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559. One by One

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ruth Ware

Genre:   Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Crime, Mystery, Foreign

372 pages, published September 8, 2020

Reading Format:   Audio Book

Summary

Getting snowed in at a mountain chalet in the Swiss Alps is just the beginning of the problems facing the membes of the tech company Snoops who are there for a corporate retreat to decide whether or not to take a huge buyout offer.  Bigger problems ensue for them and the two Chalet employees when the murders start, one by one.

Quotes 

“I stop, thinking of Topher and his cushioned, monied existence–the way he has had everything handed to him on a plate, the way he’s never had to scrap for anything, never had to swallow a snub from a boss, or pick up a stranger’s dirty underwear, or do any of the myriad demeaning, boring jobs the rest of us take for granted.”

 

“They are arrogant, that’s what I realize–maybe not Liz and Carl quite so much, but all of them to some degree. They are protected by the magic of their shares and their status and their IP. They think that life can’t touch them–just like I used to do.”

 

“Only now it has. Now life has them by the throat. And it won’t let go.”

 

 “Behind him is a girl with fluffy yellow hair that cannot possibly be her real shade. It’s the color of buttercups and the texture of dandelion fluff.”

 

 “But it’s not just her body language that sets her apart—it’s everything. She’s the only one wearing clothes that look more H&M than D&G, and though she’s not the only one w

earing glasses, the others look like they’re wearing props provided by a Hollywood studio.”

 

My Take

One by One is a crackling thriller.  I had previously read her books In a Dark, Dark Wood and The Woman in Cabin 10 and had really enjoyed them.  I liked One by One even more.  It was very  suspenseful and kept me guessing throughout.  The main character and Chalet Manager Erin is also well developed and gives the reader someone to identify with and root for.

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544. The Midnight Library

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Matt Haig

Genre:  Fiction

288 pages, published September 29, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

After contemplating ending her life, protagonist Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library with her former school librarian Mrs. Elm.  In this supernatural place where the bookshelves go on forever, Nora can pick a book which represents a different version of a life that she did not lead and is then inserted into that life.  A chance to undo her regrets.  Nora tries out mulitiple different possible lives and arrives at a surprising realization.

Quotes 

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.  It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have.  It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.  But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.  We can’t tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”

 

“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.”

 

“The only way to learn is to live.”

 

“A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”

 

 “We only need to be one person.  We only need to feel one existence.  We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”

 

“As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

 

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things.”

 

 “Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”

 

“You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”

 

“Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”

 

“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil – rich, fertile soil.  She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.

She could plant a forest inside herself.”

 

“Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely.”

 

“And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.”

 

“The thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.”

 

“You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.”

 

“Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.”

 

“Regrets don’t leave. They weren’t mosquitoe bites. They itch forever.”

 

“Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs. Elm softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’

 

‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibilities…In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living…never underestimate the big importance of small things.”

 

“That was how she had felt most of her life.

Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.”

 

“It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.”

 

“The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature…solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”

 

“Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

[…]

There are patterns of life… Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of the particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”

 

“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”

 

“Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all.”

 

“She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.”

 

“Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.”

 

“When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.”

 

My Take

The Midnight Library was a true pleasure to read (or rather listen to, in my case, with superb narration by Carey Mulligan). Author Matt Haig weaves a compelling tale of what could have been when Nora Seed is given the opportunity to explore many of the lives she could have lived, much in the same vein as George Bailey seeing how the lives around him would have been impacted if he had never been born in my favorite movie It’s a Wonderful Life.  This book will really get you thinking, appreciating your own life and may even spur you on to take some risks.  Highly recommended.

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484. Station Eleven

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Emily St. John Mandel

Genre:    Fiction, Dystopia, Science Fiction

333  pages, published September 9, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Station Eleven is a dystopian novel set in the days of civilization’s collapse after a virus kills off most of the world’s population.  Author Emily St. John Mandel examines how human beings cope when almost every aspect of the world as they knew it ceases to exist.

Quotes 

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”

 

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”

 

“No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.”

 

“They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.”

 

“She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle.”

 

“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”

 

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”

 

“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think – this will maybe sound weird – it’s like the corporate world’s full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I’ve had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia’s no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood’s full of ghosts.”

 

 “She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”

 

“I’ve been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they’ll never truly die. I know that’s a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They’re all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”

 

“Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.”

 

 “An incomplete list:

No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.

No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.

No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.

No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.

No more countries, all borders unmanned.

No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.”

 

“He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.”

 

My Take

After reading and loving The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, I was intererested to see if she had written any other books.  I discovered that Station Eleven was her breakthrough novel, so added the audio version to my library queue.  While I prefer The Glass Hotel, I did enjoy Station Eleven, especially her fascinating descriptions of how life changes after a pandemic wipes out most of civilization.

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446. An Object of Beauty

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Steve Martin

Genre:   Fiction, Art

304 pages, published November 23, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Lacey Yeager is an attractive, ambitious young woman who comes to New York to make her way in the art world during its heyday from the late 1990s through today.  Starting out at Sotheby’s, she climbs the social and career ladders with ease, finally opening her own gallery.

Quotes 

“When someone less capable is ahead of me, I am not pleased. It makes me insane.”

 

“Lacey was just as happy alone as with company. When she was alone, she was potential; with others she was realized. Alone, she was self-contained, her tightly spinning magnetic energy oscillating around her. When in company, she had invisible tethers to anyone in the room: as they moved away, she pulled them in.”

 

“I have found that– just as in real life–imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.”

 

“You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, ‘This is art, and you can’t do it.”

 

“…when the person beside you is making you alert and keen and the idea of being with anyone else is not imaginable…”

 

“she is nearing forty and not so easily forgiven as when her skin bloomed like roses.”

 

“She started converting objects of beauty into objects of value.”

 

“An artist who painted a face was now ‘playing with the idea of portraiture,’ or ‘exploring push-pull aesthetics,’ or toying with contradictions like ‘menacing-slash-playful,’ but he or she was never, ever, just painting a face.”

 

My Take

Written by iconic comedian Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty is a compelling character study of an ambitious young woman who also loves art.  I found it fascinating and learned a lot about the inner workings of New York art scene and how the market for art operates.

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436. The Design of Everyday Things

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Donald A. Norman

Genre:   Non Fiction, Business, Psychology, Design

240 pages, published September 19, 2002

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Design of Everyday Things is about how the design of objects and systems can help or hinder users.  Author Donald Norman explores how bad design can be avoided and the desirability of good design.

Quotes 

“Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.”

 

“When people fail to follow these bizarre, secret rules, and the machine does the wrong thing, its operators are blamed for not understanding the machine, for not following its rigid specifications. With everyday objects, the result is frustration. With complex devices and commercial and industrial processes, the resulting difficulties can lead to accidents, injuries, and even deaths. It is time to reverse the situation: to cast the blame upon the machines and their design. It is the machine and its design that are at fault. It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.”

 

“Principles of design:

  1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.
  2. Simplify the structure of tasks.
  3. Make things visible: bridge gulfs between Execution and Evaluation.
  4. Get the mappings right.
  5. Exploit the power of constraints.
  6. Design for error.
  7. When all else fails, standardize.”

 

“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible,”

 

“Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.”

 

“A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.”

 

“Fail often, fail fast,”

 

“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.”

 

“The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.”

 

“The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can’t do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can’t, so you don’t even try. The result is that you can’t, just as you thought.”

 

“The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That’s why we blame others and even ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea that a person is at fault is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often the blame is attributed to “human error.” The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training procedures are revised. The law rests comfortably. But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else.”

 

“It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.”

 

“It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.”

 

“A story tells of Henry Ford’s buying scrapped Ford cars and having his engineers disassemble them to see which parts failed and which were still in good shape. Engineers assumed this was done to find the weak parts and make them stronger. Nope. Ford explained that he wanted to find the parts that were still in good shape. The company could save money if they redesigned these parts to fail at the same time as the others.”

 

“Norman’s Law: The day the product team is announced, it is behind schedule and over its budget.”

 

“Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all, because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking.”

 

“original ideas are the easy part. Actually producing the idea as a successful product is what is hard.”

 

“If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things. It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life.”

 

“Cognition and emotion cannot be separated. Cognitive thoughts lead to emotions: emotions drive cognitive thoughts. The brain is structured to act upon the world, and every action carries with it expectations, and these expectations drive emotions. That is why much of language is based on physical metaphors, why the body and its interaction with the environment are essential components of human thought. Emotion is highly underrated. In fact, the emotional system is a powerful information processing system that works in tandem with cognition. Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value. It is the emotional system that determines whether a situation is safe or threatening, whether something that is happening is good or bad, desirable or not. Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgments. A human without a working emotional system has difficulty making choices. A human without a cognitive system is dysfunctional.”

 

My Take

While there are some interesting ideas in The Design of Everyday Things (as exemplified by the quotes above), I found the book to be dated with lots of discussion of computer and phone systems that are no longer relevant in 2020.  2002, when this book was published, is an eternity in the world of technology.

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431. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    J.K. Rowling

Genre:   Fiction, Fantasy, Young Adult

870 pages, published September 1, 2004

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is book number five in the classic Harry Potter series.  Harry is growing up and as an emerging young adult/wizard is facing greater and more fearsome challenges.  Other than the dark lord Voldemort who continues to gain power, Harry’s chief adversary is the head in the sand approach of the Ministry of Magic, personified by the new Hogwart’s Headmaster Dolores Umbridge.  However, Harry is not alone in his battle, but is joined by the Order of the Phoenix which includes Professor Lupin, Sirius Black, Mad Eye Moody and the Weasley’s.

Quotes 

“Wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.”

 

“Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.”

 

“Is it true that you shouted at Professor Umbridge?”

“Yes.”

“You called her a liar?”

“Yes.”

“You told her He Who Must Not Be Named is back?”

“Yes.”

“Have a biscuit, Potter.”

 

“You’re a prefect? Oh Ronnie! That’s everyone in the family!”

“What are Fred and I? Next door neighbors?”

 

“Why were you lurking under our window?”

“Yes – yes, good point, Petunia! What were you doing under our windows, boy?”

“Listening to the news,” said Harry in a resigned voice.

His aunt and uncle exchanged looks of outrage.

“Listening to the news! Again?”

“Well, it changes every day, you see,” said Harry.”

 

“From now on, I don’t care if my tea leaves spell ‘Die, Ron, Die,’ I’m chucking them in the bin where they belong.”

 

“The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters.”

 

“You should write a book,” Ron told Hermione as he cut up his potatoes, “translating mad things girls do so boys can understand them.”

 

“Harry, don’t go picking a row with Malfoy, don’t forget, he’s a prefect now, he could make life difficult for you…”

“Wow, I wonder what it’d be like to have a difficult life?” said Harry sarcastically.”

 

“Well?” Ron said finally, looking up at Harry. “How was it?”

Harry considered it for a moment. “Wet,” he said truthfully.

Ron made a noise that might have indicated jubilation or disgust, it was hard to tell.

“Because she was crying,” Harry continued heavily.

“Oh,” said Ron, his smile faded slightly. “Are you that bad at kissing?”

“Dunno,” said Harry, who hadn’t considered this, and immediately felt rather worried. “Maybe I am.”

 

“By all means continue destroying my possessions. I daresay I have too many.”

 

“Well, we were always going to fail that one,” said Ron gloomily as they ascended the marble staircase. He had just made Harry feel rather better by telling him how he told the examiner in detail about the ugly man with a wart on his nose in the crystal ball, only to look up and realize he had been describing the examiner’s reflection.”

 

My Take

I am thoroughly enjoying my re-read of the Harry Potter series, this time by listening to the excellent audio versions narrated by the incomparable Jim Dale.  He really brings the story to life with spot on voices for each character.  Although clocking in at a lengthy 870 pages, The Order of the Phoenix moves swiftly along.  It also benefits from Rowling’s clever analogy to the pre-World War II mindset in which most of the world underestimated the looming danger of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.  The execrable Dolores Umbridge is the perfect character to illustrate this concept.

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427. The Giver of Stars

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Aileen Schwab, Katy Fasset

Author:   Jojo Moyes

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

400 pages, published October 8, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Set in the Depression, The Giver of Stars is the story of five women who become the Packhorse Librarians, delivering library books to the residents of rural Kentucky and changing lives (their own and others) in the process.  The main character is Alice Wright, a beautiful young British woman who marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her provincial English life.  Alice is befriended by Margery, a rugged, self-sufficient woman who advises Alice who advises Alice that “there is always a way out of a situation” when Alice’s marriage becomes interminable.  So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically.

Quotes 

“There is always a way out of a situation. Might be ugly. Might leave you feeling like the earth had gone and shifted under your feet. But there is always a way around.”

 

“She just wasn’t sure she had yet been to the place she was homesick for.”

 

“That some things are a gift, even if you don’t get to keep them.”

 

“You know the worst thing about a man hitting you?” Margery said finally. “Ain’t the hurt. It’s that in that instant you realize the truth of what it is to be a woman. That it doesn’t matter how smart you are, how much better at arguing, how much better than them period. It’s when you realize they can always shut you up with a fist. Just like that.” She mulled over it for a Monet, then straightened up , and flashed Alice a tight smile. “Course, you know that only happens till you learn to hit back harder.”

 

“There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham. • ANNA SEWELL, Black Beauty”

 

“Time flew. And each ended the night full and happy with the rare glow that comes from knowing your very being has been understood by somebody else. And that there might just be someone out there, who will only ever see the best in you.”

 

“he makes my heart flutter like a clean sheet on a long line.”

 

“And there followed a strange, elongated couple of minutes. The kind in which two people know they have to part, and don’t want to.And while neither can acknowledge it, each believes the other feels it too.”

 

“She had earned every one of her bruises and blisters, had built a new Alice over the frame of one with whom she had never felt entirely comfortable.”

 

My Take

I really enjoyed The Giver of Stars, another great book by Jojo Moyes.  Previous books by Moyes, a talented and entertaining writer, that I have read on my Quest include  After You, One Plus On, The Girl You Left Behind, Silver Bay, Still Me and Paris for One.  A foray into historical fiction, The Giver of Stars is one of Moyes’ best books.  The characters are interesting, well detailed and come to life, especially in the audio version that I listened to, and the plot definitely holds your interest.  Highly recommended.

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425. The Silent Patient

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Alex Michaelides

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller, Mystery

325 pages, published February 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Silent Patient is a psychological thriller written from the point of view of Theo Faber, a criminal psychotherapist whose latest patient is Alicia Berenson, a famous painter who is in a mental ward after killing her husband Gabriel, a successful fashion photographer.  Since the murder, Alicia has refused to speak.  Her most recent painting, entitled Alcestis, is a self portrait and is based on the Greek myth of a female heroine who is betrayed by her husband who selfishly asks his wife, Alcestis, to die in his place. When Alcestis is returned to him from her death, Alcestis mysteriously remains mute.

Quotes 

“Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist. We need to ask ourselves, is this someone who will be honest with me, listen to criticism, admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible?”

 

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways. —SIGMUND FREUD”

 

“The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it. —ALICE MILLER”

 

“We’re all crazy, I believe, just in different ways.”

 

“About fireworks?

About love. About how we often mistake love for fireworks – for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It’s boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm – and constant. I imagine you do give Kathy love – in the true sense of the word. Whether or not she is capable of giving it back to you is another question.”

 

“At the time I didn’t understand. But that’s how therapy works. A patient delegates his unacceptable feelings to his therapist; and she holds everything he is afraid to feel, and feels it for him. Then, ever so slowly, she feeds his feelings back to him.”

 

“There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other.”

 

“Somehow grasping at vanishing snowflakes is like grasping at happiness: an act of possession that instantly gives way to nothing. It reminded me that there was a world outside this house: a world of vastness and unimaginable beauty; a world that for now, remained out of my reach. That memory had repeatedly returned to me over the years. It’s as if the misery that surrounded that brief moment of freedom made it burn even brighter: a tiny light surrounded by darkness.”

 

“Love that doesn’t include honesty doesn’t deserve to be called love.”

 

“You know, one of the hardest things to admit is that we weren’t loved when we needed it most. It’s a terrible feeling, the pain of not being loved.”

 

“I believe the same is true for most people who go into mental health. We are drawn to this profession because we are damaged – we study psychology to heal ourselves. Whether we are prepared to admit this or not is another question.”

 

“No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.”

 

My Take

The Silent Patient is a taut thriller that delves into the worlds of greek mythology and modern day therapy.  It kept me guessing and there were some unexpected twists at the end.  Recommended.

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424. Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Katy Fassett

Author:    Amaryllis Fox

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir, Foreign

240 pages, published October 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA is the memoir of Amaryllis Fox who writes about her life  as a young woman in the CIA.   Fox was an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded.  Roused by this horrific event, Fox applied to a master’s program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world.  At the tender age of 21, Fox was recruited by the CIA where she went from analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day to help prepare the daily briefing for the president. She then worked on the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training and then deployed as a spy under non-official cover as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Life Undercover is a quick read.  I learned a lot about the CIA training and covert operations.  Fox is a good writer and has some interesting tales to tell about her live undercover and how she got there.

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422. The Bluest Eye

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Marlys Lietz

Author:   Toni Morrison

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

216 pages, published September 6, 2005

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel and tells the story of 11 year old Pecola Breedlove.  Pecola, a poor black child from a dysfunctional family, prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as the blond, blue-eyed children in her town.

Quotes 

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”

 

“We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.”

 

“And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

 

“guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.”

 

“Anger is better.  There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

 

“Jealousy we understood and thought natural… But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.”

 

“She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one’s major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.”

 

“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us–all who knew her–felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used–to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.  And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

 

My Take

I liked, but did not love, The Bluest Eye.  While it is well written and has something to say, I found it hard to relate to the characters and was not very engaged in the story.  Also, it is depressing.

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