“There are few greater pleasures than feeling proud of someone, of worrying you might burst with it”

We have unintentionally deprived ourselves of the opportunity to engage in a critical discussion about the businesses that ought to exist, not merely the venture that could. It is far easier to serve the consumer than the public. With Zynga and Groupon, the market has spoken that we need more online games and more effective coupon aggregators… depriving us of the meaningful discussion about what companies should exist.

Embarrassingly, I looked up what made this book critically acclaimed wondering, what was I missing? That tension of young friendship that seesaws between desperate longing and cutting jealousy? That, I recognised but no longer felt. Perhaps the “grown up” version I‘m shying away from is when you act but do so with an awareness of how you will be perceived by that one person you can‘t help but want to impress. Or worse, you act in spite of them.

Butler described herself as “an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.” That phrase “oil-and-water combination” captures how this book holds repelling things together. Religion and community failed, yet are worth re-envisioning. A future of kill or be killed makes more precious, not less, that drive to survive and share. We‘re not at this future yet. That “yet” sags with a call to do something about it.

Dead-end: (adjective) 1. an end without an exit 2. a position, situation, or course of action that leads to nothing further. When you find yourself in a dead-end marriage, family, job,….a dead-end life, you often dig yourself deeper into a hole vs find a way out. It‘s both depressing and inspiring the lengths people will go to make do, numb out, or grasp for something better.

A book mainly about a life of solitude but with small glimpses of people being people. “The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in—as if he‘d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream. They spent the whole afternoon among the daisies kissing. He felt glorious and full of more blood than he was supposed to have in him.”

You can love someone while also being so wrong about them, failing to see them in their fullest self because your own misshapen expectations dampen their light. Susan was forever doubting her husband, forever wishing he‘d be more talkative and more genteel. In doing so, she appeared the biggest fool for not seeing all that she had. Oliver repaid the unintentional slight by watching her survive but never changing course enough to let her thrive.

I suspect this book was intended to be about friendship with a look into addiction as a mere subplot. Perhaps more broadly, it told the story of intense people who pour their whole selves into what they do, be it their sport, their profession, or their relationships. I read it, however, as a book about loneliness. The author, Abraham Verghese, wrote himself into this book. Surprisingly, to me, he was the most lonely character of all.

O‘Farrell was inspired by Robert Browning poem “My Last Duchess.” She describes the poem as “absorbing, shocking, technically perfect and so psychologically astute.” That last descriptor - so psychologically astute - actually describes her own novel perfectly. It‘s eerie and contained and remote yet defiant, bursting, and wild. It states simply: Even if you contain me, you cannot control me. Even if you end me, you never had me.

There is a hidden domain of partnership. No one else can say, “I know and love this woman well, but she is not the girl I married” as neither sad nor celebrated, simply true. What is even harder to explain is non-romantic love. That friendship you build outside of marriage. It deserves more attention in how adoring it can be. It makes you feel alive. There is no obligation - only being who you are.

None of McMurtry‘s characters feel typical or cliche. They‘re too real, glinting and faulted. Call is a leader, rugged and resolute. To others, he is a coward. Gus with all his charm and bravery fills the role of a gentleman, yet forever remains a rambler without much direction.

I started to say that McMurtry writes women well but really, he writes people well. He treats the women characters the same as the men, full and human.

This book didn‘t make much sense. Maybe that was the point. We often divulge secrets to complete strangers feeling naked and free and oh so daring. At the same time, we get caught up in an affair so flat and fleeting it just fades away. We move to a new country and call it our home as a foreigner that never makes it so. We feel compelled to set the record straight and to be remembered, thinking it matters, while not being able to articulate why.

Mark Murphy points out that “Billie Holiday always gave the emotional value that the songwriter had intended. That is why so many songwriters enjoy hearing her.” (Listen to: Strange Fruit & All of Me). This misses that Holiday could have been a hell of a song writer herself. The sentences she write and the phrases she turns in this autobiography show the world as it is, with a nod to it not being how it ought to be. Each line could be a song.

Little Fires Everywhere shows how small decisions can accumulate turning into a blaze. Good intentions can broadcast superiority not kindness. A mother‘s worry can become so layered in relentless criticism that it becomes unrecognisable even to itself. Being inconspicuous can in fact make you conspicuous. These little fires can be the events, people, choices…or just the spirit of being willing to burn it all down for something - or for someone.

Having the unimaginable done to you. Doing the unthinkable. That‘s what this book is about. It‘s about seeing your family members as they truly are. Yourself too for that matter. It takes looking at the past with eyes relaxed to a blur to see it, vague at first then shockingly clear. Set on a farm where you want bounty and nostalgia, you find only debt and darkness.

This has the feel of being 16 again, in the midst of those never-ending summers. I miss it, but you also couldn‘t pay me to go back. It is a reminder of all those times when you were still figuring out what you wanted, what mattered to you, and what you had outgrown.

“Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune.”

There‘s a surprising calm that comes from reading this book. It comes in between the rushes to survive. It‘s among the hope that there are still good people out there. The calm comes from Sal having faced it all, knowing she can make it through anything - and from Peppa laughing along the entire way. You can have that seriousness of survival alongside the levity of being along for the ride, laughing - both allowing for and feeding the other.

Leaves lots to question

“The kindest thing you can say about life is: It‘s not nothing.”

It‘s peculiar that a novel that has an artificial being as the protagonist can be so much about what it means to be a person and an individual.

Ishiguro originally intended the story as a children‘s book. This points out another peculiarity: the fact that children‘s stories often tell us more about who we are, or who we want to be, than other forms of fiction deemed more serious or profound.

Giving someone freedom feels a lot like love. Sometimes you have to let people go, to have them come home. Sometimes you have to see someone in their own element, not as your mother or your husband or in any relation to yourself, but just as themselves - to see them for who they are and not just what you have thought them to be.

Felt a tad “too soon” to be reading a book about COVID lockdowns after so recently having been through it…

A glimpse of what it means to live a meaningful life.
This is an apt title for a story about the “small things like these” that make people great.

To get someone, to really get them. To marvel at what they too marvel. To play and have your attention entirely stolen away in the reckless joy of it. To always feel young with them, because you were when you two met. To love them so deeply but to be willing to forgo a romance with them because you have something even better: A true friend who will walk in life with you until the very end.

Other people‘s preconceived notions of you, and what you are capable of, can cages you, but it can also set you free.

I don‘t even know how Strout manages to talk about typical life in a way that just makes you read on and on without any obvious “hook”. It‘s so subtle, it‘s baffling. The characters are unique, but not particularly so. The story lines are interesting but not gripping. She takes you on a meandering walk through life through the eyes of a woman many other characters in fiction have yet to portray. The book feels both nostalgic and modern somehow.

Subtle yet unique ending that struck me as fitting.

“I miss the sun in Guatemala, the sunheat, you know?Sunheat as one word, lovely.” In these phrases, Goldman captures the spirit of the women who raised him in such a way that you almost feel nostalgic as if it‘s a distant memory of your own. There is so much tenderness here. “I used to worry, Frankie, that life, especially those years at home with Bert, had given you a hard heart. Now I saw that you were a feeling person, and it made me happy.”

A timely read that puts into context WWI with the era that proceeded it and outlines all the driving forces that culminated in the war.

A fun, lighthearted coming of age book with all the angst and inner drama of being 14 again

A page turner - Ken Follet doesn‘t disappoint

Passion, compassion, humour, and style - words to life by.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VmdY-uutkkw

David Sedaris‘ novels are the literary equivalent to stand up comedy. What humour and wit. He has such an eye for how the small moments of our lives can become pure comedic gold.

Felt more like a short story than a novel.

It‘s unusual to read a book about a truly unremarkable man - not neurotic, nor insightful, nor charming, nor….anything really - just a man of a certain age. When Julian Barnes narrates the thoughts and memories or his main character, Tony Webster, he is so remarkably, unremarkable. The book touches on deep, philosophical themes of memory and one‘s sense of self but does so through the story of a regular - mostly self-involved and clueless - guy.

What a unique structure and writing style Evaristo employs. Without any full-stop punctuation, each line spills into the next as the story jump backwards and forwards across generations. This stream-of-consciousness-flow is balanced with the practical of the day-to-day experiences and relationships that tie these characters together. The story somehow manages to span over a hundred years yet seem firmly rooted in the conversations of today.

The characters, how they talk, and the small moments they pay attention to seem so subtle yet entirely unique that it‘s hard not to think that this was a memoir rather than a work of fiction. Ann Burns builds an entire personal world. She writes “to convey something about closed societies and how they work and to depict the very restrictive conditions that go on within them and how the inhabitants adopt these conditions as if they were normal.”

After so many years, it was a treat to revisit Margaret Atwood‘s Gilead to see the aftermath of the Handmaid‘s Tale

“Why the fuck did you bring me here?” His answer? “I had to see if you would actually come. She had loved him, and he had needed to break her completely to leave her for good. Agnes Bain was too rare a thing to let someone else love. It wouldn‘t do to leave pieces of her for another man to repair later.” Stuart depicts, in a brutal starkness, the breaking down of a person. He also shows a solidness, however, of undeniable character & daring style.

Ben Lerner is quite innovative in The Topeka School, in a way that I didn‘t fully appreciate until I read this review by The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/04/it-made-me-really-crazy-ben-lerner....

What an unusual tale about what we strive to preserve out of a sense of purpose or love - or just for the sake of it. There is thinking you have all the answers, only to find out you have no idea where you are. There is finding paradise to only turn around and go back to where you‘ve come from. There is escapism. There is coming home. And what better place to find these two contradicting themes than within a library: a central scene of the book.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=p6foww6DH24

A book so full of thoughtful nuggets that you have to stop highlighting and taking notes and just slap on a post-it note that reads: “NOTE TO SELF: Read again for parenting advice… or love guidance ….or advocacy work……or when you‘re about to get on stage….or when you don‘t want to open the front door…or when you‘ve found your person…just read it again.”

There are certain books that leave you different, not just in how you understand the past but in how you look at the future. Marceline Loridam-Ivens‘ memoir about her time at Auschwitz-Birkenau and her experience wading through the aftermath left me different. In a mere 100 pages, she pulls you in so deep that you leave feeling simultaneous full and absolutely hollow.

Past neglect can hang like fog for years or generations. Current put-downs, rude remarks, and cruel patterns make self destructive behaviour the path needed to feel ok. Such weight rests on Queenie‘s shoulders. She sinks into it, yes, but there is no free-falling as friends, extended family, and counsellors - along with her own sense of self and spirit - create a floor to the downward spiral, a solid foundation to stand on.

This short story captures such understanding and loyalty between friends. On a big-picture societal commentary level it has such a sadness to it by putting dreams next to despondent realities. You know how the story is going to end from the very start. You can‘t help but feel the weight of apathy creep in.-

“At forty-two, I had never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem--my chronic inability to astonish myself. I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself; I caused a brilliant wreckage. Some say I fell from grace; they're being kind. I didn't fall. I dove.”