Michael Mullins

There really is no secret. A positive attitude tends to produce a positive life; a negative attitude, a negative one. This is not rocket science. I enjoyed the movie because of the music, funnily enough. I ripped the soundtrack and have listened to it numerous times. This is no philosophical heavyweight. Nonetheless, you could do worse than to spend a few hours with something of a positive message, Pollyanna notwithstanding.

There are certainly deeper truths. True and great philosophies to explore and inhabit. Taoism and Buddhism spring to mind — my personal favorites. The philosophies which propelled the Renaissance and the Enlightenment have something to offer. The smorgasbord with which we are not presented in terms of available literature means you can range far and wide, pick and choose, and with a little work come away from the experience with a fairly sophisticated worldview.

So why the high rating? I tend to judge things more and more on their own merit as apposed to comparing, one to the next. The perspective presented here is very positive. And as I said, I liked the music. If you want deep, read Nietzsche. If you're looking for a game-changer, I would recommend Lao Tzu. If darkness encroaches and fear is taking over, consider the words of Siddhartha Gautama. Whatever you do, please don't turn it into a religion. And if you do, please don't foist it on your neighbor.

If you simply want to turn off you brain for a few hours and have someone tell you it can all be alright, well, you could do worse than this.

A tough call. Many disagree with reducing the effect of a piece of literature to a simple star rating, but truth be told I do it more for myself and less for others. It's a way of keeping track and a shorthand for the books I enjoyed, or hated, or books that were just middling. A near five-star read for me, this book is written in a register which just works, or does so at least for me. The story of a British High Court judge — specializing in family law? (I can't be sure) — middle age and feeling it, forced to deal with a marriage in strife while she would rather put herself fully into her work, for which she seems to have considerable talent. Novels of manners, novels of the quiet intricacies of family life can go so wrong, so easily, that I'm caught off guard when someone gets it exactly right. Not that this is wholly either, but it is a novel of human intricacies, and this is what seems to trip up so many writers. McEwan seems to remember to make the stories interesting, that in fact the greatest writer of them all would poison, or stab, or rape, or to chase by bear if it came to that, and the greatest sin would be to bore, to have people sitting endless in salons chatting in mutual navel-gazing. My favorite novels are when the writer balances the equation, getting both sides right. Here is the story of these people and they are real, or seem so to us — and here is why this story is interesting absent all of that faffing about. I've read two or three or four other McEwan novels (I've lost track) but at this point I've decided to line them all up in row, everything the man has written, and read them every one, over time. I can offer no higher recommendation than that.

We read books with many different facilities: our intellect, imaginations, past learning, powers of deduction, powers of debate... We reread books often with at least one more facility: our memories. Books reread are colored by the past, colors growing more vibrant and nostalgic when the distance between reading and rereading is measured in decades. The Ralph S. Mouse books form a bold memory in my imagination. These were my favorite books as a child. My greatest impression now is the belief that there's nothing here that doesn't hold up. A kid picking up the books today cold relate completely to the plucky little mouse and his red motorcycle.

A successful, creative comedian/actor mistaking randomness for creativity. Let me be clear, my estimation of this book is not some puritan knee-jerk reaction to base material — I have no such prejudice — but simply a reader responding to the lack of structure or vision in the material. A memoir by any other name does not a memoir make: many forget that a memoir not written explicitly and carefully for an audience is just a diary or journal written in retrospect. Better writers than Oswalt have forgotten this. I recently read Venice Observed by Mary McCarthy, an esteemed writer apparently. She likewise failed to connect the reader with the material. You could make a convincing argument that this is the primary job of all writers. Fail at this and nothing else matters. The comparison between McCarthy and Oswalt is an interesting one, I think. The writing style and subject matter could be no further apart, and yet both authors fail in very much the same way. Random memories are just that, your random memories. If you expect a reader to care you need to make those memories the reader's, vicariously, so that the reader can invest. Oswalt tells us he understands this on some level. About half way through the book, the origin of the book's title is made clear. He says:

But for me, and my circle of high school friends, it came down to Zombies, Spaceships, or Wastelands. These were the three doors out of the Vestibule of Adolescence, and each opened onto a dark, echoing hallway. The corridors twisted and intertwined, like a DNA helix. Maybe those paths were a rough reflection of the DNA we were born with, which made us more likely to cherish and pursue one corridor over another.

I'm going to try to explain each of these categories (and will probably fail). And then I'll figure out where I came out, on the other end, once the cards were played. I think this chapter is more for me than for you.

It's hard to actually place this book in terms of overall quality. The author is certainly on the right track and largely eschews dogma though the scent of the dogmatic is in the air. (The smell of wet dogma?) Moreover, my extensive reading with admittedly popular nutrition convinces me that he's operating from a limited perspective. This is an earlier book and if memory serves Fuhrman eventually begins strongly advocating for intermittent fasting, so I think his thinking becomes broader and to my mind better aligned with truth, which for nutritional science, is a very hard nut to crack indeed. Our bodies are a miracle of infinite complexities and any declaration of how they behave needs to be tempered with a healthy portion of humility. Lastly, the facts have changed somewhat since the writing of this book. (Which is to say that either the situation has changed or our understanding has changed — facts, of course, don't actually themselves change.) Specifically the prevalence of trans fats in the food supply has significantly diminished due to federal regulation. Mark one small win in a sea of losses for the American eater.