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| 0241145473
| 9780241145470
| 4.03
| 14,708
| Mar 2016
| Apr 28, 2016
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it was amazing
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Really enjoyed this book. It's a novel about a couple. The first bit is about them falling in love and the rest of it is about how their relationship
Really enjoyed this book. It's a novel about a couple. The first bit is about them falling in love and the rest of it is about how their relationship plays out over many decades, life phases, kids, etc etc. The book has explanatory paragraphs every couple of pages that we assume is in the voice of the all-knowing Alain de Botton. Some might consider this to be a lazy writing strategy, but it works here because the analysis is always funny and insightful. I was reading this book in physical form so I did not highlight anything but here is an example: ############## Novel text: After the ceremony, members of the wedding party repair to a nearby restaurant, and by late that same evening the new husband and wife are ensconced in a small hotel near Saint-Germain, in Paris. Analytical paragraph that follows: Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't yet know who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate. ############ Would definitely recommend this book, especially to anyone married or considering marriage. ...more | Notes are private!
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not set
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Jul 2018
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Aug 15, 2018
| Hardcover
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| 1439172560
| 9781439172568
| 3.59
| 20,009
| Jan 13, 2015
| Jan 13, 2015
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it was amazing
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This is the funniest, and in some ways truest, book I've ever read. It's characters are insanely whacky, which makes it all the more relatable. Highlig This is the funniest, and in some ways truest, book I've ever read. It's characters are insanely whacky, which makes it all the more relatable. Highlights: ### I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than his bond with his mother. We didn’t. That’s the problem with men my age, I’m somehow older than them. When you live alone people are always thinking they can stay with you, when the opposite is true: who they should stay with is a person whose situation is already messed up by other people and so one more won’t matter. I made myself very still so he would continue; I love to be described. It doesn’t have a name—I just call it my system. Let’s say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy, and they stop doing the dishes. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork. So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and this makes the person feel like a homeless person. So they stop bathing. Which makes it hard to leave the house. The person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups because they’re closer to the bed. We’ve all been this person, so there is no place for judgment, but the solution is simple: Fewer dishes. How much time do you spend moving objects to and fro? Before you move something far from where it lives, remember you’re eventually going to have to carry it back to its place—is it really worth it? Can’t you read the book standing right next to the shelf with your finger holding the spot you’ll put it back into? Or better yet: don’t read it. And if you are carrying an object, make sure to pick up anything that might need to go in the same direction. This is called carpooling. Putting new soap in the bathroom? Maybe wait until the towels in the dryer are done and carry the towels and soap together. Maybe put the soap on the dryer until then. Like a rich person, I live with a full-time servant who keeps everything in order—and because the servant is me, there’s no invasion of privacy. After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore, it’s as if I don’t exist. Obviously her features were better than mine, but if you just looked at the spaces between the features, I won. Some people think it’s really important to be in the moment with sex, to be present with the other person; for me it’s important to block out the person and replace them, entirely if possible, with my thing. Reincarnation?” “I don’t relate to that word.” He drove like he lived, with entitlement, not using the blinker, just gliding very quickly between lanes in his Land Rover. At first I kept looking over my shoulder to check if the lane was actually clear or if we were going to die, but after a while I threw caution to the wind and sank back into the heated leather seat. Fear was for poor people. Maybe this was the happiest I’d ever been. Everything in the bathroom was white. I sat on the toilet and looked at my thighs nostalgically. Soon they would be perpetually entwined in his thighs, never alone, not even when they wanted to be. But it couldn’t be helped. We had a good run, me and me. I imagined shooting an old dog, an old faithful dog, because that’s what I was to myself. Go on, boy, get. I watched myself dutifully trot ahead. Then I lowered my rifle and what actually happened was I began to have a bowel movement. It was unplanned, but once begun it was best to finish. I flushed and washed my hands and only by luck did I happen to glance back at the toilet. It was still there. One had to suppose it was the dog, shot, but refusing to die. This could get out of hand, I could flush and flush and Phillip would wonder what was going on and I’d have to say The dog won’t die gracefully. Is the dog yourself, as you’ve known yourself until now? Yes. No need to kill it, my sweet girl, he’d say, reaching into the toilet bowl with a slotted spoon. We need a dog. But it’s old and has strange, unchangeable habits. So do I, my dear. So do we all. I flushed again and it went down. I could tell him about it later. For plain water I was Heidi, dipping a metal ladle into a well. It’s from the end, when she’s living in the Alps. For orange juice I was Sarge from the Beetle Bailey comic, where Sarge and Beetle Bailey go to Florida and drink all-you-can-drink orange juice. Glug, glug, glug. It worked because it wasn’t me, it was the character swallowing, offhandedly—just a brief moment in a larger story. The urgency predated cars—it had to be me alone thrusting through space, chest out, hair blown back. Each driver who saw me thought, She is running for her life, she will die if she doesn’t get there, and they were right. Except it was quite a bit farther on foot than I had anticipated, and the rain had thickened. My clothes became heavy with water, my face was washed again and again. Each driver who passed me thought, She is a giant rat or some other wet, craven animal whose hunger strips her of her dignity. And they were right. “I appreciate the gift but I’m not . . . you know. I’m into dick.” She coughed huskily and spit into one of the empty Pepsi bottles on the coffee table. “We’re in the same boat, as far as that goes,” I said. I saw us in a little dinghy together, liking dick on the big dark sea. pause—I saw us through the homeless gardener’s eyes and felt obscene. Being outside society, he didn’t know about adult games; he was like me before I met Ruth-Anne, thinking everything that happened in life was real. The noise shook everything out of my head. What a magical way to get around. I’d always thought of these types of machines as toys for uneducated people who didn’t care about the environment, but maybe they weren’t. Maybe this was a kind of meditation. I felt connected to everything and the motor volume held me at a level of alertness I wasn’t used to. I kept waking up and then waking up from that, and then waking up even more. Was everything redneck actually mystical? See, this is what we do, I began, we exist in time. That’s what living is; you’re doing it right now as much as anyone. I could tell he was deciding. He was feeling it out and had come to no conclusions yet. The warm, dark place he had come from versus this bright, beepy, dry world. Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn’t representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works. And in case he wasn’t into nature, I added: And it’s a really wild time in terms of technology. You’ll probably have a robot and that will be normal. Should I introduce myself or try to kill them? Not violently, just enough that they wouldn’t exist. Anyone who questions what satisfaction can be gained from a not-so-bright girlfriend half one’s age has never had one. It just feels good all over. It’s like wearing something beautiful and eating something delicious at the same time, all the time. Sometimes I looked at her sleeping face, the living flesh of it, and was overwhelmed by how precarious it was to love a living thing. She could die simply from lack of water. It hardly seemed safer than falling in love with a plant. But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway. What did it really matter if I spent it like this—caring for this boy—as opposed to some other way? I would always be earthbound; he hadn’t robbed me of my ability to fly or to live forever. I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have? There would be other unpardonable crimes, I could feel them coming—things that in retrospect would become my greatest regrets. I’d always be catching up with my love. How terrible. ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 2016
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Jul 11, 2017
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0802122558
| 9780802122551
| 3.84
| 55,492
| Jun 03, 2014
| Jun 03, 2014
|
liked it
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I read this with my book club. I think it's interesting that this is based on the life of Margaret Mead. I found the love story to be annoying / predi
I read this with my book club. I think it's interesting that this is based on the life of Margaret Mead. I found the love story to be annoying / predictable. Overall, didn't love it, but def want to learn more about Margaret Mead! Highlights: ##### But it was impossible not to be envious of other people’s people. Until you laid it all out neatly on the page, your own tribe looked a mess. ‘Everyone becomes a genius when they die young. But I’ve always thought my opinion was the right one. It’s a small flaw I have.’ I feel like I got most of life’s lessons before I turned six. For me, other people are the point, but other people can disappear. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.’ I’m not sure I’ve seen such height & sensitivity paired before. Very tall men are so often naturally removed and distant Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation. And all the while I am aware of a larger despair, as if Helen & I are vessels for the despair of all women and many men too. Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our “progress,” so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? Always in her mind there had been the belief that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it. They know their ancestors have a plan for them. There’s no sense that it was wrong. Tragedy is based on this sense that there’s been a terrible mistake, isn’t it?’ Alone was not something you saw among tribes she’d studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil. When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis? Why are there so many tribes who share everything—food, shelter, land, income—but their stories always revolve around someone’s brother or best friend stealing his woman?’ ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jan 2016
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Jul 11, 2017
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0812994787
| 9780812994780
| 3.99
| 10,316
| Jul 01, 2014
| Jul 01, 2014
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really liked it
|
Someone recommended this book somewhere randomly...I wish I could remember where. I think the context was that they were discussing American novels wi
Someone recommended this book somewhere randomly...I wish I could remember where. I think the context was that they were discussing American novels with Indian protagonists. I really enjoyed this book and it made me cry (in addition to being about what it means to grow up as an Indian person in America, this book is also about dealing with major loss). I give it 4 stars because I haven't found myself recommending it to many people, so I guess it wasn't *that* amazing. Highlights: ##### Her mother’s conviction that movies continue in some private offscreen world had always been as baffling as it was irrefutable. Had he really turned into one of those men who thought asking the uncomfortable question proved something about his integrity? wasn’t much of a conversation anyway, just some sort of weird shared understanding of how it was to always be outside of everything, even your own family, waiting to be seen. his edicts were always promptly dismissed by the others, giving him the air of a king ruling the wrong kingdom. “You never try to meet anyone because you think that something is wrong with you,” this was the feeling that always arose when she left, an unmet urgency, as though she hadn’t really done whatever it was she was supposed to do to make home feel like home again. Is their need to dominate so much stronger than their instinct to protect? At the funeral, Amina kept her eyes closed for fear of seeing any one image that would stick too deeply inside, turning the day into something real. As it turned out, it was not Akhil whom she missed in those first weeks so much as her family, or the family they had been before. Amina realize suddenly how much she missed her mother. She missed Kamala banging the cupboards in the kitchen. She missed her shouting “Hey, dummies! Rise and shines!” from the bottom of the stairs in the morning. She missed her saying “Oh, really?” when Queen Victoria burped too loudly, like they were having an actual conversation, and how sometimes she would come up and squeeze Amina’s shoulder out of the blue, which used to feel like a poor excuse for a hug but now, in memory, felt like sitting in front of a blazing fire with a world of snow falling outside. Sanji, her parents from this point on would need her to be more than she had ever been, and along with their need would come her inability to fill it. if those first days were hard because remembering things about him hurt, these days, the days of forgetting things about him, actually hurt worse. sometimes a surprise was just the acknowledgment of something you had tried hard to ignore. At first, it had been strange to see everyone sitting at the same table—like watching a play where she knew too much about all the actors to believe anything they said. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
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1
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not set
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Jan 2016
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Jul 11, 2017
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0544323521
| 9780544323520
| 3.74
| 2,879
| 2015
| Sep 29, 2015
|
it was amazing
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I saw Paul Theroux interviewed as part of SF's City Arts and Lectures. I'd never read any of his books at that point, but he was so impressive on stag
I saw Paul Theroux interviewed as part of SF's City Arts and Lectures. I'd never read any of his books at that point, but he was so impressive on stage that I bought his latest book (this one) right afterward. The results of the 2016 Presidential election make this book doubly important. My fellow Americans in the deep south are such a mystery to me, and reading this book was a very educational glimpse into some of their lives. Highlights: ##### The poor, having little else, keep their culture intact as part of their vitality, long after the well-off have dumped it. Our great gift as a country is its size and its relative emptiness, its elbow room. That space allows for difference and is often mistaken for tolerance. The person who dares to violate that space is the real traveler. observation by Charles Shelton Aiken, writing about the Southern landscape and Faulkner: “One of the grandest creations of the New South was a mythical concept of an Old South.” What people take to be an epoch was a matter of mere decades of pretension and an exercise in irrational nostalgia. The gun show was the one place where they could be themselves, like a clubhouse with strict admission and no windows. Yet the atmosphere was unmistakable: it was airless, self-conscious, rueful, watchful, and impoverished. Even putting on a brave face, the gun-show people radiated the feeling that throughout their history they had been beaten by outsiders and made to conform to laws that had no precedent and half the time caused more problems and required more laws—their world turned upside down. What was lovely to observe and describe was even lovelier to leave, which is perhaps why I was hyperventilating in a wordy way by seeing it as a winter wonderland, The relief of departure often brings on dishonest praise and grateful exaggeration Because of this shrinkage, the slipping into greater poverty, people—many of the ones I spoke to—had a clear memory of the past, of how things had been long ago, and what their hopes had been. American-style motels are so rare as to be almost unknown in India, and so, Varadarajan wrote, “America’s motels constitute what could be called a nonlinear ethnic niche.” He explained this rarefied sociological term: “A certain ethnic group becomes entrenched in a clearly identifiable economic sector, working at jobs for which it has no evident cultural, geographical or even racial affinity.” “70 percent of all Indian motel owners—or a third of all motel owners in America—are called Patel.” That was in 1999. The figure is much higher now. Yet I loved being at the gun show for what it said of the South. I was a stranger here, I didn’t know a soul, and so it was a relief to step inside this building and be welcomed among so many people. I could have struck up a conversation with any of them, because it was assumed we were all in agreement on guns, and therefore in agreement on everything else—politics, war, religion, hunting, child rearing, food choices, TV shows. In that way it resembled a large, hospitable church. For a traveler, this meant a great deal. I was not there to challenge them in their beliefs but only to watch and listen. “A nuclear accident has a beginning but no end.” The traveler’s conceit is that one visit is plenty, that travel is not a study but a summing up, personal and partisan. I have lived much of my traveling life that way, well aware of the reductiveness and dissonance and smirking self-regard in the breezing through, conscious that my journeys were as much about my life as about the places I was experiencing. It was not poverty as an absence or an insufficiency of things, but poverty as a great unsorted accumulation of decaying and broken possessions, A foreigner might learn to speak perfect English, but a foreigner laughs in his own native way, Telling the truth and being ethical often keeps people from political power, but doing the right thing, always, without exception, is all that matters in the long run, and is ultimately powerful. as I had seen in many lands, that the Bible was often the happy hunting ground of an unbalanced mind. for the old nothing is shocking except the obvious repetition of human stupidity, ...more | Notes are private!
| none
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1
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not set
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Dec 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0679456201
| 9780679456209
| 4.08
| 21,503
| Oct 27, 2015
| Oct 27, 2015
|
really liked it
|
I really look up to Gloria Steinem and I loved learning more about her important contributions to feminism by reading this book (her memoir). I found
I really look up to Gloria Steinem and I loved learning more about her important contributions to feminism by reading this book (her memoir). I found the Hillary Clinton chapter of this book to be a bit off-putting. I understand why she did it, but it felt like a political campaign ad right smack dab in the middle of the book. I am a Clinton supporter, but would have preferred to see that part of the book taken up with more of Gloria's fascinating stories. Highlights: ##### Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two, and those who don’t. “Hate generalizes, love specifies.” Faraway India helped to introduce me to the way most people live in the world, something way beyond anything I knew. I’m still thankful to that huge and struggling country for being impossible to ignore; otherwise I might have come home as the same person I was when I left. hope is a form of planning. My dream bore a suspicious resemblance to the life I saw in movies, but my longing for it was like a constant low-level fever. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, “If I’d left, you never would have been born.” I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead. Like many daughters especially, I was living out the unlived life of my mother. I never told my father how grateful I was that he was different from my best friend’s father. I had just witnessed my first humiliating clean-your-plate-or-you-can’t-have-dessert incident at her house. When I came home, I tested my father. We were eating in our usual haphazard way in the living room—never on the debris-covered dining room table that was used only on national holidays—and he asked me if I wanted dessert. I pointed out that I hadn’t finished my dinner. “That’s okay,” he said as he went into the kitchen for ice cream. “Sometimes you’re hungry for one thing and not another.” I loved him so much at that moment. Only after I saw women who were attracted to distant, condescending, even violent men did I begin to understand that having a distant, condescending, even violent father could make those qualities seem inevitable, even feel like home. Because of my father, only kindness felt like home. I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us—which is both the good and the bad news. I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize. “When an Ethiopian general is killed, the troops are in disarray,” one Eritrean driver explained to me. “When an Eritrean general is killed, every fighter becomes a general.” If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel. If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you. No wonder studies show that women’s intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence. They applaud when Margaret says, “I still have scars on my head and dust between my toes from marching across that bridge in Selma. Once I was left for dead. But when the organizing began, they asked me to make coffee.” Since many have also been raised with traditional southern ideas of womanhood, they also cheer when I talk about women feeling like a half-person without a man standing next to them, whether on Saturday night or throughout life. This would surprise men, too, I explain, if they realized how little it matters which man is standing there. More laughter, and cries of “Tell it!” If there is one that men want to talk about most, it’s how much they missed having nurturing fathers, or any man in their lives who cared. Once they delve into that, the question is how to become that father or man themselves. This childhood wish is one of the greatest allies that feminism could have. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. I’ve noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I’m energized by listening to people’s stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That’s the work of an organizer. Both white and black women were more likely than their male counterparts to support Hillary Clinton—and in my observation, also more likely to believe that she couldn’t win. Male and female black voters were more likely than white voters to support Obama and also to believe he couldn’t win. Each group was made pessimistic by the depth of the bias they had experienced. Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger—and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn’t usually mean including women. In choosing Hillary, I would be seen as selfish for supporting a woman “like” me. But that was a warning, too. Needing approval is a female cultural disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing. children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both. the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we’re in love because, if we’re kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality. Einstein said he had to be very careful while shaving, because when he had an idea, he laughed—and he cut himself. Laughter is an orgasm of the mind. Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise. Truckers are such constant listeners that they dictate pop music hits. Also, Nashville produces specialty truckers’ songs as a profitable category. Who knew? “You’re always the person you were when you were born,” she says impatiently. “You just keep finding new ways to express it.” Those with extra money discover how much more satisfying it is to see talent and fairness grow than to see objects accumulate. Those without money learn the valuable lesson that money doesn’t cure all woes. Instead, it may actually insulate and isolate. I think this No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren’t. “The root of oppression is the loss of memory.” By respecting and expecting self-authority in others, she drew people out of passivity and despair. YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING. YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING. —Native Elders ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1609452860
| 9781609452865
| 4.39
| 44,661
| Oct 29, 2014
| Sep 01, 2015
|
it was amazing
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Highlights: So either I tend to pass over my own affairs to recapture Lila and all the complications she brings with her or, worse, I let myself be car Highlights: So either I tend to pass over my own affairs to recapture Lila and all the complications she brings with her or, worse, I let myself be carried away by the events of my life, only because it’s easier to write them. But I have to avoid this choice. I mustn’t take the first path, on which, if I set myself aside, I would end up finding ever fewer traces of Lila—since the very nature of our relationship dictates that I can reach her only by passing through myself. But I shouldn’t take the second, either. That, in fact, I speak of my experience in increasingly greater detail is just what she would certainly favor. Come on—she would say—tell us what turn your life took, who cares about mine, admit that it doesn’t even interest you. And she would conclude: I’m a scribble on a scribble, completely unsuitable for one of your books; forget it, Lenù, one doesn’t tell the story of an erasure. What to do, then? Admit yet again that she’s right? Accept that to be adult is to disappear, is to learn to hide to the point of vanishing? as if, truly, everything that I was capable of adding up with words written and spoken were destined to add up in reality as well. “Think about it. A woman separated, with two children and your ambitions, has to take account of reality and decide what she can give up and what she can’t.” Everything, in that last sentence, bothered me. Ah, how exciting it was to feel that I was not only loved but esteemed. I soon discovered that I was getting used to being happy and unhappy at the same time, as if that were the new, inevitable law of my life. I discovered that, with Lila set aside, I didn’t know how to give myself substance except by modeling myself on Nino. I was incapable of being a model for myself. Without him I no longer had a nucleus from which to expand outside the neighborhood and through the world, I was a pile of debris. Why, then, did he drive from Naples to Milan, why did he travel all night, why did he humiliate himself, accusing himself, why did he beg you not to leave him? All that should signify something. It signifies, I cried, that he is a liar, that he is a superficial person, that he is incapable of making a choice. And he kept nodding yes, he agreed. But then he asked: What if he loved you, seriously, and yet knew that he could love you only in this way? And although we both had many worries, on those occasions we were almost always happy to have found again, at the age of thirty-six, a pathway to affection: though distant in every way we were still close. But now that other person seemed to have emerged directly from the churning guts of the earth; she bore almost no resemblance to the friend who a few minutes before I had envied for her ability to choose words deliberately; there was no resemblance even in the features, disfigured by anguish. However much she had always dominated all of us and had imposed and was still imposing a way of being, on pain of her resentment and her fury, she perceived herself as a liquid and all her efforts were, in the end, directed only at containing herself. Was it him? Was he the man I had always loved? Or a stranger I was forcing to assume a clear and definite character? As for infidelities, he said, if you don’t find out about them at the right moment they’re of no use: when you’re in love you forgive everything. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. Their relationship was based on the idea that even an open lie from Lila was the only truth that could be uttered. I said to myself that to be adult was to recognize that I needed her impulses. She wrote that she had decided to give up school, that my cult of study had always seemed to her foolish, that it wasn’t books that made people good but good people who made some good books. When there’s too much silence, she said, so many ideas come to mind, I don’t pay attention. Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause, there are the likable ones and the unlikable, the good and the bad, everything in the end consoles you. Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0345418913
| 9780345418913
| 4.21
| 1,151,987
| Oct 12, 1979
| Jun 23, 1997
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really liked it
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I felt like I needed to read this book because I've heard to many references to it over the years. Overall, I found it clever and enjoyable, but I am
I felt like I needed to read this book because I've heard to many references to it over the years. Overall, I found it clever and enjoyable, but I am not really sure what all of the hype is about. Highlights: ##### “Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. “The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’ “‘But,’ says Man, ‘the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’ “‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. “‘Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next pedestrian crossing. girls? The leather? The machismo? Or do you just find that coming to terms with the mindless tedium of it all presents an interesting challenge?” ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Paperback
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| 1936365812
| 9781936365814
| 3.86
| 2,627
| Jan 01, 2013
| Nov 05, 2013
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really liked it
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This book is so poetic and so smartly written. I need to read more of Hilton Als' work. Highlights: #### That’s how you recognize love: you’ve never met This book is so poetic and so smartly written. I need to read more of Hilton Als' work. Highlights: #### That’s how you recognize love: you’ve never met it before. What no mother in history, including Hamlet’s own, has ever been able to entirely process, let alone admit: My husband may not actually be our child’s type. I am not a child. I am a judge. I have been made older through cultivating need, which feeds my imagination, the one thing Daddy does not have access to, the one thing I can make him a lovesick prisoner of. I was attracted to him from the first because I am always attracted to people who are not myself but are. Mrs. SL pretended to understand what we were talking about, but I know she didn’t. How could she? How could any girl? We were better mothers than any of them. Twinship, SL says, is the archetype for closeness; it is also the archetype for difference: in one’s other half, one sees both who one is and who one isn’t. Auguste left me. He said to me: I’ve decided that I’m not like you; I don’t use my self-love to not love; I use it to love. I’m the one who loves more. For eight years, I—me, a man of genius—used my genius to make you love me. I failed. I’m giving it up for lost; Pygmalion had only one love, his marble statue; Galatea, me, I had more to do: I had you to love. I’m not the one leaving you; it’s you who’s leaving me. And as metaphors go, marriage—twins joined by a ring and flesh—has always been attractive to me, the pomp and circumstance, the illusion veil and orange blossom, the rice landing on sanctioned heads like a hard rain as I and I become we, if they weren’t born that way. SL abhors weddings, all that “O thou / to whom from whom, / without whom nothing” stuff Marianne Moore eviscerates in her great poem “Marriage.” SL accepts this in me: half living life so I can get down to really living it by writing about it. “Without the faith that our face expresses our self, without that basic illusion, that arch-illusion, we cannot live or at least we cannot take life seriously.” mundane daily closeness would have hurt their mutually lonely skin too much and encroached on their independence of mind. Having not grown up hearing complaints about the old ball and chain, I longed to be one; what a novelty, to be a source of love and irritation, all at once. She was our first home, no, she was our tree, and we hung in her young branches, our bodies swinging like flags in a permanent sweet chill, then a little sunshine through the branches, some bird sounds and maybe Jesus floating beyond the birds. No, she was our ground, and we would die to be closer to her. No, she was a white girl, whatever that means. No, she was colored because she preferred colored men to most white people. No, she was words, and they always came up short against her presence, and if you were a poet whose vocation it is to take the words out from in between other words, and relish white space, then you would be more suited to the task of relaying who she was, as Wallace Stevens seemed to do when he if I said I loved her, it would limit her to my love just as a tree, once described, becomes just a tree, or your tree. I always wanted others to know her and cherish their perspective of her; that would mean there was more of her in the world, how marvelous, and other men aside from SL and myself who felt as one of my boyfriends felt when he said, after meeting her: Whatever that girl has, someone should bottle it. I can’t write one complete sentence about her because she was her own complete sentence, and her sentence about herself was better than anyone else’s because she uttered it sort of without thinking while thinking too much, I can’t tell you how unusual that is in a world where, nowadays, no one leaves the house without some kind of script. As Mrs. Vreeland and Jean talked to each other in a conspiratorial way at that opening, I became what I would always be, later, in her and SL’s presence, a kid loving the smell of their adhesion. And because she loved you, she wanted to have your experience not in a purely selfish way, but in an empathetically selfish way. We tried to sport hats as jauntily as he did, but our heads seemed to miss the point. From the beginning of her reading life, O’Connor preferred stories that were direct in their telling and mysterious only in their subtexts. If they don’t feel I am worth giving more money to and leaving alone, then they should let me go...Selby and I came to the conclusion that I was “prematurely arrogant.” I supplied him with the phrase. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness. How slimily we creep toward them—on our bellies, masks intact, the better to make our way toward the inconvenient places their ignorant experience hides— Mrs. Little is one long sentence that is a question. Every poet begins with the word. But every epic poet begins with the word as it shapes and reflects his or her world and thus the world. there’s the bizarre fact that queerness reads, even to some black gay men themselves, as a kind of whiteness. In a black, Christian-informed culture, where relatively few men head households anymore, whiteness is equated with perversity, a pollutant further eroding the already decimated black family. So Michael Jackson died a long time ago; it’s just taken years for anyone to notice. But the fact is, most of the men I was with were never smart enough to get the fact that when I accused them of not being available, I was talking about myself. For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don’t like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they’re babies. Eventually, you direct that anger at yourself—it has nowhere else to go. That black men and white women were drawn to each other through their oppression by white men was a concept I had first seen expressed in the feminist Shulamith Firestone’s book The Dialectic of Sex: A Case for Feminist Revolution. There is a bond in oppression, certainly, People are quick to make monuments of anything they live long enough to control. Acting has come to this: engaging less in make-believe than in making a bad carbon copy of reality. All an actress needs to do to get a little juice these days is give up on being an actress and take on the real-life role of wife. Aren’t the queens fabulous? They don’t want much: an orgasm and a cocktail. Acting isn’t funny, but being is. Richard was never an actor. All he did was put his being out there. In actual fact, no one can handle vast quantities of power or fame. Richard couldn’t. It nearly burned him alive. He was always looking for something bigger than himself to tell him what to do. We all are. In any case, there was no room on the dance floor. It was filled with female meanness, the thickest substance known to man. “Go white boy, He was always waiting for love to be what he thought of it: an event informed by niceness, divorced from appeased egos, hatred, and pornography. Love would be his rescue one day, laying him down on a field of daisies, making him and his love lambs of Jesus. Before, boys had handled Fran like a passing moment descended from a larger moment starring them and the first woman they hated: Mother. Not remembering, or misremembering one’s childhood is a way of allowing oneself the notion that the past does not exist, that it was not lived through in quite that way, that somehow it did not make one different than the rest, ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 030794932X
| 9780307949325
| 4.30
| 47,465
| Jul 10, 2012
| Jul 10, 2012
|
it was amazing
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Hard not to love an advice book that is so wisely and honestly and beautifully written! Highlights: ##### she offers what we wish every mother would: en Hard not to love an advice book that is so wisely and honestly and beautifully written! Highlights: ##### she offers what we wish every mother would: enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope. The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you’re talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated. Accounting for what happened in our childhoods and why and who our parents are and how they succeeded and failed us is the work we all do when we do the work of becoming whole, grown-up people. Long after she was dead, it was her words and conduct that formed the bridge I teetered across to heal the wounds my father had made. You’re up too high and down too low. Neither is the place where we get any work done. The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that. But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got. Doing what one wants to do because one wants to do it is hard for a lot of people, but I think it’s particularly hard for women. You wrote that not inviting him is the “easiest thing to do,” but I encourage you to make it the hardest thing. Use your decision as an opportunity to have a frank conversation with him about how his behavior affects you and your ability to truly let him back into your life. Nobody’s going to do your life for you. You have to do it yourself, whether you’re rich or poor, out of money or raking it in, the beneficiary of ridiculous fortune or terrible injustice. And you have to do it no matter what is true. No matter what is hard. No matter what unjust, sad, sucky things have befallen you. Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It’s up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out. Addiction is a tunnel that wakes you up in the middle of the night. Everything else happens out here in the light. Be brave enough to break your own heart. Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| ebook
| ||||||||||||||
| 0385536976
| 9780385536974
| 3.82
| 142,297
| Jun 11, 2013
| Jun 11, 2013
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really liked it
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I was recently spending a weekend with some friends in a house and one woman was reading this book. She was pretty embarrassed by the title (she was r
I was recently spending a weekend with some friends in a house and one woman was reading this book. She was pretty embarrassed by the title (she was reading a hardcover version) and kept trying to explain it away, but the reality that almost everyone else there had read the book! This is a guilt pleasure read, for sure. It is all made up, but fun to fantasize about the life of a "Crazy Rich Asian" (in Hong Kong / Singapore) ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0062409859
| 9780062409850
| 3.31
| 190,201
| Jul 14, 2015
| Jul 14, 2015
|
really liked it
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This book was so different from "How to Kill a Mockingbird". I think I read somewhere that this was actually more like the original version of HTKAM,
This book was so different from "How to Kill a Mockingbird". I think I read somewhere that this was actually more like the original version of HTKAM, but then it was edited into what we know it as. What I liked about this book is that it feels like the adult version of what Scout would see in her father. He is only human! In the first book, she is young and he is God-like. When she grows up, she realizes that he is a flawed man. How about that, Highlights: ##### Hell is eternal apartness. What had she done that she must spend the rest of her years reaching out with yearning for them, making secret trips to long ago, making no journey to the present? I am their blood and bones, I have dug in this ground, this is my home. But I am not their blood, the ground doesn’t care who digs it, I am a stranger at a cocktail party. Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.” “Jean Louise, have you ever met your father?” No. She had not. She was terrified. the time your friends need you is when they’re wrong, Jean Louise. They don’t need you when they’re right—” ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0307592731
| 9780307592736
| 3.98
| 489,996
| Mar 20, 2012
| Mar 20, 2012
|
it was amazing
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I'll come clean: I read this book so that I could see the movie. Of course, the book was better than the movie (but I enjoyed both!). This book inspir I'll come clean: I read this book so that I could see the movie. Of course, the book was better than the movie (but I enjoyed both!). This book inspired me. Don't think I will go hiking the PCT any time soon, but it does speak to the power of completing very ambitious goals. And getting in touch with *nature*. Only thing I highlighted (the writing is all good, just not in a way where I wanted to quote it, I guess): "we had seemed that way. Just as I’d seemed to be doing okay after my mom died. Grief doesn’t have a face." ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1841156736
| 9781841156736
| 3.79
| 141,045
| Sep 2001
| Sep 02, 2002
|
it was amazing
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I loved this book. It so magically captures each person's little bubble of existence in this family. They are all experiencing a shared life from comp
I loved this book. It so magically captures each person's little bubble of existence in this family. They are all experiencing a shared life from completely different angles. To read the account of one is to feel like the previous account has everyone in their family completely wrong. And we most likely do, right? We all misunderstand each other. Or at least, we understand each other, but not in the same way. Our relationships are asymmetrical, even in the closest of life's bonds. Highlights: ##### in trying to save money in life she had made many mistakes like this. She reached the point of thinking it would have been better to buy no rug than to buy this rug. She’d always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like. For a moment it seemed to Chip that his father had become a likable old stranger; but he knew Alfred, underneath, to be a shouter and a punisher. a pair of hulking “residence halls” that were less like dorms than like vivid premonitions of the hotels in which the students would book rooms for themselves in their well-remunerated futures. “I’m saying, Melissa, that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There’s supposed to be some element of rebellion. That’s how you define yourself as a person.” He couldn’t figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up. Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you’d be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he’d established that his daughter, Denise, was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip’s living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence “A great worker is almost impossible to fire,” Alfred said. “The process can get very political, though. I have to have alternatives.” “As you wish,” Alfred said. “However, I’ve found that it’s usually best to choose one plan and stick with it. If you don’t succeed here, you can always do something else. But you’ve worked many years to reach this point. One more semester’s hard work won’t hurt you.” “Right.” “You can relax when you have tenure. Then you’re safe.” “Right.” Of all the things he was wasting—Denise’s money, Julia’s goodwill, his own abilities and education, the opportunities afforded by the longest sustained economic boom in American history—his sheer physical well-being, there in the sunlight by the river, hurt the worst. He ran out of money He had a spring in his step, an agreeable awareness of his above-average height and his late-summer suntan. Declines led advances in key indices of paranoia (e.g., his persistent suspicion that Caroline and his two older sons were mocking him), and his seasonally adjusted assessment of life’s futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy. He was not the least bit clinically depressed. He saw that he’d made two critical mistakes. He should never have promised Caroline that there would be no more Christmases in St. Jude. And today, when she was limping and grimacing in the back yard, he should have snapped at least one picture of her. He mourned the moral advantages these mistakes had cost him. The aspects of his life not related to grilling now seemed like mere blips of extraneity between the poundingly recurrent moments when he ignited the mesquite and paced the deck, avoiding smoke. But his entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life, Over the years he’d collected certain remarks of hers into a kind of personal Decalogue, an All-Time Caroline Ten to which he privately referred for strength and sustenance: Nothing at all like your father. You don’t have to apologize for buying the BMW. Your dad emotionally abuses your mom. I love the taste of your come. Work was the drug that ruined your father’s life. Let’s buy both! Your family has a diseased relationship with food. You’re an incredibly good-looking man. Denise is jealous of what you have. There’s absolutely nothing useful about suffering. He’d subscribed to this credo for years and years—had felt deeply indebted to Caroline for each remark—and now he wondered how much of it was true. Maybe none of it. Before long, what at first glance had seemed to Gary an absurd possibility—that the till of their marriage no longer contained sufficient funds of love and goodwill to cover the emotional costs that going to St. Jude entailed for Caroline or that not going to St. Jude entailed for him—assumed the contours of something terribly actual. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary—of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? His lumbering forces of conventional domestic warfare were no match for this biological weaponry. He cruelly attacked her person; she heroically attacked his disease. She was sleeping now, silently, like a person feigning sleep. Alfred asleep was a symphony of snoring and whistling and choking, an epic of Z’s. Enid was a haiku. She lay still for hours and then blinked awake like a light switched on. Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn’t need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. A last child was a last opportunity to learn from one’s mistakes and make corrections, when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? he thinks our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it’s out of control, it’s not computers that are making everything virtual, it’s mental health. Everyone’s trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to, Her idea of Austria was way more vivid than Austria itself. Robin turned and looked straight into her. “What’s life for?” “I don’t know.” “I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.” If Mom and Dad were my children, whom I’d created out of nothing without asking their permission, I could understand being responsible for them. Parents have an overwhelming Darwinian hard-wired genetic stake in their children’s welfare. But children, it seems to me, have no corresponding debt to their parents. Basically, I have very little to say to these people. And I don’t think they want to hear what I do have to say. The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself. There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite. She’d never really known her father. Probably nobody had. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy. ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B00REWKDWC
| unknown
| 4.08
| 24,683
| 2009
| Dec 24, 2014
|
it was ok
|
Attempted this and couldn't get into it. Felt too meandering. Even though it is supposed to be prose-drive and not plot-drive, I didn't find the rando
Attempted this and couldn't get into it. Felt too meandering. Even though it is supposed to be prose-drive and not plot-drive, I didn't find the random reflections to be that relatable. Ditched it. Want to give it a second try, though, because I know that so many others are big fans. Highlights from what I did read: ##### We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of death. Nonetheless, there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to a see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and parking lots, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Not until the evening when they are asleep and I am sitting wondering what I am really doing is there any room for the insight that she is only two years old. nothing I had previously experienced warned me about the invasion into your life that having children entails. The immense intimacy you have with them, the way in which your own temperament and mood are, so to speak, woven into theirs, such that your own worst sides are no longer something you can keep to yourself, hidden, but seem to take shape outside you, and are then hurled back. The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
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1
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not set
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Jun 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Audiobook
| ||||||||||||||
| 1609452232
| 9781609452230
| 4.29
| 50,390
| Oct 30, 2013
| Sep 02, 2014
|
it was amazing
|
Highlights: I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the Highlights: I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things. All the way back I was impossible. I exclaimed that I didn’t like Florence, and it wasn’t true. I exclaimed that I didn’t want to write anymore, I wanted to teach, and it wasn’t true. I exclaimed that I was tired, I was very sleepy, and it wasn’t true. Not only that. When, suddenly, Pietro declared that he wanted to meet my parents, I yelled at him: you’re crazy, forget my parents, you’re not suitable for them and they aren’t suitable for you. Then he was frightened, and asked: “Do you not want to marry me anymore?” I was about to say: No, I don’t want to, but I restrained myself in time, I knew that that wasn’t true, either. Nino would last a single night, he would leave me in the morning. Even though I had known him forever, he was made of dreams, and holding on to him forever would have been impossible: he came from childhood, he was constructed out of childish desires, he had no concreteness, I had never heard of the author of the article, but it was certainly someone who wrote well, and his words acted as a balm. He praised my novel wholeheartedly and insulted the prestigious professor. I went home reassured, maybe even in a good mood. I paged through my book and this time it seemed to me well put together, written with mastery. my novel wasn’t simply the episode on the beach, there were more interesting and finer passages; and then, if here and there something sounded daring, that was mainly because it had been written by a girl; obscenity, he said, is not alien to good literature, and the true art of the story, even if it goes beyond the bounds of decency, is never risqué. I didn’t take my eyes off my future husband; I was sure that I loved him, he was a person who knew his value and yet, if necessary, he could forget himself with naturalness. I love him—Lila reflected—but do I love him just as he is? An ugly question. But the fact remained, incontrovertible, that they had accepted me, that I was about to marry Pietro, with their consent, that I was about to enter a protective family, a sort of well-fortified castle from which I could proceed without fear or to which I could retreat if I were in danger. So it was urgent that I get used to that new membership, and above all I had to be conscious of it. I was no longer a small match-seller almost down to the last match; I had won for myself a large supply of matches. And so—I suddenly understood—I could do for Lila much more than I had calculated on doing. With her, there was no way to feel that things were settled; every fixed point of our relationship sooner or later turned out to be provisional; something shifted in her head that unbalanced her and unbalanced me. Marriage by now seemed to me an institution that, contrary to what one might think, stripped coitus of all humanity. We had become for each other abstract entities, so that now I could invent her for myself both as an expert in computers and as a determined and implacable urban guerrilla, while she, in all likelihood, could see me both as the stereotype of the successful intellectual and as a cultured and well-off woman, all children, books, and highbrow conversation with an academic husband. We both needed new depth, body, and yet we were distant and couldn’t give it to each other. In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.” And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition. I had wanted to become something—here was the point—only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind. My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her. I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes. The solitude of women’s minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it’s a waste to be separated from each other, without procedures, without tradition. Every so often I was surprised at myself: I had the impression that striving for Nino’s approval made the writing easier, freed me. I enjoyed dressing up. But sometimes—especially when I had dressed not only to make a good impression in general but for a man—preparing myself (this was the word) seemed to me to have something ridiculous about it. All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn’t, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn’t. A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table set for the sexual appetite of the male, to a well-cooked dish to make his mouth water. And then the anguish of not succeeding, of not seeming pretty, of not managing to conceal with skill the vulgarity of the flesh with its moods and odors and imperfections. “Lina, when we were children, dazzled us both.” I felt an intense uneasiness. “In what sense?” “You ended up attributing to her capacities that are only yours.” “And you?” “I did worse. What I had seen in you, I then stupidly seemed to find in her.” Maybe, I thought, I’ve given too much weight to the cultivated use of reason, to good reading, to well controlled language, to political affiliation; maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved. ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Apr 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1609451341
| 9781609451349
| 4.36
| 64,221
| 2012
| Sep 03, 2013
|
it was amazing
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Highlights: As she spoke, she touched her face, her breast, her stomach, her hips as if they were no longer hers, and showed that she knew everything a Highlights: As she spoke, she touched her face, her breast, her stomach, her hips as if they were no longer hers, and showed that she knew everything about those women, down to the tiniest details, in order to prove that no one told me anything but told her everything, or, worse, in order to make me feel that I was wrapped in a fog, unable to see the suffering of the people around me. That year, my fourth year of high school, between studying and difficult readings, I was exhausted, but it was the exhaustion of contentment. He was absolutely the first person to show me in a practical sense how comfortable it is to arrive in a strange, potentially hostile environment, and discover that you have been preceded by your reputation, It never occurred to me, as, in fact, it had on other occasions, that she had felt the need to humiliate me in order to better endure her own humiliation. Get up early, hurry to Mezzocannone, slave all day, go home tired, the thousands of words learned in school packed into my head, unusable. “Yes, anyone who believes that is lucky: there are people who leave and people who know how to be left.” I certainly had no particular passion for those subjects, for the real things and people they referred to. I had no training, no habit, only the usual desire not to make a bad showing. it was impossible for me to accept that he was as profound in confronting the great problems of the world as he was superficial in feelings of love. I struggled with astronomical geography, with geometry, with trigonometry. It was a sort of race to know everything, when in fact I took it for granted that my inadequacy was constitutional and so couldn’t be eliminated. How easy it is to tell the story of myself without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at an airport; you pick them up, put them on the page, and it’s done. from what I knew it was easy to deduce how little good it had done her to take Nino away from me. “Don’t read books that you can’t understand, it’s bad for you.” “A lot of things are bad for you.” “You’re not happy?” “So-so.” “You were destined for great things.” “I’ve done them: I’m married and I’ve had a baby.” “Everyone can do that.” “I’m like everyone.” “You’re wrong.” “No, you are wrong, and you always were wrong.” “You were rude as a child and you’re rude now.” I understood that she wanted to get everything possible for herself, Stefano, the grocery stores, the money, the house, the cars. And I thought it was her right to fight that battle, which we were all fighting, one way or another. They considered me impartial, without malicious feelings or passions, sterilized by study. Gone was the pleasure of re-educating my voice, my gestures, my way of dressing and walking, as if I were competing for the prize of best disguise, the mask worn so well that it was almost a face. Suddenly I was aware of that almost. Had I made it? Almost. Had I torn myself away from Naples, the neighborhood? Almost. Did I have new friends, male and female, who came from cultured backgrounds, often more cultured than the one that Professor Galiani and her children belonged to? Almost. Behind the almost I seemed to see how things stood. I was afraid. I was afraid as I had been the day I arrived in Pisa. I was scared of anyone who had that culture without the almost, with casual confidence. I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts. I recognized in them, father and daughter, what I had never had and, I now knew, would always lack. What was it? I wasn’t able to say precisely: the training, perhaps, to feel that the questions of the world were deeply connected to me; the capacity to feel them as crucial and not purely as information to display at an exam, in view of a good grade; a mental conformation that didn’t reduce everything to my own individual battle, to the effort to be successful. Most important, I knew that, like Franco, he would soon disappear, and that after all it was better that way, because I didn’t love him, I was with him in the dark alleys, in the meadows, only so that I would feel the fear less. “Trust yourself: don’t touch a comma, there is sincerity, naturalness, and a mystery in the writing that only true books have.” I understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that—in good faith, certainly, with affection—I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other. I wanted to remain myself, chained to Lila, to the courtyard, to the lost dolls, to Don Achille, to everything. It was the only way to feel intensely what was happening to me. ...more | Notes are private!
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Mar 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
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| 3.90
| 121,366
| Oct 19, 2011
| Sep 25, 2012
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it was amazing
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Favorite book series EVER. The way she captures Elena and Lila's friendship is incredible. I've heard that some people do not like this book, but for
Favorite book series EVER. The way she captures Elena and Lila's friendship is incredible. I've heard that some people do not like this book, but for anyone who has ever had a true and complicated friendship, this book is impossible to put down. Also, the writing is lovely (good job to the translator!) Highlights: ### soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn’t excite me, only what Lila touched became important. Meanwhile I wanted that conversation to become the model for all our next encounters. Also for the first time, I felt how, having to search for words on a subject where I didn’t have words ready, I tended to reduce the relationship between Lila and me to extreme declarations that were all exaggeratedly positive. Yes, I thought, maybe she’s changing, and not only physically but in the way she expresses herself. It seemed to me—articulated in words of today—that not only did she know how to put things well but she was developing a gift that I was already familiar with: more effectively than she had as a child, she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy. because she knew how to be autonomous whereas I needed her, I wanted her to be curious, to want at least a little to share my adventure from the outside, to feel she was losing something of me as I always feared losing much of her. Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me? She eluded me when Sometimes I even had the impression that it was Lila who depended on me and not I on her. words, the last ten days of July gave me a sense of well-being that I had never known before. I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new. However hard I tried in my letters to communicate the privilege of the days in Ischia, my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full. Nino has something that’s eating him inside, like Lila, and it’s a gift and a suffering; they aren’t content, they never give in Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but—further—she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. Perhaps the idea of money as a cement to solidify our existence and prevent it from dissolving, together with the people who were dear to us, endured. But the fundamental feature that now prevailed was concreteness, the daily gesture, the negotiation. Money gave even more force to the impression that what I lacked she had, and vice versa, in a continuous game of exchanges and reversals that, now happily, now painfully, made us indispensable to each other. I knew—perhaps I hoped—that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again. I was ashamed of myself, but I was no longer able to trace a coherent design in the division of our fates. The concreteness of that date made concrete the crossroads that would separate our lives. It was during that journey to Via Orazio that I began to be made unhappy by my own alienness. I had grown up with those boys, I considered their behavior normal, their violent language was mine. But for six years now I had also been following daily a path that they were completely ignorant of and in the end I had confronted it brilliantly. With them I couldn’t use any of what I learned every day, I had to suppress myself, in some way diminish myself. What I was in school I was there obliged to put aside or use treacherously, to intimidate them. I asked myself what I was doing in that car. ...more | Notes are private!
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Feb 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
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| 044991190X
| 9780449911907
| 3.59
| 4,333
| 1968
| Aug 27, 1996
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it was ok
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I like some of John Updike's writing so I picked this up but abandoned it after a few chapters. So much sex, per usual Updike, and too many different
I like some of John Updike's writing so I picked this up but abandoned it after a few chapters. So much sex, per usual Updike, and too many different confusing storylines from different people. Would attempt again, though. My one highlight: "All love is a betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed." ...more | Notes are private!
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Jul 11, 2017
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| 0316085251
| 9780316085250
| 4.08
| 3,915
| Jan 01, 1998
| Jan 29, 1999
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really liked it
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I am giving this book 4 stars because I remembering reading it quickly and enjoying it, but not 5 stars because I honestly can hardly remember reading
I am giving this book 4 stars because I remembering reading it quickly and enjoying it, but not 5 stars because I honestly can hardly remember reading it at this point, which means it didn't leave much of an impression, in the end. Highlights: ##### It occurs to me that Grandma and Ralph have nothing, they don’t even enjoy Bonanza all that much, they just turned it on because my mom told them to let me watch it. There can’t be anything for them to enjoy, with their long empty days, full of curled-up old ladies and dirty sheep. They don’t even drink pop. ] On the other side of the dance floor Mitch stands listening intently to one of our distant, female relatives. He winks at us when she isn’t looking and we wink back hugely. “That’s my first husband, Mitch,” Wendell says fondly. A woman friend stops over to visit me one afternoon. She is lonely, melancholy, and at loose ends. Do you ever feel like this? she asks me. That’s how the entire world feels, I say. “He’s already left me,” I say, “he’s just too chicken to take his body with him.” “I know you don’t want to hear I observe that he isn’t fully present past eight o’clock each night, and surprise myself by feeling grateful. I am left free to traipse around in my own psychic landscape. ...more | Notes are private!
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Feb 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
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| 0465010210
| 9780465010219
| 3.63
| 4,871
| 2011
| 2011
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liked it
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I think this is a fascinating topic, but I abandoned this book. Too dry for me, unfortunately. Maybe I will attempt it again. Highlights from what I re I think this is a fascinating topic, but I abandoned this book. Too dry for me, unfortunately. Maybe I will attempt it again. Highlights from what I read: ##### But by then, my optimism of 1984 had been challenged. I was meeting people, many people, who found online life more satisfying than what some derisively called “RL,” that is, real life. Doug, a Midwestern college student, played four avatars, distributed across three different online worlds. He always had these worlds open as windows on his computer screen along with his schoolwork, e-mail program, and favorite games. He cycled easily through them. He told me that RL “is just one more window.” And, he added, “it’s not usually my best one.” I thank Rebecca for her forbearance, for her insightful and decisive editorial support, and for giving me permission to quote her. She refused to friend me on Facebook, but she taught me how to text. The story of digital culture has been the story of Rebecca’s life. The book is written as a letter to her about how her mother sees the conversations in her future. Now Rebecca is nineteen, if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude. Ellen’s multitasking removed her to another place. She felt her grandmother was talking to someone who was not really there. During their Skype conversations, Ellen and her grandmother were more connected than they had ever been before, but at the same time, each was alone. Ellen felt guilty and confused: she knew that her grandmother was happy, even if their intimacy was now, for Ellen, another task among multitasks. ...more | Notes are private!
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not set
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Jan 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Hardcover
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| 0307266303
| 9780307266309
| 4.28
| 136,467
| Jan 2009
| May 05, 2009
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it was amazing
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I've heard a lot about this book before reading it. I almost felt like I didn't have to read it, because many people had already explained its hypothe
I've heard a lot about this book before reading it. I almost felt like I didn't have to read it, because many people had already explained its hypothesis to me. But I am glad I picked up the book myself, because it's a great source of running inspiration. I don't 100% buy all of the theories presented in the book about how running is super essential to mankind's wellbeing. But I did love hearing about the amazing athletes and I also loved hearing the author's story of falling in love with running. The feeling you have after a nice long run is amazing and not something I've found with many other activities, so I always want running to be a part of my life. Reading this book was great inspiration to keep going! Highlights: ###### For five years, Leadville’s reigning champion was Steve Peterson, a member of a Colorado higher-consciousness cult called Divine Madness, which seeks nirvana through sex parties, extreme trail running, and affordable housecleaning. One Leadville legend is Marshall Ulrich, “There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. sunny and pixie-tailed ultrarunner from Idaho who trained through blizzards to win a six-day race in the Sahara, talks about exhaustion as if it’s a playful pet. “I love the Beast,” she says. “I actually look forward to the Beast showing up, because every time he does, I handle him better. I get him more under control.” Once the Beast arrives, Lisa knows what she has to deal with and can get down to work. And isn’t that the reason she’s running through the desert in the first place—to put her training to work? To have a friendly little tussle with the Beast and show it who’s boss? You can’t hate the Beast and expect to beat it; the only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it. “I never really discussed this with anyone because it sounds pretentious, but I started running ultras to become a better person,” Jenn told me. “I thought if you could run one hundred miles, you’d be in this Zen state. You’d be the fucking Buddha, bringing peace and a smile to the world. It didn’t work in my case—I’m the same old punk-ass as before—but there’s always that hope that it will turn you into the person you want to be, a better, more peaceful person. “No wonder your feet are so sensitive,” Ted mused. “They’re self-correcting devices. Covering your feet with cushioned shoes is like turning off your smoke alarms.” “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.” Maybe she’s self-medicating against deep-seated problems, but maybe (to paraphrase Bill Clinton) there was never anything wrong with Jenni that couldn’t be fixed by what’s right with Jenni. ...more | Notes are private!
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Jan 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Hardcover
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| 0307588378
| 9780307588371
| 4.05
| 1,842,952
| May 24, 2012
| Apr 22, 2014
|
it was amazing
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This book is super addictive. Great read for a vacation. Although it is definitely plot-drive and not prose-drive, I did have a few highlights: ##### "We This book is super addictive. Great read for a vacation. Although it is definitely plot-drive and not prose-drive, I did have a few highlights: ##### "We’ve already talked to one another at a thousand holiday parties, we have nothing left to say, we are collectively bored, but we don’t want to go back into the January cold; our bones still ache from the subway steps." "People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges." "Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?" "I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore." "It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters." ...more | Notes are private!
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not set
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Jan 2015
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Jul 11, 2017
| Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0374182531
| 9780374182533
| 3.68
| 737
| May 17, 2016
| May 17, 2016
|
it was amazing
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Was very impressed with this book. Well-researched and well-written. Dating in the modern era seems super messed up. This book both makes you feel way
Was very impressed with this book. Well-researched and well-written. Dating in the modern era seems super messed up. This book both makes you feel way better and way worse (better because 'dating' has been changing and worried about for the past 100 years, worse because it is clear that our current cultural expectations do not make people happy). Highlights here: https://gist.github.com/jessieay/4546... ...more | Notes are private!
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not set
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Sep 2016
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Sep 28, 2016
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0316055433
| 9780316055437
| 3.89
| 538,054
| Sep 23, 2013
| Oct 22, 2013
|
it was amazing
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Like many people, I tore through this book. I expected it to be 100% plot-driven like so many other popular novels. But what really drew me in (at lea
Like many people, I tore through this book. I expected it to be 100% plot-driven like so many other popular novels. But what really drew me in (at least at first) was the amazingly accurate portrait of grief that is painted in the first section of the book. While I haven't experienced the type of deep grief that comes with losing a parent, I have experienced other types of grief. So I can tell that the way the main character's grief of losing his mother is portrayed is both gripping and accurate. After grief comes mystery and suspense. I couldn't read fast enough. Hardly put this book down before I finished it. A definite must read for me! ### My highlights: Part of her was there, but it was invisible. The invisible part was the important part. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away. He was a planet without an atmosphere. Living with them was like living with roommates I didn’t particularly get along with. When they were at home, I stayed in my room with the door shut. And when they were gone—which was most of the time—I prowled through the farther reaches of the house, Somehow the present had shrunk into a smaller and much less interesting place. But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn’t he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and founded charitable organizations and supported political candidates and attended the U.S. Open and dined and travelled and distracted themselves with all kinds of gadgets and devices, flooding themselves incessantly with information and texts and communication and entertainment from every direction to try to make themselves forget it: where we were, what we were. Maybe she was just really really guarded, really locked-down, putting up a masterly front. But those sparkling blue shallows—so enticing at first glance—had not yet graded off into depths, so that sometimes I got the disconcerting sensation of wading around in knee-high waters hoping to step into a drop-off, a place deep enough to swim. Stay away from the ones you love too much. Those are the ones who will kill you. What you want to live and be happy in the world is a woman who has her own life and lets you have yours.” To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet—for me, anyway—all that’s worth living for lies in that charm? ...more | Notes are private!
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not set
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Jan 2015
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Oct 12, 2015
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0061941026
| 9780061941023
| 3.79
| 45,141
| Oct 22, 2013
| Oct 22, 2013
|
it was amazing
|
I really loved this book. The characters drew me in. I cared about them and wanted to know what happened to them. It also (disturbingly) provides a re
I really loved this book. The characters drew me in. I cared about them and wanted to know what happened to them. It also (disturbingly) provides a really interesting perspective on sexual abuse of children and how the cycle of abuse continues itself and affects people throughout their lives. I definitely recommend this book! My highlights: But as the people of the Old Country say, Il destino mischia le carte, ma siamo noi a giocare la partita. Destiny shuffles the cards, but we are the ones who must play the game.” I nod. Smile at my guest. “Overseeing the Statler’s collection and hanging shows in its gallery hall is what paid our bills. But painting has always been my primary calling.” “One’s wife, one’s art: you can never know either fully. Is that what love is all about? Needing them to come back to you when they’re away? To come home and keep you safe? “Put your hand out,” I’d tell these students. “Now bring it closer. Now closer still.” And when their hands were a half inch from their noses, I’d ask them to describe what they saw. “It’s blurry,” they’d say, and I’d suggest that sometimes the closer we got to a situation, the less clear it looked. Maybe that’s what love is. Having someone who guides you through different experiences, coaxes you to try new things but still makes you feel safe. One thing I’ve learned in my program is that guilt is a wasted emotion, you know? Look back on the past but don’t stare.” ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 2014
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Oct 12, 2015
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0393978893
| 9780393978896
| 3.84
| 1,117,840
| Dec 1847
| 2002
|
it was ok
|
Reading this again for book club confirmed for me that I am not a fan of this style / period of writing. The drama of the storyline is captivating but
Reading this again for book club confirmed for me that I am not a fan of this style / period of writing. The drama of the storyline is captivating but I would never call it a favorite like so many do. Highlights: he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.’ Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable;’ the mild and generous are only more justly selfish than the domineering; I have now heard all my neighbour’s history, at different sittings, as the housekeeper could spare time from more important occupations. I’ll continue it in her own words, only a little condensed. She is, on the whole, a very fair narrator, and I don’t think I could improve her style. ‘Kiss me again; and don’t let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?’ Happily, as Mr. Heathcliff conjectured, he’ll not win twenty. I doubt whether he’ll see spring, indeed. she seemed to have made up her mind to enter into the spirit of her future family, and draw pleasure from the griefs of her enemies. ...more | Notes are private!
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Sep 2014
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Oct 12, 2015
| Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0241144140
| 9780241144145
| 3.43
| 27,552
| Aug 2012
| Sep 04, 2012
|
really liked it
|
I've read a lot of Zadie Smith's work, and while this was not my all-time favorite, I did enjoy it quite a lot. She captures the always-important less
I've read a lot of Zadie Smith's work, and while this was not my all-time favorite, I did enjoy it quite a lot. She captures the always-important lesson of "you can't compare other peoples' outsides to your insides. ### Highlights: Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her. They had dozens of sexual partners before they married each other. Dance floor romances, Ibiza flings. The nineties, ecstatic decade! They were married though they needn’t have married, and though both had sworn they never would be. It is hard to explain—in that game of musical chairs—why they should have stopped, finally, at each other. Kindness, as a quality, had something to do with it. Many things were easy to find on those dance floors, but kindness was rare. Her husband was kinder than any man Leah Hanwell had ever known, aside from her father. And then of course they had been surprised by their own conventionality. The marriage pleased Pauline. It calmed the anxieties of Michel’s family. It was pleasing to please their families. Beyond this, the proper names “wife” and “husband” had a power neither party had expected. If it was voodoo, they were grateful for it. It allowed them to stop dancing round chairs without ever admitting they were tired of it. They were married before they were friends, which is another way of saying: Their marriage was the occasion of their friendship. They were married before they noticed many small differences in background, aspiration, education, ambition. The truth is she had believed they would be naked in these sheets forever and nothing would come to them ever, nothing but satisfaction. To Adina a university degree is like a bungee cord, lowering in and pulling out with dangerous velocity. Of course, you won’t be here long. Look, I don’t want to give you projects you’re not going to be here to finish . . . Money avoids relationship, obligation. Michel always speaks sincerely, and it is strange that exactly this trait—highly valued by Leah in private—should so embarrass her in public. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became. Why won’t everybody stay still? She has forced a stillness in herself, but it has not stopped the world from continuing on. Maybe it doesn’t matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Michel is very happy in his anger, they are drawn together under its canopy. It is the nicest time they’ve had together in months. “literally” will not be happy until they’ve moved into our houses. They can never move into our houses. Pass the heirloom tomato salad. The thing about Islam. Let me tell you about Islam. The thing about the trouble with Islam. Everyone is suddenly an expert on Islam. But what do you think, Samhita, yeah what do you think, Samhita, what’s your take on this? Samhita, the copyright lawyer. Pass the tuna. Solutions are passed across the table, strategies. Private wards. Private cinemas. Christmas abroad. A restaurant with only five tables in it. Security systems. Fences. You live in the same place long enough, you get memory overlap. “How’s poor Devon doing?” “Fine.” “You’re mistaking me for one of those people who ask questions out of politeness.” “You know, Felix”—a dainty little voice, like a waitress reciting the specials—“not everyone wants this conventional little life you’re rowing your boat toward. I like my river of fire. And when it’s time for me to go I fully intend to roll off my one-person dinghy into the flames and be consumed. I’m not afraid! I’ve never been afraid. Most people are, you know. But I’m not like most people. You’ve never done anything for me and I don’t need you to do anything for me.” In the child’s mind a breach now appeared: between what she believed she knew of herself, essentially, and her essence as others seemed to understand it. She began to exist for other people, and if ever asked a question to which she did not know the answer she was wont to fold her arms across her body and look upward. Like most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns. If she was more curt with her own family than a homeless man this only suggested that generosity was not an infinite quantity and had to be employed strategically where it was most needed. It had been everywhere, the air, free for the taking, but she had only come to desire it now that she saw it thus defined, extracted, rendered visible. The infinitely available thing, now enclosed in the sole of a shoe! if you read the relevant literature or watched the pertinent movies you soon found that being bullied was practically a sign of a superior personality, and the greater the intensity of the bullying the more likely it was to be avenged at the other end of life, wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television. It did not strike Keisha Blake that such feelings of alienation are the banal fate of adolescents everywhere. They thought life was a problem that could be solved by means of professionalization. She had been asked to pass the entirety of herself through a hole that would accept only part. Elena was the kind of woman to prefer a spectacular disaster to a conventional failure. Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison. “Can I give you a tip?” said Imran. “Start on the third episode of series two.” Was it possible to feel oneself on a war footing, constantly, even at brunch? The money was not for these poky terraced houses with their short back gardens. The money was for the distance the house put between you and Caldwell. Natalie Blake had become a person unsuited to self-reflection. Left to her own mental devices she quickly spiraled into self-contempt. The Blake–De Angelises started work early and tended to finish late, and in the gaps treated each other with an exaggerated tenderness, as if the slightest applied pressure would blow the whole thing to pieces. Many things that had seemed, to their own mothers, self-evident elements of a common-sense world, now struck Natalie and Leah as either a surprise or an outrage. Physical pain. The existence of disease. In the show poverty was understood as a personality trait. They were “time poor.” They didn’t even have time to collect their latest reward for all their hard work. “You’re difficult for her to understand.” “Why? What’s difficult about me?” “You have your work. You have Frank. You’ve got all these friends. You’re getting to be so successful. You’re never lonely.” Blake was a double agent. She had no intention of being made ridiculous by failing to do whatever was expected of her. For her, it was only a question of timing. She grew anxious that she was not anxious about the things you were meant to be anxious about. It filled her with panic and rage to see her spoiled children sat upon the floor, flicking through past images, moving images, of themselves, on their father’s phone, an experience of self-awareness literally unknown in the history of human existence—outside dream and miracle—until very recently. Until just before just now. She had been eight for a hundred years. She was thirty-four for seven minutes. She had a new urge for something other than pure forward momentum. She wanted to conserve. Natalie Blake had completely forgotten what it was like to be poor. It was a language she’d stopped being able to speak, or even to understand. Was it possible not only to have contempt for the people who kept time for you? If only someone could have forced Natalie Blake to attend a funeral every day of her life! She had picked up the habit of being embarrassed by other people’s bad luck. It struck Natalie that she was no longer crying or shaking, and that dread was the hardest emotion in the world to hold on to for more than a moment. this was her life now. Two silent enemies shepherding children to their social appointments. if it were an object, maybe Natalie Blake would have seen that the perfect gift at this moment was an honest account of her own difficulties and ambivalences, clearly stated, without disguise, embellishment or prettification. But Natalie Blake’s instinct for self-defense, for self-preservation, was simply too strong. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
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1
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not set
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Aug 2014
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Oct 12, 2015
| Hardcover
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| 0385351399
| 9780385351393
| 3.44
| 156,933
| Oct 08, 2013
| Oct 08, 2013
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it was amazing
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I gave this book 5 stars because I talked about it for months after I read it. I still talk about it. I read The Circle for my book club and we all ag
I gave this book 5 stars because I talked about it for months after I read it. I still talk about it. I read The Circle for my book club and we all agreed Mae was not a believable (female) character. But this book isn't really about believable characters. It's about two things: 1) The future of society and technology 2) The experience of being an employee at a large technology company at this point in time To expand on 1: The Circle seems like a dramatization of what could happen in the future of social media. But it isn't really all that far off. It's an extreme, but all signs point to our society moving in the direction of "total transparency" etc etc. On 2: this was what got me most riled up while reading this book. The Circle doesn't just expect Mae to do her job, they want her to be her job. And everyone around her (parents, friends, etc) thinks that she has "hit the jackpot" because she works at a well-regarded company. While I don't think the Googles or Twitters are quite as insane as The Circle with requiring employees to use their social networks all the time as part of their evaluation, the lines between work and life are becoming increasingly blurred and I am not sure that is such a great thing. Sure it's great to love what you do. But what if you just like what you do but are made to feel like it is your entire identity? What if you don't really enjoy your work but you stay because everyone in your life makes you feel like you are the luckiest person alive to work at X company? These are real issues and why I think this is a must-read for anyone working in the tech industry today. ### My highlights: By midmorning that Friday, her aggregate for the week was at 97, and the affirmations were coming from everyone in the Circle. The work was demanding, and the flow did not stop, but it varied just enough, and the validation was frequent enough, that she settled into a comfortable rhythm. When she graduated from middle school, they’d driven her to Disneyland, not quite understanding that she was too old, and that her going there alone—with two adults, which was effectively alone—was at cross-purposes with any notion of fun. “I just casually slip it into conversation. My daughter’s at the hottest company on the planet and has full dental.” “I’m sure she’s got a lot of responsibility.” “And stock options!” her father said. “I can’t imagine what she’s worth.” “No, in a good way! But I haven’t had time yet to do extracurricular stuff.” Gina tilted her head and cleared her throat theatrically. “That’s so interesting you put it that way,” she said, smiling, though she didn’t seem happy. “We actually see your profile, and the activity on it, as integral to your participation here. This is how your coworkers, even those on the other side of campus, know who you are. Communication is certainly not extracurricular, Mae, feeling some darkness opening its wings within her, signed off. Equal access to all possible human experiences is a basic human right.” That’s probably why I didn’t get in where I wanted to. Don’t let anyone tell you Exeter helps. So many quota spots to fill with people from Pakistan and Fresno, right?” ...more | Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jun 2014
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Oct 12, 2015
| Hardcover
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| 9781937894283
| 3.33
| 4,324
| Mar 25, 2014
| Mar 25, 2014
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really liked it
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Another book club book. I liked this short story (novella?) and found it thought-provoking. A few quotes: Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar Another book club book. I liked this short story (novella?) and found it thought-provoking. A few quotes: Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar office; nobody wants to peer through glass windows, in a building with a foundation, and admit that the insomnia emergency is now a permanent condition. Death’s dress rehearsal is ongoing at any bus stop in America, where sick people beg us not for minutes of sleep but for metallic dollar-flakes, wealth dandruff. “She’s like a grief hemophiliac,” Rudy told the German widow, Doesn’t it matter how you ask the question? Or if the tone of your request is closer to a fist than to an open palm? Can the nature of the request corrupt the purity of the gift, the donated sleep? America’s great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively, to a body like mine, and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end. Forty-five dollars for the moon-plot? Put it on the card. What a steal. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
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1
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not set
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Jun 2014
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Oct 12, 2015
| ebook
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