Reviews of the books I've read

Mom recommended this book to me after I finished A Man Called Ove. What I didn't understand immediately was why Mom kept recommending to me books where the spouse had recently died. Now, I'm pretty sure she's been recommending them to me because they are light, but they also show how there's more after the sorrow of that parting.

This book smacks of Defending Your Life (1991 movie starring Albert Brooks) with its telling of the life of Harriet Chance nee Nathan. The story-line bounces from current time, back to when she was a year old, and all the way through all the times she failed to choose herself during life. We hear of how again, and again, and again, Harriet's deferment to authority and others causes her to become smaller and smaller.

And you know what? It's is hard not to defer to authority. Some people can. Most people cannot.

The story is about redemption, how one can forgive, and how one can choose a different path, no matter when in life that choice is made. I found out this was the point of the story not through the story, but through the author's note at the end. And the study notes. Why do books include study notes at the end?

The book was cute, but I really couldn't get past the Defending Your Life ("NINE DAYS!") feel of it. I kept waiting for the trial at the end, or the movie screens, or an explanation about the Candidate and Chancellor stuff with Bernard. Didn't happen, seemed odd.

I don't recommend this book. If you're a fan of the author, sure. Otherwise, skip it.

Somebody to commiserate with. Somebody you can complain to. Somebody to listen to you without offering advice. How is it that you’ve so rarely managed to achieve this? Why is female fellowship forever so elusive to you? Are you different from other women?
Page 30

Sunny Acres promotes health and active living, but it nurtures dependence.
Page 32

Have you released your independence at long last? Have you finally stopped tracking the progress of that other incarnation of yourself, the one who didn’t bow to the expectations of society, the one who didn’t opt for the easy way out, the one who wasn’t going to have children until she was thirty? Or have you simply lowered your standards?
Page 53

Why does it always come to this between her and Caroline? As though they’re out of patience before they’ve even begun. It doesn’t seem to matter how firmly they resolve themselves to diplomacy or civil obligation, after the briefest of exchanges their relationship devolves into this prickly state of nervous exhaustion. They’re forever plagued by the same old pettiness, still stung by the same insults, still harboring the same old resentments.
Page 68

The fruits of self-pity were no less bitter at seventy-eight than they were at sixteen.
Page 68

And when I began to suggest we break off the association, new qualities emerged in my lover: Jealousy. Possessiveness. He became a tyrant with his opinions. He lowered my opinion of myself. And such was my guilt by then that I began to need this, too. It was as if by punishing myself, I could undo everything that came before. The less respect he paid me, the more I needed him to achieve balance. For here was the love I deserved, the love I had earned.
Page 104

You sometimes wish you could ask the other you for advice, or guidance, or clarity, or at the very least a little perspective on the life you’ve muddled so badly. If only that other you could take you by the hand and walk you back through the misbegotten paths of your life—the botched decisions; the cowardly retreats; the circumstances you might have controlled, avoided, or otherwise been spared—to the very beginning, where it all started going wrong. You sometimes wish the other you could tell your story.
Page 112

Be honest, Harriet: you don’t even know why you’re crying in the kitchen. You have zero emotional clarity at this moment. Your emotional self has no borders, no shape, no horizons. You can’t tell rage from sadness, anymore. You’re lost at sea emotionally.
Page 197

And lastly, there’s the truth, plain and shabby as a hobo’s trousers, that you believe yourself to be worthless, though you don’t fully know it yet, at least you haven’t formally acknowledged it.
Page 223

“What if it’s too late?” “There’s always that possibility. But don’t let it stop you from trying.
Page 232

It’s amazing the things we can talk ourselves into when we’re desperate for a result.
Page 276

If we’ve learned one thing digging up all these old bones, dusting them off, and holding them to the light, we’ve learned this: While the days unfold, one after the other, and the numbers all move in one direction, our lives are not linear, Harriet. We are the sum of moments and reflections, actions and decisions, triumphs, failures, and yearnings, all of it held together, inexplicably, miraculously, really, by memory and association.
Page 293

When I had finished Beartown, Mom and I talked about the book, about how I found it difficult to read once The Conflict Event happened. Mom suggested that I read "A Man Called Ove" next, then, as the book was by the same author, Fredrik Backman, and it wasn't as heavy. I had a few other books lined up, but picked it up this week.

To quote Mom, "It's cute."

I enjoyed this book. It made me cry. I was honestly confused why my mom would suggest a book about a man whose wife had passed away and the grief surrounding that, knowing the sorrow and depression and stress I'm having now in my life, but was willing to trust her, because she is my mom, and the world is always going to be okay when your mom is holding you as you cry.

And yes, I cried a few times while reading the book. I wouldn't expect most people to cry when reading it, though. A few moments struck home, and so, yeah, I thought, sure, crying is fine right now, so I did.

A Man Called Ove (pronouced oooo-vay) has been made into a movie. I'll likely watch it, then complain the book was better. Just as Ove would have.

I'm rating this book as "Strongly Recommended" because it's more than worth reading, but it's light-hearted enough not to be necessarily strongly recommended, but rules are rules, and one shouldn't have half rankings, so strongly recommended it is.

Also drives an Audi, Ove has noticed. He might have known. Self-employed people and other idiots all drive Audis.
Page 10

I giggled at this, but only because my car is an Audi.

It was more an argument where the little disagreements had ended up so entangled that every new word was treacherously booby-trapped, and in the end it wasn’t possible to open one’s mouth at all without setting off at least four unexploded mines from earlier conflicts.
Page 81

I am sad that this is the way of several of my relationships.

But Sonja would not have been Sonja if she had let the darkness win.
Page 202

“We can busy ourselves with living or with dying, Ove. We have to move on.”
Page 202

"Get busy living, or get busy dying." -- Shawshank Redemption

Has never liked the feeling of losing control. He’s come to realize over the years that it’s this very feeling that normal folk like and strive for, but as far as Ove is concerned only a complete bloody airhead could find loss of control a state worth aiming for.
Page 215

She married him. And now he doesn’t quite know how to carry on without the tip of her nose in the pit between his throat and his shoulder.
Page 215

In the other direction, I don't quite know how to carry on without the smell of him.

Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.
Page 246

yes.

Maybe neither of them forgave themselves for not being able to give the women they loved more than anything what they wanted more than anything.
Page 246

Sometimes it is difficult to explain why some men suddenly do the things they do. Sometimes, of course, it’s because they know they’ll do them sooner or later anyway, and so they may as well just do them now. And sometimes it’s the pure opposite—because they realize they should have done them long ago. Ove has probably known all along what he has to do, but all people at root are time optimists. We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like “if.”
Page 282

But we are always optimists when it comes to time; we think there will be time to do things with other people. And time to say things to them.
Page 287

It is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time.
Page 305, repeated on page 309

Something inside a man goes to pieces when he has to bury the only person who ever understood him. There is no time to heal that sort of wound.
Page 325

And time is a curious thing. Most of us only live for the time that lies right ahead of us. A few days, weeks, years. One of the most painful moments in a person’s life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead. And when time no longer lies ahead of one, other things have to be lived for. Memories, perhaps.
Page 325

Love is a strange thing. It takes you by surprise.
Page 326

Having read Predictably Irrational by Ariely, and being fascinated by just how much we are so bad at being "rational," I was excited to read this book, about being irrational with money. I was excited mostly because I expected that Ariely and Kreisler would both show how everyone is weird with money, and suggest ways to counteract our weirdness.

I was not disappointed.

This book is a fantastic explanation of human quirks around money, and a quick summary of ways to combat our quirks.

I recommend this book. For maximum effectiveness, when reading, don't skip to the end.

We decide how much to eat not simply as a function of how much food we actually consume, but by a comparison to its alternatives.
Location 632

Another place we see this kind of comparison is with quantity (so-called bulk) discounts.
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It seems that discounts are a potion for stupidity. They simply dumb down our decision-making process. When an item is “on sale,” we act more quickly and with even less thought than if the product costs the same but is marked at a regular price.
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Happiness too often seems to be less a reflection of our actual happiness and more a reflection of the ways in which we compare ourselves to others. In most cases, that comparison is neither healthy nor good.
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In some ways, the concept of regret is itself just another version of comparison. With regret, we compare ourselves—our lives, our careers, our wealth, our status—not to other people, but to alternative versions of ourselves.
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A curious finding about the way we categorize money is that people who feel guilty about how they got money will often donate part of it to charity. 2 Let that sink in: How we spend money depends upon how we feel about the money.
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We’re easily led astray by emotions, selfishness, impulse, lack of planning, short-term thinking, self-deception, outside pressure, self-justification, confusion, and greed. We might consider those the Ten Financial Sins. Not Deadly Sins, but certainly not good.
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We could “virtually” end the trip before we get into the unpleasant stuff by, for instance, celebrating the end of the trip the night before we check out.
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Another solution would be to prolong the trip. After we get home and deal with reentry into everyday routine, we can make time to talk over memories and experiences, look at the pictures, and write some notes, all while the journey is fresh in our minds. Spending time savoring the vacation brings the experience into our regular lives and this, too, can give us a softer ending.
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The pain of paying is, as it sounds, the idea that we experience some version of mental pain when we pay for things.
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The term “the pain of paying” was based on the feeling of displeasure and distress caused by spending, but more recently, studies using neuroimaging and MRIs have showed that paying indeed stimulates the same brain regions that are involved in processing physical pain.
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When we experience any pain, our first instinct is to try to get rid of it. We want to ease our pain, to control it. When we see pain coming, we flinch, we duck, we avoid it.
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Avoiding pain is a powerful motivator and a sly enemy: It causes us to take our eyes off value. We make faulty decisions because we’re focused on the pain we experience in the process of buying, rather than the value of the purchase itself.
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The point is, we can increase or decrease the pain of paying that we feel at any time, for any transaction. But we should do so deliberately, based upon how much we want to enjoy or limit our spending, rather than just letting it increase or decrease without our knowledge or control.
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When we fill up our car with gas, we watch the dollars spin by on the gas pump. Aware of our spending, we feel the pain of paying and perhaps contemplate buying a more efficient vehicle or finding a carpool group. But at home, the energy meter is usually outside or hidden. We rarely look at it. Moreover, the bill for the usage in any one day or week doesn’t come for a month or more. And then it is often deducted directly from our checking account. Thus it’s impossible to tell what we’re spending at any one moment. So we are not as aware of our spending and we do not feel the associated pain.
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In some cases, it feels almost free right now. We’re not paying until the great, unknowable, optimistic future, when we may be a lottery winner or a movie star or inventor of the solar-powered jetpack.
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When we pay for a restaurant meal with a credit card, do we really feel like we’re paying right now? Not really. We’re just signing our name; the payment will be sometime in the future. Similarly, when the bill comes later, do we really feel like we’re paying? Not really. At that point, we feel like we already paid at the restaurant. Not only do credit card companies employ the illusion of time shifting to alleviate the pain of paying, but they do it twice—once by making it feel like we are going to pay later and once by making us feel like we already paid. This way they enable us to enjoy ourselves, and spend our money, more freely.
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Credit cards also make us value purchases differently. They seduce us into thinking about the positive aspects of a purchase, in contrast to cash, which makes us also consider the downsides of the purchase and the downside of parting with our cash.
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Free is a strange price, and yes, it is a price. When something is free, we tend not to apply a cost-benefit analysis to it. That is, we choose something free over something that’s not, and that may not always be the best choice.
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Another effect of free is that once something initially costs us nothing, it becomes very difficult to start paying for it later.
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A dollar clearly is not a lot in the scheme of things, particularly for something that enriches our life.
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Taking the pain of paying into account, the recommended method for splitting the bill with friends is credit card roulette. When the server drops off the check at the end of a meal, every one puts down their credit card. The server picks one, and that one person pays the entire bill.
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ANCHORING occurs when we are drawn to a conclusion by something that should not have any relevance to our decision. It is when we let irrelevant information pollute the decision-making process.
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We don’t ever get to doubt decisions that we make unconsciously, that we don’t pay attention to, that we’ve forgotten, or those we’ve been using thoughtlessly forever as a foundation for our lives.
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We stand on the shoulders of giants . . . even if those giants are the giant mistakes we ourselves have made.
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Investing in anything causes us to increase our sense of ownership, and ownership causes us to value things in ways that have little to do with actual value.
Location 1960

They found that people who held a coffee mug in their hands for more than thirty seconds were willing to pay more to buy that mug than were those who held it for fewer than ten seconds or not at all.
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We feel the pain of losses more strongly than we do the same magnitude of pleasure.
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If we’re very sensitive to small fluctuations over time, one solution is to simply make a long-term decision and stick to it.
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Sunk costs are costs that are permanently in the loss column of our life-ledger. They are ours, we can never get rid of them, we own them. We don’t just see the dollar amount, we see all the choices and efforts and hopes and dreams that went along with those dollars. They become weightier. And since we overvalue these sunk costs, we’re less willing to give them up and we are more likely to dig ourselves deeper into a hole.
Location 2180

too. A friend of Dan’s was conflicted about whether to get divorced. His life was consumed by this decision. At some point, Dan asked him a simple question: “Imagine that right now you were not married to this person, and you knew about her everything you now know, but you’ve just been friends for the last ten years. Would you now propose to her?”
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One way to overcome the traps of ownership is to try to separate ourselves psychologically from the things that we own, in order to more accurately assess their value.
Location 2224

When the sender offers less than a third of the total amount, the receiver most often rejects the offer and they both go home with nothing. People actually refuse free money in order to punish someone—someone they don’t know and probably won’t deal with ever again—just for making an unfair offer.
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Ultimately the problem is that we have a hard time paying for knowledge and acquired skills. It’s hard for us to account for the years spent learning and honing those skills and factor them into what we’re willing to pay. All we see is that we’re paying a lot for a task that didn’t seem too difficult.
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This is what expectations do. Expectations add color to the black-and-white images we hold of our future selves.
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Once again, past performance is simply no guarantee of future success. But go tell this to our expectations. Just because something went well in the past, that doesn’t mean it will in the future.
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When we pay before we consume something, it reduces the pain we feel at the time of consumption.
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Hopefully the rest of us are not jerks, but we are like Vinny sometimes, when we, in our failure to recognize our behavior, rely upon our expectations to evaluate our choices and determine our spending.
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Today our reality is clearly defined, with details, emotions, and so on. In the future, it is not. So, in the future we can be wonderful people. We will exercise, diet, and take our medication. We will wake early, save for retirement, and never text and drive. Imagine how enriched the world would be if everyone wrote the great American novels we’ve said we’ll start “any day now.” The problem, of course, is that
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That’s what happens when we add emotions to the decision-making mix: Now tempts us, but the future doesn’t.
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Much of what makes us so emotionally detached from our future selves is the fact that our future selves are so poorly defined. We often imagine our future selves to be entirely different people than our present selves.
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That’s because self-control requires not just a recognition and understanding of the temptations of now, but also the willpower to avoid them. And willpower, by definition, requires effort—the effort to resist temptation, to refuse our instincts, to turn down a free marshmallow or fancy bike gear or anything that has any emotional resonance.
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That’s because another important way we value things—a way unrelated to actual value—is by assigning meaning to a price. When we can’t evaluate something directly, as is often the case, we associate price with value.
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In Predictably Irrational, Dan showed that we are conditioned to see high price as a stand-in for effectiveness.
Location 3333

While few people consider maximizing frequent-flyer miles to be the key to a life worth living, it’s tempting to maximize anything that’s easily measurable.
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Money works the same way. It isn’t the final goal in life, it’s a means to an end. But because money is much more tangible than happiness, well-being, and purpose, we tend to focus our decision-making on money instead of on our ultimate, more meaningful goals.
Location 3430

doing. Well, they didn’t understand what he was doing, but they were not dismissive. They were trying to understand. They were using the money question as a proxy in an attempt to learn. Seeking monetary terms was a bridge for them to reach out, to translate the intangible, incomprehensible steps Jeff was taking into a language they could understand: money.
Location 3452

When it comes to making financial decisions, what should matter are opportunity costs, the true benefit a purchase provides, and the real pleasure we receive from it compared to other ways we could spend our money.
Location 3519

What should not matter in a perfectly rational world? 

Sale prices or “savings,” or how much we’re spending at the same time on something else (relativity) 
The classification of our money, where it came from, and how we feel about it (mental accounting) 
The ease of payment (pain of paying) 
The first price we see or previous prices we’ve paid for a purchase (anchoring) 
Our sense of ownership (endowment effect and loss aversion) 
Whether someone appears to have worked hard (fairness and effort)
Location 3521

What can matter:

 Whether we give in to the temptations of the present (self-control) 
The ease of comparing the price of a product, experience, or widget (overemphasizing money)
Location 3531

Language, rituals, and expectations are in a different group from the other factors because they can change the experience.
Location 3540

Think about transactions in terms of opportunity costs by considering more explicitly what we’re sacrificing for what we’re getting.
Location 3570

When we see a sale, we shouldn’t consider what the price used to be or how much we’re saving. Rather, we should consider what we’re actually going to spend.
Location 3573

We should try not to think in percentages. When the data is presented to us in percentages (for example, 1 percent of assets under management), we should do the extra work and figure out how much money is really on the line.
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Money is fungible. Every dollar is the same. It doesn’t matter where money comes from—our job, an inheritance, a lottery ticket, a bank robbery, or our gig moonlighting as the bassist in a jazz quartet (dare to dream)—the money is all ours and it belongs, in fact, to the general “our money” account.
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... remember that using mental accounting to categorize our spending can be a useful budgeting tool for those of us who can’t do constant, instantaneous opportunity cost calculations.
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Maintaining some pain of paying helps us at least consider the value of our options and the opportunity costs that lie within. The pain helps us pause before purchasing and consider whether or not we really should spend our money then and there—it helps us consider opportunity
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This is why the best solution for the pain of paying may be as simple as “Don’t use credit cards.”
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Yuuuuup.

When it comes to spending, trusting our past decisions contributes to the problems of anchoring, herding, and arbitrary coherence. So we should question seemingly “random” numbers, prominently placed MSRPs, and insanely high-priced products.
Location 3603

... question the prices we set ourselves. We should avoid doing something all the time, like getting a $ 4 latte, just because we’ve always done it before. From time to time, let’s stop and question our long-term habits.
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We overvalue what we own and what we might lose
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We should watch out for trial offers and promotions. Marketers know that once we own something, we will value it more and have a harder time giving it up.
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Sunk costs cannot be recovered. If an amount is spent, it’s spent. The past is past. When making decisions, consider only where we are now and where we will be in the future.
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The world isn’t fair. Sorry. Let’s not get caught up in whether something is priced fairly; instead, consider what it’s worth to us. We
Location 3620

Let’s also recognize that there is value in knowledge and experience.
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Craftspeople have perfected the art of making what they do look effortless, but it’s not. From Picasso to parenting, sometimes the most difficult jobs look easier than they really are.
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But let’s be careful not to fall for false effort. We ought to watch out for too much transparency.
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If the description of something, or the process of consuming something, is long-winded and overblown, we’re probably paying for that description and process, even if it doesn’t add any real value.
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Watch out for irrelevant effort heuristics:
Location 3636

remember that language and rituals can change the quality of our experiences, so we should embrace them to enhance experiences if we so choose.
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Expectations give us reason to believe that something will be good—or bad, or delicious, or gross—and they change our perception and experience without altering the true underlying nature of the thing itself. We should be aware of the source of expectations—whether it’s the pleasure of dreams and aspirations or the irrelevant allure of brand names, biases, and presentation.
Location 3639

As with language and ritual, we—Dan and Jeff—want to acknowledge, again, that expectations actually can alter our experiences. We can use such expectations to our advantage or they can be used by others to take advantage of us.
Location 3643

We don’t want to be manipulated unwillingly or unconsciously by someone else, but if we choose to be manipulated or design a system to do so ourselves, that’s okay.
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We overemphasize money Prices are just one of the many attributes that signal the value of things.
Location 3660

Consider using other criteria, even when they’re hard to measure.
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A price is just a number, and while it can be a powerful part of a decision, it doesn’t, and shouldn’t, mean everything.
Location 3663

When we don’t have any specific idea about an item’s value, we should do some research.
Location 3665

Every time we face a situation where we know less than others and that gap can be used against us—which is the case in much of life and for people of all persuasions—we stand to gain a whole lot from studying up even a little bit. 1
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Use simple tools to help us imagine our future self more vividly, specifically, and relatably. 2 It can be as simple as having an imaginary conversation with an older “us.” Or we can write a letter to an elderly version of ourselves. We can also simply think about what our specific needs, desires, greatest joys, and toughest regrets will be when we’re sixty-five, seventy, ninety-five, one hundred.
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We can start with self-conversations, but we should also put in place other systems that help us become emotionally invested in our older selves. The more we can make the future defined, vivid, and detailed, the more relatable it becomes, and the more we’ll care, connect, and act in our future selves’ interests, too.
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A Ulysses contract is any arrangement by which we create barriers against future temptation. We give ourselves no choice; we eliminate free will.
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Common financial Ulysses contracts include things like preset limits on our credit cards or only using prepaid debit cards or even canceling all of those cards and only using cash.
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Another way to combat self-control problems is through REWARD SUBSTITUTION.
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What if we tried to bypass our inability to be motivated by future reward altogether and replaced it with another kind of present reward?
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The gold coin made the act of saving salient by changing what people were thinking about as they were going about their day.
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We should react most strongly to the method that maximizes our money—a bonus for saving, which is free money—but we don’t. We are more influenced by something that shapes our memory, attention, and thinking, such as the coin.
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There are several ways to use this checking balance rule to our advantage, to use it to trick ourselves into saving. For example, we can move a little bit of money out of our checking and into a savings account. That way, our checking account will be artificially too low and it will get us to think that we’re poorer than we really are.
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from ourselves. Yes, if we stop to consider it, we know we’re hiding it and where. But we can take advantage of our cognitive laziness and the fact that we don’t regularly think about how much money is in our other accounts—and we think about it even less if it’s automatic deposit and we don’t move the money ourselves every time. So, tricking ourselves is an easy and useful strategy.
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We react differently to “Oh, this coffee is $ 4 a day” than to “Oh, this coffee is $ 1,460 per year.”
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This book wasn't originally on my loose, more-than-a-little-disorganized-not-really-a-true-list, to-read list. I have a number of books that I'm actively looking forward to reading, and while I lurve me a Heinlein, I'm more likely to read a new book these days than one I've already read.

That said, after Rob read Artemis, he started in on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and suggested I read the Heinlein lunar revolution book before reading Artemis, there being some similarities (I haven't read his review of Artemis yet). Easy enough to do. So I did.

And remembered why I love Heinlein so much. Yes, he has opinions I find offensive. Yes, he has ideas about humans that fundamentally could absolutely never work. But, yes, he has a way with words, a way that draws you in and makes you wish that people were more than our natures, that we could be his idealized version of ourselves.

I love the idea of people being rational. We are not.

I love the idea of a small government that respects the rights of its people. Its people are fragile, irrational beings, capable of incredible cruelty to each other. One cannot respect all the rights of a person when said person cannot respect the rights of another; cannot be rational when irrational acts creates a "might makes right" belief; cannot be fair when a victim cannot speak up or out for fear of retaliation, banishment, exile, or death.

His ideas are lovely on paper, and impossible in life.

The story, though, wheeeeeee, what a ride. Heinlein totally missed out on the fiction part of the future, with everyone communicating over hardwired telephone lines. The communicator doesn't exist yet, even though the Internet was predicted in the early 1900s. Which is fine, the story works, and would work with current technology with only a few other adjustments. A wifi connection is not going to work through a hundred kilometers of lunar rock, so there would still be hardwire connections of a sort.

Still, I enjoyed this book the second (third?) time through. Worth reading if you're a Heinlein fan, or want insights into how a revolution c/should be done.

Remember Mike was designed, even before augmented, to answer questions tentatively on insufficient data like you do; that's "high optional" and "multi-evaluating" part of name. So Mike started with "free will" and acquired more as he was added to and as he learned - and don't ask me to define "free will."
Location 18

By ship, of course - and, since a ship is mass-rated almost to a gram, that meant a ship's officer had to be bribed.

Some were bribed, they say. But were no escapes; man who takes bribe doesn't necessarily stay bribed.
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Tourists often remark on how polite everybody is in Luna - with unstated comment that ex-prison shouldn't be so civilized. Having been Earthside and seen what they put up with, I know what they mean. But useless to tell them we are what we are because bad actors don't live long - in Luna.
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Girls are interesting, Mike; they can reach conclusions with even less data than you can.
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A man can face known danger. But the unknown frightens him.
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"The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally. When the number is as high as four, chances are even that one is a spy."
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Revolution is a science only a few are competent to practice.
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It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized and properly timed it is a bloodless coup. Done clumsily or prematurely and the result is civil war, mob violence, purges, terror.
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As Prof says, a society adapts to fact, or doesn't survive.
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Easier to get people to hate than to get them to love.
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Mike listened at all times in workshop and in Wyoh's room; if he heard my voice or hers say "Mike," he answered, but not to other voices.
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Here, Heinlein predicts Siri.

Nothing frustrates a man so much as not letting him get in his say.
Location 2565

"Oh, 'tanstaafl.' Means ~There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.' And isn't," I added, pointing to a FREE LUNCH sign across room, "or these drinks would cost half as much. Was reminding her that anything free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless."
Location 3179

Where do you start explaining when a man's words show there isn't anything he understands about subject, instead is loaded with preconceptions that don't fit facts and doesn't even know he has?
Location 3196

Here we are, two million males, less than one million females. A physical fact, basic as rock or vacuum. Then add idea of tanstaafl. When thing is scarce, price goes up. Women are scarce; aren't enough to go around - that makes them most valuable thing in Luna, more precious than ice or air, as men without women don't care whether they stay alive or not.
Location 3214

Mike drew parallels from XVIIIth century, when Britain's American colonies broke away, and from XXth, when many colonies became independent of several empires, and pointed out that in no case had a colony broken loose by brute force. No, in every case imperial state was busy elsewhere, had grown weary and given up without using full strength.
Location 3295

We had Mort in a twitter; he was yelling for help.
Location 3450

In a twitter. I giggled.

Women are amazing creatures - sweet, soft, gentle, and far more savage than we are.
Location 3631

But was best we had, so we organized First and Second Volunteer Defense Gunners of Free Luna - two regiments so that First could snub lowly Second and Second could be Jealous of First. First got older men. Second got young and eager.
Location 3901

Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: "Please pass this so that I won't be able to do something I know I should stop." Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them "for their own good" - not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.
Location 3967

This particular quote changed my attempts at classic Stoicism a bit. When I'm angry, I've been asking myself, "How have I been harmed?" Usually, the anger is the result of an action I don't like done by someone else, but I'm not actually harmed. This realization helps me let go.

"I almost needn't have bothered; more than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better - and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest."
Location 3981

"Why not admit that any piece of writing was imperfect? If thin declaration was in general what they wanted, why not postpone perfection for another day and pass this as it stands?"
Location 4060

All drug had done for me at catapulting had been to swap a minute and a half of misery and two days of boredom for a century of terrible dreams—and besides, if those last minutes were going to be my very last, I decided to experience them. Bad as they would be, they were my very own and I would not give them up.
Location 4321

The only thing we truly have is ourselves.

Is mixed-up place another way; they care about skin color - by making point of how they don't care. First trip I was always too light or too dark, and somehow blamed either way, or was always being expected to take stand on things I have no opinions on.
Location 4980

I saw Yankees play and I visited Salem. Should have kept my illusions. Baseball is better over video, you can really see it and aren't pushed in by two hundred thousand other people. Besides, somebody should have shot that outfield.
Location 4987

I laughed at this.

"A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers... and its greatest strength is a 'free press' when 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers define what is 'irresponsible.'"
Location 5048

This planet isn't crowded; it is just mismanaged... and the unkindest thing you can do for a hungry man is to give him food. 'Give.' Read Malthus. It is never safe to laugh at Dr. Malthus; he always has the last laugh. A depressing man, I'm glad he's dead. But don't read him until this is over; too many facts hamper a diplomat, especially an honest one."

"I'm not especially honest."

"But you have no talent for dishonesty, so your refuge must be ignorance and stubbornness. You have the latter; try to preserve the former."
Location 5063

"Comrade Members, like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have freedom - if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant."
Location 5895

"But if representative government turns out to be your intention there still may be ways to achieve it better than the territorial district. For example you each represent about ten thousand human beings, perhaps seven thousand of voting age - and some of you were elected by slim majorities. Suppose instead of election a man were qualified for office by petition signed by four thousand citizens. He would then represent those four thousand affirmatively, with no disgruntled minority, for what would have been a minority in a territorial constituency would all be free to start other petitions or join in them. All would then be represented by men of their choice. Or a man with eight thousand supporters might have two votes in this body. Difficulties, objections, practical points to be worked out - many of them! But you could work them out... and thereby avoid the chronic sickness of representative government, the disgruntled minority which feels - correctly! - that it has been disenfranchised.
Location 5918

"But, whatever you do, do not let the past be a straitjacket!"
Location 5920

"I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent - the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?
Location 5921

Voluntary contributions just as churches support themselves... government-sponsored lotteries to which no one need subscribe... or perhaps you Congressmen should dig down into your own pouches and pay for whatever is needed; that would be one way to keep government down in size to its indispensable functions whatever they may be. If indeed there are any. I would be satisfied to have the Golden Rule be the only law; I see no need for any other, nor for any method of enforcing it. But if you really believe that your neighbors must have laws for their own good, why shouldn't you pay for it? Comrades, I beg you - do not resort to compulsory taxation. There is so worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.
Location 5939

The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys.
Location 5950

It may not be possible to do away with government - sometimes I think that government is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive—and can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby?"
Location 5951

"Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again."
Location 7125

Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden.
Location 7402

I commented to Mom not long ago that I read too many happy ending books. Said happy ending books do not prepare one for real life. Real life rarely has happy endings. Sure, sometimes things work out and work out very well, but bad things happen to good people, and the universe is truly random. Bad things happen, through no fault of anyone sometimes, through active hostility and assholery other times.

Mom responded by suggesting this book. "This one doesn't have a happy ending," she said. She was correct. This book doesn't have a happy ending. It does, however, have the right ending.

If you want the short version, I'm told there is a movie. I haven't seen it.

This book reminded me of Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), which describes the real-world phenomenom of good people doing horribly wrong things, and how they rationalize the wrong to themselves. They do it one small decision at a time. No decision seems bad, each is close to the previous decision, but in total a very wrong action occurs.

This is pretty much what happens in this book. And then it all comes crumbling down.

Couple all of this with a woman's desire for motherhood, and yeah, you don't get a happy ending.

I started and finished this book in less than a day. I read this one so fast from start to finish, I didn't have time to set up an in-progress page. I'll admit to being sick, and sitting for hours to read it instead of sleeping, but it was still an engaging read. The writing is really close to being great, but tried too hard and is "only" good. The book itself is worth reading.

If he can only get far enough away—from people, from memory—time will do its job.
Page 13

Of course, the losing of children had always been a thing that had to be gone through. There had never been guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length. Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making.
Page 21

His body craved sleep, but he knew too well that if you don’t eat you can’t work.
Page 41

He knows keepers who swear under their breath at the obligation, but Tom takes comfort from the orderliness of it. It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.
Page 43

“Is that so?” asked Tom, as amused as he was surprised. He had a sense of being waltzed backward.
Page 48

“I’ll tell you if you really want. It’s just I’d rather not. Sometimes it’s good to leave the past in the past.”

“Your family’s never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.”

“More’s the pity.”
Page 53

“If I can’t talk about the past, am I allowed to talk about the future?”

“We can’t rightly ever talk about the future, if you think about it. We can only talk about what we imagine, or wish for. It’s not the same thing.”
Page 55

If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasn’t safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back.
Page 57

Able to cure and to poison; able to bear the whole weight of the light, but capable of fracturing into a thousand uncatchable particles, running off in all directions, escaping from itself.
Page 96

A life had come and gone and nature had not paused a second for it. The machine of time and space grinds on, and people are fed through it like grist through the mill.
Page 105

“Then why upset them? Please, Tom. It’s our business. My business. We don’t have to tell the whole world about it. Let them have their dream a bit longer."
Page 109

As he put it decades later, that sort of experience either gives you a taste for death, or a thirst for life, and he reckoned death would come calling soon enough anyway.
Page 169

This is a small community, where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember.
Page 183

History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.
Page 184

That’s how life goes on — protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.
Page 184

“But it’s not always plain sailing, even when you’ve found the right girl. You’ve got to be in it for the long haul. You never know what’s going to happen: you sign up for whatever comes along. There’s no backing out.”
Page 200

There was a need in Isabel that he could now never fill. She had given up everything: comforts, family, friends—everything to be with him out here. Over and over he told himself — he couldn’t deprive her of this one thing.
Page 202

Tom was very still, sensing bodily the relief that would follow the unburdening of the truth about Lucy.
Page 213

"Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can’t tell which is which until you’ve shot ’em both, and then it’s too late.”
Page 214

“Christ—the quickest way to send a bloke mad is to let him go on re-fighting his war till he gets it right.”
Page 214

“You’re the one who always says that if a lighthouse looks like it’s in a different place, it’s not the lighthouse that’s moved.”
Page 219

A lighthouse is for others; powerless to illuminate the space closest to it.
Page 220

She’d reached her edge, that was all. Everyone had one. Everyone.
Page 285

There was nothing he was going through that the stars had not seen before, somewhere, some time on this earth. Given enough time, their memory would close over his life like healing a wound. All would be forgotten, all suffering erased.
Page 302

“There’s nothing you can do,” her father had said. “Once a horse bolts, you can only say your prayers and hang on for all you’re worth. Can’t stop an animal that’s caught in a blind terror.”
Page 310

When it comes to their kids, parents are all just instinct and hope. And fear. Rules and laws fly straight out the window.
Page 328

He is embraced by nature, which is waiting, ultimately, to receive him, to re-organize his atoms into another shape.
Page 365

“Sometimes life turns out hard, Isabel. Sometimes it just bites right through you. And sometimes, just when you think it’s done its worst, it comes back and takes another chunk.”
Page 370

"I’m not sure if or when I’ll be able to speak to you again. You always imagine you’ll get the chance to say what needs to be said, to put things right. But that’s not always how it goes."
Page 374

“You’ve had so much strife but you’re always happy. How do you do it?”

“I choose to,” he said. “I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget.”

“But it’s not that easy.”

He smiled that Frank smile. “Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things.”
Page 384

Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream.
Page 386

"Izz, I’ve learned the hard way that to have any kind of a future you’ve got to give up hope of ever changing your past.”
Page 396

Years bleach away the sense of things until all that’s left is a bone-white past, stripped of feeling and significance.
Page 398

No point in thinking like that. Once you start down that road, there’s no end to it. He’s lived the life he’s lived. He’s loved the woman he’s loved. No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on this earth, and that’s all right by him.
Page 408

This is Book 6 of The Chronicles of Narnia.

I did not like this book. This would have been the first book of two books triggering my rule "stop reading a series after two consecutive bad books," except it is the second to last book of the series, and, well, I intend to read the whole series. Suffice it to say, I'm glad I have this book from the library.

Part of my dislike of this book is the shallow treatment given to the long trek the main characters, and the seriously little sh-ts said main characters are. Though, really, Pole and Scrubb likely are little sh-ts, as they are kids, and how could one expect a kid to be honest and thoughtful and strong and good and steadfast, without the experience needed to understand how important these characteristics are.

Of course, many adults also lack these characteristics, so I'm unsure why I was so frustrated with these kids, except maybe that Christ-Analogy told them what to do and they ignored him. How many times does someone get to see Asland? How many lives never saw him? Pole sees him, talks with him, receives instructions from him, and still ignores his words. Frustrating.

I will, of course, finish the series, since I'm reading all these classic children's books. I'm glad to be done with this one. Blah.

Jill suddenly flew into a temper (which is quite a likely thing to happen if you have been interrupted in a cry).
Page 3

Yuuuuuuup.

"Now a job like this — a journey up north just as winter’s beginning, looking for a Prince that probably isn’t there, by way of a ruined city that no one has ever seen — will be just the thing. If that doesn’t steady a chap, I don’t know what will.”
Page 76

Jill thought that when, in books, people live on what they shoot, it never tells you what a long, smelly, messy job it is plucking and cleaning dead birds, and how cold it makes your fingers.
Page 84

“The bright side of it is,” said Puddleglum, “that if we break our necks getting down the cliff, then we’re safe from being drowned in the river.”
Page 85

Puddleglum! What a great character! He spends his time imagining the worst and is delighted when things aren't so bad! Too bad the kids ignore him.

“And why were you so stiff and unpleasant? Didn’t you like them?”

“Them?” said the wiggle. “Who’s them? I only saw one.”

“Didn’t you see the Knight?” asked Jill.

“I saw a suit of armor,” said Puddleglum. “Why didn’t he speak?”
Page 92

I'm laughing at that. He also takes things literally.

“Oh, bother his ideas!” said Scrubb. “He’s always expecting the worst, and he’s always wrong."
Page 93

But delighted when wrong - very Stoic in his imagining the worst and being able to accept it.

“That’s all very well,” said Puddleglum. “But what I was saying was — ”

“Oh, shut up,” said Jill crossly.
Page 104

Oh, look, Jill being a b--ch!

If you want to get out of a house without being seen, the middle of the afternoon is in some ways a better time to try it than in the middle of the night. Doors and windows are more likely to be open; and if you are caught, you can always pretend you weren’t meaning to go far and had no particular plans.
Page 125

How often they woke and slept and ate and slept again, none of them could ever remember. And the worst thing about it was that you began to feel as if you had always lived on that ship, in that darkness, and to wonder whether sun and blue skies and wind and birds had not been only a dream.
Page 154

“Where I come from,” said Jill, who was disliking him more every minute, “they don’t think much of men who are bossed about by their wives.”
Page 166

Well, Jill, go back to the horrible world you live in, where women are second-class citizens.

Thirdly, the pain itself made Puddleglum’s head for a moment perfectly clear and he knew exactly what he really thought. There is nothing like a good shock of pain for dissolving certain kinds of magic.
Page 190

"All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so."
Page 190

"It would not have suited well either with my heart or with my honor to have slain a woman."
Page 194

Note to self, grow up to be an evil empress.

"And all’s one, for that. Now, by my counsel, we shall all kneel and kiss his likeness, and then all shake hands one with another, as true friends that may shortly be parted."
Page 200

Kiss... his likeness. Uh, false idols much?

“Friends,” said the Prince, “when once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason."
Page 202

Jill held her tongue. (If you don’t want other people to know how frightened you are, this is always a wise thing to do; it’s your voice that gives you away.)
Page 224

Even in this world, of course, it is the stupidest children who are the most childish and the stupidest grownups who are the most grown-up.
Page 253

In the Susan Slack, Kristin asked for dystopian book recommendations. Rob immediately responded, "American War." He responded emphatically, "American War." I added it to my library hold list, not expecting it to drop into my borrowed list until next year. Well, it dropped, and I read it, and wow. This book is good.

The book tells the tale of Serat growing up through the end of the second American Civil War. The war triggered on the ban of gasoline and oil, with the South saying, "Nope." We see, as in most dystopian novels, how people can be awful to each other. What makes this book particularly difficult to read is that we can see our current culture, political environment, and temperament, what we have right now, become this world. We are in the declining years of the American Empire. Other empires will rise after its fail. This book gives the tale of a fictional and completely plausible version.

This book is worth reading, even if you don't really like dystopian fictions. Be in a place where death is bearable, though, it's a rough read.

"Bury me in the same grave because I can’t go on alone. Life’s not worth living alone."
Location 499

This was in the days before — before Julia Templestowe became the rebel South’s first martyr, its first killer, the patron saint of its war.

It is often forgotten: There’s always a before.
Location 579

If you lived in the South during that war, maybe you were never forced from your home at gunpoint, but you knew someone who was. Maybe you didn’t lose a loved one when the Birds came and rained down death with no rhyme or reason, but you knew someone who had.

Now for most of people, just knowing wasn’t enough to make them take up arms — not everyone can face the thought of getting shot or torn to bits by shrapnel or, even worse, getting captured and sent to rot in Sugarloaf or some other detention camp.

But damned if it didn’t make you want to do something.
Location 1262

Work provided purpose, a sense of place, a sense of agency.
Location 1389

But for the refugees who paid or begged Martina to write these pleadings on their behalf, hopelessness was no impediment to hope.
Location 1398

“Ahh, it’s all long gone now. Time buries time, my mother used to say."
Location 1652

“No matter what they tell you, some things are just wrong, war or no war.”
Location 1692

Even then, at such a young age, she understood that smile for what it was: a mask atop fear, a balm for the crippling insecurity of childhoods deeply damaged. They were fragile boys who wore it, and their fragility demanded menace. Sarat knew the boys better than they knew themselves. And she knew there was no winning this dare. That was the point — for there to be no winning, only different magnitudes of losing.
Location 1879

“Yeah, but I bet you the whole time he was busy being mean, the other guys were busy fighting,” another replied. “Mean don’t mean nothing.”
Location 1933

“I’m not sorry and none of them can make me sorry. They’re liars and cowards, all of them. They pretend like this is normal, like it’s normal to live this way. But it’s not normal. Your dad’s right. We’re just waiting to die, waiting for the Blues to come up over that fence one day and kill every last one of us. I’m not sorry. I’m not the one who’s wrong.”

“I don’t think you’re wrong,” Marcus said. “I’ve never thought you were wrong.
Location 1943

She moved the clipper slowly, in part out of caution but also to prolong the act; the shearing felt good against her skin. Soon the clipper glided along smoothly, and no more hair fell.
Location 2003

I f'ing understand this sensation.

“That’s what an empire is,” he said, “an orchestrator of gravity, a sun around which all weaker things spin.”
Location 2162

"But my father was a doctor, and he wanted me to study medicine. He used to say the only truly stable profession is blood work — the work of the surgeon, the soldier, the butcher. He said all industries rise and fall but as long as there’s even a single man still alive, there will always be use for blood work."
Location 2202

It seemed sensible to crave safety, to crave shelter from the bombs and the Birds and the daily depravity of war. But somewhere deep in her mind an idea had begun to fester — perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence — a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else’s home?
Location 2434

She’d learned recently that solid land was not the natural skin of the world, only a kind of parasitic condition that surfaced and receded in million-year cycles. The natural skin of the world was water, and all water on earth was connected.
Location 2441

"He said people think of that war now the way they think about most wars: just a bunch of young men killing young men on the orders of old men. But he said it was women who were left to clean it all up in the end, women who rebuilt the scorched Southern country and nursed what was left of those young men."
Location 2460

What is the first anesthetic?

Wealth.

And if I take your wealth?

Necessities.

And if I demolish your home, burn your fields?

Acknowledgment.

And if I make it taboo to sympathize with your plight? Family. And if I kill your family?

God.

And God…

…Hasn’t said a word in two thousand years.

Good girl.
Location 2467

“You see, we have a habit in this country of deciding the wisdom of our wars only after we’re done fighting them, and I guess we decided the war I’d been sent to fight wasn’t a very good idea after all."
Location 2579

“I sided with the Red because when a Southerner tells you what they’re fighting for — be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness — you can agree or disagree, but you can’t call it a lie. When a Northerner tells you what they’re fighting for, they’ll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day, changes like the weather. I’d had enough of all that. You pick up a gun and fight for something, you best never change your mind. Right or wrong, you own your cause and you never, ever change your mind.”
Location 2584

“Do you know how to use a knife?” asked Gaines, pointing the blade toward her.

“Everyone knows how to use a knife,” said Sarat.

“No, everyone knows how to stab.”
Location 2598

"But I also believe that all reasonable people of the world — regardless of race or ethnicity or religion — yearn for the same right to liberty, democracy, and self-determination. These are truly universal human ideals, and what we do today to advance them is the most important gift we leave for our children. Wars are temporary; these principles are not."
Location 2622

"I saw in the people of this country a spirit I had rarely seen elsewhere, a dedication to liberty so overpowering, it made of many, one."
Location 2630

Of course others had suffered; some arrived at the camp missing limbs or sight or kin and some were nothing but hollow shells in the shape of the living, but she had suffered too.
Location 2667

And as she imagined these possibilities, Sarat thought of something else: of desertion, of treason against one’s own. But what the man and his son had done didn’t feel to her like treason, only the grim work of the hopeless.
Location 2792

Sarat paused at the threshold. She tried to steel herself for what she might find inside, tried to preemptively imagine her mother’s body, the life gone from it. But she was incapable of making herself imagine it. Instead, her mind recoiled and offered only a feeble, child’s defense: My mother cannot be dead because she is my mother. Everyone else can die but not my mother.
Location 3086

Once, during a rare moment of candor, Miss Dana told Karina that all their lives the Chestnuts had lived at the feet of rivers and walls. Always bounded, always trapped — trapped by movement, trapped by stillness.
Location 3173

The room, dark and dank, smelled overwhelmingly of that sweet bile, that old fossil fuel smell. The scent always jump-started ancient memories in Karina’s mind, memories from a childhood spent on the other side of the world: army jeeps refueling, well fires wild and unquenchable, wounds tended to by the light of headlamps. To her, the smell of any old-world fuel was invariably the smell of war.
Location 3229

She knew from experience that there existed no soldier as efficient, as coldly unburdened by fear, as a child broken early.
Location 3253

Husbands never wore black. Husbands were never confined to that kind of passive declaration, were never compelled to sulk across the world for the remainder of their lives, walking signposts of mourning. Husbands were permitted rage, permitted wrath, permitted to avenge their loss by marching out and inflicting on others the very same carnage once inflicted upon them.
Location 3300

And what she understood — what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood — was that the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same — and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.
Location 3312

“He’s doing real well,” Karina said. She knew the Widow Bentley hated it when she interjected, so she did it as much as possible.
Location 3332

She soon learned that to survive atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to a republic of pain. There existed unspoken protocols governing how she was expected to suffer. Total breakdown, a failure to grieve graciously, was a violation of those rules. But so was the absence of suffering, so was outright forgiveness.
Location 3401

She had seen them do these things both publicly — in defiant, chest-thumping speeches — and privately, pragmatically, in the backrooms of Atlanta and Augusta. She saw them do these things and she was disgusted by it. They were to her nothing more than prideful, opportunistic captains, arguing over the boundaries of long-obsolete star maps as all the while the opposing armada’s cannonballs tore their hull to shreds.
Location 3673

"He’s caught up in the old way of doing things, still thinks he’s in the desert, still fighting that old, faraway war. All that tradition he’s saddled with, it’s too late to shake it off."
Location 3697

The exits came as they always did, in a cascade. As soon as the shame of being the first fighter down was gone, the men’s threshold for pain suddenly plummeted, and those who knew they had little chance of winning were almost happy to find themselves in a headlock or an arm-bar from which they could tap out.
Location 3755

Instinctively, they expected of him the same chivalrous defiance they believed they themselves, placed in the same position, would show.
Location 3771

It had once belonged to Layla’s mother, and had reached that useless middle age between novelty and antique — it was simply old.
Location 3925

“So let him,” Sarat said. “I’m not afraid to die.”

“That’s because you’re young and you think dying’s quick,” Bragg Sr. said. “But they got ways to make dying take just as long as living.”
Location 4251

“All these old men want it to be like it was when they were young. But it’ll never be like that again, and they’ll never be young again, no matter what they do. And it’s not just ours that do it. It’s theirs too. Imagine if the North had just let us be. Imagine if they didn’t fight us tooth and nail, kill all those innocent people, just to keep us from having a country of our own and doing things our own way — would it really have been so bad? No, of course it wouldn’t. But it wasn’t that way when all those old people that run everything were young, so they can’t let it be."
Location 4298

Rising, she looked at the hollowed remains of the guard and she felt the inverse of fulfillment — the empty undoing of a castaway who, rabid with thirst, resorts to drinking from the ocean.
Location 5024

"They didn’t understand, they just didn’t understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories."
Location 5093

“Why’d you do it?” she asked me.

“I just wanted to know.”

“Don’t ever apologize for that,” she said. “That’s all there is to life, is wanting to know.”
Location 5178

"They still think the miracle is that he survived. But bad people survive too; lucky people survive. The miracle isn’t that he survived, the miracle is that he’s healing.”
Location 5260

“But I’ll love you anyway. And your brother will love you anyway. And your nephew will love you anyway. That’s what family does. Take what time you need, Sarat. Heal how you want to heal.”
Location 5289

“Come here,” she said. I shook my head.

“I’m scared.”

“Good,” she said. “Now you have something you can kill. Come here.”
Location 5434

She held the nail in place. “One soft one to set it, one hard one to drive it,” she said.
Location 5471

“My people have created an empire. It is young now, but we intend it to be the most powerful empire in the world. For that to happen, other empires must fail."
Location 5570

"It said in the South there is no future, only three kinds of past — the distant past of heritage, the near past of experience, and the past-in-waiting."
Location 5769

“Sarat told me you were a sweet boy, Benjamin, but you must understand that in this part of the world, right and wrong ain’t about who wins, or who kills who. In this part of the world, right and wrong ain’t even about right and wrong. It’s about what you do for your own.”
Location 6030

This is Book 5 of The Chronicles of Narnia.

In terms of Christian allegory and stories with morals, this book pretty much hits one upside the head with the Sledgehammer of God. There's no light hand in this story, to be sure.

Continuing the Narnia tale, Lucy and Edmund go back to Narnia, along with their cousin Eustace, who's the 1950's model for Dudley Dursley. He's a little shit, know-it-all, arrogant, lazy kid. We could call him a Well Actually and be accurate. He goes off by himself, turns himself into a dragon, learns his lesson through loneliness and loss of connection with all his human friends - why they didn't immediately kill the dragon flying over the camp? - and needs to be restored only through the grace of Aslan washing away his sins in special water.

And then he drops from the story.

There are a number of other smaller lessons learned, don't eavesdrop on others, turn towards God for strength, getting everything you want is a Bad Thing™, regaining your throne is as easy as walking into the top government house and declaring you are the king works every time even when you're a slave, and, for all the flat-earthers, Narnia is flat with the oceans having an edge.

One of my frustrations with the book is Lord Rhoop, who was found on Dark Island, where your dreams (literal dreams, including nightmares, not daydreams) come true. He escaped, yay he was rescued, and HE LEFT OR LOST ALL HIS MEN ON THAT ISLAND. They celebrate this guy's rescue, but he was a horrible leader, all of his men were dead or left for dead. This is a horrible result. None of the men who went out with the seven lords of Narnia were ever found. So, in Narnia, the only people who matter are named royalty?

I'm five books into the series. I'll be finishing the series. I really hope for fewer eye rolls.

But when she looked back at the opening words of the spell, there in the middle of the writing, where she felt quite sure there had been no picture before, she found the great face of a lion, of The Lion, Aslan himself, staring into hers. It was painted such a bright gold that it seemed to be coming toward her out of the page; and indeed she never was quite sure afterward that it hadn’t really moved a little. At any rate she knew the expression on his face quite well. He was growling and you could see most of his teeth. She became horribly afraid and turned over the page at once.
Page 165

And here's an example the sledgehammer shows up. Oh, look, Lucy is doing something she isn't supposed to do, and HEY LOOK, God^H^H^HAslan is watching here, insisting she do the right thing.

Now Lucy had wanted very badly to try the other spell, the one that made you beautiful beyond the lot of mortals. So she felt that to make up for not having said it, she really would say this one. And all in a hurry, for fear her mind would change, she said the words (nothing will induce me to tell you what they were).
Page 165

Yep, human nauture.

“Well,” said Lucy to herself, “I did think better of her than that. And I did all sorts of things for her last term, and I stuck to her when not many other girls would. And she knows it too. And to Anne Featherstone, of all people! I wonder are all my friends the same? There are lots of other pictures. No. I won’t look at any more. I won’t, I won’t"—and with a great effort she turned over the page, but not before a large, angry tear had splashed on it.
Page 167

“It did,” said Aslan. “Do you think I wouldn’t obey my own rules?”
Page 170

“Child,” he said, “I think you have been eavesdropping.”

“Eavesdropping?”

“You listened to what your two schoolfellows were saying about you.”

“Oh that? I never thought that was eavesdropping, Aslan. Wasn’t it magic?”

“Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way. And you have misjudged your friend. She is weak, but she loves you. She was afraid of the older girl and said what she does not mean.”
Page 170

Adults explaining human nature. Peer pressure is hard to resist.

Several of the sailors said things under their breath that sounded like, “Honor be blowed,”
Page 193

This is where dreams — dreams, do you understand — come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.”
Page 197

Would be horrific.

“Because,” said the Mouse, “this is a very great adventure, and no danger seems to me so great as that of knowing when I get back to Narnia that I left a mystery behind me through fear.”
Page 212

Ramandu. “In this island there is sleep without stint or measure, and sleep in which no faintest footfall of a dream was ever heard. Let him sit beside these other three and drink oblivion till your return.”
Page 228

For the tortured mind, this is heaven.

"A good many who had been anxious enough to get out of the voyage felt quite differently about being left out of it. And of course whenever anyone sailor announced that he had made up his mind to ask for permission to sail, the ones who hadn’t said this felt that they were getting fewer and more uncomfortable. So that before the half-hour was nearly over several people were positively “sucking up” to Drinian and Rhince (at least that was what they called it at my school) to get a good report. And soon there were only three left who didn’t want to go, and those three were trying very hard to persuade others to stay with them. And very shortly after that there was only one left. And in the end he began to be afraid of being left behind all on his own and changed his mind.
Page 233

“Or perhaps there isn’t any bottom. Perhaps it goes down for ever and ever. But whatever it is, won’t it be worth anything just to have looked for one moment beyond the edge of the world.”
Page 252

Okay, I think this is the first Grisham I have ever read. I have to say, I enjoyed it. If you read the various reviews, all the men and Grisham fans are loudly saying "THIS ISN'T GRISHAM, THIS IS A GHOST WRITER! Hated it," and all the women (yes, hyperbole) are saying, "This was a great read!" Be unsurprised, as the protagonist is a woman. And a book-reader at that.

Moazam recommended this book to me a bit ago. He commented he thought I would enjoy it, as it is about books and reading and bookstores and wheeeeee! Well, he was right about this one. I was careful to wait until he finished it before starting it, though. He had a couple recommendations that missed the mark. This one was on. More on that I would have expected it to be, given that I had recently read an F. Scott Fitzgerald book, my first, and the original manuscripts were fictionally stolen at the beginning of the book (so, I'm not spoiling the story by saying that, it's on the back cover, too). A delightful coincidence.

This was a fun read. If you're a Grisham fan, this will be a change of pace, based on the other reviews. I find this to be a good beach read, but definitely not high literature.

The heist was over, it was a success, but in any crime clues are left behind. Mistakes are always made, and if you can think of half of them, then you’re a genius.
Page 21

He claimed to average four books per week and no one doubted this. If a prospective clerk did not read at least two per week, there was no job offer.
Page 55

I really cracked up at this. I managed this feat in 2015, but haven't quite managed a repeat performance since. This year I'll be just under 2 a week, I think, at 1.8 a week.

She didn’t buy books either. Why buy books when you could get them for free at the library?
Page 70

Something I recently started doing myself! Thanks, Libby!

But she was a writer, not a teacher, and it was time to move on. To where, she wasn’t certain, but after three years in the classroom she longed for the freedom of facing each day with nothing to do but write her novels and stories.
Page 72

Having time does not mean work will actually happen.

When he’d sold cars he talked about nothing but cars, and now that he scouted for the Orioles he talked of nothing but baseball. Mercer wasn’t sure which subject held less interest, but she gamely hung on and tried to make lunch enjoyable.
Page 88

We talk about what is important in our lives at the moment.

“Tessa always said you were too competitive. Checkers, chess, Monopoly. You always had to win.”

“I guess. Seems kind of silly now.”
Page 93

“Have you been to the store?” Myra asked.

“I stopped by on the way here. It’s lovely.”

“It’s civilization, an oasis."
Page 118

I feel this way about every bookstore. And every chocolate store. And paper store. And tea shop.

“Anybody else?” Mercer asked. So far every other writer had been trashed and Mercer was enjoying the carnage, which was not at all unusual when writers gathered over drinks and talked about each other.
Page 119

Same for pretty much any vocation.

“Got a bunch of the self-published crowd. They crank ’em out, post ’em online, call themselves writers."
Page 119

We all want to believe our work is better, more important, "correct," and those who didn't suffer or found an easier way are somehow less.

They moved a lot, and always to larger homes in nicer neighborhoods. They were chasing something, a vague dream, and Mercer often wondered where they would be when they found it. The more money they made the more they spent, and Mercer, living in poverty, marveled at their consumption.
Page 212

The typical "American Dream."

On the one hand she almost admired their ability to love each other enough to allow the other to stray at will, but on the other hand her southern modesty wanted to judge them for their sleaze.
Page 217

“A fling? Your wife has been sleeping with her French boyfriend for at least a decade. You call that a fling?”

“No, that’s more than a fling, but Noelle doesn’t love him. That’s all about companionship.”
Page 220

Own it, girl. The old saying from college: “If you’re gonna be stupid you gotta be tough.”
Page 230

“Thanks. So will you finish that?”

“I doubt it. I’ll give any book a hundred pages, and if by then the writer can’t hold my attention I’ll put it away. There are too many good books I want to read to waste time with a bad one.”
Page 237

I wish I could stop reading bad books. Instead, I read faster to stop the pain.

“Same here, but my limit is fifty pages. I’ve never understood people who grind through a book they don’t really like, determined to finish it for some unknown reason. Tessa was like that. She would toss a book after the first chapter, then pick it up and grumble and growl for four hundred pages until the bitter end. Never understood that.”
Page 238

*cough*

Even though Mark was being filmed and recorded, all four FBI agents and all five grim-faced young men from the U.S. Attorney’s office scribbled furiously as if their notes were important.
Page 273