Deb Nance
A review in quotes from the book...
“This book is about the melancholic direction, which I call ‘bittersweet': a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy and the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired...Yet to fully inhabit these dualities—the dark as well as the light—is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the ultimate point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.” (p. xxiii)
“Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don't transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other. This idea—of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love—is the heart of this book.” (p. xxv)
“...creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.” (p. 61)
“We're taught to think of our psychic and physical wounds as the irregularities of our lives, deviations from what should have been; sometimes, as sources of stigma. But our stories of loss and separation are also the baseline state, right alongside our stories of landing our dream job, falling in love, giving birth to our miraculous children. And the very highest states—of awe and joy, wonder and love, meaning and creativity—emerge from this bittersweet nature of reality. We experience them not because life is perfect—but because it's not.” (pp. 92-93)
Okay, I think that's enough to give you the flavor (if you will) of this lovely, lovely book.
I resisted reading this book. An octopus as a character? An octopus as a friend? An octopus that thinks like a human? No, not my sort of read, I thought.
But more and more people recommended it to me, and I finally gave in and got a copy.
So what do I think?
A story that's just the sort that I love.
Marcellus is a Giant Pacific Octopus who has lived for several years in an aquarium where Tova Sullivan works as a custodian. Tova has recently suffered the loss of her husband, and thirty years ago, she suffered the most devastating loss of her life when her teenaged son, Erik, disappeared on a boat. Marcellus is exceptionally perceptive, and it is up to Marcellus to help Tova figure out what happened to Erik so long ago.
Yes, I'm afraid I will now be nagging others to pick up a book about a talking octopus.
Georgie and Levi are both ne'er-do-wells. Levi's got the reputation of being trouble, and Georgie just can't seem to get focused. When Georgie returns to her hometown after losing her job, she finds an old notebook full of things she had planned to do in high school, and she decides to take on those tasks now. And then she meets up with Levi...
I'm definitely not the target audience for this book, and it honestly did not work for me, but I've seen lots of other positive reviews, so I generously nudged my rating up a bit.
The title could be the determining factor as to whether or not you should read this book, so listen up...
Rhododendron pie is a tradition in the quirky Laventies family. Instead of the usual celebratory fruit pie for birthdays, the Laventieses choose to enjoy a pie made of flowers. Which you cannot eat. You just look at it. Youngest child Ann secretly does not want a pie made of flowers. She wants something she can eat.
Ann's family steps to the beat of a different drummer. Her brother is an artist. Her sister is a writer. Her dad is described as a dilettante.
But Ann? She feels like she's in the wrong family. And is it really so wrong to just want what everybody else wants? Especially if that's what you really want?
A complete delight. Oozing with charm.
Aw, this is fun.
Emily Wilde is a Cambridge professor trying to make her name by creating the first encyclopaedia of faeries. Off she goes to a village in the far north to do research, and she is not there long when who should arrive but her handsome academic rival, Wendell Bambleby.
Emily is devoted to her work in an obsessive way, while Wendell seems to get by on charm alone. The setting is a frozen and isolated land, in the middle of winter. And there are faeries and they are just as I have pictured them for all these years—selfish, sure of their own worth, yet oddly compelling.
This is the perfect setup for a delightful story.
I am drawn to books like this, books you can read a page or two here and there and then flip ahead and flip back. I call them browsable books, and this one is perfect for that. Lasting Lines is a collection of the most famous lines of poetry from one hundred poets, along with a short paragraph about the poets' lives.
There are poets here from (mostly) England, Australia, and the US, but there are a nice selection of women as well as men, and older poets as well as more recent ones.
A Sand County Almanac is a collection of essays about nature written by author Aldo Leopold and compiled by his son after his death in 1949. Leopold considered the relationship of land to the people that live on it, the people who use it.
Leopold writes with a wry sense of humor, and he tends to look upon humans as doomed to always put self-interest above the interests of the natural world.
Here are some quotes from the book:
“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.“
“Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.”
“ I sit in happy meditation on my rock, pondering, while my line dries again, upon the ways of trout and men. How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time!”
“ Like other great landowners, I have tenants. They are negligent about rents, but very punctilious about tenures. Indeed at every daybreak from April to July they proclaim their boundaries to each other, and so acknowledge, at least by inference, their fiefdom to me.”
“ Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains.”
“ I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.”
“ In October I like to walk among these blue plumes, rising straight and stalwart from the red carpet of dewberry leaves. I wonder whether they are aware of their state of well-being. I know only that I am.”
I can see why many people I know reread this book often.
Creativity...art...can these things be analyzed and broken down into doable steps? Can creativity and art be harnessed to make money?
This book answers yes to these questions and then explains the hows and whys.
Author Maria Brito looks at creativity as a force to use to shape a business in a positive direction. She outlines the steps to do so. And she talks her readers into listening to her by sharing stories of her own successes and the successes of others in using creativity in the world.
Children need to hear stories about heroes, people who work for causes larger than their own interests, and Jeannette Rankin was a hero.
“Jeannette Rankin was a take-charge girl.”
At a time when women could not even vote, when people worked in dangerous conditions, when children lived in unhealthy and crowded places, Rankin worked to make things better. She became a social worker, worked for women's right to vote, and ran for the U. S. Congress.
This story will inspire children (maybe even some grownups!) to work to improve the lives of people in the world.
Kate Hannigan tells the story of inventor Josephine Cochrane, born in 1839 and living in a time when married women could not own property or sign legal documents without permission from their husbands. Cochrane was dismayed at the condition of her dishes after hand washing, and she longed to spend time used for washing dishes for creative endeavors, so she set out to create a mechanical dishwasher.
Author Hannigan did her homework; the book has a strong bibliography and includes additional information about Cochrane and other women inventors. Hannigan tells this story with clever phrasing, adapting similes and metaphors relating to dishwashing to wryly describe the events of Cochrane's life.
Adam Bede. It worried me. The main character is a man, and I often have trouble feeling a connection with male main characters. It was first published in 1859, and I sometimes struggle with older titles. The dialogue is written in dialect, and that can be difficult to read. But it is the first book scheduled for Chapter-a-Day this year, and it's written by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), and both of those were great reasons to push through my worries.
So, now that I did and have, what do I think?
It was initially a little bit of a struggle to connect with the character of Adam Bede. But male character Adam is rendered by a female author, and so comes across in a form that I can emotionally connect to.
I did struggle with it in the same ways as I often do with older titles: The plot and dialogue and descriptions of settings and characters often seems overly drawn out; I want to say, Get on with it. And that happened, off and on, throughout Adam Bede. But it wasn't so annoying that I wanted to give up.
The dialogue-written-in-dialect was really tricky for me. Sometimes I had to stop and read the dialogue aloud to figure out what the people were saying. But there was also a sense of accomplishment in doing so, almost like figuring out a clue in a crossword.
Adam Bede is a marvelous book, with rich characters, both heroes and villains, heroes who blunder and act like villains, and villains who rise and act like heroes. It has a story that we can all connect to: falling for someone based on surface qualities and the results of doing that. It has a deep and thoughtful narrator who shares this story with us as if the narrator were in the room with us, relating the tale in person, with a sense of reflection about the happenings of the story that only time and age can give.
‘Freddy laughed...“That's the funny thing about adventures. I've had my share of them in my time, as you know, and my experience is that either you're too busy to think whether you're enjoying them or not, or else you're just scared. And yet there must be something about them that you like, too, or else you wouldn't go on trying to have more.”‘
Freddy the pig and his two duck friends go up in a hot air balloon, but when it comes time to let the balloon down, the valve doesn't work. Freddy is accused of stealing the balloon. Can Freddy figure out a way to get the balloon back to its owner without being arrested and sent to prison?
Does anyone else remember the talking pig, Freddy, who, along with his animal friends, set off on their various adventures? I couldn't resist picking up this book at a library sale some years ago, but it has been lingering on my shelves for too long. Now it will be off to a new reader via my LFL.
Tomorrow is Alice's fortieth birthday. She's not happy but she's not unhappy. She has an apartment, a job, a best friend. But her dad is in the hospital, dying.
Alice wakes up the next morning to find she is sixteen, and suddenly Alice wonders, What would happen if...
Now wasn't this a fun ride?! Time travel. Doing things differently and seeing what happens. What's important in life. A delight.
This book sounded like it would be helpful with meeting my goal of becoming a better listener this year.
It was.
Here are some of my notes.
At a time when our relationships are increasingly mediated through devices that lack the warmth and honesty of a face-to-face interaction; when we are moving farther from home, and more frequently; when our social ties are weaker, our anxiety levels higher, and loneliness is on the rise; in a culture of self-promotion, overwork, and political and racial divisiveness; and in the midst of unexpected global crises that keep us not just culturally but physically far apart from each other, we need to feel connected more than ever—and listening provides a way forward.
Vengoechea, Ximena. Listen Like You Mean It (pp. xiii-xiv). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
form, I began to observe what made others around me effective listeners. These individuals seemed to have many of the qualities we researchers are trained in: curiosity, empathy, and the ability to ask thoughtful questions.
Vengoechea, Ximena. Listen Like You Mean It (p. xv). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
We often stop listening because we think we know what the other person is going to say...because we have an informed opinion about how they will respond...or because we have an idea of how we think they should respond...Sometimes we even assume our own experience is the same as others, and expect others will respond like we would....
Vengoechea, Ximena. Listen Like You Mean It (p. 5). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
One of the most common—and easiest—listening mistakes we can make in surface listening mode is to project our own feelings, ideas, or experiences onto others.
Vengoechea, Ximena. Listen Like You Mean It (p. 7). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Surface listening can also include behaviors like multitasking, interrupting others, mentally checking out, or continually bringing a conversation back to what we want to talk about.
Vengoechea, Ximena. Listen Like You Mean It (p. 7). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
When we listen with empathy, our conversation partner should feel not just comfortable but seen and known in some way. We do this by listening not just for what is said but also for what is meant—and then going deeper still to understand what is felt.
Vengoechea, Ximena. Listen Like You Mean It (pp. 8-9). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
I tell my participants I am like “neutral Switzerland”—I will pass no judgment on their opinion or perspective; I want to hear it all. “You cannot hurt my feelings,” I say, before inviting them to share with me the good, the bad, and the ugly. I also admit that I do not have all the answers and that I am ready to be wrong.
Vengoechea, Ximena. Listen Like You Mean It (p. 15). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Getting curious means being open to learning more about a topic, idea, or person—even if it does not initially pique our interest.
Vengoechea, Ximena. Listen Like You Mean It (p. 18). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
It turns out humans can be over threshold, too: certain conditions can throw us off our game and make it harder to stay present and have the productive, empathetic conversations we seek.
Vengoechea, Ximena. Listen Like You Mean It (p. 39). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
“You cannot cut an apple with an apple. You cannot cut an orange with an orange. You can, if you have a knife, cut an apple or an orange. Or slice open the underbelly of a fish. Or, if your hands are steady enough and the blade is sharp enough, sever an umbilical cord.”
Two young girls, Agnès and Fabienne. An intense friendship.
“You can slash a book. There are different ways to measure depth, but not many readers measure a book's depth with a knife, making a cut from the first page all the way down to the last. Why not, I wonder.”
Fabienne is the mastermind. Agnès follows her lead.
“You can hand the knife to another person, betting with yourself how deep a wound he or she is willing to inflict. You can be the inflicter of the wound.”
Fabienne concocts a scheme to write a book. The book is about all the awful things that happen in their provincial village in France. Fabienne convinces Agnès to claim to be the sole author of the book.
“One half orange plus another half orange do not make a full orange again. And that is where my story begins. An orange that did not think itself good enough for a knife, and an orange that never dreamed of turning itself into a knife. Cut and be cut, neither interested me back then.”
Two young girls, Agnès and Fabienne. An intense friendship...
Cautionary note: This is not a thriller. Don't go into reading this novel expecting a story where characters are clearly defined. It is not a novel where a plot develops and things happen and other things happen as a result of those things.
Instead, this novel feels like a story that the characters told to the author, a story the author in which the author had no input, but a story with characters that feel very true, a story that feels very true.
I will say that when I closed the book, I felt disappointed. I wanted things to happen; things did not happen. I wanted big revelations; there are no big revelations. But as time went on after I finished the book, I liked the book more and more. I am still thinking about the book a day later. I will probably keep thinking about this book. By the end of the year, I may think it's one of the best books I read in 2023.
Maria is the ten-year-old orphan mistress of the poverty-stricken remains of the old Malplaquet estate, and her life is misery. She's been placed in the hands of a governess and a vicar who despise her and her only friend is an absent-minded professor who spends most of his time lost in the past.
Then her life changes dramatically when Maria discovers there is a complete civilization of people, tiny people, only inches tall, living on an island in the far corner of her estate.
The strength of this book, like the strength of the other T. H. White books I've read, is how he creates—whether they are charming or vile—endearing characters. You can't help but be riveted when White's characters begin to speak. Each character is unique and compelling.
S. E. Lee spent time interviewing his father, Joe, and used his recollections of a life that began in the 1890s to write this personal memoir. Joe was my grandpa's good friend when they were children and as they grew up in north Louisiana. The book was given to my grandma after my grandpa died, and my grandma passed it on to my dad, and my dad passed it on to me. The chapters about Joe's childhood were my favorites, filled with details about what the family ate and how they worked.
The last chapter was a shocker. Its title? The Ku Klux Klan! Yes, Joe was a member, but he says he was pressured into joining, that he really never knew what they did, and that he never did anything with the group. Oh my. I do hope my grandpa wasn't involved with that. I guess I will never know now.
It's obvious I should keep this short.
Books under 200 pages and tell a powerful story...that's the criteria Kenneth C. Davis uses to make his list of great short books. He also chose to skip books he'd already read and short story collections.
There is, then, this list.
For each of the fifty-eight books he features in the book, Davis shares the first lines, a plot summary, information about the author, reasons for reading the book, and what to read next.
Nils is a little boy who causes trouble wherever he goes, especially among the animals on his farm. One day he captures an elf and when the elf gets free, he changes Nils into an elf. Nils takes off with the family goose, joining wild geese migrating over Sweden.
The author weaves lots of intriguing folktales and stories into her book, folktales and stories that are more interesting and unexpected than the typically moralistic children's stories of that time. For me, these stories and folktales were the best part of the book.
Nils grows in character as he experiences many trials on his trip with the geese, and that is interesting and unexpected, too.
The descriptions of Sweden? Whew. Very, very detailed. I could have done with much less of that.
How many times have people recommended this book to me? At least a hundred, I'm sure. But I was determined to stay away from it. I've been encouraged to read celebrity memoirs before, and, time and time again, I was disappointed. Celebrities can't write, I told myself.
Then a copy of Born a Crime appeared in my Little Free Library, and I was tempted. Why not try it?
I've had to adapt my former precept to most celebrities can't write. Trevor Noah is the exception. Not only can Noah write, he can write with the best of them.
This is the story of Trevor Noah's young life, growing up in the worst of times in South Africa, with a white father and a black mother. He tells the stories of his life trying to fit in at school with a racial group that accepts him (is he white? is he black? is he colored?) when none of them really do. He tells stories of his mother and his older relatives and their beliefs. He tells stories of South Africa. And all of these are tinged with humor and deep emotion.
I've been hearing about Small Things Like These for weeks now, and everything I heard about it was good, so I have been waiting and waiting for the single copy of it in our huge library system to arrive for me for a long time. I worried that I might have pumped up my expectations for this book, and that I would be disappointed; I did not.
Small Things Like These is a small book about small lives in a small town. Bill Furlong is a coal merchant, and it's winter, and Furlong is busily trying to keep all his customers fully stocked. He is married and has five girls, and he's respected in the community, but his life was not always so smooth. His mother became pregnant with him out of wedlock, and things could have been horrible for Bill and his mother, but, unexpectedly, his mother's employer kept her on, and everything changed for Bill.
When Bill is faced with a difficult situation, he must make a moral judgment about how to proceed. Whatever path he decides to take will not be easy.
Here are some quotes that might offer some small spoilers...read with caution...
“What was it all for? Furlong wondered. The work and the constant worry. Getting up in the dark and going to the yard, making the deliveries, one after another, the whole day long, then coming home in the dark and trying to wash the black off himself and sitting into a dinner at the table and falling asleep before waking in the dark to meet a version of the same thing, yet again. Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?”
“Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?”
“He found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?”
“He thought of Mrs Wilson, of her daily kindnesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life. Had it not been for her, his mother might very well have wound up in that place. In an earlier time, it could have been his own mother he was saving – if saving was what this could be called. And only God knew what would have happened to him, where he might have ended up.”