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344. Then She Was Gone

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Lisa Jewel

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

359 pages, published April 17, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

Then She Was Gone tells the story of Laurel whose 15 year old daughter Ellie disappears.  Ten years later, Laurel is a divorced woman in her early 50’s who starts dating a charming stranger named Floyd whose 9 year old daughter Poppy is a precocious, pretty and reminiscent of Ellie.  Things then take a dark and unexpected turn.

Quotes 

“When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it’s like I go back into the dream.”

 

“I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing.”

 

“Did you know that the parts of the brain involved in decision-making aren’t fully developed until you’re twenty-five years old?”

 

“If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along.”

 

“If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along.”

 

“That was how she’d once viewed her perfect life: as a series of bad smells and unfulfilled duties, petty worries and late bills.”

 

“People try and make out there’s a greater purpose, a secret meaning, that it all means something. And it doesn’t.”

 

“She’d never worked out how he’d done it, how he’d found that healthy pink part of himself among the wreckage of everything else. But she didn’t blame him. Not in the least. She wished she could do the same; she wished she could pack a couple of large suitcases and say good-bye to herself, wish herself a good life, thank herself for all the memories, look fondly upon herself for just one long, lingering moment and then shut the door quietly, chin up, morning sun playing hopefully on the crown of her head, a bright new future awaiting her. She would do it in a flash. She really would.” 

My Take

Then She Was Gone was a quick, captivating read.  Author Lisa Jewell does a particularly good job with the main character Laurel and her struggles to keep living after her 15 year old daughter disappears.  There are also several twists that kept me turning the pages of this book.

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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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242. Fahrenheight 451

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Marianne Boeke

Author:  Ray Bradbury

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia

175 pages, published October 1953

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary

Ray Bradbury’s science fiction classic Fahrenheight 451 is set in a dystopian future where books are verboten because the powers that be deem them to make people unhappy.  The main character is Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is to burn books.  After a few interactions with a teenage neighbor named Clarice, Guy comes to realize that something is missing in his life.  As begins to defy society’s rules by keeping books, he becomes a hunted man.

 

Quotes 

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

 

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

 

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

 

“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”

 

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

 

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”

 

“The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They’re Caeser’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, “Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal.” Most of us can’t rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”

 

“It doesn’t matter what you do…so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.”

 

“And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the backyard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands? He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”

 

My Take

I first read Fahrenheight 451 in high school.  I enjoyed it then, but think I liked it even better on the second reading more than 35 years later.  As an avid reader, it is hard for me to imagine a world without books.  They enrich my life deeply and make me think about ideas in whole new ways.  That is the point Bradbury is trying to make.  Without exposure to ideas both old and new (with books as the premier transmission form), we are destined for a life of mediocrity and banality.

 

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216. State of Wonder

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Julie Horowitz

Author:  Ann Patchett

Genre:  Fiction, Foreign

353 pages, published June 7, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary

State of Wonder chronicles the journey of Dr. Marina Singh into the insect-infested Amazon jungle in attempt to find out what happened to her longtime professional colleague Anders Eckman.  Anders, who was sent to Brazil by his pharmaceutical company employer to track down Dr. Annick Swenson, is presumed dead after contracting a mysterious illness.  Marina must find Dr. Swenson, who was her professor in medical school, and report on the status Dr. Swenson’s research on a drug that will allow women to maintain lifelong fertility.  Along the way, Marina will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice.

 

Quotes 

“Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.”

 

“Hope is a horrible thing, you know. I don’t know who decided to package hope as a virtue because it’s not. It’s a plague. Hope is like walking around with a fishhook in your mouth and somebody just keeps pulling it and pulling it.”

 

“Everyone knows everything eventually.”

 

“No one tells the truth to people they don’t actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.”

 

“In this life we love who we love. There were some stories in which facts were very nearly irrelevant.”

 

“There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.”

 

“It is said the siesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.”

 

“The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you, or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived. That is how one respects indigenous people. If you pay any attention at all you’ll realize that you could never convert them to your way of life anyway. They are an intractable race. Any progress you advance to them will be undone before your back is turned. You might as well come down here to unbend the river. The point, then, is to observe the life they themselves have put in place and learn from it.”

 

“Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one’s partner on both the left and the right.”

“Questions are for the benefit of every student, not just the one raising his hand. If you don’t have the starch to stand up in class and admit what you don’t understand, then I don’t have the time to explain it to you. If you don’t have a policy against nonsense you can wind up with a dozen timid little rabbits lined up in the hall outside your office, all waiting to whisper the same imbecilic question in your ear.”

 

My Take

This was my second time reading State of Wonder (by the wonderful novelist Ann Patchett), although this time I listened to the audio version.  With respect to this book, I must say that Gretchen Rubin’s axiom “the best reading is re-reading,” certainly is true.  The voice work by Hope Davis (an actress that I have always liked) brings State of Wonder to life in a way that I didn’t get with the book.  This time around, I particularly enjoyed the character of Dr. Annick Swenson, an extremely self-confident, domineering woman who charts her own path with little regard to the impact on others. She has most of the best lines of the book and it was a treat to once again visit the Amazon jungle in my second reading of State of Wonder.

 

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197. Days Without End

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Sebastian Barry

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Western

259 pages, published January 24, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary

Days Without End is a western set in the middle of the 1800’s, during the American Indian and Civil Wars.  It is narrated by seventeen year old Thomas McNulty who fled Ireland’s Great Famine for a better life in America.  Thomas, along with his best friend and lover John Cole, joins the U.S. Army in the 1850s.  The men witness repeated cruelties, but rely on each other for love and create a family with a young Sioux girl.

 

Quotes 

“Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.”

 

“There’s no soldier don’t have a queer little spot in his wretched heart for his enemy, that’s just a fact. Maybe only on account of him being alive in the same place and the same time and we are all just customers of the same three-card trickster.”

 

“A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”

 

“Things that give you heart are rare enough, better note them in your head when you find them and not forget.”

 

“Why should a man help another man? No need, the world don’t care about that. World is just a passing parade of cruel moments and long drear stretches where nothing going on but chicory drinking and whisky and cards.”

 

“It’s a dark thing when the world sets no value on you and your kin, and then Death comes stalking in, in his bloody boots.”

 

“The men hunched around, talking with the gaiety of souls about to eat plentifully, with the empty dark country about us, and the strange fabric of frost and frozen wind falling on our shoulders, and the great black sky of stars above us like a huge tray of gems and diamonds.”

 

“Gods work! Silence so great it hurts your ears, colour so bright it hurts your staring eyes. A vicious ruined class of man could cry at such scenes because it seems to tell him that his life is not approved. The remnant of innocence burns in his breast like a ember of the very sun.”

 

My Take

While I am typically not a big fan of the Western genre, I did really enjoy Days Without End which received numerous accolades:  Man Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist, Costa Book Award for Novel, Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction, Walter Scott Prize, Costa Book of the Year and HWA Endeavour Ink Gold Crown Nominee for Longlist.  While Barry vividly captures the rough and tumble of war time America in the middle of the 19th Century, the compelling part of his story are the characters of Thomas McNulty and John Cole who start a relationship when they are both hired to dress up as women and dance with miners.  As the story progresses, the reader is impressed with their fundamental decency during an indecent time and their affection for each other and the Indian girl they save and adopt.  Recommended.

 

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5. The Revenant

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:  Michael Punke

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Western

Info:  272 pages, published June 10, 2002

Format:   Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary 

Based on a true incident of heroism in the history of the American West, The Revenant tells the story of Hugh Glass, a Philadelphia-born adventurer and frontiersman.  Glass goes to sea at age 16 and enjoys a charmed life, including several years under the flag of the pirate Jean Lafitte and almost a year as a prisoner of the Loup Pawnee Indians on the plains between the Platte and the Arkansas rivers.

In 1822, at age 36, Glass escapes, finds his way to St. Louis and enters the employ of Capt. Andrew Henry, trapping along tributaries of the Missouri River. After surviving months of hardship and Indian attack, he falls victim to a grizzly bear.  His throat nearly ripped out, scalp hanging loose and deep slashing wounds to his back, shoulder and thigh, Glass appears to be mortally wounded.

Initially, Captain Henry refuses to abandon him and has him carried along the Grand River.  Unfortunately, the terrain soon makes transporting Glass impossible. Even though his death seems certain, Henry details two men, a fugitive mercenary, John Fitzgerald, and young Jim Bridger (who lived to become a frontier hero) to stand watch and bury him.

After several days, Fitzgerald sights hostile Indians. Taking Glass’s rifle and tossing Bridger his knife, Fitzgerald flees with Bridget, leaving Glass. Enraged at being left alone and defenseless, Glass survives against all odds and embarks on a 3,000-mile-long vengeful pursuit of his betrayers.

 

Quotes

“Of course it’s not simple. Who said it was simple? But you know what? Lots of loose ends don’t ever get tied up. Play the hand you’re dealt. Move on.”

“He would crawl until his body could support a crutch.  If he only made three miles a day, so be it. Better to have those three miles behind him than ahead.”

“Though no law was written, there was a crude rule of law, adherence to a covenant that transcended their selfish interests. It was biblical in its depth, and its importance grew with each step into wilderness. When the need arose, a man extended a helping hand to his friends, to his partners, to strangers. In so doing, each knew that his own survival might one day depend upon the reaching grasp of another.”

“Glass shot an irritated glance at Red, who had an uncanny knack for spotting problems and an utter inability for crafting solutions.”

“No mystery surrounded his nickname: he was enormous and he was filthy. Pig smelled so bad it confused people. When they encountered his reek, they looked around him for the source, so implausible did it seem that the odor could emanate from a human.”

“His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential.”

Read more

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