Read this while in Costa Rica. The title essay made me think a lot about tourism and thus reading it while on vacation was quite a trip (literally - hRead this while in Costa Rica. The title essay made me think a lot about tourism and thus reading it while on vacation was quite a trip (literally - haha).
I would read it again, for sure. It gave me that peculiar feeling that reading David Foster Wallace always does: that you are part of the joke, the fellow cynic looking on, flabbergasted yet highly amused at the absurdity of it all.
To show how many random/interesting thoughts it brought up, here are some things I wrote in the cover of the book while reading it:
- Lynch essay describes how I feel about IJ - absurdist but with no judgment - To read: "Stop-Time" - I should buy a camera case and a waterproof watch. - Professional smile - New theory on photography: to remember - I learned very early on that parents are only people - Email Naomi about Starbucks memory - Memory of listening to OJ Simpson trial in parking lot in Utah - Things to not forget about Linares: store without a sign, crying goat, sleeping outside, separate kitchen, radio background, grapes/raspberries, dogs, chickens, first time meeting extranjero, girl with camera, riding horse in sunset, slow hiking, out of shape ppl in denial, being cold at night, eating cold canned soup, making people try PB, 'will you marry my son?', flowers in the yard, houses made of mud, annoying when people speak English instead of slowing down Spanish, treatment of pets, road put in ten years ago, man walking house to house selling clothes, Spanish heritage, woman in Burton shoes carrying a water bucket, sitting in river eating blackberries, sitting on a rock above the river, once on a Sunday with family
There are more. Maybe the amount of idea-generating influence it had alone makes this book a must-read. ...more
I found this memoir to be very cathartic. The author is so real. She displays her confusion and her certainty at the same time. She is happy and satisI found this memoir to be very cathartic. The author is so real. She displays her confusion and her certainty at the same time. She is happy and satisfied and sad and dissatisfied in ways that I find very relatable. And most importantly, to me at least, she serves as a great role model for other women who don't want to form their entire identity around motherhood. So many memoirs from women are like "I did this then that then I had kids and realized kids are everything." Glynnis follows a different path but still leads an enviable life. And I love the way she weaves in the stories of other people in her life to show how different directions can all lead to interesting and fulfilling life outcomes....more
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 inspirI'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
It was a slog to get through, because the writing style can be somewhat dry. But, the content is pretty damn compelling. IThis was a book club book.
It was a slog to get through, because the writing style can be somewhat dry. But, the content is pretty damn compelling. I think the title of this book is wrong - it isn’t really about happiness, it’s more a look at what we believe about ourselves and what is actually true about the human brain and how to think about where those two things diverge. I’ve heard the “money doesn’t actually make you happy” research recited elsewhere, but here Haidt really drives the point home.
Despite this book not being a page turner, I would still recommend it highly. The information it holds is just too interesting. You will find yourself paraphrasing it to friends all the time. And who knows - maybe even acting on a thing or two!
Favorite bits:
“For example, if the word ‘walk’ is flashed to the right hemisphere, the patient might stand up and walk away. When asked why he is getting up, he might say, ‘I’m going to get a Coke.’ The interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing that it has done so.” -p.9
“This difference in maturity between automatic and controlled processes helps explain why we have inexpensive computers that can solve logic, math, and chess problems better than any human beings can (most of us struggle with these tasks), but none of our robots, no matter how costly, can walk through the woods as well as the average six-year-old child (our perceptual and motor skills are superb).” -p.15
“Twin studies generally show that from 50 percent to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their teens rather than in their life experiences.” -p.33
“My research indicates that a small set of innate moral intuitions guide and constrain the world’s many moralities, and one of the intuitions is that the body is a temple housing a soul within. Even people who do not consciously believe in God or the soul are offended by or feel uncomfortable about someone who treats her body like a playground, its sole purpose to provide pleasure.” -p.42
“People who think they are particularly moral are in fact more likely to ‘do the right thing’ and flip the coin, but when the coin flip comes out against them, they find a way to ignore it and follow their own self-interest. Watson called this tendency to value the appearance of morality over the reality ‘moral hypocrisy’” p.62
“So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for ever thing one has a mind to do” -p.66 (quoting franklin)
“People acknowledge that their own backgrounds have shaped their views, but such experiences are invariably seen as deepening one’s insights” -p.71
“Sometimes evil falls our of a clear blue sky onto the head of an innocent victim, but most cases are much more complicated, and Baumeister is willing to violate the taboo against ‘blaming the victim’ in order to understand what really happened…..This does not mean that both sides are equally to blame: Perpetrators often grossly overreact and misinterpret (using self-serving biases). But Baumeister’s point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls ‘the myth of pure evil’” -p.74
“Most activities that cost more than a hundred dollars are things we do with other people, but expensive material possessions are often purchased in part to impress other people. Activities connect us to others; objects often separate us.” -p.100
“If in those first few months you take action - you do something that changes your daily life - then the changes might stick. But if you do nothing more than make a resolution (‘I must never forget my new outlook on life’), then you will soon slip back into old habits and pursue old goals.” -p.144
“Don’t edit or censor yourself; don’t worry about grammar or sentence structure; just keep writing. Write about what happened, how you feel about it, and why you feel that way….be sure you have done your best to answer these two questions: Why did this happen? What food might I derive from it?” - p.149
“Younger children know some stories about themselves, but the active and chronic striving to integrate one’s past, present, and future into a coherent narrative begins only in the mid to late teens” -p.150
“For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).” - p.153
“Where the Greeks focused on the character of a person and asked what kind of person we should each aim to become, modern ethics focuses on actions, asking when a particular action is right or wrong.” -p.163
“Where the ancients saw virtue and character at work in everything a person does, our modern conception confines morality to a set of situations that arise for each person only a few times in any given week.” -p.164
“Trying to make children behave ethically by teaching them to reason well is like trying to make a dog happy by wagging its tail. It gets causality backwards.” -p.165
“Awe is the emotion of transcendence….it was always had a link to fear and submission in the presence of something much greater than the self.” -p.202
“The universe is perceived as a unified whole where everything is accepted and nothing is judged or ranked; egocentrism and goal-striving disappear as a person feelings merged with the universe (and often with God); perceptions of time and space are altered; and the person is flooded with feelings of wonder, awe, joy, love, and gratitude” -p.205 (“peak openness”)
“Maslow did not believe religions were literally true (as actual accounts of God and creation), but he thought they were based on the most important truths of life, and he wanted to unite those truths with the truths of science.” -p.206
“It is impossible to analyze ‘the meaning of life’ in the abstract, or in general, or for some mythical and perfectly rational being. Only by knowing the kinds of beings that we actually are, with the complex mental and emotional architecture that we happen to possess, can anyone even begin to ask about what would count as a meaningful life” -p.215
“Why do some people live lives full of zest, commitment, and meaning, but others feel that their lives are empty and pointless?” -p.219...more
I loved this book. I live in Oakland so it was lovely to read a novel based in Oakland. But this book is not about an Oakland that I personally inhabiI loved this book. I live in Oakland so it was lovely to read a novel based in Oakland. But this book is not about an Oakland that I personally inhabit. It is about native americans who live in Oakland. Many of them are overcoming challenges. The theme of what it means to be native and what it means to be native when you are living in an urban environment like Oakland is an interesting one and not something I've read a lot about. An engaging and educational book. But if you have trouble keeping track of many different characters, beware! Can get kind of confusing because each chapter is told from a different perspective even though all of the stories weave in and out of each other....more
Read this book with in Vietnam, which made it extra relevant. But I think I would have enjoyed it either way. An engaging memoir of biking through VieRead this book with in Vietnam, which made it extra relevant. But I think I would have enjoyed it either way. An engaging memoir of biking through Vietnam as a Vietnamese-American. Gave me a lot to think about and I gobbled it right up....more
Before he’d arrived, life at Westish had seemed heroic and grand, grave and essential, like Mike Schwartz. It was turning outHighlights from Kindle:
Before he’d arrived, life at Westish had seemed heroic and grand, grave and essential, like Mike Schwartz. It was turning out to be comic and idle, familiar and flawed—more like Henry Skrimshander.
It astonished and humbled him to think that a mind could grow so rich that its every gesture would come to seem profound.
She’d gotten so far ahead of the curve that the curve became a circle, and now she was way behind.
Locker rooms, in Schwartz’s experience, were always underground, like bunkers and bomb shelters. This was less a structural necessity than a symbolic one. The locker room protected you when you were most vulnerable: just before a game, and just after. (And halfway through, if the game was football.) Before the game, you took off the uniform you wore to face the world and you put on the one you wore to face your opponent. In between, you were naked in every way. After the game ended, you couldn’t carry your game-time emotions out into the world—you’d be put in an asylum if you did—so you went underground and purged them. You yelled and threw things and pounded on your locker, in anguish or joy. You hugged your teammate, or bitched him out, or punched him in the face. Whatever happened, the locker room remained a haven.
A majestic fart propelled him to the top of Section 12, just at the springing of the stadium’s curve.
Science professors, she assumed; the kind of lovably obdurate old men who bicycled everywhere, ate seven small meals a day, and were plotting to live to a hundred twenty. Her dad, though not a habitual swimmer, was a little like that too. At sixty, he seemed no more than halfway finished with this world.
Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering. Most people couldn’t do this alone; they needed a coach. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you. A bad coach made everyone suffer in the same way, and so was more like a torturer.
Slovenliness correlated highly with despair—the inability to exert influence over one’s environment, et cetera.
Such consistency suggested, or seemed to suggest, that Owen found their afternoons worth repeating, even down to the smallest detail. This was the dreamy, paradisiacal side of domestic ritual: when all the days were possessed of the same minutiae precisely because you wanted them to be.
In the room of a girl at a place like Westish, the presence of family was almost always palpable, not just in the framed photographs but in the careful replication of a childhood room, updated for post-adolescence; the holdover stuffed animals, the condom box or plastic pastel birth-control wheel left in plain view in tribute to the parent who wasn’t there to object.
victory could make a man magnanimous.
“If I were you I’d ask me out to dinner. I’d put on a nice shirt that matched my eyes and I’d pick me up in my silver Audi and teach me about opera while I drove me out through the dark countryside to some Friday-night fish fry in some little town in the middle of nowhere.” “You don’t eat fish,” Affenlight said. “I know. But I’d be so smitten by the invitation that I wouldn’t care. And then I’d take me to a motel and turn off the heat and crawl into bed with me and watch cable television into the wee hours, the way that consenting adults are sometimes entitled to do, even if they normally detest television. And I’d hold me all night and kiss me on the ear and recite whatever poems I knew by heart and feed me awful processed snacks from the vending machine, since I wouldn’t have touched the fish. And then in the morning I’d have me back nice and early, so I could make team breakfast before the game.”
She didn’t love David anymore, but love had trained her to see the world through his eyes, and through his eyes this place was a vapid dump.
You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard.
“I’ll be at the game,” Affenlight said, eager to cement some tiny portion of their future.
“How many times does something happen before we give it a name? And until the name exists, neither does the condition.
“Doubt has always existed,” Aparicio said. “Even for athletes.”
All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever.
There were two kinds of incompetent con men. Those who talked too much and those who didn’t talk enough.
That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed.
You could say that young people were desired because they had smooth bodies and excellent reproductive chances, but you’d mostly be missing the point. There was something much sadder in it than that. Something like constant regret, the sense that your whole life was an error, a mistake, that you were desperate to redo.
He wondered, not for the first time, what it would have been like to spend a few decades with a woman like that—a woman who turned family life into a smooth-running corporate entity, whose genius was to take a sizable income and make it seem infinite, who knew how to convert money into pleasure and pleasantry.
They’d been fighting half her life, and yet the fights always felt like aberrations.
People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent.
What would he say to her, if he was going to speak truly? He didn’t know. Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them—you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch. You had to send your words out where they weren’t yours anymore.
If Affenlight were to list the things he loved, he wouldn’t include Westish—that would seem silly, like saying you loved yourself. He spent half his time frustrated with, ambivalent about, annoyed at the place. But anything that happened to alter the fortunes of Westish College, however small; anything that was done to or even said about Westish College, Affenlight took more seriously than if it were happening to himself.
There were no whys in a person’s life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite patience.
Deep down, he thought, we all believe we’re God. We secretly believe that the outcome of the game depends on us, even when we’re only watching—on the way we breathe in, the way we breathe out, the T-shirt we wear, whether we close our eyes as the pitch leaves the pitcher’s hand and heads toward Schwartz.
Men were such odd creatures. They didn’t duel anymore, even fistfights had come to seem barbaric, the old casual violence all channeled through institutions now, but still they loved to uphold their ancient codes. And what they loved even more was to forgive each other.
“You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love....more
What I loved about this book is that it made me emotional about trees. My family has a long history of being emotional about trees, but I myself usualWhat I loved about this book is that it made me emotional about trees. My family has a long history of being emotional about trees, but I myself usually stop at feeling awe when faced with a magnificent tree. This book took me from awe to tears.
In the end, I am not sure how invested I was in these characters. But, I loved all of the information about trees contained with the story, and the fight for justice for the forest, and the philosophical ideas about environmental activism that were portrayed so elegantly....more
I LOVED this book. It's historical fiction surrounding the assassination of JFK. All of the information surrounding the assassination is true and wasI LOVED this book. It's historical fiction surrounding the assassination of JFK. All of the information surrounding the assassination is true and was very interesting/educational for someone who didn't know much about that important historical event.
The premise of the book is that there is a portal for time travel that always takes a traveler back to a certain date a few years before the JFK assassination. The man who finds it decides that anyone who could prevent that event would save the US/world from many of the terrible events that happened afterward.
This book gave me a new appreciation for historical fiction and Stephen King. I highly recommend it -- a total page turner.
My highlights (not many, since the best part of this book was the plot):
for such an unforgiving thing, time is uniquely malleable.
the scholar’s greatest weakness: calling hesitation research.
It filled me up in some way I can’t explain. Or want to. Explanations are such cheap poetry.
stupidity is one of two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.
“I’m very sorry to hear it.” “Thank you, George. Expressed to a nicety. Any more would be sloppy.”
Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor, she once told me. I’m no different....more
This was my favorite read of 2018. Such an engaging story of alcoholism and what it means to be an alcoholic through the lens of 1) being a writer 2)This was my favorite read of 2018. Such an engaging story of alcoholism and what it means to be an alcoholic through the lens of 1) being a writer 2) being a woman and 3) being white. Gender and privilege made Leslie's experience different from the experiences of many others, and she goes into great depth chronicling exactly that difference. Her ability to go from telling the story of a fight with her boyfriend into a deep sociological analysis of addiction and criminal justice/injustice related to substance abuse is remarkable. It seems like addiction is something that touches us all in one way or another, and this is the best book I've read on the subject....more
I was going to give this four stars, but looking back on my Kindle highlights, I remembered that this book is really quite amazing. The discussions onI was going to give this four stars, but looking back on my Kindle highlights, I remembered that this book is really quite amazing. The discussions on female body hair are spot on. Also obesity, marriage and pretty much everything that concerns women as we grow up into full adulthood. She manages to treat these topics both seriously and with a good sense of humor.
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It’s very important my parents don’t think I’m starting to fall in love with people, because then they might notice that I’m growing up, and I’m kind of trying to keep it secret. I think it will cause some kind of incident.
Hair is one of the first big preoccupations of womanhood. It appears, unbidden, and so decisions must be made about it—decisions that signal to yourself, and the world, who you are.
As the teenage years are where you begin the complicated, lifelong business of starting to work this out, hair is the opening salvo in decades of quietly screaming “WHO AM I?” while standing in front of an array of products in the drugstore, clutching an empty basket.
While some use the euphemism “Brazilian” to describe this state of affairs, I prefer to call it what it is—“a ruinously high-maintenance, itchy, cold-looking child’s vagina.”
I can’t believe we’ve got to a point where it’s basically costing us money to have a vagina. They’re making us pay for maintenance and upkeep of our lulus, like they’re a communal garden. It’s a stealth tax. Muff excised. This is money we should be spending on THE ELECTRICITY BILL and CHEESE and BERETS. Instead, we’re wasting it on making our Chihuahuas look like a skanky chicken breast.
The transformation of my body from something that does little more than poo and do jigsaws into a magical department store that will, one day, vend babies takes up nearly all my time and worry.
All art is someone trying to tell you something, I realize. There’re thousands of people who want to talk to me, so long as I open their book or turn on their show.
And every book, you find, has its own social group—friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.
I feel fandom—that slightly lazy, wholly thrilled decision to simply believe everything your hero says and does; to follow in their fluorescing slipstream without question.
The more women argue, loudly, against feminism, the more they both prove it exists and that they enjoy its hard-won privileges.
When people suggest that what, all along, has been holding women back is other women bitching about each other, I think they’re severely overestimating the power of a catty zinger during a cigarette break. We have to remember that snidely saying, “Her hair’s a bit limp on top” isn’t what’s keeping womankind from closing the 30 percent pay gap and a place on the board of directors. I think that’s more likely to be down to tens of thousands of years of ingrained social, political, and economic misogyny and the patriarchy, tbh.
Someone who walks away from a table—replete—shouting, “THAT WAS SPLENDID!” before sitting in front of a fire, drinking port and eating truffles, doesn’t have neuroses about food. They are in a consensual relationship with eating and, almost unfailingly, couldn’t care less about how it’s put an extra couple of pounds on them.
No—I’m talking about those for whom the whole idea of food is not one of pleasure, but one of compulsion. For whom thoughts of food, and the effects of food, are the constant, dreary background static to normal thought. Those who think about lunch while eating breakfast, and pudding as they eat chips; who walk into the kitchen in a state bordering on panic and breathlessly eat slice after slice of bread and butter—not tasting it, not even chewing—until the panic can be drowned in an almost meditative routine of chewing and swallowing, spooning and swallowing.
Overeating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that’s why it’s come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions. It’s a way of fucking yourself up while still remaining fully functional, because you have to. Fat people aren’t indulging in the “luxury” of their addiction making them useless, chaotic, or a burden. Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anyone. And that’s why it’s so often a woman’s addiction of choice.
Ladies, we are at a massive disadvantage in the workplace. Your male peers are flirting with their male bosses constantly. The average workplace is like fucking Bromancing the Stone. That’s basically what male bonding is. Flirting. They’re flirting with each other playing golf, they’re flirting with each other going to football, they’re flirting with each other chatting at the urinals—and, sadly, flirting with each other in after-hours visits to strip clubs
We are, physically, the weaker sex. We’re not as good at hefting stones, killing mammoths, and rowing boats. In addition, sex often had the added complication of getting us pregnant and leaving us feeling “too fat” to lead an army into India. It’s not a coincidence that efforts toward female emancipation only got going under the twin exegeses of industrialization and contraception—when machines made us the equal of men in the workplace, and the Pill made us the equal of men in expressing our desire. In more primitive times—what I would personally regard as any time before the release of Working Girl in 1988—the winners were always going to be those both physically strong enough to punch an antelope to the ground and whose libido didn’t end up with them getting pregnant, then dying in childbirth.
The people around you are mirrors, I think. The dog is paddling in the lake. I watch her lap at the water. You see yourself reflected in their eyes. If the mirror is true, and smooth, you see your true self. That’s how you learn who you are. And you might be a different person to different people, but it’s all feedback that you need, in order to know yourself.
“This is like an annual convention for Bad Husband Material,” I say to Vicky as we go in. “Everyone here has left a trail of sad girlfriends and wives.”
Why do so many people have a gut reaction against strip clubs? Because, inside them, no one’s having fun. Instead, people are expressing needs (to earn money, to see a woman’s skin) in pretty much the most depressing way possible.
addiction to porn and strip clubs is the third biggest cause of debt in men. Between 60 and 80 percent of strippers come from a background of sexual abuse.
If we were inventing things from scratch, surely we would decide to throw a gigantic £21,000 celebration of love right at the end of the whole thing—when we’re in our sixties and seventies, the mortgage is paid off, and we can see if the whole “I love you forever” thing actually worked out or not.
£21,000! Oh, it makes me cry. Personally, I wouldn’t spend £21,000 on anything that didn’t have either (a) doors and windows or (b) the ability to grant me three wishes. It is an absurd amount of money to spend on something. It is a figure that denotes insanity.
Clearly—with these enforced parameters—your wedding is actually like some unholy mélange of some work off-site and family therapy and should, therefore, be regarded with the same mixture of quiet stoicism, grim determination, and heavy drinking.
you should always be distrustful of days that are preordained to be legendary: a sad trail of disappointing New Year’s Eves, Christmas Days, romantic long weekends, first shags, and birthdays should tell us this.
When a woman says, “I have nothing to wear!” what she really means is, “There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.”
No one has ever claimed for a moment that childless men have missed out on a vital aspect of their existence, and were the poorer and crippled by it. Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Newton, Faraday, Plato, Aquinas, Beethoven, Handel, Kant, Hume. Jesus. They all seem to have managed quite well....more
Hard not to love an advice book that is so wisely and honestly and beautifully written!
Highlights:
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she offers what we wish every mother would: enHard not to love an advice book that is so wisely and honestly and beautifully written!
Highlights:
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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
I finished this on an airplane. I think it was raining. Or maybe I was just crying so hard there is a quality of wetness to the memory. This book is bI finished this on an airplane. I think it was raining. Or maybe I was just crying so hard there is a quality of wetness to the memory. This book is beautiful and heartbreaking.
My highlights:
(from introduction)
Christopher was the beau ideal of the public intellectual. You felt as though he was writing to you and to you alone. And as a result many readers felt they knew him.
To his friends, Christopher will be remembered for his elevated but inclusive humor and for a staggering, almost punishing memory that held up under the most liquid of late-night conditions. And to all of us, his readers, Christopher Hitchens will be remembered for the words he left behind. These last ones, free as they are of sentiment or self-pity, are among his last. They are also among his best.
(from the book)
To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)
I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.
Ingenious though the full reasoning of his essay may be—he was one of the founders of probability theory—Pascal assumes both a cynical god and an abjectly opportunist human being. Suppose I ditch the principles I have held for a lifetime, in the hope of gaining favor at the last minute? I hope and trust that no serious person would be at all impressed by such a hucksterish choice. Meanwhile, the god who would reward cowardice and dishonesty and punish irreconcilable doubt is among the many gods in which (whom?) I do not believe.
Other similar trials are under review by the Food and Drug Administration, but I am in a bit of a hurry, and I can’t forget the feeling of flatness that I experienced when I received the news.
“Until you have done something for humanity,” wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, “you should be ashamed to die.”
she said, “Yes, I suppose a time comes when you have to consider letting go.” How true, and how crisp a summary of what I had just said myself. But again there was the unreasonable urge to have a kind of monopoly on, or a sort of veto over, what was actually sayable. Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic.
I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.
The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed.
For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.
If I convert it’s because it’s better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.
good it is to be us,” he would say in his perfect voice. My husband is an impossible act to follow. And yet, now I must follow him. I have been forced to have the last word....more
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:
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"WeThis 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:
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"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
I loved this book. It was long, making it a great book to read on Kindle, but I went through it in no time. I regret waiting so long to review it becaI loved this book. It was long, making it a great book to read on Kindle, but I went through it in no time. I regret waiting so long to review it because I am no longer exactly sure of why I loved it, but I think it was the characters. So complicated. So different. So many interesting commentaries on modern suburban life, family, and relationships more generally. I hope to read this one again.
My highlights:
She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street. the Berglunds were the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege.
Looking back now, the autobiographer sees her younger self as one of those miserable adolescents so angry at her parents that she needed to join a cult where she could be nicer and friendlier and more generous and subservient than she could bring herself to be at home anymore. Her cult just happened to be basketball.
“Wow, thank you so much for the compliment!” Patty answered brightly, to end things. At the time, she believed that it was because she was selflessly team-spirited that direct personal compliments made her so uncomfortable. The autobiographer now thinks that compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.
Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head.
The music was like food too hot to have any taste,
What she was feeling became a lot more familiar to her later in her life, when she made the acquaintance of serious depression, but on that February night it was a hideous novelty to feel the game swirling around her, totally out of her control, and to intuit that the significance of everything that happened, every approach and retreat of the ball, every heavy thud of her feet on the floor, every new moment of trying to guard a fully focused and determined Bruin, every teammate’s hearty halftime whap on the shoulder, was her own badness and the emptiness of her future and the futility of struggle.
One afternoon near the end of the semester, over coffee at the Student Union, the two of them had a memorable talk about Patty’s Primitive Art professor, whose lectures she approvingly described to Walter by way of giving him a subtle hint about what she found lacking in his personality.
“You don’t stop being loyal to a friend just because they’re not perfect.”
Joyce and Ray’s neglect of Patty, however much it stung when she was younger, seems more and more benign when she considers her sisters, who are now in their early forties and living alone in New York, too eccentric and/or entitled-feeling to sustain a long-term relationship, and still accepting parental subsidies while struggling to achieve an artistic success that they were made to believe was their special destiny.
It turns out to have been better after all to be considered dumb and dull than brilliant and extraordinary. This way, it’s a pleasant surprise that Patty is even a little bit Creative, rather than an embarrassment that she isn’t more so.
And since he was so intellectually honest in other areas of life, he had excellent credibility when he criticized her family and signed on with her questionable programs of competing with it. He may not have been exactly what she wanted in a man, but he was unsurpassable in providing the rabid fandom which, at the time, she needed even more than romance.
She loved him (and does love him, does love him) for qualities that made abundant sense to her in their two-person private world but weren’t necessarily apparent to the sort of critical eye that she was sure her sisters, Abigail in particular, would train on him. His nervous giggle, his too-readily reddening face, his very niceness: these attributes were dear to her in the larger context of the man. A source of pride, even. But the unkind part of her, which exposure to her family always seemed to bring out in force, couldn’t help regretting that he wasn’t six-foot-four and very cool.
He was so much his family’s winner that he could afford to make regular voyages back to help the others.
“I know essentially nothing about sex,” Walter confessed. “Oh, well,” she said, “it’s not very complicated.” And so began the happiest years of their life.
“It’s good to have friends in life,” she said. “If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody’s perfect.”
serious fans always need to feel uniquely connected to the object of their fandom; they jealously guard those points of connection, however tiny or imaginary, that justify the feeling of uniqueness.
there are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself.
She felt she’d never been younger than she’d been at twenty-one. It was as if her Westchester childhood, though chronologically prior, had somehow taken place in a later and more fallen time.
There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of
She took War and Peace out to the grassy knoll, with the vague ancient motive of impressing Richard with her literacy, but she was mired in a military section and kept reading the same page over and over.
A weariness set in as she stood and vacillated: a premonition that none of the possible impending outcomes would bring enough relief or pleasure to justify her current heart-racing wretchedness. She saw, in other words, what it meant to have become a deeply unhappy person.
Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn’t an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales.
since the interval between cigarettes was how he was currently sectioning his days into swallowable bites,
And this, of course, was the simplest definition of depression that he knew of: strongly disliking yourself.
Walter and the girl seemed to have snapped under the pressure of thinking in too much detail about the fuckedness of the world.
the really attractive girls he’d met in Virginia all seemed to have been sprayed with Teflon, encased in suspicion of his motives.
effortlessly performed the shallow affability that college life required of him.
the need, in times of national emergency, to counter evil lies with benevolent half-truths.
He spoke of Plato as if he’d personally received enlightenment at his Athenian feet. He referred to members of the president’s cabinet by their first names, explaining how “we” had been “leaning on” the president to exploit this unique historical moment to resolve an intractable geopolitical deadlock and radically expand the sphere of freedom.
“Isn’t that what freedom is for? The right to think whatever you want?
Upstairs, in his turkey-smelling bedroom, Joey found a stack of books on the nightstand—Elie Wiesel, Chaim Potok, Exodus, The History of the Jews—and a note from Jonathan’s father: Some kindling for you. Feel free to keep or pass along. Howard. Flipping through them, feeling both a deep lack of personal interest and a deepening respect for people who were interested,
While the rain lashed and the sky flashed, he tried to fill her with self-worth and desire, tried to convey how much he needed her to be the person he could bury his cares in. It never quite worked, and yet, when they were done, there came a stretch of minutes in which they lay and held each other in the quiet majesty of long marriage, forgot themselves in shared sadness and forgiveness for everything they’d inflicted on each other, and rested.
Walter was frightened by the long-term toxicity they were creating with their fights. He could feel it pooling in their marriage like the coal-sludge ponds in Appalachian valleys.
Katz felt very, very tired. To be unable to bring himself to play for even ten seconds the game that Caitlyn was interested in playing with him was to understand the allure of death.
“The girls all come for publishing and art and nonprofits,” he said. “The guys come for money and music. There’s a selection bias there. The girls are good and interesting, the guys are all assholes like me. You shouldn’t take it personally.”
“People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to. That’s what Bill Clinton figured out—that we can’t win elections by running against personal liberties. Especially not against guns, actually.”
“I admire your capacity for admiring,”
He’d followed an instinct in coming down here, but there was a big difference, he was realizing, between an instinct and a plan.
He knew perfectly well that Jenna was bad news. Indeed, what excited him was wondering if he might become bad enough news himself to get her.
Joey smiled fiercely to keep himself from crying. He was experiencing a hurt that felt structural, as if he and his dad had each chosen their politics for the sole purpose of hating the other, and the only way out of it was disengagement.
She didn’t sound at all like the independent older woman he’d been imagining, and a flutter in his stomach warned him to slow down and be sure he really wanted her back. Warned him not to mistake the pain of losing her for an active desire to have her.
From the various acceptable guy-to-guy responses available to him, Joey chose to produce a sheepish smirk suggesting mucho excellente sex, the irrational demands of girlfriends, their need to be bought trinkets, and so forth. Casey cast a quick connoisseurial glance at Connie’s bare shoulders and nodded judiciously. The entire exchange took four seconds,
he, like all people, secretly enjoyed the smell of his own farts,
the smell of his shit was something else. It was so bad as to seem evil in a moral way.
do you think you can find some other way to be a disappointment? I’m not sure you’ve checked every conceivable disappointment box yet.”
What had been abhorrent for five minutes made a great story forever after.
Having achieved, through his native intelligence and hard labor, a degree of affluence and independence, but not nearly enough of either, he became a study in anger and disappointment.
were humping fiercely through their clothes, between piles of other clothes, and then one of those pauses descended, an uneasy recollection of how universal the ascending steps to sex were; how impersonal, or pre-personal.
she was still young enough to be trying to look much older.
which Joey and Connie listened with the exquisite courtesy of a couple secure in their two-person world.
He looked at his girlfriend, her firm hands on the steering wheel, her bright eyes on the road, and thought he might burst with his desire to be like her; with gratitude that she didn’t mind that he was himself instead.
sitting with the patient dignity of people who had more regular experience with funerals than she did.
In the early nineties, he’d done what any holder of a PhD in linguistics might have done: become a stock trader.
“In terms of my practice, it’s literally like not having my cake and not eating it, too.”
When Jessica lost her heart to a musician, the boyish little drummer who’d dropped out of NYU, Patty had to forget everything she knew about musicians and endorse, at least tacitly, Jessica’s belief that human nature had lately undergone a fundamental change: that people her own age, even male musicians, were very different from people Patty’s age.
Although this was difficult, she was happy to make the effort, in part because Jessica and her friends really are somewhat different from Patty and her generation—the world looks scarier to them, the road to adulthood harder and less obviously rewarding ...more
My manager gave me this book when I started on a project related to education. I asked a few friends in the education world if they had heard of it; tMy manager gave me this book when I started on a project related to education. I asked a few friends in the education world if they had heard of it; they all had, but none had read it. So, I went into it with an open mind.
Wow! What an amazing book. What I appreciate most is how the author provides anecdote after anecdote and research upon research without obviously trying to come to any one conclusion. He lays out the facts, and then lets the reader be the judge. I didn’t come away from this book with any hard and fast theories about how education does or should work. but it was a really thought provoking book and I would recommend it to anyone.
I didn’t take any notes in the book because it was a borrowed copy, but I almost want to read it again just so I can highlight my favorite parts.
3 memorable stories / concepts:
- overcoming obstacles is important. Oftentimes, kids who are born with a lot of opportunity do not go on to do GREAT things, just good things, because they never had to overcome the type of things that are between goodness and greatness while growing up.
Related quote: “The typical Harvard undergraduate…is driven more by feat or not being a success than by a concrete desire to do anything in particular.” -p.184
- Chess: there is a story of a chess team in the book that really stuck with me. The team is from a school where few kids have played chess before high school. The coach has been able to churn out a consistently good team for years. The key is nothing secret, just hard work. But in there, there was a description of what makes a great chess player. Someone who is confident enough to play someone better than him, but cautious enough to weigh all options before making a move. This is a good analogy for being successful in general: you need to provide kids with enough confidence that they will challenge themselves, but not so much confidence that they assume they are always right and never stop to question themselves or learn new things.
- stress at home: I'd heard this before, but never really understood it. When kids have a stressful home environment, it is impossible for them to be successful at school. This concept is explained well in the first section of the book....more
I can't believe I read this book over 2 years ago because I think about it (and talk about it!) all the time. Especially because I read it around theI can't believe I read this book over 2 years ago because I think about it (and talk about it!) all the time. Especially because I read it around the same time that I read Hillbilly Elegy and the two books had some interesting overlap in themes but difference in opinion. I highly recommend reading this book and, if you can, doing the same book pairing that I did....more
I heard Eli Batuman interviewed on the Longform podcast and found her entertaining and wildly intelligent. This book is a novel but is really a noveliI heard Eli Batuman interviewed on the Longform podcast and found her entertaining and wildly intelligent. This book is a novel but is really a novelized version of her memoir of the college years, as far as I can tell. I thought it was entertaining and intelligent, just like its author....more
"So this is a confession: Rather than simple reporting on his progress, I want to see Greg Mortenson succeed. I wish him success because he is fightin"So this is a confession: Rather than simple reporting on his progress, I want to see Greg Mortenson succeed. I wish him success because he is fighting the war on terror the way I think it should be conducted." pg.5
"Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel" hand-lettered sign in Skardu
"Greatnes is always built on this foundation: the ability to appear, speak and act, as the most common man." - Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz
I, too, felt a lot of compassion for Greg Mortenson while reading this book. What I liked most about him was his realness. He wasn't some saintly, overly-driven man. He seems like a somewhat simple guy with a good heart who was able to accomplish a lot through perseverance, hard work, and a bit of luck. The overall message that perhaps terrorism (and other such problems in the world) could be fought with education is one that I truly truly want to believe.
This is also an interesting read culturally, I learned a lot about Pakistan and the Himalayan culture....more
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