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310. The Language of Food

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Chad Stamm

Author:   Dan Jurafsky

Genre:  Non Fiction, Food, Linguistics

272 pages, published September 15, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

In The Language of Food, linguist Dan Jurafsky (who specializes in food linguistics), offers  up a smorgasbord of food/linguistic topics including menus, dinner courses, the use of different types of food adjectives depending on whether the restaurant is upscale or downscale and the history of foods from different parts of the world.

Quotes 

“Taste, says Bourdieu, is “first and foremost . . . negation . . . of the tastes of others.” A high-status group maintains its status by legitimizing some tastes but not others, independent of inherent artistic merit, and by passing on these tastes as cultural preferences.” 

My Take

While parts of The Language of Food were interesting, other parts were a bit of a bore.  I also could have done without the recipes (especially as I was listening to the audio version of the book).  I think there must be better books out there on the intersection of language and food.

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302. The 4th Man

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Lisa Gardner

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime

47 pages, published December 27, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

A young woman is found strangled in the stairwell of a college library.  The only thing missing are her sneakers.  With no physical evidence, no signs of sexual assault, and no witnesses, all the police have to go on are the three men who were in the library with her: her boyfriend and two campus security guards, all of whom have secrets.  Five years later, ex-FBI profiler Pierce Quincy and his wife, former police officer Rainie Conner, agree to investigate this cold case.  The question is whether they be able to build a case against one of the three suspects, or is there a fourth man out there?

 

My Take

At 47 pages, The 4th Man is really a short story rather than a book.  Even so, I found it hard  to focus as the it was not particularly compelling.  There is a twist at the end, but it too was underwhelming.

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300. Don’t Worry, Life Is Easy

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Agnès Martin-Lugand

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Romance

246 pages, published May 2, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Following the loss of her husband and young daughter, Diane is stuck in a depressive rut.  After returning from Ireland (where she had an ill-fated relationship with the brooding photographer Edward), she is singularly focused on getting her literary café back on track.  Things change when she meets and falls in love with Olivier.  However, when Edward appears in Paris, Diane is thrown for a loop and must decide between the two men.

Quotes 

“Life was taking over, and I did not want to fight it anymore.”

 

“All those vacationers crammed against each other on a tiny beach, or fighting in the evening in front of the buffet, horrified at the idea that the snoring neighbor is stealing the last sausage, those people who are happy to have been locked up for ten hours in a cabin with brailing kids around them, all that made me want to throw up. “ 

My Take

Not a fan of this book.  Clichéd and syrupy romance.  There are better books out there.

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265. I Sold My Soul on Ebay

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Hemant Mehta

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Theology, Memoir

224 pages, published April 17, 2007

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In the mid-2000’s, Heman Mehta received widespread notoriety as “the eBay atheist,” i.e. the nonbeliever who auctioned off the opportunity for the winning bidder to send him to church.  Jim Henderson, a former pastor and author of Evangelism Without Additives, won the auction and sent Mehta out to a variety of church services.  Mehta, an atheist who was raised in the Jainism religion (which he rejected as a teenager) writes about the experience, including insightful critiques about what churches could be doing better to win over converts. on the Internet and spawning a positive, ongoing dialogue between atheists and believers.

 

Quotes 

“Pastor Ted and other evangelical pastors I hear about in the media seem to perceive just about everything to be a threat against Christianity. Evolution is a threat. Gay marriage is a threat. A swear word uttered accidentally on television is a threat. Democrats are a threat. And so on.

I don’t see how any of these things pose a threat against Christianity. If someone disagrees with you about politics, or social issues, or the matter of origins, isn’t that just democracy and free speech in action? How do opposing viewpoints constitute a threat?”

 

My Take

While there are some interesting parts of I Sold My Soul on Ebay (especially author Mehta’s discussion of why he became an atheist), it started to lose me with the somewhat repetitious discussion of the different church services attended by Mehta as part of his Ebay bargain.  Okay, but not particularly compelling.

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251. Artemis

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Andy Weir

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction

305 pages, published November 14, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Jazz Bashara is a petty criminal trying to make ends meet who lives on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon.  Everything changes when Jazz is given the offer to commit the perfect crime for a lucrative reward.  However, she soon discovers that she’s in the middle of a conspiracy for control of Artemis.

 

Quotes 

“On a scale from one to ‘invade Russia in winter,’ how stupid is this plan?”

 

“How dare you call me lazy? I’d come up with a scathing retort but, meh, I’m just not motivated.”

 

“A clumsy, awkward success is still a success.”

 

“By the way, we also hate it when people . . . call Artemis “the city in space.” We’re not in space; we’re on the moon. I’m mean, technically, we’re in space, but so is London.”

 

“I live in Conrad Down 15, a grungy area fifteen floors underground in Conrad Bubble. If my neighborhood were wine, connoisseurs would describe it as “shitty, with overtones of failure and poor life decisions.”

 

“And like all good plans, it required a crazy Ukrainian guy.”

 

“Quality is quality,” Jin said. “Age is irrelevant. No one bitches about Shakespeare fans.”

 

“My cart is a pain in the ass to control, but it’s good at carrying heavy things. So I decided it was male. I named him Trigger.”

 

“Very few people get a chance to quantify how much their father loves them. But I did. The job should have taken forty-five minutes, but Dad spent three and a half hours on it. My father loves me 366 percent more than he loves anything else. Good to know.”

 

“There was something weird about being on the moon and fighting for your life with a stick and some fire.”

 

“But no idiot-proofing can overcome a determined idiot.”

 

“The moon’s a mean old bitch. She doesn’t care why your suit fails. She just kills you when it does.”

 

“It’s all part of the life-cycle of an economy. First it’s lawless capitalism until that starts to impede growth. Next comes regulation, law enforcement, and taxes. After that: public benefits and entitlements. Then, finally, overexpenditure and collapse.”

 

“I didn’t want to spend any more time inside the mind of an economist. It was dark and disturbing.”

 

My Take

I picked up the Artemis audio book because I had really enjoyed Andy Weir’s The Martian.  Unfortunately, Artemis didn’t match the inventiveness, creativity and fun of The Martian.  I found it hard to care for Jazz, the protagonist, and was bored by much of the technical aspects.  My recommendation is to skip.

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210. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Author:  Sherman Alexie

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir

457 pages, published June 13, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me is the book that well known Native American author Sherman Alexie wrote after his mother’s death.  As he reveals in the book, he had a complicated relationship with his mother who could be alternatively kind and cruel.  Alexie also has a complicated relationship with his fellow Native Americans which he also explores.

 

Quotes 

“What about me?” I asked. “Am I mean?” “You aren’t mean to me with words,” she said. “You’re mean to me with your silences.”

 

“But a person can be genocided-can have every connection to his past severed- and live to be an old man whose rib cage is a haunted house built around his heart.”

 

“I TEND TO believe in government because it was the U.S. government that paid for my brain surgery when I was five months old and provided USDA food so I wouldn’t starve during my poverty-crushed reservation childhood and built the HUD house that kept us warm and gave me scholarship money for the college education that freed me. Of course, the government only gave me all of that good shit because they completely fucked over my great-grandparents and grandparents but, you know, at least some official white folks keep some of their promises.”

 

“An Indian’s wealth   Is determined by what they lose And not by what they save.”

 

“Scholars talk about the endless cycle of poverty and racism and classism and crime. But I don’t see it as a cycle, as a circle. I see it as a locked room filled with the people who share my DNA. This room has recently been set afire and there’s only one escape hatch, ten feet off the ground. And I know I have to build a ladder out of the bones of my fallen family in order to climb to safety.

 

“I don’t recall the moment when I officially became a storyteller—a talented liar—but here I must quote Simon Ortiz, the Acoma Pueblo writer, who said, “Listen. If it’s fiction, then it better be true.”

 

“My parents sold blood for money to buy food. Poverty was our spirit animal.”

 

“I cannot defeat cancer. Nobody defeats cancer. There is no winning or losing. There is no surviving or not surviving. There are only coin flips: heads or tails; benign or malignant; weight loss or bloating; morphine or oxycodone; extreme rescue efforts or Do Not Resuscitate; live or die.”

 

My Take

I decided to read You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me largely based the graphi nove that Sherman Alexie wrote about his childhood and teenage years:  The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  I really enjoyed that clever, engaging and touching book and had high hopes for this one.  Unfortunately, I was disappointed.  In You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, Alexie spends a lot of his time wallowing, blaming and casting aspersions.  I also found the book  to be relentlessly repetitive, a construct that did not work for me.  The upside is that I did learn about Native American culture in the modern world, an area I knew little about.  If that could have been done in a less negative manner, I think I would have enjoyed this book more.

 

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207. Men Without Women

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Author:   Haruki Murakami

Recommended by:   Lisa Goldberg

Genre:  Fiction, Short Stories, Foreign

240 pages, published May 9, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Men Without Women is a collection of short stories from Japanese author Haruki Murakami.  All of the stories take place in Japan and, as the title instructs, all have a theme of men without women.

 

Quotes 

“Once you’ve become Men Without Women loneliness seeps deep down inside your body, like a red-wine stain on a pastel carpet.”

 

“Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.”

 

“There were two types of drinkers:  those who drank to enhance their personalities, and those who sought to take something away.”

 

“Here’s what hurts the most,” Kafuku said. “I didn’t truly understand her–or at least some crucial part of her. And it may well end that way now that she’s dead and gone. Like a small, locked safe lying at the bottom of the ocean. It hurts a lot.”  Tatsuki thought for a moment before speaking.  “But Mr. Kafuku, can any of us ever perfectly understand another person? However much we may love them?”

 

“But he doubted the dead could think or feel anything. In his opinion, that was ones of the great things about dying.”

 

My Take

While I enjoyed a few of the stories in Men Without Women, overall the book did not do it for me.  It was a bit of a slog to finish it (never a good sign), especially as the quality level of the stories declined precipitously towards the end of the book.  More than once, I wondered what point the author was trying to make.  This will probably be my only experience with Haruki Murakami.

 

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200. The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Marianne Boeke

Author:   Douglas Adams

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Humor

193 pages, published June 23, 1997

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Right before the Earth is to be destroyed to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.  Together, Arthur and Ford journey through space aided by a galaxyful of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed, ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian (formerly Tricia McMillan), Zaphod’s girlfriend, whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; and Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he’s bought over the years.

 

Quotes 

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”

 

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

 

“This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

 

“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”

 

“A towel, [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”

 

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

 

“If there’s anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.”

 

“I’d far rather be happy than right any day.”

 

“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”

“Why, what did she tell you?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”

 

“For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.”

 

“So this is it,” said Arthur, “We are going to die.”

“Yes,” said Ford, “except… no! Wait a minute!” He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur’s line of vision. “What’s this switch?” he cried.

“What? Where?” cried Arthur, twisting round.

“No, I was only fooling,” said Ford, “we are going to die after all.”

 

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”

 

My Take

While preparing the summary for this book, I was reminded of the reasons that it didn’t really do it for me (it seemed better suited for the geeky teenage boy cohort).  However, while pulling out some quotes (which, more often than not, were very clever), I found myself liking the book a bit better.  What can I say, a mixed bag.

 

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198. The Child in Time

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Ian McEwan

Genre:  Fiction

263 pages, published November 2, 1999

Reading Format:  E-Book

 

Summary

Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children’s books, must deal with the unthinkable when his only child, three-year-old Kate, is snatched from him in a supermarket. The tragedy breaks up his marriage to Julie and leaves Stephen bereft.  Stephen and Julie struggle to deal with their horrific loss and grasp at an opportunity to continue to live.

 

Quotes 

“For children, childhood is timeless. It is always the present. Everything is in the present tense. Of course, they have memories. Of course, time shifts a little for them and Christmas comes round in the end. But they don’t feel it. Today is what they feel, and when they say ‘When I grow up,’ there is always an edge of disbelief—how could they ever be other than what they are?”

 

“It was not always the case that a large minority comprising the weakest members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of work and of many constraints on their behaviour and were able to devote much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not a natural occurrence. There was a time when children were treated like small adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource.”

 

“Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born.”

 

“…children are at heart selfish, and reasonably so, for they are programmed for survival.”

 

My Take

While I am a big fan of Ian McEwan (having enjoyed Atonement, The Children Act, Saturday, Amsterdam, Nutshell and Sweet Tooth), I am not a big fan of The Child in Time.  This book took me longer to finish than any other book that I have read during my quest.  I found it to be a slog and only finished it because I wanted the reading credit.  While there are many others who love this book, I suggest you try Atonement, Saturday or Nutshell for some great McEwan reading.

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196. The Boy on the Bridge

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   M.R. Carey

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Young Adult

392 pages, published May 2, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

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

 

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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