings happiness.”

 

“I realized that for my own part, I was much more likely to take risks, reach out to others, and expose myself to rejection and failure when I felt happy. When I felt unhappy, I felt defensive, touchy, and self-conscious.”

 

“Nothing,’ wrote Tolstoy, ‘can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”

 

“Keep it simple’ wasn’t always the right response. Many things that boosted my happiness also added complexity to my life. Having children. Learning to post videos to my website. Going to an out-of-town wedding. Applied too broadly, my impulse to ‘Keep it simple’ would impoverish me. ‘Life is barren enough surely with all her trappings,’ warned Samuel Johnson, ‘let us therefore by cautious how we strip her.”

 

“Laughter is more than just a pleasurable activity…When people laugh together, they tend to talk and touch more and to make eye contact more frequently.”

 

“The days are long, but the years are short.”

 

“I always had the uncomfortable feeling that if I wasn’t sitting in front of a computer typing, I was wasting my time–but I pushed myself to take a wider view of what was “productive.” Time spend with my family and friends was never wasted.”

 

“What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.”

 

“It’s about living in the moment and appreciating the smallest things. Surrounding yourself with the things that inspire you and letting go of the obsessions that want to take over your mind. It is a daily struggle sometimes and hard work but happiness begins with your own attitude and how you look at the world.”

 

“While some more passive forms of leisure, such as watching TV or surfing the Internet, are fun in the short term, over time, they don’t offer nearly the same happiness as more challenging activities.”

 

“It struck me as poignant that my long relationship with my beloved grandparents could be embodied in a few small objects. But the power of objects doesn’t depend on their volume; in fact, my memories were better evoked by a few carefully chosen items than by a big assortment of things with vague associations.”

 

“Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but every day is a clean slate and a fresh opportunity.”

 

“It’s easy to be heavy; hard to be light.”

 

“Once I started trying to give positive reviews, though, I began to understand how much happiness I took from the joyous ones in my life—and how much effort it must take for them to be consistently good=tempered and positive. It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. We nonjoyous types suck energy and cheer from the joyous ones; we rely on them to buoy us with their good spirit and to cushion our agitation and anxiety. At the same time, because of a dark element in human nature, we’re sometimes provoked to try to shake the enthusiastic, cheery folk out of their fog of illusion—to make them see that the play was stupid, the money was wasted, the meeting was pointless. Instead of shielding their joy, we blast it.”

 

“When we do stumble, it’s important not to judge ourselves harshly. Although some people assume that strong feelings of guilt or shame act as safeguards to help people stick to good habits, the opposite is true. People who feel less guilt and who show compassion toward themselves in the face of failure are better able to regain self-control, while people who feel deeply guilty and full of self-blame struggle more.”

 

“Although we presume that we act because of the way we feel, in fact we often feel because of the way we act.”

 

“The pleasure of doing the same thing, in the same way, every day, shouldn’t be overlooked. The things I do every day take on a certain beauty and provide a kind of invisible architecture to my life.”

 

“With habits, we don’t make decisions, we don’t use self-control, we just do the thing we want ourselves to do—or that we don’t want to do.”

 

“Did I have a heart to be contented? Well, no, not particularly. I had a tendency to be discontented: ambitious, dissatisfied, fretful, and tough to please…It’s easier to complain than to laugh, easier to yell than to joke around, easier to be demanding than to be satisfied.”

 

“Never start a sentence with the words ‘No offense.”

 

“When I thought about why I was sometimes reluctant to push myself, I realized that it was because I was afraid of failure – but in order to have more success, I needed to be willing to accept more failure.”

 

“I enjoy the fun of failure. It’s fun to fail, I kept repeating. It’s part of being ambitious; it’s part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”

 

“Look for happiness under your own roof.”

 

“Studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn’t relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.”

 

“The things that go wrong often make the best memories.”

 

“It was time to expect more of myself. Yet as I thought about happiness, I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself but accept myself. I wanted to take myself less seriously — and also more seriously. I wanted to use my time well, but I also wanted to wander, to play, to read at whim. I wanted to think about myself so I could forget myself. I was always on the edge of agitation; I wanted to let go of envy and anxiety about the future, yet keep my energy and ambition.”

 

“From my observation, habits in four areas do most to boost feelings of self-control, and in this way strengthen the Foundation of all our habits. We do well to begin by tackling the habits that help us to: 1. sleep 2. move 3. eat and drink right 4. Unclutter. ”

 

“Enthusiasm is more important than innate ability, it turns out, because the single more important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice.”

 

“When I find myself focusing overmuch on the anticipated future happiness of arriving at a certain goal, I remind myself to ‘Enjoy now’. If I can enjoy the present, I don’t need to count on the happiness that is (or isn’t) waiting for me in the future”.”

 

“[S]tudies show that one of the best ways to lift your mood is to engineer an easy success, such as tackling a long-delayed chore.”

 

“Studies show that in a phenomenon called “emotional contagion,” we unconsciously catch emotions from other people–whether good moods or bad ones. Taking the time to be silly means that we’re infecting one another with good cheer, and people who enjoy silliness are one third more likely to be happy.”

 

“… one flaw throws the loveliness of [everything else] into focus. I remember reading that Shakers deliberately introduced a mistake into the things they made, to show that man shouldn’t aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed can be more perfect than perfection.”

 

“There are no do overs and some things just aren’t going to happen. It is a little sad but you just have to embrace what is.”

 

“I think adversity magnifies behavior. Tend to be a control freak? You’ll become more controlling. Eat for comfort? You’ll eat more. And on the positive, if you tend to focus on solutions and celebrate small successes, that’s what you’ll do in adversity.”

 

“[S]tudies show that one of the best ways to lift your mood is to engineer an easy success, such as tackling a long-delayed chore.”

 

“Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

 

“I can DO ANYTHING I want, but I can’t DO EVERYTHING I want.”

 

“Money. It’s a good servant but a bad master.”

 

“Because money permits a constant stream of luxuries and indulgences, it can take away their savor, and by permitting instant gratification, money shortcuts the happiness of anticipation. Scrimping, saving, imagining, planning, hoping–these stages enlarge the happiness we feel.”

 

“He is my fate. He’s my soul mate. He pervades my whole existence. So, of course, I often ignore him.”

 

“It isn’t enough to love; we must prove it.”

 

“There is no love; there are only proofs of love.” Whatever love I might feel in my heart, others will see only my actions.”

 

“The biggest waste of time is to do well something that we need not do at all.”

 

“What you do everyday matters more than what you do once in a while.”

 

“How we schedule our days is how we spend our lives.”

 

“There’s a great satisfaction in knowing that we’ve made good use of our days, that we’ve lived up to our expectations of ourselves.”

 

“[Benjamin Franklin] identified thirteen virtues he wanted to cultivate–temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity and humility–and made a chart with those virtues plotted against the days of the week. Each day, Franklin would score himself on whether he practiced those thirteen virtues.”

 

“In the chaos of everyday life, it’s easy to lose sight of what really matters, and I can use my habits to make sure that my life reflects my values.”

 

“We won’t make ourselves more creative and productive by copying other people’s habits, even the habits of geniuses; we must know our own nature, and what habits serve us best.”

 

“For work: I bought some pens. Normally, I used makeshift pens, the kind of unsatisfactory implements that somehow materialized in my bag or in a drawer. But one day, when I was standing in line to buy envelopes, I caught sight of a box of my favorite kind of pen: the Deluxe Uniball Micro. “Two ninety-nine for one pen!” I thought. “That’s ridiculous.” But after a fairly lengthy internal debate, I bought four. It’s such a joy to write with a good pen instead of making do with an underinked pharmaceutical promotional pen picked up from a doctor’s office. My new pens weren’t cheap, but when I think of all the time I spend using pens and how much I appreciate a good pen, I realize it was money well spent. Finely made tools help make work a pleasure.”

 

“Sleep is the new sex.”

 

“Another study suggested that getting one extra hour of sleep each night would do more for a person’s happiness than getting a $60,000 raise.”

 

“I had everything I could possibly want — yet I was failing to appreciate it. Bogged down in petty complaints and passing crises, weary of struggling with my own nature, I too often failed to comprehend the splendor of what I had.”

 

“The desire to start something at the “right” time is usually just a justification for delay. In almost every case, the best time to start is now.”

 

“It’s so easy to wish that we’d made an effort in the past, so that we’d happily be enjoying the benefit now, but when now is the time when that effort must be made, as it always is, that prospect is much less inviting.”

 

“The most important step is the first step. All those old sayings are really true. Well begun is half done. Don’t get it perfect, get it going. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started, and strangely, starting is often far harder than continuing.”

 

“I’m not tempted by things I’ve decided are off-limits, but once I’ve started something, I have trouble stopping. If I never do something, it requires no self-control for me; if I do something sometimes, it requires enormous self-control.”

 

“In fact, for both men and women—and this finding struck me as highly significant—the most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a difference.”

 

“There are times in the lives of most of us,” observed William Edward Hartpole Lecky, “when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.”

 

“A sense of growth is so important to happiness that it’s often preferable to be progressing to the summit rather than to be at the summit.”

 

“This is one of the many paradoxes of happiness: we seek to control our lives, but the unfamiliar and the unexpected are important sources of happiness.”

 

“W. H. Auden articulated this tension beautifully: “Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.”

 

“The imperfect book that gets published is better than the perfect book that never leaves my computer.”

 

“It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that if you have something you love or there’s something you want, you’ll be happier with more.”

 

My Take

As is readily apparent from the sheer volume of quotes that I have included from The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin has many, many pearls of wisdom to impart.  As she herself opines, the best reading is re-reading.  This was my third reading of The Happiness Project and it was still fresh for me and I had new takeaways that I had forgotten about.  I really appreciate her writing style that includes her own personal experience, reference to scientific research on topics related to happiness, relevant literary quotes and lots of practical tips on how to implement happiness improvements into your own life.  More than any other book, The Happiness Project has changed my life for the better.  I consider Gretchen Rubin to be my guru for happiness.  Often as I go through my day, a quote from The Happiness Project (such as “do it now,” “there is only love,” “outer order leads to inner calm,” “by doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished,” and “people don’t notice your mistakes and flaws as much as you think”) will pop into my head and influence my actions. Her other books, Happier at Home, Better than Before, and The Four Tendencies are also very much worth a read, but my favorite is still The Happiness Project.  A rare five stars and strongly recommended.

 

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202. How to Win Friends and Influence People

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Author:   Dale Carnegie

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement, Psychology

288 pages, published October, 1936

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

How to Win Friends and Influence People is primer for how to have sincere, positive interactions with other people to better achieve your personal and business goals.   Full of anecdotes to support his points, here is a summary of Carnegie’s advice:

 

Techniques in Handling People

  1. Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
  2. Give honest and sincere appreciation.
  3. Arouse in the other person an eager want.

 

Six ways to make people like you

  1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
  2. Smile.
  3. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
  4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
  5. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
  6. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

 

Win people to your way of thinking

  1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
  2. Show respect for the other person’s opinions. Never say, “You’re wrong.”
  3. If you are wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
  4. Begin in a friendly way.
  5. Get the other person saying “yes, yes” immediately.
  6. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
  7. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.
  8. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.
  9. Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.
  10. Appeal to the nobler motives.
  11. Dramatize your ideas.
  12. Throw down a challenge.

 

Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

  1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
  2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.
  3. Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.
  4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
  5. Let the other person save face.
  6. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.”
  7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
  8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
  9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

 

Quotes 

“It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.”

 

“Everybody in the world is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.”

 

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

 

“Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.”

 

“Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, ‘I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you. That is why dogs make such a hit. They are so glad to see us that they almost jump out of their skins. So, naturally, we are glad to see them.”

 

“People who smile,” he said, “tend to manage, teach and sell more effectively, and to raise happier children.”

 

“A man without a smiling face must not open a shop.”

 

“A great man shows his greatness,” said Carlyle, “by the way he treats little men.”

 

“The Value of a Smile at Christmas.   It costs nothing, but creates much.   It enriches those who receive, without impoverishing those who give.   It happens in a flash and the memory of it sometimes lasts forever.   None are so rich they can get along without it, and none so poor but are richer for its benefits.   It creates happiness in the home, fosters good will in a business, and is the countersign of friends.”

 

“The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.”

 

“Benjamin Franklin, tactless in his youth, became so diplomatic, so adroit at handling people, that he was made American Ambassador to France. The secret of his success? “I will speak ill of no man,” he said, “ … and speak all the good I know of everybody.”

 

“The unvarnished truth is that almost all the people you meet feel themselves superior to you in some way, and a sure way to their hearts is to let them realize in some subtle way that you recognize their importance, and recognize it sincerely.”

 

“Remember that other people may be totally wrong. But they don’t think so.”

 

“As Lord Chesterfield said to his son: Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.”

 

“If there is any one secret of success,” said Henry Ford, “it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”

 

“Simply changing one three-letter word can often spell the difference between failure and success in changing people without giving offense or arousing resentment. Many people begin their criticism with sincere praise followed by the word “but” and ending with a critical statement. For example, in trying to change a child’s careless attitude toward studies, we might say, “We’re really proud of you, Johnnie, for raising your grades this term. But if you had worked harder on your algebra, the results would have been better.” In this case, Johnnie might feel encouraged until he heard the word “but.” He might then question the sincerity of the original praise. To him, the praise seemed only to be a contrived lead-in to a critical inference of failure. Credibility would be strained, and we probably would not achieve our objectives of changing Johnnie’s attitude toward his studies. This could be easily overcome by changing the word “but” to “and.” “We’re really proud of you, Johnnie, for raising your grades this term, and by continuing the same conscientious efforts next term, your algebra grade can be up with all the others.”

 

“Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself.  Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment. …. Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.  That reminds me of this famous quote by Thomas Carlyle: “A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.”

 

“I have come to the conclusion that there is only one way under high heaven to get the best of an argument— and that is to avoid it. Avoid it as you would avoid rattlesnakes and earthquakes.”

 

“Try leaving a friendly trail of little sparks of gratitude on your daily trips. You will be surprised how they will set small flames of friendship that will be rose beacons on your next visit.”

 

“Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.”

 

“You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.”

 

“By fighting you never get enough, but by yielding you get more than you expected.”

 

“If you argue and rankle and contradict, you may achieve a victory sometimes; but it will be an empty victory because you will never get your opponent’s good will.”

 

“Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. “To know all is to forgive all.”

 

“If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, don’t wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence.”

 

“Emerson said: “Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.”

 

“Buddha said: ‘Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love,’ and a misunderstanding is never ended by an argument but by tact, diplomacy, conciliation and a sympathetic desire to see the other person’s viewpoint.”

 

“about 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.”

 

“The legendary French aviation pioneer and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: “I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself. Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.”

 

“I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

 

“I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people,” said Schwab, “the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. “There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticisms from superiors.”

 

“Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. “To know all is to forgive all.” As Dr. Johnson said: “God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days.” Why should you and I?”

 

“A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty earthquakes in Africa.”

 

“The only reason, for example, that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren’t rattlesnakes. You deserve very little credit for being what you are.”

 

“The secret of his success? “I will speak ill of no man,” he said, “. . and speak all the good I know of everybody.”

 

“To change somebody’s behavior, change the level of respect she receives by giving her a fine reputation to live up to. Act as though the trait you are trying to influence is already one of the person’s outstanding characteristics.”

 

“The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.”

 

“A man convinced against his will

Is of the same opinion still”

 

“When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.”

 

“ [T]he only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.”

 

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”

 

My Take

The classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, which was first published in 1936, is a book whose title everyone has heard of and which has had enormous influence on the world.  After seeing it recommended on several websites, I decided to read it.  Even though more than 80 years have passed since its publication, it stands the test of time.  Just look at the summary and quotes above to see a sampling of all the pearls of wisdom contained in this book.  In fact, I got so much out of it that I asked my 19 year old son to read it as his Christmas gift to me and then spend some time discussing it.  I wholeheartedly recommend you do the same with someone you know from the younger generation. The advice is timeless and will improve the lives of all who read it.

 

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164. 100 Days of Happiness: a novel (2nd Reading)

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Fausto Brizzi

Genre:  Fiction, Happiness

368 pages, published August 11, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

100 Days of Happiness tells the story of Lucio Battistini, a resident of Rome, who is separated from his wife Paola and their two young children (Lorenzo and Eva) after she learns that he has had an affair.  Lucio is sleeping in the stock room of his father-in-law’s bakery when he learns that he has inoperable cancer and only 100 days to live, give or take.  Lucio buys a notebook and the first item he writes in it is to win back Paola.  Lucio spends the next three months trying to do that and also enjoying every moment with a zest he hasn’t felt in years.  By the end of the journey, Lucio becomes the man he’s always meant to be.

 

Quotes 

“I know her by heart, and that doesn’t make me love her any less. Like a Dante scholar who learns the entire Divine Comedy and then just appreciates the poem even more profoundly.”

 

“The important thing is to make sure that when death comes, it finds us still alive.”

 

“Always remember that the only riches we possess are the dreams we have as children. They are the fuel of our lives, the only force that pushes us to keep on going even when things have gone all wrong.”

 

“Just work, work, work, even at the risk of making mistakes. And if and when you do make mistakes, and you do hurt someone, ask for forgiveness. Asking forgiveness and admitting you’ve made a mistake is the hardest thing of all. But if someone else does you good, remember it always. Showing gratitude is every bit as complicated.”

 

“Every one of us has already experienced thousands of last times without even realizing it. Most of the time, in fact, you never even imagine that what you’re experiencing is the last time.”

 

“It makes me sad. Everything, even good things, makes me sad.”

 

“A chitchat shop. Simple but brilliant. Not even Leonardo da Vinci ever came up with this one. It’s like a pharmacy that stocks friendship.”

 

“Sometimes real troubles give you a strength you never had before”

 

Papà was a professional bullshit artist so outstanding in his lying skills that if he’d set his mind to it, he could easily have become prime minister of Italy.

 

My Take

A mantra of one of my favorite writers and happiness guru Gretchen Rubin is that the best reading is re-reading.  I took that to sentiment to heart when I re-read 100 Days of Happiness (the first re-read during my thousand book quest) (this time I read the book instead of listening to the audiobook).  It was time well spent because I loved this book even more the second time through.  While I still enjoyed themes and characters, on the second reading, I noticed all of the small details that give Lucio’s world texture and depth.  His daughter saying “meow” instead of “ciao,” the marriage proposal to his wife that was spoiled by his best friend Umberto, his reminiscing about youth travel when he tries to relive the experience 25 years later, the folks who inhabit the Chit Chat shop, and the regular invocation of Leonardo Da Vinci.  While 100 Days of Happiness made me think again about how I would live my life if the end was near, I also just loved spending time with Lucio, his family and friends.  Highly recommended.

 

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156. A Gentleman in Moscow

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Blair Norman, Barbara Corson

Author:   Amor Towles

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction

462 pages, published September 6, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

In A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles depicts Russia during the beginning and middle of the twentieth century through the eyes of Count Alexander Rostov.  In 1922, Count Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin.   Rostov, a paragon of sophistication and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors.  Unexpectedly, his changed circumstances provide him a unique viewpoint into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

 

Quotes 

“if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.”

 

“For his part, the Count had opted for the life of the purposefully unrushed. Not only was he disinclined to race toward some appointed hour – disdaining even to wear a watch – he took the greatest satisfaction when assuring a friend that a worldly matter could wait in favor of a leisurely lunch or stroll along the embankment. After all, did not wine improve with age? Was it not the passage of years that gave a piece of furniture its delightful patina? When all was said and done, the endeavors that most modern men saw as urgent (such as appointments with bankers and the catching of trains), probably could have waited, while those they deemed frivolous (such as cups of tea and friendly chats) had deserved their immediate attention.”

 

“For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”

 

“The principle here is that a new generation owes a measure of thanks to every member of the previous generation. Our elders planted fields and fought in wars; they advanced the arts and sciences, and generally made sacrifices on our behalf. So by their efforts, however humble, they have earned a measure of our gratitude and respect.”

 

“He had said that our lives are steered by uncertainties, many of which are disruptive or even daunting; but that if we persevere and remain generous of heart, we may be granted a moment of lucidity—a moment in which all that has happened to us suddenly comes into focus as a necessary course of events, even as we find ourselves on the threshold of the life we had been meant to lead all along.”

 

“the Confederacy of the Humbled is a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile. ”

 

“It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life,” he began, “that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces.”

 

“It is a well-known fact that of all the species on earth Homo sapiens is among the most adaptable. Settle a tribe of them in a desert and they will wrap themselves in cotton, sleep in tents, and travel on the backs of camels; settle them in the Arctic and they will wrap themselves in sealskin, sleep in igloos, and travel by dog-drawn sled. And if you settle them in a Soviet climate? They will learn to make friendly conversation with strangers while waiting in line; they will learn to neatly stack their clothing in their half of the bureau drawer; and they will learn to draw imaginary buildings in their sketchbooks. That is, they will adapt.”

 

“After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”

 

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

 

“Invariably dressed in black, the Countess was one of those dowagers whose natural independence of mind, authority of age, and impatience with the petty made her the ally of all irreverent youth.”

 

“Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate and our opinions evolve–if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew.”

 

My Take

I had high expectations for A Gentleman in Moscow after my friend Barbara told me that she loved the book so much that as soon as she finished reading it, she started rereading it again.  I cannot think of higher praise.  While high expectations can sometimes ruin an experience, that was not the case here.  It started a bit slowly, but after an hour or two of listening to the audio book version (with excellent voice work by Nicholas Guy Smith), I was hooked.  Full of humor, a magnificent cast of characters, and one wonderful scene after another, A Gentleman in Moscow reveals layer after layer of discovery and growing self awareness as Count Rostov comes to understand the reality of the world surrounding him and his place in it.

 

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86. 100 Days of Happiness: a novel

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Fausto Brizzi

Genre:  Fiction

368 pages, published August 11, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

100 Days of Happiness tells the story of Lucio Battistini, a resident of Rome, who is separated from his wife Paola and their two young children (Lorenzo and Eva) after she learns that he has had an affair.  Lucio is sleeping in the stock room of his father-in-law’s bakery when he learns that he has inoperable cancer and only 100 days to live, give or take.  Lucio buys a notebook and the first item he writes in it is to win back Paola.  Lucio spends the next three months trying to do that and also enjoying every moment with a zest he hasn’t felt in years.  By the end of the journey, Lucio becomes the man he’s always meant to be.

 

Quotes

“I know her by heart, and that doesn’t make me love her any less. Like a Dante scholar who learns the entire Divine Comedy and then just appreciates the poem even more profoundly.”

 

“The important thing is to make sure that when death comes, it finds us still alive.”

 

“Always remember that the only riches we possess are the dreams we have as children. They are the fuel of our lives, the only force that pushes us to keep on going even when things have gone all wrong.”

 

“Just work, work, work, even at the risk of making mistakes. And if and when you do make mistakes, and you do hurt someone, ask for forgiveness. Asking forgiveness and admitting you’ve made a mistake is the hardest thing of all. But if someone else does you good, remember it always. Showing gratitude is every bit as complicated.”

 

“Every one of us has already experienced thousands of last times without even realizing it. Most of the time, in fact, you never even imagine that what you’re experiencing is the last time.”

 

“It makes me sad. Everything, even good things, makes me sad.”

 

“A chitchat shop. Simple but brilliant. Not even Leonardo da Vinci ever came up with this one. It’s like a pharmacy that stocks friendship.”

 

“Sometimes real troubles give you a strength you never had before”

 

“Papà was a professional bullshit artist so outstanding in his lying skills that if he’d set his mind to it, he could easily have become prime minister of Italy.”

 

My Take

I really loved 100 Days of Happiness and gave it one of my few five star ratings.  While the subject matter (one’s last three months to live) is somber and could be depressing, Lucio makes it into a kind of wistful adventure on which you are all too happy to tag along on. Along the way, as we learn about what matters most to Lucio, you are given the opportunity to reflect on what is most important to you.  How you spend the last 100 days of your life?  What have you left undone that you can address before it’s too late?  It also doesn’t hurt that the book takes place in Italy, one of my favorite countries, and Brizzi makes you feel as if you are there (or at least wish you were).  I highly recommend this book, especially the audio book version.

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78. A Little Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Heather Ringoen

Author:   Hanya Yanagihara

Genre:  Fiction

720 pages, published March 10, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

A Little Life tells the stories of Willem, JB, Malcolm and Jude, four young men who meet at a small, exclusive college in Massachusetts college and become fast friends.  They all move to New York to pursue different interests.  Willem is a waiter/aspiring actor; JB a struggling artist; Malcolm an architect and Jude a lawyer.  While the book initially focuses on the lives and ambitions of each character, it quickly becomes Jude’s story.  Although physically disabled, Jude’s exemplary talents as a baker, singer, pianist, mathematician, and corporate litigator (to name a few) are too good to be true.  However, none of that matters to Jude who is scarred by a horrific childhood, the details of which are slowly unveiled during the course of the book.  As an adult, Jude is extremely successful at his chosen career and is surrounded by people who love and care for him.  However, he remains a broken man who believes that he is unworthy of all of these gifts.   

 

Quotes

“…things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”

 

“Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all you want from a person – sexual chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty – and you get to pick three of them.”

 

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

 

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”

 

“Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.

Right and wrong, however, are for—well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.”

 

“I have never been one of those people—I know you aren’t, either—who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield.”

 

“…when your child dies, you feel everything you’d expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won’t even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that’s written about mourning is all the same, and it’s all the same for a reason – because there is no read deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same. But here’s what no one says – when it’s your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.  Ah, you tell yourself, it’s arrived. Here it is.

And after that, you have nothing to fear again.”

 

“We all say we want our kids to be happy, only happy, and healthy, but we don’t want that. We want them to be like we are, or better than we are. We as humans are very unimaginative in that sense. We aren’t equipped for the possibility that they might be worse. But I guess that would be asking too much. It must be an evolutionary stopgap – if we were all so specifically, vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we would none of us have children at all.”

 

“He had looked at Jude, then, and had felt that same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought of Jude and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but it wasn’t a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn’t know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it.”

 

“But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.”

 

“It was precisely these scenes he missed the most from his own life with Willem, the forgettable, in-between moments in which nothing seemed to be happening but whose absence was singularly unfillable.”

 

“They all—Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors—sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.”

 

“Everyone thought they would be friends for decades, forever. But for most people, of course, that hadn’t happened. As you got older, you realized that the qualities you valued in the people you slept with or dated weren’t necessarily the ones you wanted to live with, or be with, or plod through your days with. If you were smart, and if you were lucky, you learned this and accepted this. You figured out what was most important to you and you looked for it, and you learned to be realistic.”

 

“I know my life’s meaningful because” – and here he stopped, and looked shy, and was silent for a moment before he continued – ” because I’m a good friend. I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”

 

“Ethics and morals do, in reality, have a place in law—although not in jurisprudence. It is morals that help us make the laws, but morals do not help us apply them.”

 

My Take

I really loved A Little Life, an engrossing book about friendship, love, the meaning of life, and dealing with horrific pain inflicted during childhood from which it seems impossible to recover.  Yanagihara creates her characters so vividly and with such incredible depth, especially Jude St. Francis, that you are sad when the book ends and you have to say goodbye to them and their sharply realized world that you have been living in.  While A Little Life can sometimes be a tough read, the prose is often beautiful and moving.  This book stayed with me long after I finished it and I look forward to reading more from Ms. Yanagihara, a very talented writer.

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52. When Breath Becomes Air

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Paul Kalanithi

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

208 pages, published January 19, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book


Summary 

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer.  One day he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live.  Overnight, his imagined future was gone.  When Breath Becomes Air, which includes a Foreword by Dr. Abraham Verghese and an Epilogue by Kalanithi’s wife Lucy, tells the story of  Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student into a young neurosurgeon at Stanford, guiding patients toward a deeper understanding of death and illness, and finally into a patient and a new father to a baby girl, confronting his own mortality.  Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all.

 

Quotes

“I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything.”

 

“Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?” she asked. “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?”  “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”

 

“Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head:  ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’”

 

“Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”

 

“Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”

 

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”

 

“Grand illnesses are supposed to be life-clarifying. Instead, I knew I was going to die—but I’d known that before. My state of knowledge was the same, but my ability to make lunch plans had been shot to hell. The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I’d spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d write a book. Give me ten years, I’d get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?”

 

“Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”

 

“The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”

 

“The physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.”

 

“Don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it.  The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness.  Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end.  The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt.  Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”

 

“The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may feel differently. Two months after that, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.”

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24. The Nightingale

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Summer Youngs  

Author:  Kristin Hannah

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, World War II

Info:  440 pages, published February 3, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book


Summary 

The Nightingale tells the tale of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, and their experiences in rural France during World War II.  After her husband Antoine joins the French army at the start of the war, Vianne is left to manage on her own with her daughter Sophie and soon finds herself billeting a German officer with a softer side in her home.  Vianne eventually starts to shelter Jewish children after their parents are deported to a concentration camp and even adopts three-year-old Ari, the son of her best friend Rachel.  Vianne’s younger and bolder sister Isabelle joins the French Resistance and becomes the Nightengale, an integral part of the underground network that leads Allied soldiers through the Pyrenees to safety in Spain.  As the war progresses, the sisters’ relationship and strength are tested.  With life changing in unbelievably horrific ways, Vianne and Isabelle will find themselves facing frightening situations and responding in ways they never thought possible as bravery and resistance take different forms in each of their actions.

 

Quotes

“Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.”

“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”

“Today’s young people want to know everything about everyone. They think talking about a problem will solve it. I come from a quieter generation. We understand the value of forgetting, the lure of reinvention.”

“But love has to be stronger than hate, or there is no future for us.”

“I am a mother and mothers don’t have the luxury of falling apart in front of their children, even when they are afraid, even when their children are adults.”

“Tante Isabelle says it’s better to be bold than meek. She says if you jump off a cliff at least you’ll fly before you fall.”

“She wanted to bottle how safe she felt in this moment, so she could drink of it later when loneliness and fear left her parched.”

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

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