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420. Midnight Sun

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Jo Nesbø

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

273 pages, published February 16, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

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

However, the Fisherman’s men are closing in.

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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411. The Deserter

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Mike Brady

Author:    Nelson DeMille

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Suspense

448 pages, published October 22, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Army Special Operator Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor of the Criminal Investigation Division are sent in by the military to Venezuela to capture Captain Kyle Mercer of the Army’s elite Delta Force.  When Mercer disappeared from his post in Afghanistan, a video released by his Taliban captors made international headlines.  But it was unclear if Mercer deserted before he was captured.  A second video sent to Mercer’s Army commanders revealed that Mercer intentionally disappeared.

Quotes 

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

 

“He had a clean shot, but he also had an informal rule of trying not to kill anyone within an hour of landing in a new country.”

 

“The first casualty of war is the truth.”

 

“I’m always ready for anything, but prepared for nothing.”

 

My Take

The Deserter is a somewhat engaging, but a bit clichéd, thriller.  With the nonstop machismo of the main character, I think its appeal was wasted on a 54 year old woman like me.

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379. There There

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Author:  Tommy Orange

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

294 pages, published June 5, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

There There is a story of twelve characters, all of whom are traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle’s memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and has come to the powwow to dance in public for the very first time.

Quotes 

“If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.”

 

“The spider’s web is a home and a trap.”

 

“This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff.”

 

“She told me the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories.”

 

“Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping. This is what we’ve done: We’ve tried to find ways to get them to stop jumping. Convince them that burning alive is better than leaving when the shit gets too hot for them to take. We’ve boarded up windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, the one they’ve inherited.”

 

“That’s what she loves about Motown, the way it asks you to carry sadness and heartbreak but dance while doing so.”

 

“The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. Not that we’re broken. And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would you call an attempted murder victim resilient?”

 

“The problem with believing is you have to believe that believing will work, you have to believe in belief.”

 

“We’ve been defined by everyone else and continue to be slandered despite easy-to-look-up-on-the-internet facts about the realities of our histories and current state as a people. We have the sad, defeated Indian silhouette, and the heads rolling down temple stairs, we have it in our heads, Kevin Costner saving us, John Wayne’s six-shooter slaying us, an Italian guy named Iron Eyes Cody playing our parts in movies. We have the litter-mourning, tear-ridden Indian in the commercial (also Iron Eyes Cody), and the sink-tossing, crazy Indian who was the narrator in the novel, the voice of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We have all the logos and mascots. The copy of a copy of the image of an Indian in a textbook. All the way from the top of Canada, the top of Alaska, down to the bottom of South America, Indians were removed, then reduced to a feathered image. Our heads are on flags, jerseys, and coins. Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both before we could even vote as a people—which, like the truth of what happened in history all over the world, and like all that spilled blood from slaughter, are now out of circulation.”

 

My Take

While generally well written with a few interesting characters, There There is such a downbeat tale of victimology that I was happy to finally be finished with it.  It reminded me a lot of You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie (author of the highly recommended The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian).  I get that Native Americans have had a raw deal in this country and feel betrayed.  It is  just a downer to read these tales of woe.

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366. Isaac the Alchemist: Secrets of Isaac Newton, Reveal’d

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Mary Losure

Genre:  Non Fiction, Biography, Science, History

176 pages, published February 1, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Isaac the Alchemist is a biography of Isaac Newton, the father of physics, an extraordinary mathematician, and leader of the scientific revolution.  It starts with his boyhood living in an apothecary’s house and traces his life through Cambridge and adulthood where he made remarkable discoveries and immeasurably impacted science, physics and mathematics.

Quotes 

“The outlines of birds and beasts and sailing ships could still be seen in the apothecary’s attic in Grantham, along with the drawings of men and mathematical symbols. But the boy who who had made them was gone. He had taken his notebook with him: his secret world of star names and tawny lions and golden ink made from quicksilver.”

 

“He could travel in his mind, though. He did it all the time.”

 

“When your head is filled with things that other people don’t seem to give much thought to – chymistry, star names, mandrake root, mathematicall magick – it can be hard to make friends. Being short, secretive, and smarter than everybody else doesn’t help.” 

My Take

A bit dry, but I did learn a lot about Isaac Newton.

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365. Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Matt Taibbi

Genre:  Non Fiction, Politics, Public Policy

352 pages, published January 17, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

My Take

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

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364. The New Health Rules: Simple Changes to Achieve Whole-Body Wellness

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Frank Lipman, M.D.

Genre:  Non Fiction, Health, Nutrition, Self Improvement

224 pages, published December 13, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

The New Health Rules contains succinct tips on how to be a healthy person, covering categories from nutrition to exercise to stress reduction.

Quotes 

“Make your default mode one of generosity. It’s a nice way to live, and it’s contagious.”

 

“avocado—score it, spritz with lemon or olive oil, sprinkle with salt and cumin, and eat it like a grapefruit.”

 

“If you have a sweet tooth and you’re making a concerted effort to get yourself off sugar, take a supplement called glutamine when you have a craving (1,000 milligrams every four to six hours as needed).”

 

“Alcohol is liquid sugar. It’s more depleting than restorative. To feel your best, you shouldn’t be having alcohol every day, even red wine.”

 

“Eat grass-fed meat, wild-caught fish, greens, nuts, a bit of fruit—and no other carbs—for a month and see how you feel.”

 

“Lunch should be the largest meal—packed with protein, good fats, and vegetables.”

 

“If You Learn Only One Yoga Pose . . . . . . let it be supta baddha konasana.”

 

“Raw sugar and brown sugar have a better public image but are just as problematic as the white stuff. Cut it out.”

 

“If you’re on a statin drug like Lipitor to lower your cholesterol, you may know there’s controversy surrounding these meds. Here’s clarity: Lowering cholesterol does not, it turns out, prevent heart attacks and strokes. We’ve been sold a bill of goods. The big deal about this is that millions of people are on statins unnecessarily, and statins cause diabetes, liver damage, nervous system problems, muscle weakness, and more. Talk to your doctor about possibly getting off statins.” 

My Take

While there is lots of good advice in The New Health Rules, a pithy, informative book, I’ve heard about 90% of it before and I’m not sure about the other 10%.  Worth reading if you don’t keep up on nutrition news and are looking for guidance on how to eat.

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362. The Colorado Kid

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller, Novella

205 pages, published October 4, 2005

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Colorado Kid is a novella by master storyteller Stephen King that centers around an unsolved mystery.  On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There’s no identification on the body.  It’s more than a year before the man is identified and the more that is learned about the man and the bizarre circumstances of his death, the less that is understandable.  It seems like an impossible crime.

Quotes 

“Sometimes loving eyes don’t see what they don’t want to see.”

 

“Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it’s too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It’s a man’s most anonymous age.”

 

“Here I am, ninety years old and ready for the cooling board, using a brand new Macintosh computer, and there you sit, twenty-two and gorgeous, fresh as a new peach, yet scrawling on a yellow legal pad like an old maid in a Victorian romance.”

 

“Well then, I’m going to tell you a secret almost every newspaper man and woman who’s been at it awhile knows: in real life, the number of actual stories – those with beginnings, middles, and ends – are slim and none. But if you can give your readers just one unknown thing (two at the very outside) and then kick in what Dave Bowie there calls a musta-been, your reader will tell himself a story.”

 

“We poor humans are wired up to always think the worst is gonna happen because it so rarely does.”

 

“You go back to that old business the way a kid who’s lost a tooth goes back to the hole with the tip of his tongue.”

 

“It was that kind of story. The kind that’s like a sneeze which threatens but never quite arrives.”

 

“I like a woman who hasn’t decided the kitchen’s a place of slavery just because she works for a livin.” “I feel absolutely the same way about a man,” 

My Take

While I’m a big fan of Stephen King, I really didn’t enjoy The Colorado Kid that much.  Not enough story, character development and an unsatisfying ending.

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352. Herding cats: a “Sarah’s scribbles” collection

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Sarah Anderson

Genre:  Graphic Novel, Humor

112 pages, published March 27, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Herding Cats is a humorous graphic novel by Sarah Anderson that takes on topics such meeting deadlines, piles of junk-food wrappers under a glowing computer screen, and an ever-growing horde of pets.

Quotes 

 

My Take

I picked up this book from the library after seeing that it had won a Goodreads 2018 Choice Award.  I also mistakenly thought it was by Alie Brosh, author of Hyperbole and a Half, a graphic novel with similar illustration style that I read earlier in the year (and enjoyed much more).  I found Herding Cats just kind of mehhh.  Try Hyperbole and a Half. 

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341. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Hank Green

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Young Adult

352 pages, published September 25, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing starts out with the appearance of the Carls, giant alien sculptures that resemble ten-foot-tall Transformers wearing suits of samurai armor, throughout the world.  23 year old April May and her friend Andy make a video with the Carl located in New York City and post it on YouTube. The video goes viral and April and Andy find themselves at the center of an intense international media spotlight which has enormous consequences for their lives.

Quotes 

“I had a very happy childhood; I just wasn’t a very happy child.”

 

“I’d heard all this before, but I also knew that this line of argument worked. If you tell people that they’re being attacked for their beliefs, then suddenly they want to defend their beliefs, even if they didn’t really believe them before. It’s pretty amazing, really.”

 

“You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.”

 

“Maya was the most effective talker I knew. It was like she wrote essays in her brain and then recited them verbatim. She once explained to me that she thought this was part of being Black in America. “Every black person who spends time with a lot of white people eventually ends up being asked to speak for every black person,” she told me one night after it was too late to still be talking, “and I hate that. It’s really stupid. And everyone gets to respond to that idiocy however they want. But my anxiety eventually made me extremely careful about everything I said, because of course I don’t represent capital-B Black People, but if people think I do, then I still feel a responsibility to try to do it well.”

 

“It turns out pundits don’t want to talk about what’s happened; they want to use what’s happened to talk about the same things they talk about every day.”

 

“I don’t think any of us are blameless when we all, more and more often, see ourselves not as members of a culture but as weapons in a war.”

 

“What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way?”

 

“As is often the case, it was the easier choice to make and the more difficult choice to live with.” 

My Take

While Green makes a few interesting observations about fame, celebrity and social media and the larger media, I found myself mostly bored by this novel.  Skip.

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319. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen Greenblatt

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Philosophy

356 pages, published September 4, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Swerve tells the story of the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a poem containing dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.  The copying and translation of this ancient book inspired Renaissance figures including artist Botticelli, shaped the thought of Galileo, Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and influenced writers Montaigne, Shakespeare and Thomas Jefferson.

Quotes 

“What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.”

 

“The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear. Even the dreaded plague, in Lucretius’ account—and his work ends with a graphic account of a catastrophic plague epidemic in Athens—is most horrible not only for the suffering and death that it brings but also and still more for the “perturbation and panic” that it triggers.”

 

“The quintessential emblem of religion and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.  Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.”

 

“The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.”

 

“In short, it became possible – never easy, but possible – in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.”

 

“books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.”

 

“We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment’s peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.”

 

“I am,” Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, “an Epicurean.”

 

“The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views.” 

My Take

While there are lots of interesting ideas in The Swerve, I found it pretty dense and a little boring to plough through.  It would have benefited from a more engaging writing style.

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