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96. The Dinner

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Boulder Public Library Librarian

Author:   Herman Koch

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense

292 pages, published February 12, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Set in an exclusive, high priced Amsterdam restaurant, The Dinner starts off with the polite conversation of two couples.  However, the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened. Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act which has been caught on camera and their grainy images have been broadcast throughout the country.  Despite an ongoing investigation, the boys remain unidentified by everyone except their parents.  At the end of the dinner, the couples finally confront the crisis with their children and each of them must decide what they are prepared to accept and do.  

 

Quotes

“That was how I looked at life sometimes, as a warm meal that was growing cold. I knew I had to eat, or else I would die, but I had lost my appetite.”

 

“This particular restaurant is one where you have to call three months in advance—or six, or eight, don’t ask me. Personally, I’d never want to know three months in advance where I’m going to eat on any given evening, but apparently some people don’t mind. A few centuries from now, when historians want to know what kind of crazies people were at the start of the twenty-first century, all they’ll have to do is look at the computer files of the so-called “top” restaurants.”

 

“Sometimes things come out of your mouth that you regret later on. Or no, not regret. You say something so razor-sharp that the person you say it to carries it around with them for the rest of their life.”

 

“If I had to give a definition of happiness, it would be this: happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn’t have to be validated.”

 

“When the conversation turns too quickly to films, I see it as a sign of weakness. I mean: films are more something for the end of the evening, when you really don’t have much else to talk about. I don’t know why, but when people start talking about films, I always get a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, like when you wake up in the morning and find that it’s already getting dark outside.”

 

“The first thing that struck you about Claire’s plate was its vast emptiness. Of course I’m well aware that, in the better restaurants, quality takes precedence over quantity, but there are voids and then there are voids. The void here, that part of the plate on which no food at all was present, had clearly been raised to a matter of principle.

It was as though the empty plate was challenging you to say something about it, to go to the open kitchen and demand an explanation. ‘You wouldn’t even dare!’ the plate said, and laughed in your face.”

 

“I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? How many fathers who humiliate their children? How many morons whose breath stinks like rotten meat but who refuse to do anything about it? How many hopeless cases who go on complaining all their lives about the non-existent injustices they’ve had to suffer? Look around you, I said. How many of your classmates would you be pleased not to see return to their desks tomorrow morning? Think about that one family member of your own family, that irritating uncle with his pointless, horseshit stories at birthday parties, that ugly cousin who mistreats his cat. Think about how relieved you would be – and not only you, but virtually the entire family – if that uncle or cousin would step on a landmine or be hit by a five-hundred-pounder dropped from a high altitude. If that member of the family were to be wiped off the face of the earth. And now think about all those millions of victims of all the wars there have been in the past – I never specifically mentioned the Second World War, I used it as an example because it’s the one that most appeals to their imaginations – and think about the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of victims who we need to have around like we need a hole in the head. Even from a purely statistical standpoint, it’s impossible that all those victims were good people, whatever kind of people that may be. The injustice is found more in the fact that the assholes are also put on the list of innocent victims. That their names are also chiselled into the war memorials.”

My Take

I didn’t know what to expect when I started listening to The Dinner.  At first, it seemed like a clever, satirical commentary on our societal preening and pretensions.  However, as the story unfolds, The Dinner becomes a commentary on the callousness of society at large and it delivers a stinging indictment with rhetorical flare.  An interesting book by a talented writer.

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94. Nutshell

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ian McEwan

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense

197 pages, published September 13, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Trudy and Claude are having an affair and plotting to murder Trudy’s husband who also happens to be Claude’s brother. However, there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month old resident of Trudy’s womb from whose vantage point the story is told.

 

Quotes

“It’s not the theme parks of Paradiso and Inferno that I dread most – the heavenly rides, the hellish crowds – and I could live with the insult of eternal oblivion. I don’t even mind not knowing which it will be. What I fear is missing out. Health desire or mere greed, I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness. I’m owed a handful of decades to try my luck on a freewheeling planet. That’s the ride for me – the Wall of Life. I want my go. I want to become. Put another way, there’s a book I want to read, not yet published, not yet written, though a start’s been made. I want to read to the end of My History of the Twenty-First Century. I want to be there, on the last page, in my early eighties, frail but sprightly, dancing a jig on the evening of December 31, 2099.”

 

“It’s already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence.”

 

“You may never have experienced, or you will have forgotten, a good burgundy (her favourite) or a good Sancerre (also her favourite) decanted through a healthy placenta.”

 

“However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you’re inside them.”

 

“Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They’re not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they’ll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want.”

 

“Not everyone knows what it is to have your father’s rival’s penis inches from your nose.”

 

“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches civilisation.”

 

“When love dies and marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It’s the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. So, against that headwind of forgetfulness I want to place my little candle of truth and see how far it throws its light.”

 

“In science too, one dedicates his life to an Albanian snail, another to a virus. Darwin gave eight years to barnacles. And in wise later life, to earthworms. The Higgs boson, a tiny thing, perhaps not even a thing, was the lifetime’s pursuit of thousands. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.

So why not be an owl poet?”

 

“No child, still less a fetus, has ever mastered the art of small talk, or would ever want to. It’s an adult device, a covenant with boredom and deceit.”

 

“There are not many options for the evening that follows an afternoon of drinking. Only two in fact; remorse, or more drinking and then remorse.”

 

“A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs.”

 

“In the middle of a long, quiet night I might give my mother a sharp kick. She’ll wake, become insomniac, reach for the radio. Cruel sport, I know, but we are both better informed by the morning.”

 

“I’ve heard it argued that long ago pain begat consciousness…Adversity forced awareness on us, and it works, it bites us when we go too near the fire, when we love too hard. Those felt sensations are the beginning of the invention of the self…God said, Let there be pain. And there was poetry. Eventually.”

 

“I don’t know much yet about murder. Still, his scheme is more baker than butcher. Half-baked.”

 

“My immediate neighbourhood will not be palmy Norway – my first choice on account of its gigantic sovereign fund and generous social provision; nor my second, Italy, on grounds of regional cuisine and sun-blessed decay; and not even my third, France, for its Pinot Noir and jaunty self-regard. Instead I’ll inherit a less than united kingdom ruled by an esteemed elderly queen, where a businessman-prince, famed for his good works, his elixirs (cauliflower essence to purify the blood) and unconstitutional meddling, waits restively for his crown. This will be my home, and it will do.”

My Take

Listening to Ian McEwan’s latest book Nutshell was a real treat (including the excellent voicework on the audio version by Rory Kinnear).  McEwan has always been one of my favorite writers (I especially enjoyed Atonement, The Children Act and Saturday), and Nutshell is a worthy addition to his canon. I particularly enjoyed the creative and original use of the fetal perspective to tell the story.  At first, you don’t think this is going to work or its going to get tiresome, but McEwan manages to pull it off and the device makes Nutshell a clever and memorable read.

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92. Her

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Librarian

Author:   Harriet Lane

Genre:  Fiction, Thriller, Suspense, Mystery

272 pages, published January 6, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Emma and Nina, the two main characters in Her, appear to have very little in common.  As a relatively new mother, Emma is isolated and exhausted.  She has mixed emotions about leaving her job, her marriage is strained and her self-confidence is on the decline.  Nina, who is sophisticated, generous, and effortlessly in control stands in stark contrast.  When the two women strike up an unexpected relationship, something seems a bit off.   We soon learn that there is more to Nina then meets the eye and a dangerous game of cat and mouse develops.  

 

Quotes

“Emma is the engine of this home, the person who propels it forward, keeps everyone fed and clothed and healthy and happy—and yet she’s entirely alone within it, and getting lonelier with every item ticked off her checklist. This is what it comes down to: the flat-out invisible drudgery of family maintenance, the vanishing of personality as everyone else’s accrues.”

 

“Over time, I’ve come to see that so much of a personality boils down to confidence: whether you have it, or not.”

 

“I once heard someone on the radio saying that a bee is never more than forty minutes away from starving to death, and this fact has stayed with me because it seems to have a certain personal resonance. My children are in a perpetual proximity to catastrophe: concussion, dehydration, drowning or sunstroke. Keeping them safe requires constant vigilance.”

 

“I turn my back and look out to sea, the sun so low and molten that my eyes fill with tears, and yet I can feel it: a cooler wind is coming in, the edge of evening approaching. Dusk is gathering along the coast, in the coves and quaysides and marinas, where in an hour or so the long strings of coloured bulbs will twinkle and sway; and then it will pass over us-like a visitation: a plague or a blessing….”  

 

“I found the final plot twist unsatisfying, as plot twists often are: nothing like life, which – it seems to me – turns less on shocks or theatrics than on the small quiet moments, misunderstandings, or disappointments, the things that it’s easy to overlook.”

 

“I’m already someone else, but the person I turn into at these low points is someone I never imagined I could be a few years ago: someone with a hot knot of fury where her heart used to be.”

My Take

There are several things that I really liked about Her.  First of all, it’s a page turner.  Lane infuses the story with a something is not quite right creepiness that makes you want to learn more.  Secondly, I really liked Lane’s writing style.  She is a pleasure to read.  Finally, the set pieces of London and the French countryside are two places that I love and Lane does a great job capturing these locales.  Highly recommended and an especially good vacation book.

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68. Mr. Mercedes

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Crime, Thriller, Suspense

436 pages, published June 3, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

Mr. Mercedes, the first book in the Bill Hodges Trilogy by Stephen King, tells the story of a psychopathic serial killer nicknamed Mr. Mercedes after he intentionally plows through a crowd of people waiting for an unemployment fair to begin in a stolen Mercedes.  He escapes after killing eight people and wounding fifteen more.  Months later, retired cop Bill Hodges, who is still haunted by this unsolved crime, receives a crazed letter from someone who self-identifies as the “perk” and threatens more attacks.  Hodges takes the bait and starts conversing with Mr. Mercedes.  It soon becomes apparent that only Bill Hodges, with a couple of highly unlikely allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again in a bigger way.

Quotes

“Never tell a lie when you can tell the truth.”

 

“Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.”

 

“Hodges has read there are wells in Iceland so deep you can drop a stone down them and never hear the splash. He thinks some human souls are like that.”

 

“It’s easy—too easy—to either disbelieve or disregard someone you dislike.”

 

“Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master.”

 

“You know the three Ages of Man, don’t you?” Hodges asks. Pete shakes his head, grinning. “Youth, middle age, and you look fuckin terrific.”

 

“Any system created by the mind of man can be hacked by the mind of man.”

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57. Joyland

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Thiller

283 pages, published June 4, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

Joyland takes place in 1973 at a North Carolina amusement park which was the site of a vicious murder of a young woman in the “Haunted House.”  Devin Jones, a student at the University of New Hampshire, takes a summer job at Joyland in North Carolina and is told by the resident fortune teller that he will meet two children that summer, a girl with a red hat and a boy with a dog, and that one of them has The Sight.  Jones becomes close to Annie, a single mother, and her disabled son Mike.  Devin finds that he has a talent for “wearing the fur,” Joyland-talk for portraying Howie the Happy Hound, Joyland’s mascot.  One day, he saves a young girl in a red hat from choking on a park hot dog.  Devin later discovers that Mike is the child with “The Sight.”  Devin and his friends start investigating a string of unsolved murders that they believe are related to the Joyland murder.  It all comes together on a dark and stormy night at Joyland.

Quotes

“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”

 

“This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy.  Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wake up nights.”

 

“All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I’m blue — when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day — I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn’t always a butcher’s game. Sometimes the prizes are real.  Sometimes they are precious.”

 

“I’m not sure anybody ever gets completely over their first love, and that still rankles.  Part of me still wants to know what was wrong with me.  What I was lacking.”

 

“When you’re twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It’s only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you’ve been looking at the map upside down, and not until you’re forty are you entirely sure. By the time you’re sixty, take it from me, you’re fucking lost.”

 

“My father had taught me – mostly by example – that if a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems.”

 

“The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life.”

 

“Young women and young men grow up, but old women and old men just grow older and surer they’ve got right on their side.”

 

“Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down – a thing not always easy to do. “Son, do you know what history is?”  “Uh…stuff that happened in the past?”  “Nope,” he said, trying on his canvas change-belt. “History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever growing pile of crap.  Right now, we’re standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we’ll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come.  That’s why your folks’ clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example.  And, as someone who’s destined to buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving.”

 

“We could see other fires–great leaping bonfires as well as cooking fires–all the way down the beach to the twinkling metropolis of Joyland. They made a lovely chain of burning jewelry.  Such fires are probably illegal in the twenty-first century; the powers that be have a way of outlawing many beautiful things made by ordinary people.  I don’t know why that should be, I only know it is.”

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25. Confess

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Colleen Hoover

Genre:  Fiction, Suspense, Romance 

Info:  306 pages, published March 10, 2015

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

Since Confess won the Goodreads Choice Award for Romance in 2015, it seemed worth checking out.  It tells the story of twenty one year old Auburn Reed who walks into a Dallas art studio in search of a job and find herself deeply attracted to Owen Gentry, the inscrutable artist who works there and who invites people to leave their anonymous confessions at the gallery.  Auburn takes a risk and starts a relationship with Owen.  Many twists, turns and passionate scenes ensue.

 

Quotes

“Every day I’m grateful that my husband and his brother look exactly alike.  It means there’s less of a chance that my husband will find out that our son isn’t his.”  

“I’m scared I’ll never feel this again with anyone else,” I whisper.  He squeezes my hands. “I’m scared you will.”

“Selflessness. It should be the basis of every relationship. If a person truly cares about you, they’ll get more pleasure from the way they make you feel, rather than the way you make them feel.”

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15. The Girl on the Train

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Heather Bohart

Author:  Paula Hawkins

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Suspense

Info:  395 pages, published January 13, 2015

Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

The Girl on the Train is psychological thriller told from the point of view of three women: Rachel, Anna, and Megan.  Rachel Watson is a 32-year-old alcoholic who frequently binges and has blackouts.  Rachel’s life has been in a downward tailspin since her divorce from Tom, who left her for another woman, Anna Watson. Tom and Anna are now married and have a baby daughter which exacerbates Rachel’s self-destructive tendencies, as it was her inability to conceive a child that began her spiral into alcoholism.  

Rachel’s drinking has caused her to lose her job, a fact which she hides from her roommate by taking the train into the city every day.  While the train slowly passes her old house, which is now occupied by Tom, Anna, and their daughter, Rachel begins watching an unknown, attractive couple who live a few houses away from Tom, and fantasizes about the couple’s perfect life together until Rachel sees the wife kissing another man.  

When the wife goes missing after Rachel experiences a drunken blackout, Rachel begins to question whether she bears any responsibility.  As Rachel inserts herself into Scott Hipwell’s life and the investigation into Megan’s disappearance, the story unfolds in unpredictable ways.

 

Quotes

“But I did become sadder, and sadness gets boring after a while, for the sad person and for everyone around them.”

“I’d never realized, not until the last year or two of my life, how shaming it is to be pitied.”

”let’s be honest: women are still only really valued for two things—their looks and their role as mothers.”

“She must be very secure in herself, I suppose, in them, for it not to bother her, to walk where another woman has walked before.  She obviously doesn’t think of me as a threat. I think about Ted Hughes, moving Assia Wevill into the home he’d shared with Plath, of her wearing Sylvia’s clothes, brushing her hair with the same brush. I want to ring Anna up and remind her that Assia ended up with her head in the oven, just like Sylvia did.”

“I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.  Who was it said that following your heart is a good thing? It is pure egotism, a selfishness to conquer all.”

“How much better life must have been for jealous drunks before emails and texts and mobile phones, before all this electronica and the traces it leaves.”

“it’s possible to miss what you’ve never had, to mourn for it.”

“Hollowness:  that I understand. I’m starting to believe that there isn’t anything you can do to fix it. That’s what I’ve taken from the therapy sessions: the holes in your life are permanent. You have to grow around them, like tree roots around concrete; you mold yourself through the gaps.”

“The thing about being barren is that you’re not allowed to get away from it. Not when you’re in your thirties. My friends were having children, friends of friends were having children, pregnancy and birth and first birthday parties were everywhere. I was asked about it all the time. My mother, our friends, colleagues at work. When was it going to be my turn? At some point our childlessness became an acceptable topic of Sunday-lunch conversation, not just between Tom and me, but more generally. What we were trying, what we should be doing, do you really think you should be having a second glass of wine? I was still young, there was still plenty of time, but failure cloaked me like a mantle, it overwhelmed me, dragged me under, and I gave up hope.”

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10. The Life We Bury

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Heather Ringoen 

Author:  Allen Eskens

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Crime

Info:  303 pages, published October 14, 2014

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

As part of a college English class assignment, Joe Talbert must interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. At a nearby nursing home, Joe meets Carl Iverson, a dying Vietnam veteran who has been medically paroled after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.  As Joe writes about Carl’s life, especially Carl’s service in Vietnam, he cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the contemptible acts of the convict.  Joe, along with his female neighbor and love interest Lila, throws himself into uncovering the truth, but he is constrained in his efforts by having to deal with his extremely dysfunctional mother, the guilt of leaving his autistic brother vulnerable, and a haunting childhood memory.

 

Quotes

“What if I was wrong? What if there was no other side. What if, in all the eons of eternity, this was the one and only time that I would be alive. How would I live my life if that were the case?”

“Add to that cauldron an ever increasing measure of cheap vodka–a form of self-medication that quelled the inner scream but amplified the outer crazy–and you get a picture of the mother I left behind.”

“But deep down, I knew the truth: I needed her—not as a son needs a mother, but as a sinner needs the devil. I needed a scapegoat, someone I could point at and say, “You’re responsible for this, not me.” I needed to feed my delusion that I was not my brother’s keeper, that such a duty fell to our mother. I needed a place where I could store Jeremy’s life, his care, a box that I could shut tight and tell myself it was where Jeremy belonged—even if I knew, deep down, that it was all a lie. I needed that thin plausibility to ease my conscience.”

“We are surrounded every day by the wonders of life, wonders beyond comprehension that we simply take for granted. I decided that day that I would live my life—not simply exist. If I died and discovered heaven on the other side, well, that’d be just fine and dandy. But if I didn’t live my life as if I was already in heaven, and I died and found only nothingness, well…I would have wasted my life. I would have wasted my one chance in all of history to be alive.”

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