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77. Sister Mother Husband Dog

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Delia Ephron

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Humor

240 pages, published September 17, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Sister Mother Husband Dog is a series of autobiographical essays about life, love, sisterhood, movies, and family written by Delia Ephron, best-selling author and writer of movies You’ve Got Mail, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Hanging Up, and Michael.  Ephron deftly captures the rivalry, mutual respect, and intimacy that made up her relationship with her older sister and frequent writing companion.

 

Quotes

“Wanting to be liked can get in the way of truth.”

 

“Being in your twenties has changed a lot since I was in my twenties, but it is still a time everything awful that happens is awful in a romantic way, even if you don’t admit it (and you can’t admit it because then you would be less important in the tragedy you’re starring in, your own life)…because in your twenties you know, even if you don’t admit this either, even if this is buried deep in your subconscious, that you can waste an entire decade and still have a life.”

 

“Irony, according to the dictionary, is the use of comedy to distance oneself from emotion. I developed it as a child lickety-split. Irony was armor, a way to stick it to Mom. You think you can get me? Come on, shoot me, aim that arrow straight at my heart. It can’t make a dent because I’m wearing irony.”

 

“To the night version of her (mother) I owe free-floating anxiety. I am no longer a child in an unsafe home, but anxiety became habit. My brain is conditioned. I worry. I recheck everything obsessively. Is the seat belt fastened, are the reservations correct, is my passport in my purse? Have I done something wrong? Have I said something wrong? I’m sorry – whatever happened must be my fault. Is everyone all right, and if they aren’t, how can I step in? That brilliant serenity prayer: God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. To all the children of alcoholics I want to say, Good luck with that. If I don’t do it myself, it won’t get done (this belief is often rewarded in this increasingly incompetent world). Also, I panic easily. I am not the person you want sitting in the exit row of an airplane.

 

“I was always decoding. I was hyperalert.  Being hyperalert is a lasting thing. Being a watcher. Noticing emotional shirts, infinitesimally small tremors that flit over another person’s face, the jab in a seemingly innocuous word, the quickening in a walk, an abrupt gesture – the way, say, a jacket is tossed over a chair.”

 

My Take

All in all, I enjoyed listening to Sister Mother Husband Dog, Delia Ephron’s autobiographical series of essays.  Meg Ryan read the audiobook version and her voice captures perfectly the essence of Ephron who is often insightful and humorous in a wry way.  While Ephron is a talented writer who has had an interesting life, this book does not rise to the level of a must-read or even come to mind when a friend asks for a book recommendation.  Hence, the award of three stars.

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67. The Social Animal

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   David Brooks

Genre:  Non Fiction, Sociology

424 pages, published March 8, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

The Social Animal is the story of how people succeed in our society.  It is told through the lives of Harold and Erica, a composite American couple, and follows how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed.  Brooks infuses their lives with a vast amount of social science research to illustrate an understanding of human nature.  In the last thirty years, we have learned more about the human brain than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind which contains our emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms is creative center where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made.

Quotes

“It is an emotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception.”

 

“In his book Human Universals, Donald E. Brown lists traits that people in all places share. The list goes on and on. All children fear strangers and prefer sugar solutions to plain water from birth. All humans enjoy stories, myths, and proverbs. In all societies men engage in more group violence and travel farther from home than women. In all societies, husbands are on average older than their wives. People everywhere rank one another according to prestige. People everywhere divide the world between those inside their group and those outside their group. These tendencies are all stored deep below awareness.”

 

“Children are coached on how to jump through a thousand scholastic hoops. Yet by far the most important decisions they will make are about whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise, and how to control impulses.  On these matters, they are almost entirely on their own.  We are good at talking about material incentives, but bad about talking about emotions and intuitions.  We are good at teaching technical skills, but when it comes to the most important things, like character, we have almost nothing to say.”

 

“Most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years.  And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations.  The most common four thousand words account for 98 percent of conversations. Why do humans bother knowing.”

 

“Plato believed the soul was divided into three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. Reason seeks truth and wants the best for the whole person. Spirit seeks recognition and glory. Appetite seeks base pleasures.”

 

“Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed.  Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it.  Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.”

 

“There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there”

 

“People who succeed tend to find one goal in the distant future and then chase it through thick and thin.  People who flit from one interest to another are much, much less likely to excel at any of them.  School asks students to be good at a range of subjects, but life asks people to find one passion that they will follow forever.”

 

“If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.”

 

“Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.”

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66. About Alice

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Calvin Trillin

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir

96 pages, published December 26, 2006

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

In this very short memoir about his late wife, Calvin Trillin paints a moving portrait of Alice.  She was the wife who had “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day” and the mother who thought that if you didn’t go to every performance of your child’s school play, “the county would come and take the child.” Trillin tells stories of Alice as an educator who was equally at home teaching at a university or a drug treatment center, a gifted writer, a stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaged woman who, in the words of a friend, “managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.”  Trillin deeply loved his wife and never quit trying to impress her.  The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice.  Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”

Quotes

“Your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.”

 

“School plays were invented partly to give parents and easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities.”

 

“Among married couples the person who actually makes out the mortgage check is likely to be more cautious about spending money than the person who doesn’t. There is something sobering about sending away that much money every month in the knowledge that, rain or shine, you’ll have to come up with the same amount of money the next month and the month after that.”

 

“For Alice, of course, the measure of how you held up in the face of a life-threatening illness was not how much you changed but how much you stayed the same, in control of your own identity.”

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64. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Nassim Taleb

Genre:  Non Fiction, Public Policy

521 pages, published November 27, 2012

Reading Format:  Book

Summary 

In Antifragile, Nassim Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan, writes about how some systems actually benefit from disorder.  Antifragile discusses how to gain from disorder and chaos while being protected from fragilities and adverse events. Taleb describes how “antifragile” systems benefit from adversity, uncertainty and stress, similar to human bones getting stronger when subjected to stress and tension.  Taleb posits that people, things and systems which are not antifragile will not survive.  Specifically, he looks at why the city state is better than the nation state, why debt is bad, and why almost everything modern is bound to fail.  Antifragile explores innovation, health, biology, medicine, life decisions, politics, foreign policy, urban planning, war, personal finance, and economic systems.

Quotes

“If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.”

 

“So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.”

 

“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.”

 

“This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”

 

“The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.”

 

“The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it get to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”

 

“Never listen to a leftist who does not give away his fortune or does not live the exact lifestyle he wants others to follow. What the French call “the caviar left,” la gauche caviar, or what Anglo-Saxons call champagne socialists, are people who advocate socialism, sometimes even communism, or some political system with sumptuary limitations, while overtly leading a lavish lifestyle, often financed by inheritance—not realizing the contradiction that they want others to avoid just such a lifestyle. It is not too different from the womanizing popes, such as John XII, or the Borgias. The contradiction can exceed the ludicrous as with French president François Mitterrand of France who, coming in on a socialist platform, emulated the pomp of French monarchs. Even more ironic, his traditional archenemy, the conservative General de Gaulle, led a life of old-style austerity and had his wife sew his socks.”

 

“Steve Jobs: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

 

“The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.”

 

“Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America’s asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.”

 

“Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.”

 

“The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.”

 

“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad.”

 

“Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the “victims” of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather. Finally, a thought. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.”

 

“The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom. He did not use the notion of the Procrustean bed, but he outlined it perfectly. His argument is that they repress children’s natural biophilia, their love of living things. But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children’s lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds–that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning . . . . Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.”

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61. Vegan Before Six

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mark Bittman

Genre:

288 pages, published April 30, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

Summary 

Vegan Before Six or VB6 as it is referred to was written by food writer Mark Bittman after his doctor told him to adopt a vegan diet or go on medication.  He didn’t want to do either, so he compromised and decided to become a “flexitarian” in which he focused on a vegan diet heavy in vegetables, fruits, and grains until 6:00 p.m.  After that time he would eat however he wanted in moderation. The results were quick and impressive.   Bittman lost 35 pounds and saw all of his blood numbers move in the right direction.  He also kept the weight off and his health continued to improve.

Quotes

“I live full-time in the world of omnivores, and I’ve never wanted to leave. But the Standard American Diet (yes, it’s SAD) got to me as it gets to almost everyone in this country.”

 

“Like pornography, junk [food] might be tough to define but you know it when you see it.”

 

“We spend a trillion dollars a year on food, but it’s only 9.4 percent of our expendable income, the lowest percentage of any country on record.”

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53. Boomsday

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   JL Collins

Author:   Christopher Buckley

Genre:  Fiction, Satire

336 pages, published April 2, 2007

Reading Format:  Book

Summary 

Outraged over the mounting Social Security debt, Cassandra Devine, a charismatic 29-year-old blogger and member of Generation Whatever, incites massive cultural warfare when she politely suggests that Baby Boomers be given government incentives to kill themselves by age 75.  Her modest proposal catches fire with millions of citizens, chief among them an ambitious senator seeking the presidency.  With the help of Washington’s greatest spin doctor, the blogger and the politician try to ride the issue of euthanasia for Boomers (called “transitioning”) all the way to the White House, over the objections of the Religious Right, and of course, the Baby Boomers, who are deeply offended by demonstrations on the golf courses of their retirement resorts.

 

Quotes

“My, my, my, how very different are the workings of government from what we all read about in books as children.  I wonder, do the Founders weep in heaven?”

 

“Had he merely dreamed a beautiful dream, or had a United States senator just gone on television to advocate mass suicide as a means of dealing with the deficit?”

 

“a blue blood in a red meat business”

 

“like the milk ads, only they’re drinking poison”

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49. Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Rolf Potts

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Travel

205 pages, published December 24, 2002

Reading Format:  Book

Summary 

Vagabonding is about taking time off from your normal life, from six weeks to four months to two years, to discover and experience the world on your own terms.   In this handbook, veteran travel writer Rolf Potts explains how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel.   Subjects he covers include:   determining your destination, paying for your travel time, adjusting to life on the road, working and volunteering overseas, handling travel adversities and re-assimilating back into ordinary life.

 

Quotes

“The more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that were too poor to buy your freedom.” 

 

“For all the amazing experiences that await you in distant lands, the meaningful part of travel always starts at home, with the personal investment in the wonders to come.”

 

“Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them.  The least we can do is try to be there.”  Quoting Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”

 

“Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now.  Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.  From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.”

 

“The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home — and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.”

 

“For first-time vagabonders, this can be one of the hardest travel lessons to grasp, since it will seem that there are so many amazing sights and experiences to squeeze in. You must keep in mind, however, that the whole point of long-term travel is having the time to move deliberately through the world. Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time.  At home, you’re conditioned to get to the point and get things done, to favor goals and efficiency over moment-by-moment distinction.  On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule.”

 

“In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We’d love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.”

 

“Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle.”

 

“The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. As you begin to practice this openness, you’ll quickly discover adventure in the simple reality of a world that defies your expectations. More often than not, you’ll discover that “adventure” is a decision after the fact—a way of deciphering an event or an experience that you can’t quite explain.”

 

“Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions.”

 

“Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word. Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It’s just an uncommon way of looking at life—a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it.”

 

“having an adventure is sometimes just a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing new environment—not so much a physical challenge as a psychic one.”

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14. The Language of Flowers

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Deidre Farrell

Author:  Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Genre:  Fiction, Romance

Info:  323 pages, published August 23, 2011

Format:  Book

Summary 

The Language of Flowers follows the fraught life of a Victoria Jones, who by the age of 18, had lived in 32 foster homes, and becomes a flower arranger.  Victoria learns the human lessons of love and trust with the aid of a flower dictionary, a type of Victorian-era book which defines what different types of flowers mean.

 

Quotes

“If it was true that moss did not have roots, and maternal love could grow spontaneously as if from nothing, perhaps I had been wrong to believe myself unfit to raise my daughter. Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.”

“Common thistle is everywhere,” she said. “Which is perhaps why human beings are so relentlessly unkind to one another.”

“She was perfect. I knew this the moment she emerged from my body, white and wet and wailing. Beyond the requisite ten fingers and ten toes, the beating heart, the lungs inhaling and exhaling oxygen, my daughter knew how to scream. She knew how to make herself heard. She knew how to reach out and latch on. She knew what she needed to do to survive. I didn’t know how it was possible that such perfection could have developed within a body as flawed as my own, but when I looked into her face, I saw that it clearly was.”

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6. Stumbling on Happiness

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:  Daniel Gilbert

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement, Happiness

Info: 336 pages, published January 1, 2006

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

Gilbert’s central thesis is that, through perception and cognitive biases, people imagine the future poorly, in particular what will make them happy.  He argues that imagination fails in three ways:

(1)  Imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario.

(2) Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present than they actually will be (or were).

(3) Imagination fails to realize that things will feel different once they actually happen—most notably, the psychological immune system will make bad things feel not so bad as they are imagined to feel.

Gilbert then recommends using other people’s experiences to predict the future, instead of imagining it, since people are very similar in many of their experiences.

 

Quotes

“Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.” 

“The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.”

“Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy.”

“In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.”

“Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.”

“Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts!”

“Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.”

“Indeed, in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret “not” having done things much more than they regret things they “did”, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not grasping profitable business opportunities, and not spending enough time with family and friends.”

“The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it.”

“We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy… But our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.”

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