Book Reviews

Two-hundred books

It is my goal to add book reviews each week to transpose all hand written journal entries and Kindle highlights to this gallery. I will order them alphabetically to be able to use this as a reference. This will allow easy access to edit reviews if movies of books as well as second readings change my memories and reflections.

I have been in the Penn Manor High School book club since 2010; at this point, over 150 titles. It is a delight and illuminating to gather each month to discuss and share our perceptions of the books and find what others have gleaned from the content, themes, and stories. There has been a 8-year review drought since February 2014. I would read unfocused at that time of grief, so I switched to audio books for better concentration. I returned to the hand written journal in August of 2021, and will review my Kindle notes on all those blank pages. Those reviews may only reference items I highlighted on the iPad. That technology tool was very helpful in note taking and highlights - but no energy for written reviews. I am happy to resume and try to catch up. It is interesting to me that when I look at the books doing that time of drought, I often have no recall at all of having read them. It is nice to be back in the habit of writing reviews and the discipline and effort to puzzle together what I have from the missing years.

Mad Honey ~ by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan — Book Group, Deb Meckley — August 2024 . . . . . 9.5

Listened to the audio version two times, and have many flagged pages and highlighted text on the digital version. I love the two strong women, Ava, mother of Lily and Olivia, the bee keeper, and mother of Asher. Chapters flip between the narration of Olivia and Lily, and that structure kept me engaged and wanting to know more. The audio voices were amazing.

I highly recommend this book. It is an education into the humanity of personhood, gender expression and identity. Death, murder, friendships, and physical abuse of the two mothers are slowly revealed in flashbacks. I feel that this is an important book for everyone to read, although sadly, some people would ban this book from libraries.

The Women ~ by Kristin Hannah — Book Group, Carole Shellenberger — July 2024 . . . . . 8.5

The painful realities of the truth of what happened in the field hospitals during the Vietnam war. Mas-cal (mass casualties) are vividly depicted. It is painful to read, but necessary. The book follows Frankie McGrath a 21 year old woman from an upper crust family in a southern California beach island. Hannah spells out the horrors of this time. Frankie didn’t fit the image of the poorer GI’s who were the cannon fodder for our government’s multi year’s involvement in this war. More painful was the sexist culture that cut the women out as being in “combat” all the while seeing the worst of human death of any person so unfortunate to be caught up in that war.

The nurses saw it all. Fast forward to the the GI’s coming home, being spit on, to the POW’s hero’s welcome back to the states. The PTSD was addressed for the men, but not the women. Must read to see all the disparities in social class and the misogyny and patriarchy, that perpetuated the inequality for the women.

The Woman They Cold Not Silence: ~ by Kate Moore — Book Group, Cindy Stoner — June 2024 . . . . . 8.5

One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

(True Story of the Historical Battle for Women's and Mental Health Rights) I am amazed by this historical account of Elizabeth Packard.

“In the mid-19th century, Elizabeth Packard found herself trapped in an unjust world, silenced by a society that deemed her opinions and intellect unworthy. Braving the confines of an oppressive mental asylum, Elizabeth defied all odds as she fought for her freedom and the rights of countless other women confined against their will. With relentless determination, she became a voice that resonated across the nation, igniting a movement for change. (from Amazon review)

“The Woman They Could Not Silence is a triumphant tale of resilience, challenging the status quo, and the enduring power of the human spirit. Moore's meticulous research and rich historical detail bring Elizabeth Packard's story to life, painting a vivid portrait of a woman who defied society's expectations and paved the way for future generations.” (from Amazon review)

The Only Way Through Is OUT ~ by Suzette Mullen — Book Group, Teri Hay — May 2024 . . . . . 9.5 Review in process. . .

When I read Suzette’s article in the LNP May 11, 2022 “Book coach Suzette Mullen has a story of her own” I opened another tab and shot an email off to her. I wanted to write a grief memoir and hoped she might consider taking me on as a student. She guided from my idea through the first draft, and full outline over the next 18 months and connected me to another coach for revisions because her book had been accepted by a publisher. So exciting.

This woman had landed in Lancaster, PA where I had lived 41 years and never thought had a thriving gay community. Our friends had all kept a low quiet profile, many of whom went to conservative churches – an easy place to hide if you know the religious language of the Christian enclaves that would trend toward nationalism some years later.

This is an authentic memoir, honest, and takes the reader all over the I’d been thinking I wanted to write a grief memoir structured around how used art to navigate Ike’s illness and death. We laugh about it now, as Suzette thought that she’d indulge me with an appointment when I would be visiting Lancaster ten days later. At that time Suzette had submitted her book to a publisher and was in that waiting phase.

The Women ~ by Kristin Hannah — Book Group, Carole Shellenberger — July 2024 . . . . . 8.5

The painful realities of the truth of what happened in the field hospitals during the Vietnam war. Mas-cal (mass casualties) are vividly depicted. It is painful to read, but necessary. The book follows Frankie McGrath a 21 year old woman from an upper crust family in a southern California beach island. Hannah spells out the horrors of this time. Frankie didn’t fit the image of the poorer GI’s who were the cannon fodder for our government’s multi year’s involvement in this war. More painful was the sexist culture that cut the women out as being in “combat” all the while seeing the worst of human death of any person so unfortunate to be caught up in that war.

A Man Called Ove ~ by Fredrik Backman — Book Group, Sallie Bookman — January 2017 9

A 2016 Swedish language movie of the same name was delightful and follows the book quite well. I am looking forward to seeing the Tom Hanks film of this, out sometime in 2022. This audio book was Sallie Bookman’s book club selection for January 2017, during my review drought, so below are some Kindle highlights and bookmarks from my iPad. | Page 44 – Had Ove been the sort of man who contemplated how and when one became the sort of man one was, he might have said this was the day he learned that right has to be right. . . He had only just turned sixteen when his father died. . . He wasn’t happy for several years after that. Page 45 – People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had. | Page 69 – Of all the imaginable things he most misses about her, the thing he really wishes he could do again is hold her hand in his. She had a way of folding her index finger into his palm, hiding it inside. | Page 108 – He never understood why she chose him. She loved only abstract things like music and books and strange words. Ove was a man entirely filled with tangible things. He liked screwdrivers and oil filters. He went through life with his hands firmly shoved into his pockets. She danced. “You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away,” she said to him once, when he asked her why she had to be so upbeat the whole time. | Page 129 – She talked as if she were continuously on the verge of breaking into giggles. And when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter. | It is a sad and joyful story. Serious and funny. The last of the highlights near the end of the book make it seem only sad, so I won’t ruin it for you. Its a good read. 9!

A Place for Us ~ by Fatima Fareen Mirza — Book Group, Kathy Baxter — May 2020 . . . . . . 9 . . Drought

I had no recall of this book in seeing the title, and no Kindle highlights. But after I read the description on Wikipedia, I remembered that I loved this book. Complex and well developed characters of a family of Layla and Rafiq, parents of Hadia, Huda, Amar. I am surprised that I did not make one highlight in reading it. Perhaps is was great to just get lost in the story. Interesting info on Wikipedia . . .

“A Place for Us is the debut novel of Fatima Farheen Mirza, published in New York on June 12, 2018. It is the first book published by Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint, SJP for Hogarth. The novel focuses on the varied experiences of an Indian-Muslim family living in Northern California, striving to find a balance between tradition and modernity. The family of five is left to search for home in a metaphorical and literal sense. The audience is given glimpses of the family life from the beginning, from Layla finding out about Rafiq’s proposal, to the two of them arriving in America, and their three children later finding themselves stuck between living their own lives and the lives their parents and culture expect them to follow” Source

Braiding Sweetgrass — Book Group, Deb Meckley — July 2023   .   .   .   .   .   .   .  9

“I could hand you a braid of sweetgrass, as thick and shining as the plait that hung down my grandmother’s back. But it it not mine to give, nor yours to take. Wiingaashk belongs to herself. So I offer, it its place, a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship to the world.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer narrated the audio version which I borrowed from the library. Her voice is as soothing as a lullaby, and filled with passion to pass on the knowledge of the land as seen from the lens of her indigenous ancestors, academic training, and acumen. This book is a treasure trove of information about history, land, and heritage.

I thought of my sisters, Pam and Cindy, and my position between them in the entwined growing of corn, beans, and squash. “I hold in my hand the genius of indigenous agriculture, the Three Sisters. Together these plants— corn, beans, and squash—feed the people, feed the land, and feed our imaginations, telling us how we might live.” Kimmerer writes

LitCharts “A Three Sisters garden emphasizes the “lessons of reciprocity,” Kimmerer claims, as the three plants flourish together better than they might apart, each finding its own niche to best receive sunlight and nutrients and protect itself and its neighbors. The Sisters give their gifts to each other and support each other, and the result is a plentiful harvest. Per acre, Kimmerer says, “a Three Sisters garden yields more food than if you grew each of the sisters alone.”

All the Light We Cannot See ~ by Anthony Doerr — Book Group, Maureen Klingaman — June 2015 . . . . . . . Drought

Catching up on the eight-year-six-month book review drought. I remember some things of this book, and remember thinking this was a great book. In looking at the Kindle highlights that I emailed from the iPad to myself, it seems there are many vocabulary words that I noted. I used to do this in paper books and the tradition transferred even in the drought.

CLIFF NOTES review: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See tells the story of two teenagers during World War II (WWII), one a blind girl in Nazi-occupied France, the other a German orphan boy pressed into service by the Nazi army. . . . Marie-Laure LeBlanc evacuates Paris with her father after he is entrusted with a valuable diamond named the Sea of Flames. They escape to her great-uncle Etienne’s house in Saint-Malo, where her father is arrested. Marie-Laure becomes part of the French resistance effort. She and Etienne use his contraband radio to broadcast information to the Allies. . . . Meanwhile, a brilliant German boy named Werner Pfennig seems doomed to spend his life in a coal mine—but instead receives an invitation to a Nazi school. Leaving behind his sister, Werner sacrifices everything he believes in to pursue his dream of becoming a scientist. Werner is pressed into military service and becomes part of a team assigned with the mission of locating and destroying anti-German radio broadcasts. . . . While Werner is in Saint-Malo hunting Marie-Laure’s radio broadcasts, Allied bombers attack the city. In separate locations, both Werner and Marie-Laure are trapped. Eventually Marie-Laure’s broadcasts save Werner’s life, and in return, he finds her and saves her from a German officer who is prepared to kill her in his search for the Sea of Flames diamond.

VOCABULARY: page11 extirpation, flak, cataract, 15 stentorian, 19 herbarium, 22 Golconda, 24 Zollverein, 29 cavansite, 31 émerveillement, 135 Etienne, 182 trunnions, 207 Foucault’s pendulum, 208 Saint-Malo, 220 ardency, 221 evanescence, 239 Entropy, 245 Sublimity, 423 doppelgänger, 447 inveigled

MY KINDLE HIGHLIGHTS — PARTS 1, 2, 3 — Page 27 What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. p28 There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure. But no curses. p72 She would read all of Jules Verne and all of Dumas and maybe even Balzac and Proust? p84 “You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.” p109 But nothing is as before. The trees seethe and the house smolders, and standing in the gravel of the driveway, the daylight nearly finished, the locksmith has an unsettling thought: Someone might be coming for us. Someone might know what I carry. p111 Walk the paths of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every lock its key. You can go back to Paris or you can stay here or you can go on. p126 that’ll be about as profitable as trying to pick feathers out of molasses. Bookmark p129 Everybody has misplaced someone. p131 Her arms are wrapped around her head and her wool blanket is twisted around her midsection and her pillow is jammed into the crack between mattress and wall—even in sleep, a tableau of friction. p157 Her uncle seems almost a child, monastic in the modesty of his needs and wholly independent of any sort of temporal obligations. And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind. p160 “But he died.” “And I did not.” p189 How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing? There is pride, too, though—pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.

PART 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 — p223 “Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.” p226 Who knew love could kill you? p229 Everyone trapped in their roles: orphans, cadets, Frederick, Volkheimer, the old Jewess who lives upstairs. Even Jutta. p241 She simply listens, hears, breathes. p272 I cannot go home, he thinks. And I cannot stay. p277 The führer requires trustworthiness, electricity, boot leather. Werner is beginning to see, approaching his sixteenth birthday, that what the führer really requires is boys. Great rows of them walking to the conveyor belt to climb on. Give up cream for the führer, sleep for the führer, aluminum for the führer. Give up Reinhard Wöhlmann’s father and Karl Westerholzer’s father and Martin Burkhard’s father. p290 See obstacles as opportunities, Reinhold. See obstacles as inspirations. p332 In the candlelight, she looks of another world, her face all freckles, and in the center of the freckles those two eyes hang unmoving like the egg cases of spiders. They do not track him, but they do not unnerve him, either; they seem almost to see into a separate, deeper place, a world that consists only of music. p338 He hears Dr. Hauptmann: A scientist’s work is determined by two things: his interests and those of his time. p376 Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever. p384 Lord Our God Your Grace is a purifying fire. p388 Right three degrees, repeat range . Calm, weary voices directing fire. The same sort of voice God uses, perhaps, when He calls souls to Him. This way, please. p394 The only person in Werner’s life who could see through all that stagecraft was his younger sister. How? How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked? While he knew so little? But who was to say that at that moment we wouldn’t collide against the underside of the barrier, and thus be horribly squashed between two surfaces of ice? He is here. He is right below me. Do something. Save her. But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking, as the city is gradually pounded to dust.

PART 9, 10, 11, 12 — p407 Werner sees six-year-old Jutta lean toward him, Frau Elena kneading bread in the background, a crystal radio in his lap, the cords of his soul not yet severed. p407 Frederick said we don’t have choices, don’t own our lives, but in the end it was Werner who pretended there were no choices, Werner who watched Frederick dump the pail of water at his feet—I will not—Werner who stood by as the consequences came raining down. p421 War, Etienne thinks distantly, is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk. p431 “Etienne,” Marie-Laure whispers, “are you ever sorry that we came here? That I got dropped in your lap and you and Madame Manec had to look after me? Did you ever feel like I brought a curse into your life?” “Marie-Laure,” he says without hesitation. He squeezes her hand with both of his. “You are the best thing that has ever come into my life.” p449 Today, though—or is it tonight?—the hunger peters out like a flame for which no fuel remains. Emptiness and fullness, in the end, somehow the same. p469She says, “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?” p473 the comfortable kind of silence lovers are supposed to share. Bookmark p476 He thinks of the old broken miners he’d see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop. p494The sky seems high and far away. Somewhere, someone is figuring out how to push back the hood of grief, but Marie-Laure cannot. Not yet. The truth is that she is a disabled girl with no home and no parents. p503 “We spent a month there. I think he might have fallen in love.” Jutta sits straighter in her chair. It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is. A town on the northern coast of France? Love? Nothing will be healed in this kitchen. Some griefs can never be put right. p506 Frederick: the bunkmate Werner used to write about, the boy who loved birds. He sees what other people don’t. p509 Why has she come? What answers did she hope to find?

American Dirt ~ by Jeanine Cummins — Book Group, Jodie Henderson — September 2020 . . . . . Drought

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. I remember some things of this book, and will add my kindle notes as a review later. Placeholder till then.

American Wolf ~ by Nate Blakeslee — Book Group, Deb Meckley — October 2020 . . . . . Drought

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. I will add my kindle notes as a review later. Placeholder till then.

And The Moutaions Echoed ~ by Khaled Hosseini . . . . . . . Drought

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. I will add my kindle notes as a review later. Placeholder till then.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord ~ by Peter Matthiessen . . . . . . . August 1994

7/22/21 — Placeholder to transcribe written review

Alex & Me ~ by Irene Pepperberg — Book Group, Cindy Stoner — July 2020 . . . . . . . Drought

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. I remember some things of this book, intrigued about flowers and meaning. It may be notated on the Kindle version on my iPad.

Bella Figura, How to Live, Love, and Eat the Italian Way ~ By Kamin Mohammadi — Book Group, Sallie Bookman — August 2020 . . . 9

The subtitle says it all. I have too many Kindle highlights and 25 bookmarks to include them all here. In the process of sifting through them include here. The gist of the book is finding oneself in beauty, good food, and real people. There are many culinary tips and recipes; each chapter ends with the recipes that were described in perspective of place, time, and people of that chapter. Worth the read, especially if one loves to travel. p97 · Bellissima! p98 · Contentment is probably consumerism’s biggest enemy, and I had accidentally found it here in Florence. p155 · For the first time all weekend, I relaxed and enjoyed myself, happy to talk to Betsy about her life, her art, about my book. p158 · “You know, I love New York. But it’s much too stimulating to create art. That’s why we spend six months a year here. Apart from how beautiful this house is, it’s just so nice to let the mind be washed clean of all that overstimulation. After a month or so here, I am ready to create again—that’s why I didn’t ask you before now.” p169 · Now, as I looked at Maria, I nodded my assent. Why not, I thought, cut that bastard out of my hair? p170 · “Every woman can appear her best if she stays well inside her own skin. Clothes and makeup don’t matter, it’s how you shine…”It means something like ‘learn to take pleasure at yourself.’ Is the same like say La Loren.” “Be pleased with myself?” I asked. p180 · I was content to be alone. I felt entirely self-contained. p194 · my figs were in a bowl of water in the sink; there was a bag of sugar and some lemons sliced in half. More surprisingly, there were also saucers containing, in turn, a pile of rosemary, cinnamon powder, some cardamom pods, a small knob of peeled ginger, and a handful of cloves. “All this?” p211 · Kicca knew me and my perfectionist ways well. She knew that before setting off on a drive, I would carefully decant mineral water from a large bottle into a small one for the journey. She knew that I couldn’t sleep at night if my bills weren’t paid, that I had never been a day late with my rent, and that no email was allowed to languish unanswered in my inbox for more than a day. She knew that my favorite domestic chore was washing up, for which I had to wear a pair of rubber gloves. She knew all of this about me and she loved me anyway. p274 · I am sure that no amount of spiralizing can make up for the joylessness of deprivation, and that there are not enough gluten-free products in the world to counter the devastating effects of stress and giving no time at all to your inner self.

Chosen by a Horse ~ by Susan Richards — December 2008 – January 2009

Short quick read about humanity and how some of its paradoxes and puzzles are discovered by horses. I’m not an animal person - especially horses - but this kept my interest and was a worth-the-time story. Strong single 40’s female figure who doesn’t “sell out” for a man in her life. But she is not a man hater and is open to the possibility of future companionship status with a like-minded person. p25 – “It was the dismissive, mocking, the way some people talked about the religion of others, as though there was something desperate and childish about believing in a God or an afterlife.” p188 – “I didn’t understand death, but it was all around me and inside me . . . p223 – Was I the only one who didn’t know that facing death meant facing life? . . . Lay Me Down (the horse) was my muse, my inspiration to find meaning in loss, to make peace with it, to find beauty in it.” p247 – “The death of a mother is an annihilation of that first love, which is narcissistic and fierce by nature because survival hangs on it. Children understand commitment, the security of forever, They understood, too, the magnitude of its loss.”

City of Girls ~ by Elizabeth Gilbert — Book Group, Carole Shellenberger – June 2022 . . . 8

Borrowed via library app, Libby, in the audio version in which I can only note the location in the 15 hours of audio and take hand notes, some of which are listed below. This is a novel in the same vein as Gilbert’s memoir, Eat Pray Love, which I enjoyed as an example of a woman forced to become herself. This is the fiction version of the same theme with a bit more spice and grit, and very worth the read. I contend that if chapter 14 were required study for men, they’d never have to go cheap route of porn to learn the least-real and least-true education in sex, to be doomed for life as a self-absorbed jerk-off jolly kind of guy. (Not the Anthony Rocella wasn’t that himself, but he knew how to satisfy and took pleasure in that himself.) This can be baldy and brash and very explicit, but I recommend staying with it even if might be offensive at points. It is worth the time to get to how all that fits into a story that brings out the best in the human spirit; empathy, acceptance, forgiveness, love, truth, honesty, and learning to know the ourselves and embracing the best that can come from that. The story also illuminates how words can harm other’s souls for decades, so be kind. The story is a long letter, to Angela Grecco about her father, Frank, who becomes the true love of Vivian’s life. Vivian is the protagonist and narrator. The wonderful and convincing audio version was read by Blair Brown.

BOOKMARKS — 2:19. Bear with me on this, as each digital version is a little different. These numbers represent the point in the audio by hour:minute:second for this borrowed library version. Chapter 1 — 12:52, 13:10, 14:03, 15:13, 17:20 4 — 1:51:01, I didn’t even know I was poor (or the opposite, rich) 5 — 1:55:01 Good old days of JO’s, when 14 year old girls were kept as mistresses, and discarded when they got pregnant and the man “took care of it.” 2:09:22 I had wanted more, and I had not wanted more 6 — 2:45:03Dr. Kellogg 2:48:55 You can’t have too much conscious about things, or else you’ll never stop worrying. 7 — 2:59:10 Summer of 1940 and sex. 8, 9, 10 — WWII, Can’t just follow Paris for the sake of Paris, The play, City of Girls, is conceived. 12 — 5:20:45, You can absolutely trust Billy to be himself; he’s free. 5:23:09 There are subtleties in marriages, most are neither heavenly nor hellish, but vaguely purgatorial. 13 — 5:40:40 Olive said, you always give her the spur instead of giving her the reigns (on Billy and Peg, who never divorced but are not married.) 14 — 5:43:00 Anything can get tedious after enough time. 5:52:46 Anthony Rocella, slow and seductive. Women need time, patience, and an attentive lover. 5:58:03 Kiss 6:07 Yea, baby! That’s what’s what. 6:18:57 Live your life as you wish, my peach. But don’t let it bitch up the blood show. 15 — 6:36:39. The “F” word. 16 — 6:47:03 If the play is destitute of veracity it is by no means destitute of charm. 20 — 9:10:05 Edna says to Vivian, “The thing you don’t understand about yourself, is that you’re not an interesting person. . . you will never be an interesting person. 21 — 9:23:58 “Dirty little whore.” is what Walter’s driver called Vivian. It drowned Vivian for years and years. 22 — 9:30:28 Author Watson had gotten away with his deeds and lies. Men always do. The dirty little whores had been disposed of. 9:39:24 Jim Larson. I felt no hunger for him. I felt no hunger for anything anymore. 9:42:04 Next thing you know, they were engaged. 9:46:10 Truth telling was not my instinct in stressful situations. 9:48:08 Crying and falling apart is something that all pretty young girls do instinctively, because it works. Tear distract. 9:49:19 Vivian stopped responded with a flood and swamp of manipulative tears. 23 — 10:26:15 Good to be sorry, but don’t make a fetish of it. The one good thing about being Protestant is that were are not expected to cringe forever in contrition. Your’s was a venial sin, Vivian, but not a mortal one. 24 — 10:54:03 Eating alone by the window of a quiet restaurant is one of life’s greatest secret pleasures. 11:00:41 As we get older we learn this sad truth, that some things can never be fixed. Some mistakes can never be put right. 26 — 11:21:18 Power of condemnation (imminent domain). Peg said, “Resist change at your own peril, Vivian. When something ends, let it end.” 11:36:14 Sometimes it’s just true; that other people have better ideas for your life than you do27 — 11:55:05 Did not envy anyone who was married. Once the romance faded, these women seemed to be living in constant service to their husbands. 12:05:23, Lovers but did not fall in love with them. 12:08:12 It is easy for a man who has just experienced good sex to think he is in love. 12:10:04 Didn’t believe her behavior made her bad. It made her unusual. 12:11:17 At some point a woman just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. 29 — 13:04:17 “The field of honor is a painful field, Vivian.” Olive said. 30 — 13:28:18 Frank. Maybe that is where love grows best; in the deep space of polarities. 13:28:39 Luck is the soul whose only troubles are self inflicted. 32 — 14:44:52 White dress can quiet a man’s insecurities. He is chosen. 14:54:00 Vivian sewed the dress entirely herself, bent over her work in like prayerful silence 33 — 14:56:48 Always keep your own name. 14:59:59 Vivian grew out of her sorrow and found her way back to joyful things again. 15:05:33 Vivian offers her friendship to Angela.

Cutting For Stone ~ by Abraham Verghese — Book Group, Teri Hay — May 2015 . . . . . . . Drought

This was my bookclub selection. Wish I had writing a brief synopsis as I remember that I loved the book. The quotes from my iPad Kindle version are, but as I read them, I could not cobble together the theme, but the phrases seemed such good life lessons, I had to include them all. I have highlighted passages that seem especially pithy and poignant.

Synopsis from shmoop.com “An Indian nun and an English doctor have conjoined twin babies in Ethiopia. (Yeah, you read that right: a nun and doctor had a kid.) The mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, dies in childbirth, and the father, Dr. Thomas Stone, flees the scene. The babies, Marion and Shiva Stone, are raised by Hema and Ghosh, the doctors at the hospital, and grow up to be doctors themselves. After they're un-conjoined, that is.

PROLOGUE p6 WE COME UNBIDDEN into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot. p8 “The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do.”

VOCABULARY p61 Bookmark, ablutions, Billy Strayhorn, “Take the ‘A’ Train” p82 Abyssinia p85 Djiboutian p112 Lambent p113 sine qua non p144 puttane p145 ennui p158 rexine p161 prurient p175 métier p179 guimpe p179 Discalced p188 internecine p201 Middlemarch 201 Zola’s Three Cities Trilogy: Paris p207 fecundity, 226 amanuensis, 230 parsimonious, 252 Captain Horatio Hornblower, A Ship of the Line, C. S. Forester, 331 pinna, 418 eponym, 514 plenary, 526 Rothmans, p557 perturbation, 557 miscibility, 558 augury, 561 berbere, 562 gursha, 562 injera, 600 proletariat, 603 stigmata, 604 aliquots, 612chapatti, p617 eidetic, p623 diaphoretic, 623 augured, 624 stolid

PART ONE p20 What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books? p35 “When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.” p37 “Semper per rectum, per anum salutem, if you don’t put your finger in it, you’ll put your foot in it,” p43 Bookmark p52 She wondered how a man could look in the mirror and not see the absurdity of his own appearance. p55 Sturm und Drang. The past recedes from a traveler, she thought. p56 Each day she put on the hated uniform, feeling half dressed, and feeling as if she were selling a piece of her soul. p57 She felt neither an obligation to join the herd nor any urge to try to stand out from it. When a close friend told her she always looked cross, she was surprised and a little thrilled that she could pull off such misdirection. In medical school (in full sari and now riding the bus) this quality grew stronger—not crossness, but independence and misdirection. Some classmates considered her arrogant. She drew others to her like acolytes only for them to discover she wasn’t recruiting. The men needed pliancy in their women friends, and she couldn’t bring herself to act coy or silly for their sakes. The couples who huddled in the library behind oversize anatomy atlases and whispered themselves into the notions of love amused her. I had no time for such silliness.p57 That was her trouble then—she dreamed of a greater kind of love than the kind displayed in the library. But she was also filled with a nameless ambition that had nothing to do with love. What exactly did she want? It was an ambition that wouldn’t let her compete for or seek the same things others sought. p59 In the last few years she’d come close to defining the nameless ambition that had pushed her this far: to avoid the sheep life at all costs. p60 If asked, Hema would have said, Yes, I’m doing what I intended to do; I’m satisfied. But what else could one say? p62 “ Milk the history! Exactly when and exactly how did it start? Onset is everything! In the anamnesis is the diagnosis!” p64 She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life. Now, it seemed she would only have a few seconds, and in that realization came her epiphany. As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. Having a child was about cheating death. Children were the foot wedged in the closing door. p69 she saw Hemlatha listening and then thinking when with a patient in the clinic, rather than trying to do both things at once. p72 excised a part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another. What neither the reader nor Stone would accept was that his self-amputation was as much an act of conceit as it was an act of heroism. p94 Maybe this is what keeps me in Addis all these years, Hema thought, this juxtaposition of culture and brutality, this molding of the new out of the crucible of primeval mud. p95 Bookmark. Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted? p101 “If faith and grace were meant to balance the sinful nature of all humans, hers had been insufficient, and so what she felt was shame. Still she must have believed, even with all her imperfections, that God loved her and forgiveness awaited her in His abode, if not on earth.” p109 So many times at Missing, Matron had become privy to an unspeakable secret revealed by catastrophic illness. Impending death had a way of unexpectedly unearthing the past so that it came together with the present in an unholy coupling. p122 Make your life something beautiful for God. p129 She felt the loss of Sister Mary Joseph Praise as acutely as anyone, and yet she felt guided—perhaps this was Sister’s doing—to give her all at this moment to the two infants. The twins were breathing quietly; their fingers fanned over their cheeks. They belonged in her arms. How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic. Sister Mary, bride of Christ, now gone from the world into which she just brought two children. And then she danced with the babies in her arms. p130 Hema felt light-headed, giddy. I won the lottery without buying a ticket, she thought. These two babies plugged a hole in my heart that I didn’t know I had until now. When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart—she was thinking of Stone.

PART TWO p139 What a bad idea it had been to give the Bible to anyone but priests, Ghosh thought. It made a preacher out of everybody. My note p139 Ha! p141 Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion. p144 the conversation was offered as background music, not requiring a response. p152 Ghosh recognized the song, a very popular one. It was called “Tizita”; there was no single equivalent English word. Tizita meant “memory tinged with regret.” Was there any other kind p163 imagine we know everything there is to know about our colleagues, but really how little we know. p165 Doubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief. Bookmark p166 Matron studied the view in every direction. She wasn’t registering what she saw because her thoughts were turned inward. But gradually, the valley, the scent of laurel, the vivid green colors, the gentle breeze, the way light fell on the far slope, the gash left by the stream, and above all this the sweep of sky with clouds pushed to one side—it had its effect on her. For the first time since Sister Mary Joseph Praise’s death, Matron felt a sense of peace, a sense of certainty where there had been none. She was certain that this was the spot—this was where the long voyage of Sister Mary Joseph Praise would end. She remembered, too, how in her first days in Addis, when things had looked so bleak, so terrifying, so tragic with Melly’s death—it was at those moments that God’s grace came, and that God’s plan was revealed, though it was revealed in His time. “I can’t see it, Lord, but I know You can,” she said. p184 “My journey, my pain, my operation …,” the Colonel went on, “God was showing me the suffering of my people. It was a message. How we treat the least of our brethren, how we treat the peasant suffering with volvulus, that’s the measure of this country. Not our fighter planes or tanks, or how big the Emperor’s palace happens to be. I think God put you in my path.” Bookmark p187, p188 Here was a woman who could give up the restrictions of her order when it stood in the way. Bookmark p188 p192 Matron felt she had said enough. It was a gamble. She had nothing to put on the table but the truth. My note: The truth is really the only honest thing we can bring to the "table". p203 “A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.” p212 Had he pursued her all these years precisely because she was so unattainable? What if she had agreed to marry him as soon as he arrived in Ethiopia? Would his passion have survived? Everyone needed an obsession, and in the last eight years, she’d given him his, and for that perhaps he should be grateful. p213 As for Ghosh, proximity to Hema was his drug.

PART THREE p227 “Tizita” along with “Aqualung.” Departure or imminent death will force you to define your true tastes. p236 Guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action. p271 Maybe it was written on my face that I’d become aware of human complexity—that’s a kinder word than “deceit.” p274 He wrote in the fly leaf: Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est! “That means ‘Knowledge is power!’ Oh, I do believe that, Marion.” p275 Increasingly I felt disconnected from Shiva and Hema, and guilty for feeling that way. Ghosh, in giving me the stethoscope, was saying, Marion, you can be you. It’s okay. p277 A childhood at Missing imparted lessons about resilience, about fortitude, and about the fragility of life. I knew better than most children how little separated the world of health from that of disease, living flesh from the icy touch of the dead, the solid ground from treacherous bog. p280 I’ll never forget her father’s face. Under that peasant straw hat he burned with love for his daughter, and rage against the world that shunned her. p297 In the same mysterious fashion with which permanent teeth arrived, so also self-consciousness and embarrassment came to camouflage my guilt, while shame took root in my body as a price for curiosity. p301 I marveled at his gift for distancing himself from what was going on by dancing, or by drawing the motorcycle. p312 The only skill I had was to keep going. p313 It was an early lesson in medicine. Sometimes, if you think you’re sick, you will be. p317 “Another day in paradise” was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understood what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift. p329 But I found that the bricks and mortar of medicine (unlike, say, engineering) were words. p331 But just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don’t bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They’re certainly doing all these things to you. p332 These visitors to Missing feared illness and death, but their fear of damnation was greater. Bookmark 346, p347 chicken biriyani and the fiery mango pickle, p349 All possibilities resided within me, and they required me to be here. If I left, what would be left of me? Bookmark 351 “I never knew my father, and so I thought he was irrelevant to me. My sister felt his absence so strongly that it made her sour, and so no matter what she has, or will ever have, it won’t be enough.” He sighed. “I made up for his absence by hoarding knowledge, skills, seeking praise. What I finally understood in Kerchele is that neither my sister nor I realized that my father’s absence is our slippers. In order to start to get rid of your slippers, you have to admit they are yours, and if you do, then they will get rid of themselves.” p351 The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. . . If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.” p357 to slice up papaya and pour lemon and sugar over it. p422 on a moment when the love was so palpable between father and son that the thought that it might end, and this memory be its only legacy, was unacceptable. p423 “You know what’s given me the greatest pleasure in my life? It’s been our bungalow, the normalcy of it, the ordinariness of my waking, Almaz rattling in the kitchen, my work. My classes, my rounds with the senior students. Seeing you and Shiva at dinner, then going to sleep with my wife.” He stopped there, silent for a long time as he thought of Hema. “I want my days to be that way. I don’t want everyone to stop being normal. You know what I mean? To have all that ruined.” He smiled. “When things get more severe, if it ever comes to that, I’ll tell your ma. I promise.” p433 “You’re avoiding me, Marion,” he said. “We must start. We can’t finish unless we start, right?” p434 My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts. They realize that no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit. p435 Thomas Stone wasn’t like that; he had all the needs the rest of us have. But he was scared. He denied himself his needs, and he denied himself his past.”

PART FOUR p466‘Screw your courage to the sticking place.’ 485 It was as if in Ethiopia, and even in Nairobi, people assumed that all illness—even a trivial or imagined one—was fatal; they expected death. The news to convey in Africa was that you’d kept death at bay. p486That’s what makes us human. We always want more. p514 The mind was fragile, fickle, but the human body was resilient. p519The fact that people were attentive to his body does not compensate for their ignoring his being.’ p542 In a life that was merely a prelude to death, Thomas found he looked forward to Ross’s visit, to the short man’s daily rituals. And yet he held back his affection for the doctor, because that was a recipe for loss. p548That wasn’t by choice, by the way—not being married. ‘Perfection of the life or of the work’—I could only do the one. I hope you don’t make that mistake.” p562 you use the injera as your tongs, as a barrier, while you pick up a piece of chicken or beef sopped in the sauce. 565 No wonder he was reluctant to probe my past. No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son. p567 The surgical persona was something he had crafted to protect himself. But what he had created was a prison. Anytime he strayed from the professional to the personal, he knew what to expect: pain. p569 I’d encountered a medical student from Mecca, a saint compared with my first love; she was kind, generous, beautiful, and seemed to transcend herself, as if her existence was secondary to her interest in the world and the things in it, including me. My belated and muted response must have pushed her away, lost me any chance of a future with her. Did I feel sad? Yes. And stupid? Yes, but I also felt relieved. By losing her, I was protected from her and she from me. p575 I’d followed all the rules, and tried to do the right thing while he ignored all the rules, and here we were. Could an equitable God have allowed such a thing? p604 Sonny Holmes had an inherent curiosity, an honest, all-American nosiness that came with crossing one’s seventieth year and that did not try to conceal itself. p620 Dr. Stone, these are my sons. They are a gift given to me. The pain, the heartbreak, if there is to be heartbreak, are all mine—that comes with the gift. I am their mother. p635 · Location 9293 There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed—she had reached that point. p644 She had died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it. p656 He’d been dead more than a quarter century and he was still teaching me about the trust that comes only from true love. p657 The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

Daisy Jones and the Six ~ by Taylor Jenkins Reid — Book Group, Jodie Henderson — October 2021 Libby Library Loan

9:20–Daisy, Some people only want one piece of you. 22:02–Daisy, Just in inspiration of some man’s ideas (for songs, movies, etc.) Well F that! 22/47–I am not a muse. I am the somebody . . . end of f-ing story. 41:34–Karen, men think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people. 47:16–Warren, sweet spot, not at the top; pressure and expectations. Best when you’re all potential. Potential is pure f-ing joy. 56:56–Karen, The glory of being a man, an ugly face isn’t the end of you. 106:49–Daisy, Didn’t want to be a puppet singing other people’s words. 1:11:00–Daisy, All the drugs . . . the good life, right? Except the good life never made for a good life. 1:20:16– its ineffable . . . if I could find it, I wouldn’t have a use for it. 1:55:21– Didn’t go to rehab for the right reasons, but stayed for the right reasons. 1:59:01–Must have faith in people before they earn it - otherwise it is not faith. 2:4:7–Daisy, Being given things vs earning them important to the soul to earn them. 2:23:56–Karen, Luck dress, jeans instead. 2:29:62– Billy, Tiny little dress and no bra; crying shame that ended. 2:52:4–Daisy, Scared of Hank looming over you, makes you question every decision you ever made to lead to that moment alone with a man you don’t turst . . . Flashes before your eyes. Men don’t do that, counting every mistake ever made to become an asshole. 4:49:31–Billy,, Shockingly talented and she didn’t know how to control it. Problem with people who don’t have to work for things; they don’ know how to work for things. 4:53:5– confidence is being ok. Being bad, not good. 5:18:28–Daisy, Looking for validation . . . unsatisfied, had all the things you can see and none of the things you can’t see. Oversized sense of importance and absolutely no self worth. 6:54–Daisy’s cover was everything. 5:40–Camilla, Trust, the hardest to do, but you have nothing without it. 7:43– Passion is fire, is great, but we’re made of water. Family is water to survive. 8:50:06–Karen and Graham over. The ones who never loved you enough who came to you when you can’t sleep. (Really? I don’t think so.)

Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell ~ by Robert Dugoni — Book Group, Kathy Baxter — April 2022 . . . . . . . 9

Amazon Review: Sam Hill always saw the world through different eyes. Born with red pupils, he was called “Devil Boy” or Sam “Hell” by his classmates; “God’s will” is what his mother called his ocular albinism. Her words were of little comfort, but Sam persevered, buoyed by his mother’s devout faith, his father’s practical wisdom, and his two other misfit friends. Sam believed it was God who sent Ernie Cantwell, the only African American kid in his class, to be the friend he so desperately needed. And that it was God’s idea for Mickie Kennedy to storm into Our Lady of Mercy like a tornado, uprooting every rule Sam had been taught about boys and girls. Forty years later, Sam, a small-town eye doctor, is no longer certain anything was by design―especially not the tragedy that caused him to turn his back on his friends, his hometown, and the life he’d always known. Running from the pain, eyes closed, served little purpose. Now, as he looks back on his life, Sam embarks on a journey that will take him halfway around the world. This time, his eyes are wide open―bringing into clear view what changed him, defined him, and made him so afraid, until he can finally see what truly matters.

My Kindle highlights: Bookmarks - Page 15, 39, 119, 122, 171, 201, 219, 260, 263-4, 266, 277, 285, 288, 291, 301, 338, 396, 399, 427

Page 15 · Ocular albinism p38 · “Then why draw more attention to him? Why make him stand out any more than he already does? Why not let him just . . .” My father did not finish. “What? Blend in?” “Yes, to whatever extent he can.” “Because he can’t blend in, and the sooner Samuel learns that is the case, the sooner he can learn to deal with it.” p39 · Our skin, our hair, and our eyes are simply the shell that surrounds our soul, and our soul is who we are. What counts is on the inside. . . . Sister Beatrice. “She called me Devil Boy.” “We don’t always know God’s will, Sam.” “Is it his will for her to hate me?” My mother seemed to give this further consideration. Her answer surprised me. “It might be,” she said. “No one knows.” “Then how do you know?” She stood. “Have faith, Samuel. Can you do that for me?”

Page 266 · My mother had spent her life advocating for me, ensuring that I received the same opportunities as any other child, and her maternal instinct, finely honed from those years, would always be to protect me. But at this moment I knew she was worried as to whether she could protect me. p269 ·Tears welled in my mother’s eyes. I knew it hurt. Reality could be painful to acknowledge. . . My reality was that I was not going to live some extraordinary life, as my mother so fervently believed, and prayed for. p292 · You know why. I’d be worried my children would be like me, you know. Have my eyes. . . “They should be so lucky,” she said. p296 · Time is wicked. It comes and goes like a thief in the night, stealing our youth, our beauty, and our bodies. p297 · My father knew the depth of my relationship to my mother, and he didn’t begrudge us a moment of it. My relationship with him was different. He’d raised me to be a man, and he was proud of me. p298 · But with every new beginning, there is an inevitable end we must first accept.

Page 301 · “Where is he, Mom?” I asked. I recall this moment as the moment I became a man. p304 · My father had called my name for a reason. He needed me, and not the other way around. He needed me to be the man of the house. I was just eighteen, but then, so were some of those men taken from the jungles of Vietnam on a stretcher. . . I hung back as my mother bent and kissed his lips, whispering to him words I could not hear while gently smoothing his hair. My father was my hero, the strongest-willed man I had ever known. Nothing had ever defeated him—not the chain-store pharmacies, and not the monthly struggle to make his business succeed. I wondered if that was why he lay here now in this unforgiving hospital bed. p305 · “Hey, Dad.” His face did not move, but his eyes acknowledged me. I touched his arm, which felt cold and soft, and bent and kissed his cheek. For better or for worse—and too often it is for worse for so many of us—adulthood had arrived, whether I wanted it to or not. “I’m here, Dad,” I whispered in his ear. p307 · If this is God’s will, then I’m asking you to intervene and for once show me why I am supposed to believe that all of this is for a reason. I want to believe,” I said, struggling to hold back tears. p311 · At this point I could have said something like, “Maybe it’s God’s will,” but it only would have been hurtful. Besides, I no longer believed in God’s will. I was not willing to accept that it was God’s will for a good man like my father, a devoted man, to spend his final days in some care facility.

Page 338 · “God’s will is not our way,” my mother used to say. And I agreed. I had decided it was not my way. “I’m ready,” I said. “I’d like to try those brown contact lenses.” p396 Love can be faked and, therefore, never fully trusted. p409 · “The miracle of Lourdes is acceptance, Sam. I asked God to help you to understand and to accept yourself.” And I thought again of that moment at the baths when I had forgiven so many who had bullied me and, in so doing, I had forgiven myself. Could it have been my mother’s prayer? Could it have been her final act as my mother to once again take care of me? p428 · There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.

Flight Behavior ~ by Barbara Kingslover — Book Group, Carole Shellenberger — July 2021 . . . . . . . Drought

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. I loved this book and look froward to adding this review and Kindle notes.

Fresh Water for Flowers ~ by Valerie Perrin — Book Group, Deb Meckley — August 2021 . . . . . 10

I loved this book. The grief that Violette endured is beyond imaginable. This book got me back on track to want to review books again. . . In reviewing and adding the kindle highlights below, I discovered my notes: My note at Page 186 · Moving on in living; a step in the grieving process. A step we never think we can take. Ummm. We take these steps without even realizing that we are on the path. This book has helped me to see this. So many similarities in this book and my experience in healing and gathering myself again. There have been 90 books that I did not hand write my copious notes of significant passages (to me) since Ike died. This is my grieving process. Is this why I am here in Tybee Island? Visiting even while the Covid-19 Delta variant is burning down the unvaccinated? To celebrate life on this birthday of my firstborn 39 years ago today, 8/16/21. That is living the joy as it is clarified and washed with a well of fresh tears. This is love and living again. My notes page 209 · When I went to John Herr’s after Ike died: People couldn’t look me in the eye without beseechingly trying to see that I was okay. Embarrassingly pleading silently, praying that I was okay. I was their worst nightmare. A new widow. The grocery store was the most painful place to go. Cooking for myself. When I found joy in living again, I felt some judged me. And blessedly others were genuinely happy for me. My notes page 223 · Widows makes other women fearful. I respect that fear and their abject horror of being in my shoes. Without their husbands. But I felt their judgment when I found joy and love again. How dare you betray your dead husband? No till-death-do-you-part for them. Into perpetual grieving purgatory they sent me. Advice to others; shed friends of that sort as snake skin and move into the land of the living!

Kindle Highlights: Page 15 · It’s always like that with death. The further back it goes, the less hold it has on the living. Time does for life. Time does for death. . . “Death begins when no one can dream of you any longer.” . . There’s something stronger than death, and that’s the presence of those absent in the memory of the living. Page 45 · I love to laugh about death, to make fun of it. It’s my way of putting it down. That way, it pushes its weight around less. By making light of it, I let life have the upper hand, have the power. Page 47 · “Violette, do you ever doubt, sometimes?” I weigh my words before replying to him. I always weigh my words. You never know. Particularly when I’m addressing a servant of God. Page 55 · “Memory is stronger than death. I can still feel his hands on me. I know he’s watching me from where he is.” . . . One morning, Emilie didn’t come. I thought she must have finished mourning. Because, most of the time, a person does eventually finish mourning. Time unravels grief. However immense it is. Apart from the grief of a mother or a father who has lost a child. Page 63 · Why do books attract us the way people do? Why are we drawn to covers like we are to a look, a voice that seems familiar, heard before, a voice that diverts us from our path, makes us look up, attracts our attention, and could change the course of our life? Page 69 · At first, I told myself that the hardest thing would be learning to ride a unicycle. But I was wrong. The hardest thing was the fear. Page 79 · There’s a cenotaph in my cemetery. It’s on avenue 3, Cedars section. A cenotaph is a memorial erected over a void. You must learn to be generous with your absence to those who haven’t understood the importance of your presence. . . I often hear, “Losing a child is the worst.” But . . . “There’s worse than death, there’s disappearance.” Page 95 · There’s no solitude that isn’t shared. Page 98 · “If we had to do only what was part of our job, life would be sad.” . . . The leaves fall, the seasons pass, only memory is eternal. Page 105 · “You see it all, in our line of work,” Paul Lucchini steps in. “Sadness, happiness, believers, time passing, the unbearable, the unjust, the intolerable . . . in other words, life. Basically, us undertakers, we deal with life. . . Our father, God rest his soul, always said to us, ‘Sons, we’re the midwives of death. We deliver death, so make the most of living, and earn a good one.’ Page 115 · Along with time, goes, everything goes, you forget the passions and you forget the voices, telling you quietly what pathetic folk say . . . He spoke of the solidarity among prisoners. He said that close confinement could prompt a true brotherhood between the men, that freedom to speak was an escape route. That to lose freedom was to lose a loved one. That it was like a grieving process. That no one could understand this if they hadn’t lived through it. Page 117 · Still silent, Irène Fayolle wondered what, for a lawyer, was the point of identifying each person’s clothing Once again, as if he had heard her think, he told her that, in a court, everything was written in the clothing. Innocence, regrets, guilt, hatred, or forgiveness. That each person chose exactly what he or she wore on the day of a verdict, whether it was on them or on someone else. Like for one’s funeral or one’s marriage. That there was no room for chance. And that according to what each individual wore, he was able to predict whether it was someone from the plaintiff’s side or the opposite side, the prosecution or the defense, a father, brother, mother, neighbor, witness, lover, friend, enemy, or busybody. p121 calvados Page 130 · Everything fades away, everything passes, except for memory. Page 137 · It’s when living through what I’m living through now that you know everything’s fine, that nothing’s serious, that human beings have an extraordinary ability to rebuild themselves, to cauterize themselves, as if they had several layers of skin, one on top of the other. Lives one on top of the other. Other lives in store. That the business of forgetting has no limits. Page 139 · The memory of the happy days soothes the pain. Page 141 · Although, couples who don’t shout, never get angry, are indifferent towards each other, are sometimes suffering the worst violence of all. . . I think solitude and boredom touch the emptiness in people. Page 159 · Love is when you meet someone who gives you news about yourself. Page 164 · Me, your death destroyed me. After that yelp, I stopped speaking for a long time. Page 168 · I like giving life. Sowing, watering, harvesting. And starting again every year. I like life just as it is today. Bathed in sunshine. I like being at the essence of things. It’s Sasha who taught me how. Page 169 · We sit facing the vegetable garden and, as usual, we speak first of God, as of a mutual old friend not seen for a while: for me, a villain I give no credit to, and for him, an extraordinary person, exemplary and devoted. Page 170 · Often, he says to me, “Violette, I don’t know what you and God said to each other over breakfast this morning, but you seem very angry with him.” And I always reply, “It’s because he never wipes his feet before entering my house.” Page 172 · We think that death is an absence, when in fact it’s a secret presence. . . You don’t suggest anything anymore to a mother who has lost her child. Not special offers, not savings coupons. You leave her to buy whiskey, eyes down. . . I needed time. Not time to feel better, I would never feel better. Time to be able to move once again, to be on the move. Page 174 · He thought our daughter’s ashes were worth their weight in gold. . .I would forever be a woman who would never leave, but who would be left. Page 176 · From that day on that Philippe Toussaint started to look at me as if I’d lost my mind. But he didn’t understand me: I was finding it again. Page 183 · I carried on crying as if the floodgates had given way, but the tears I shed did me good. They cleansed me of nasty things, like bad sweat, like poisonous toxins oozing out of me. I thought I had cried all my tears, but there were more left. The dirty tears, the muddy ones. Like stagnant water, the sort that just festers at the bottom of a hole, long after the rain has stopped. Page 186 · My life was a bombsite, to which an unknown soldier had sent me a funerary plaque and a letter. . . I would never recover from the death of my daughter, but the bombing had stopped. I would live through the postwar period. The longest, the hardest, the most pernicious . . . You pick yourself up, and then find yourself face to face with a girl of her age. . . The writer Christian Bobin said, “Words left unspoken go off to scream deep inside us.” . . . “The greater the misfortune, the greater one is for living.” In dying, Léonine had made everything around me disappear, except me. Page 199 · Don’t judge each day by what you can pick, but by the seeds you sow. Page 202 · Philippe Toussaint aged me. To be loved is to stay young. . . Once you’ve got used to living alone, you can’t live as part of a couple anymore. Of that I am certain. Page 204 · His life is a lovely memory. His absence a silent agony. . . Wilbur Larch. A man between life and the dead, his earth and his cemetery. L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable. Page 207 · I detected his fear. People who are afraid can sniff out others’ fear more easily. . Sweet are the memories that never fade. Page 208 · After my daughter’s death, I lost fifteen kilos, my face became both gaunt and puffy. I aged by a hundred years. I had the face and body of a child in crumpled packaging. An old little girl. I was seven-and-a-bit. Sasha said of me, “An old fledgling that’s fallen from the nest and got soaked in the rain.” Page 209 · People are strange. They can’t bear to look in the eye a mother who has lost her child, but they’re even more shocked to see her picking herself up, dressing herself up, dolling herself up. Page 210 · After Marie Gaillard’s interment, the housekeeper muttered that “nastiness is like manure, its stink hangs in the wind for ages, even once it’s been removed.” Page 212 · L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable Page 213 · Stéphanie thought I was impatient to return to my daughter, but I was impatient to return to life after my daughter. . .But I sensed branches, offshoots growing inside me. Whatever I sowed, I could feel it. I was sowing myself. Page 223 · The death of a child is a strain on grown-ups, adults, other people, neighbors, storekeepers. They avert their eyes, avoid you, change sidewalks. When a child dies, for many people, the parents die, too. Page 252 · The absence of a father strengthens the memory of his presence. . . Page 254 · He hadn’t married Violette to make her happy, he’d married her to free himself from his mother, who harassed him. That, too, he had felt guilty about. He hadn’t even learned how to suffer. In fact, he had learned nothing. Neither to love, nor to work, nor to give. A good-for-nothing. . . He’d fallen for Violette the first time he’d seen her behind the bar. He had been attracted by all the sugar she seemed to be sprinkled with. Page 374 · L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable

Have You Seen Luis Velez? ~ by Catherine Ryan Hyde . . . . Book Group, Jodi Henderson, August 2022 . . . 9

I read this delightful book a few months ago in the spring of the year, with my review and lasting impression fading a bit with each subsequent book. My Kindle highlights and notes offer a glimpse of indelible marks from this book. I am intrigued about Mrs. G, who is a 92 and blind.* Her weekly helper and friend, Luis Velez, stops showing up with no word or explanation. She is worn thin. A socially awkward teen, Raymond, makes her acquaintance and steps in to fill the void and is determined to find out what has happened to Luis Velez. A sad and beautiful journey is played out to an equally sad and beautiful ending. I adored the audio narration. * Blindness Page 276 · He had expected her to say “they must be beautiful.” Not “they are beautiful.” It was the first time he had stopped to consider that something could be beautiful in the absence of sight.— (my grandmother, Ethel Bisker, was blind. As a child, I was fascinated how she navigated effortlessly not being able to see.)

Mrs. G’s comments p157 · “Many people I have known died young. And that is all I care to say about that. Were I to see them again . . . and, who knows? Maybe there is an afterlife. Maybe I will see them. Who can say? Do you think I will join them any sooner than necessary and tell them I gave up trying because life took something away from me? That is an affront to those who were not lucky enough to grow old. It’s a slap in the face. Life gives us nothing outright. It only lends. Nothing is ours to keep. Absolutely nothing. Not even our bodies, our brains. This ‘self’ that we think we know so well, that we think of as us. It is only on loan. If a person comes into our life, they will go again. In a parting of ways, or because everyone dies. They will die or you will die. Nothing we receive in this life are we allowed to keep. Living long is a gift denied to many, and so it comes with a responsibility to make the most of it. At very least to appreciate it. People gripe about growing older—their aches and pains, how much harder everything is—as if they had forgotten that the alternative is dying young.”

Page 17 · ‘You are not my family or my friend, you are not my little tribe. You are a them, you are not an us.’ p38 · “You have no idea why juries do that? . . . Oh, I have my theories. . . Tribalism.” “Tribalism?” p239 · They could imagine being afraid of Mr. Velez better than they could imagine being him. I shouldn’t have pushed the prejudice angle. Because the whole time the defendant was pushing back, the jury was pushing back, too.

Page 23 · Then Raymond stopped himself, and felt ashamed of his thoughtlessness. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You spend a lot of time being sorry, Raymond from the fourth floor. But most of the time I don’t know for what.” p62 · “Okay,” he said. “Sorry.” There it was again. The “sorry.” p102 · “I’m sorry. What did she say?” “You’re sorry a lot,” Luis said. “And I don’t think you need to be.” “That’s what Mrs. G always tells me.”

Page 43 · “It’s a very dangerous thing when a young person—when any person—wants to hurt an animal. People pass it off sometimes because it’s ‘just’ an animal. Not a person. But to want to hurt an animal shows a very troubling lack of empathy. And the boys who hurt animals tend to become the boys who hurt people. They are practicing. It is not a good thing.

Page 67 · It’s only really giving if nobody knows. If it’s anonymous. If you let everybody know you did it, then you’re just doing it for the glory. p77 · People laugh at things they don’t understand. It makes them feel safe. But it’s a false feeling. p78 · Because I have lived ninety-two years, Raymond, and if there’s one thing I can tell you, it’s that we are never so unique as we think we are. We are all people. p91 · “We are never so very different as we think we are,”

Page 132 · Guilt is a terrible thing—that I can tell you for a fact. It tears a person apart from the inside. I would rather be me, home in my bed, having had Luis taken away from me, than to be that woman and know I had been the one to take him away. p136 · I would rather be the man who buys the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sells it. p259 · You feel guilty because you . . .” “Survived.” But still I was haunted by why I was given it. You know why, don’t you?” “Because . . . your father had money.” “Yes. Because my father had the equivalent of a few thousand dollars, and their fathers had nothing. Money, my friend. Money bought us our lives. And that is called privilege. We bought our lives, while those who couldn’t afford to were slaughtered like animals. Does that make our lives worth more? Of course not.

Page 144 · That’s the lovely thing about having an animal. You might not want to get up for your own sake, but you will bring yourself to do it for them. “When it comes to seeing what is important about a person,” she said, “I think it’s possible that what our eyes tell us is only a distraction. Not that I wouldn’t take them back if I could. Oh, I would. I miss seeing. But I also like the things I’ve learned to see without them.” * (interesting reference to blindness)

Page 148 · Like father, like son. Whether you like it or not. Page 172 “You must try to make your peace with your family, Raymond,” she said. “Because they are your family. You still only have one family of origin. One mother. So I advise you to make your peace with them, and with her. If she drives you crazy, you can spend less time with her when you’re grown. But if you don’t work out these basic differences, if you don’t talk out what is going wrong, you will regret it when all is said and done.”

Page 186 · “Welcome to the world,” she said. “Luis is dead, and the world can live with that. It’s fine just going on without him. Nobody really cares what happened to Luis except us.” p187 The idea, on the surface of the thing, was to weed out prejudice. But underneath the surface, Raymond saw that both attorneys were quite aware of prejudice, even in the jurors they let stay. Their whole job seemed to rely on prejudice. Prejudices in a courtroom felt to Raymond like a deck of cards to be strategically played in some kind of cynical game. Everyone had some prejudice, and that seemed to be part of the process. And the attorneys seemed to want that. p254 · People judge you by your most controversial half. If you meet a person, Raymond, who is prejudiced, this person will not think to himself, ‘This Raymond has a white half, and I will respect that half of him.’ People judge you only by the half they don’t like. If my family had stayed in Germany, they would not have put half of me in a camp or sent half of me to the gas chamber. No. I would have been completely killed.”

p259 · They will shoot my friend Luis, but they will never shoot me. And the people on the other side, they don’t even see it. I see my privilege because I have lived both with it and without it. The jury did not even see. They did not even see, Raymond. What can you do with a world where people do not even see?” * (another eference to blindness, blind to their unconscious bias) p267 · The world will still be a place where people do terrible things. But here’s the thing about despair. We fall into despair when the terrible gangs up on us and we forget the world can also be wonderful. We just see (blindness) terrible everywhere we look. So what you do for your friend is you bring up the wonderful, so both are side by side. The world is terrible and wonderful at the same time. One doesn’t negate the other.

Page 280 · And then Luis comes along and decides that his definition of a man is someone who is not afraid to be kind. That takes courage. Don’t you think?” . . . It was important to feel at home while at home. p286 · When you decide to be alone or have a family, you’re pretty much choosing between feeling lonely or feeling aggravated. The thing about a family is the love. The ‘what kind?’ and ‘how will it work?’ is nothing. That’s just a thing you worry about before you learn that those details aren’t what matter at all.” p295 · “After all, the only thing that hurts more than tears shed is tears unshed.”

How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk ~ by Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish . . . . 10

Read and devoured during the 1980’s and 1990’s — Handwritten notes from the original 1994 book review journal:

I read and studied this book and took a workshop by the same title after the P.E.T Parent Effectiveness Training class. The workshop was a much needed rehashing and basic of PET. I suggested it to my dear friend Janet as I was concerned about the culture of lavish and over-the-top praising of everyday things being so good! It changed her life and bonded our friendship as we were able to openly network and share the challenges and problems we encountered. I think we were both very open to parenting effectively to be the best of our ability for our children that we could be. We were open books and students of how to be better at parenting.

I'm On Your Side ~ by Jane Nelson & Lynn Lott — 1990’s

After all the reading and parenting practice during the younger years I felt the pre-teen’s would be a breeze. Surprise! The challenges change with each phase of growth. This book (now out of print, ugh) is great. I’ve read this three times and it is best to read a weekly chapter with a friend, which I did with Janet. We took notes and discussed in detail all issues. Oh, did we tackle the topics! The examples of problems in the book were shocking and I hope I’ll never have to deal with the magnitude of some. Through the third reading I got to chapters 12 and 13 and stopped. I’m ready for a new book. Raising a Daughter, perhaps. Don’t think I have that in my journal, so maybe I just burned out on this genre. I do take things too seriously.

Girl with the Pearl Earring ~ by Tracy Chevalier — October 2008 . . . . . . . Drought

Enjoyed this book in 2008; handwritten review to be transcribed later.

Joyland ~ by Stephen King — Book Group, Lisa Mayo — May 2014 . . . . . . . Drought
I do not remember anything about this book except that it was quite lively and who-done-it in nature. That I enjoyed it and I think it was my first Stephen King book (later King’s time travel book, 1963, which I loved) My Kindle reading version highlights: Location 425 My dad’s still grieving. He says there’s a reason wife and life sound almost the same. Location 447 I was twenty-one, remember, and although I would have told you different, down deep I was convinced I was never going to die. Location 771 It was the way students stare at a teacher who offers a new and possibly wonderful way of looking at reality. Location 1501 When he wanted to take Erin out, he borrowed mine… and was careful—punctilious, I should say—about paying for the gas he used. Money mattered to him. I never got the sense it completely owned him, but yes, it mattered to him a great deal. Location 1783 It’s hard to let go. Even when what you’re holding onto is full of thorns, it’s hard to let go. Maybe especially then. Location 1888 My father had taught me—mostly by example—that if a man wanted to be in charge of his life, he had to be in charge of his problems. Location 2278 “I can’t understand why people use religion to hurt each other when there’s already so much pain in the world,” Mrs. Shoplaw said. “Religion is supposed to comfort.” Location 2284 Young women and young men grow up, but old women and old men just grow older and surer they’ve got the right on their side. Especially if they know scripture.” I remembered something my mother used to say. “The devil can quote scripture.” Location 3852 Dick Cheney, that apologist for waterboarding and for too long chief preacher in the Holy Church of Whatever It Takes, got a brand-new heart while I was writing this—how about that? He lives on; other people have died. Location 3888 The last good time always comes, and when you see the darkness creeping toward you, you hold on to what was bright and good. You hold on for dear life.

Just Mercy ~ By Bryan Stevenson — Book Group, Teri Hay — April 2020 . . . . . . . Drought

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. I loved this book and look froward to adding this review and Kindle notes.

Liberated Parents Liberated Children ~ by Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish 1980 - 1990 . . . . . . . 10

Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish became my go to authors in parenting. I noted, "This is a must-read that ties in wth workshops and books below.” These titles will by the these two women are reviewed in this book review section. How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids will Talk, and Siblings Without Rivalry. Others, especially P.E.T. Parent Effectiveness Training in Action, were just what I needed to try to understand and raise the girls differently that what was modeled for me. Of course, there were many very helpful and used family-of-origin ways that were all mixed into the everyday of life. I took parenting, as everything, very seriously. (Too seriously, I often joke and laugh at myself.) What we do for love ♥️.

Life After Life ~ by Kate Atkinson — Book Group, Jodi Henderson — October 2014 . . . . . . 8-year 4-month - Drought

Catching up on 8 years of not writing my book comments. I do not remember anything about this book. I wonder if I read it. There are no highlights on the iPad Kindle version at all. I suspect, after reading different reviews and the synopsis (which I used below) on the Atkinson’s website that it was that I couldn’t stomach the subject of a person dying multiple times in different scenarios. Reading about the book now I will consider re-reading it.

From Atkinson’s website — What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to? Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again. With wit and compassion, Kate Atkinson finds warmth even in life’s bleakest moments, and shows an extraordinary ability to evoke the past. Here she is at her most profound and inventive, in a novel that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves. ‘Don’t you wonder sometimes,’ Ursula said.  ‘If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean.  If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in – I don’t know, say, a Quaker household – surely things would be different.’ ‘But nobody knows what’s going to happen. And anyway he might have turned out just the same, Quakers or no Quakers. You might have to kill him instead of kidnapping him.  Could you do that?  Could you kill a baby?  With a gun?  Or what if you had no gun, how about with your bare hands? In cold blood.’ If I thought it would save Teddy, Ursula thought.  Not  just Teddy, of course, the rest of the world, too.” Source

Lost Girls of Ireland ~ by Susanne O’Leary — Book Group, Kim Weit — October 2022 . . . . 6

I have to say, I loved the Irish accent in the narration, but this nice story was too light and filtered for my taste. I found the plot to be too-storybook like with too-perfect situations for Lydia, who is widowed and left with nothing, until she isn’t. Meets a perfect voice across the fence from the home that was left to her by an aunt. So she wasn’t left with nothing after all. But the perfect voice belongs to a pot-bellied balding man that she couldn’t be attracted to, until it isn’t. Much to her delight, she discovers that body did not belong to the voice after all, and Prince Charming was there for the picking. I hate the blatent rejection of the good-voice-bad-body man and the 180 when she discovers the package is to her liking. Would she have rejected this love, like her aunt did, because of how he looked? If the ugly man was the kind man with a great voice she would have walked away from what she decides in the end is what life is all about. And then, the 300,000 euros magically appears to tie it all up in a bow.

Page 8 · As if on autopilot, she’d arranged the funeral and everything else that had to be done, at the same time trying to console a grief-stricken fourteen-year-old girl who couldn’t stop crying. (Sunny) Page 18 · But what was the use of grieving for a life that was over? (We all grieve differently, but this seems warp speed, and Sunny gets over it very quickly too) Page 23 · This is it, she suddenly knew. A test of her strength and resilience. She felt a dart of excitement, which surprised her. ‘It’s going to be fun,’ Sunny chirped beside her, echoing her thoughts. Don’t worry, Mum, everything will be fine. It’ll make men out of us. (Seems too easy for someone who lost everything, except a house by the sea and a daughter who was embracing the move. And no it wouldn’t ‘make men’ of them.) Page 28 · It was sad leaving the house, you know.’ ‘Yes, me too,’ Lydia said softly, touching Sunny’s cheek. ‘Very sad.’ ‘It felt like leaving a little bit of me behind.’ p33 · Buying the car had given her a sense of freedom and control after all that had happened. She was finally in charge of her life again.

I bookmarked these pages — 51, 56, 67, 83, 88, 89, 112, 134, 151–3, 160, 189, 192–3, 225, 259, 266-7

Page 221 · Telling you felt like a huge burden lifting off my shoulders. You listened without judging. It released me from all the anger I’ve felt ever since it happened.’ He looked at her with great affection in his grey eyes. ‘You’re good listener, Lydia. I could feel your empathy and understanding while I talked about what happened to me.’ He smiled and touched her cheek. ‘It felt like angel’s wings carrying all my troubles away.’ Page 225 · Don’t feel bad about whatever this is between us. Being attracted to someone else is not a betrayal of the man you loved. Page 244 · ‘Wise and a little worn by life,’ Lydia replied. ‘Aren’t we all a little dented and scarred by life? Nobody escapes pain and sadness, really,’ Conor said, his voice suddenly hoarse.

Page 260 · ‘But we can work it out, can’t we? You could come to Dublin from time to time, or I could get down to Kerry for weekends. That’d be all right, wouldn’t it?’ ‘No,’ Jason said, moving away from her on the bench. ‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure that would work in the long run. We need to be together all the time. I do, anyway. I could never agree to some kind of long-distance relationship. (Typical. The man won’t moves for the woman.) Page 262 · Aunt Nellie suddenly popped into her mind again. A strong woman who had chosen independence above a life full of love and perhaps a family. Had she regretted it? There was no way of knowing. But she must have been lonely at times, especially in later years. Independence is a good thing for a woman, Lydia thought. But not loneliness. Could I live without someone to love me? Page 267 · ‘Maybe, but…’ Sunny stopped. ‘It just seems so wrong not to tell me.’ ‘I know,’ Lydia said, squeezing Sunny’s hand. ‘But I was trying to protect you.’ . . . ‘So it was all true, then? He did all that and then ran away?’ (Tied up too perfectly.)

Mists of Avalon ~ by Marion Zimmer Bradley — July 1994 First book review I put in a book review journal, from which this was transcribed on May 29, 2022.

This 876 page book took about three weeks of spare time to read. I can honestly say that it wasn’t until about page 200 that I really started to enjoy it. The story is of King Author from the woman’s point of view – thus the God/Goddess/Christian/Druid faiths. It was hard for me to get into the mystical areas (making of the king stag) near the beginning and also at the end. However, I was glad that I did stick with it, as the overall themes for me started to emerge, such as that fate and destiny are set and no matter what we do to avoid it, it will be played out in the end. The way we live, then, will determine our happiness – not the end result, or the striving for what we think the end result should be. A related second theme is acceptance of others’ differences and seeing that we are not that different after all. I’ve learned more of the story of King Author and the knights of the round table. Indeed, now I am reading a children's chapter version to Mistral. I felt that the characters were very well developed:

Morgaine, daughter of Igraine and Gorlais; tells the story, trained as a priestess of Avalon, meets at the fertility fires, Beltone Fires with the King Stag, both chosen to conceive the next High King, after the King Stag. Fostered by Viviane in Avalon at age 12. Morgause, Igraine’s young sister, more of an older sister to Morgaine, 10. Sent to mary Lot at 15, always seeking men for her bed. Fostered Gwydianonly son and child of Morgaine. Arthur, Son of Igraine and her true love - second husband - Other Pendragon, the High King after Gorlois. Became King Stag and High King after Uther. Did not know he had fathered Gwydian form Beltane, but lived with knowledge of his and Morgaine’s perceived sin of their one and only sexual encounter at Beltone and again the next morning, and then discovered who they were. Viviane, The lady of the lake - High Priestess of Avalon. Sister of Igraine, fostered Morgaine. Arranged for the union of King Stag with Morgaine, which backfired when Morgaine fled. All-wise woman.

Old Filth ~ by Jane Gardam — Book Group, Donna Brady — March 2015 . . . . . . . Drought

According to the Kindle highlights I emailed to myself for this review, this is book one of a trilogy. The highlights are listed by location, not page number at this iteration of Kindle immersion audio with text. I have no earthly idea what this book was about - but thought I liked it and was troubled by it at the same time. Now I have moved the location highlights to this website. Many wonderful phrases out of context and I jump to the location in the book on the iPad. I see much of death and the condition of those left behind. Yes, too raw only a year after Ike’s death. But, oh, the concepts and words to put into context from that time to where I am now in writing about grieving.

Words - 162 sycophancy. 217 tetchy. 374 Bourgeois. 884 louche. 966 insolently. 1021 sardonic. 1161 modus vivendi. Old fashioned manners. 1262 catafalque-rigid. 1839 penumbrous. 239 bourgeoisie. 3547 paedophobe. 3759 conchie. 3547 paedophobe. 3759 conchie. 4322 ornithology. 4502 sibilant. 5234 uxorial. 5448 catafalque. 5755 garrulous.

DONHEADS Location 125 They put their hearts into becoming content, safe in their successful lives. 226 Suddenly he missed Betty. Longed for her. Felt that if he turned round now, quickly, there she would be. KOTAKINAKULU 536 “They are calling on their god,” said Alistair. “There is no God but God. 633 She seethed against the father, the system, the Empire which she had begun to think was not God’s ordinance after all, and how had she ever thought it could be? TEMPLE 670 A wave of great desolation had swept across Eddie. He was never, ever after, to understand it. 1030 Pain and dislike, bewilderment and fear, she thought, in every face. Nobody at peace except the corpses in the doorways. OUTFIT 1052 The past, unless very pleasant, is not much discussed among children. 1069 He had not known such an uncomplicated woman could exist. Calm and dreamy, often carrying somebody a cup of tea for no reason but love; entirely at the whim of a choleric husband, of whom she made no complaints. She was unfailingly delighted by the surprise of each new day. 1145 The days were like weeks, endless as summers in childhood. TIME OF FRENZY 2330 As he stood beside the grave and thought of his long life with Betty and his achievement in presenting to the world the full man, the completed and successful being . . . he was aware of something somewhere. 2353 When she had gone he sat for a time. (Lost. Over. Gone. Finished. Happened.) She was not here. She was dead. Not here. But, he felt, elsewhere. 2559 (Why is ox-blood darker than cow’s-blood?) 2677 Darjeeling.” (She pronounced it correctly. Datcherling.) 2838 What was I doing, coming to visit her? Rather frightening, what grief can uncover in you. Don’t you think so, Betty? Just as well I wasn’t in the middle of a case when you went. But you’d have dealt with it. Got me through. Remembering, then, that the cause of the grief was that she could no longer get him through anything, he gulped, shuddered, watched the oaks, as his eyes at last filled up with tears. 2866 He drove for an hour before addressing Betty again. “You never know where help’s coming from, do you? LIGHT HOUSE 3005 The quiet life she had diligently followed over years was the rent she paid to a weak heart. 3007 Now, as a widow, Claire found that creeping about and being careful was a habit she could not drop. She would have liked a lover, but the heart battering about inside her made the practice impossible. 3534 If you’ve not been loved as a child, you don’t know how to love a child. You need prior knowledge. You can inflict pain through ignorance. COLOMBO 3960 His weakness and self-loathing numbed him. He began to stammer again, and so stopped talking. 4193 He was hollow, a shell on a beach—but safe at last. I could be OK now, he thought, if I could stay here for my life on the circle of the sea. DONHEADS 4371 He sat to his desk and attempted a Memoir, but found it impossible. Opinions, judgements had made him famous, but how to write without opinion or judgement? Statement of facts—easy. But how to decide which were the facts? 4373 He shrank from the tremendous, essential burden of seeing himself through other people’s eyes. Only God could do it. It seemed blasphemous even to try. Such a multitude of impressions, such a magnitude of emotion. Where was truth to be found? 4383 “The Law is nevertheless an instinct. A good instinct. A framework for behaviour. And a safeguard (good—bit of the church roof) in time of trouble. Parlement of Foules—Chaucer.” 4517 Loss’s defection was the metaphor for Eddie’s life. It was Eddie’s fate always to be left. Always to be left and forgotten. Everyone gone, now. Out of his reach. For the first time, Eddie was utterly on his own. 4522 Over the Styx, thought Eddie. Crossing the bar. 4971 Walt Disney 5176 Memory and desire, he thought. Who said that? Without memory and desire life is pointless? LAST RITES 5395 I often think, when I’m reading in the papers about a murder, that the murderer is the last person to be aware of the crime. REVELATION 5689 Memory and desire—I must keep track of them. Mustn’t lose hold. 5728 “Time marches on.” “Not so sure it marches anywhere in particular though.”

Olive Kitteridge ~ by Elizabeth Strout — Book Group, Kathy Baxter — April 2021 . . . . . . . Drought

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. I loved this book and look froward to adding this review and Kindle notes.

On Beauty ~ by Zadie Smith — November 2008 . . . . . . . Drought

Handwritten review from 2008 will be added later to this placeholder.

Once We Were Brothers ~ by Zadie Smith — Book Group, Kathy Baxter, July 2015 . . . . . . . Drought

I had highlighted precious little in the Kindle version on my iPad. Just do not recall any of this book. My focus at that time was zero to none, and it may have been that I started adding the audio versions to my tool box of reading. I am in the beginning stages presently, in July 2022, of starting to write my memoir of grief. Certainly lack of focus was a major concern to me. But I kept writing throughout all those days and can thankfully, reference this time seven years ago this month. July 2015 I was busy with having a new kitchen put into the home. That creative action was exciting and invigorating. It was something I wanted to do since moving into the house in 1979. But alas, the kitchen, ugly as it was, was brand new to the recently restored derelict farmhouse. It served us well as a family all those years.

HIGHLIGHTS from iPad — p10 He once commented that he abandoned God after God abandoned him in the concentration camps. He no longer practiced his faith. p27 replevin p32 “Kids have no fear. I have a career.”

By Miriam Bradman Abrahams – September 26, 2011 (Review on Jewish Book Council website)

Ben Solomon, a Holo­caust sur­vivor, pub­licly accus­es Chicago’s well-con­nect­ed, famous phil­an­thropist, Elliot Rosen­zweig, of being the Nazi Otto Piatek, ​“the butch­er of Zamosc.” Solomon has to con­vince Cather­ine Lock­hart, a young attor­ney, to help him find a way to sue Rosen­zweig and expose him for war crimes. Solomon emo­tion­al­ly nar­rates the his­to­ry of his fam­i­ly dur­ing World War II Poland which includes his rela­tion­ship with Otto Piatek. The author describes the atroc­i­ties of wartime Poland and the beau­ti­ful eter­nal romance between Solomon and his true love, Han­nah. Ben Solomon’s tale is grip­ping, but the read­er gets a respite from the ten­sion by the inter­spersed snip­pets about his grow­ing friend­ship with Cather­ine and about her rela­tion­ship with the case’s pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor, Liam. We read about the pol­i­tics and pres­sure in big law firms and about fol­low­ing one’s heart and intu­ition. Balson’s first nov­el is hard to put down.

Miri­am Brad­man Abra­hams is a Cuban-born, Brook­lyn-raised, Long Island-resid­ing mom. She is Hadas­sah Nas­sau’s One Region One Book chair­la­dy, a free­lance essay­ist, and a cer­ti­fied yoga instruc­tor who has loved review­ing books for the JBC for the past ten years.

Ordinary Grace ~ by William Kent Krueger — Book Group, Donna Brady — February 2023 . . . . . . . 9

This book is why I love Book Group so much. But for Book Group, I would never had read this book. Thank you, Donna! I read this months ago and while I could not attend the meeting on Feb 8, I am now in mid February adding my review here. I listened to the audio version as well as making notes on the Kindle text version. Some recent notes: Chapter13: Redstone’s description of “Indians and Whites, Let them eat grass.” The treatment of Native Americans; heartbreaking. . . . . not much changes today. Chapter5: The term “scag” is used in reference to girls and women. There is no similar term for boys and men in 2023.

Kindle notes: I try to pare these down, but it is difficult to do so, all speak to me.

Prequel “The heart has reasons that reason does not understand.” -Blaise Pascal

p175 Loss, once it’s become a certainty, is like a rock you hold in your hand. It has weight and dimension and texture. It’s solid and can be assessed and dealt with. You can use it to beat yourself or you can throw it away.

p181 Not knowing had offered hope. Hope that there was some possibility we’d overlooked. That a miracle might yet occur. (Ariel would be alive.) Knowing offered only death.

p191 “I can’t see any way that the God you’ve talked yourself blue to me and everyone else about would be responsible for what happened to Ariel. I can’t believe God would hurt that beautiful child in order to call you to account. No, sir, I don’t believe that for one moment.”

p194 “When we feel abandoned, alone, and lost, what’s left to us? What do I have, what do you have, what do any of us have left except the overpowering temptation to rail against God and to blame him for the dark night into which he’s led us, to blame him for our misery, to blame him and cry out against him for not caring? What’s left to us when that which we love most has been taken?

p195 “In your dark night, I urge you to hold to your faith, to embrace hope, and to bear your love before you like a burning candle, for I promise that it will light your way. “And whether you believe in miracles or not, I can guarantee that you will experience one. It may not be the miracle you’ve prayed for. God probably won’t undo what’s been done. The miracle is this: that you will rise in the morning and be able to see again the startling beauty of the day.

p195 sat down on my bed and said, “There’s something I haven’t told you. Something important.” “Yeah?” he replied with no interest at all. “You’re my best friend, Jake. You’re my best friend in the whole world. You always have been and you always will be.”

p196 “I’m afraid you’ll die, too,” he finally said. “I won’t ever die, I promise.”He sat up slowly and swung his legs off the bed. “You better not,” he said. Then he said, “Everything feels wrong, Frank.” “Everything?” “The daytime. The nighttime. Eating. Just lying here thinking. Nothing feels right. I keep waiting for her to come up the stairs and poke her head into our room and, you know, goof around with us.” “I know what you mean,” I said. “What do we do, Frank?” “I think we just keep going on. We keep doing what we always do and someday it’ll feel right again.” “Will it? Really?” “Yeah, I think so.” He nodded. Then he said, “What do you want to do today?” “I’ve got an idea,” I said, “but you might not like it.”

p258 And I understood that something had been lost between them, something that had kept my mother anchored to us and now she was slipping away and I understood too that we hadn’t just lost Ariel, we were losing each other. We were losing everything. . . I’ve come to understand that there’s a good deal of value in the ritual accompanying death. It’s hard to say good-bye and almost impossible to accomplish this alone and ritual is the railing we hold to, all of us together, that keeps us upright and connected until the worst is past.

p260 “That Mom won’t come back. I mean she might come home but she won’t come back.”

p265 “There are some things you can’t run from, Frank.”. . . “What do you mean?” “Who you are. You can’t run from that. You can leave everything behind except who you are.” “What are you talking about?” . . . There is a difference between being dead and dying. Being dead was a thing and not a horrible thing because it was finished and if you believed in God, and I did, then you were probably in a better place. But dying was a terribly human process and could, I knew, be full of pain and suffering and great fear and because I didn’t want to think about it I felt like grabbing Jake and shaking all those awful thoughts out of his head.

p269 “For God’s sake, Nathan, can’t you, just this once, offer an ordinary grace?” p270 “Heavenly Father, for the blessings of this food and these friends and our families, we thank you. In Jesus’s name, amen.” That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.

p271 With Mother home I liked the idea that we’d been saved as a family by the miracle of that ordinary grace. I didn’t know why God would take Ariel or Karl Brandt or Bobby Cole or even the nameless itinerant or if it was God’s doing or God’s will at all but I knew that the flawless grace delivered from my stuttering brother’s lips had been a gift of the divine and I took it as a sign that somehow the Drums would survive.

p289 Greek playwright, Aeschylus, wrote that he who learns must suffer. “And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

Epilogue — p305 “They’re never far from us, you know.” “Who?” I asked. “The dead. No more’n a breath. You let that last one go and you’re with them again.” It was an odd thing to say in parting. . . . p307 The dead are never far from us. They’re in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.

Orphan Train ~ by Christina Baker Kline — Book Group, Sue Hostetter — April 2015 . . . . . . . Drought

I have only a few highlights made on the Kindle Version of this book. Perhaps I didn’t finish it but I have very little recall of it. Possible because it is a dark story as described in the Kirkus Reviews, I learn that this is a “A deeply emotional story drawn from the shadows. Kline draws a dramatic, emotional story from a neglected corner of American history.” So many books to re-read!

Epigraph, p5 Nothing encumbered movement more than fear, which was often the most difficult burden to surrender. Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011, p16 It isn’t that she’s faking it, exactly, but part of her is always holding back. New York City, 1929, p33 However modest, this was a chance for a new beginning. New York City, 1929, p34 My mother and father, two brothers, and a sister as dear to me as my own self—there is no language for my loss. p38 Niamh. Pronounced “Neev.” No one feels sorry for me because I’ve lost my family. Each of us has a sad tale; we wouldn’t be here otherwise. p43 In Kinvara, poor as we were, and unstable, we at least had family nearby, people who knew us. We shared traditions and a way of looking at the world. We didn’t know until we left how much we took those things for granted. New York Central Train, 1929, p45 (bookmarked) Francis Fahy was a Kinvara poet. p49 Only the good Lord knows what’s going to happen, and He ain’t telling. Union Station, Chicago, 1929, p53 · . . . shrieking with glee as they turn, and in that moment, for the first time since the fire, my worries are gone. I feel a joy so strong it’s almost painful—a knife’s edge of joy. p57 We are headed toward the unknown, and we have no choice but to sit quietly in our hard seats and let ourselves be taken there. Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011, p58 She’s always doing this, crabbily countering his enthusiasm, but it’s become something of a routine.

kirkusreviews.com | Molly is a troubled teen, a foster child bounced from one unsuitable home to another. Vivian is a wealthy 91-year-old widow, settled in a Victorian mansion on the Maine seashore. But Vivian’s story has much in common with Molly’s. Vivian Daly, born Niamh Power, has gone "from cobblestoned village on the coast of Ireland to a tenement in New York to a train filled with children, steaming westward through farmland, to a lifetime in Minnesota." Vivian’s journey west was aboard an "Orphan Train," a bit of misguided 1900s-era social engineering moving homeless, destitute city children, mostly immigrants, into Midwest families. Vivian’s journey wasn’t entirely happy. She was deposited with the Byrnes, who wanted only child labor in a dressmaking enterprise. Then, as the Great Depression began, Vivian was dumped into the Grote household, where she suffered neglect and abuse. Only after the intervention of a kind teacher did Vivian find a home with a decent, loving family. The story unfolds through chapters set in the present day, with Molly, caught in a minor theft, forced into community service work and agreeing to help Vivian clean an attic. Other chapters flash back to the period from 1929 through World War II. In those decades, Vivian travels West, endures the Byrnes and Grotes, finds a loving home with the Nielsens, reconnects with Dutchy, another orphan-train refugee, marries and is widowed when Dutchy dies in the war. Molly’s life story unfolds in parallel—a neglected half–Native American child, whose father was an accident victim and whose mother drowned in drugs and crime—and Molly slowly opens up to Vivian. Kline does a superb job in connecting goth-girl Molly, emotionally damaged by the "toll [of] years of judgment and criticism," to Vivian, who sees her troubled childhood reflected in angry Molly. The realistic narrative follows characters as they change and grow, making a poignant revelation from Vivian entirely believable, as is Molly’s response to Vivian’s dark secret.

P.E.T. Parent Effectiveness Training ~ by Thomas Gordon — late 80’s to 1990’s . . . . 10

This, for me, was the book which started it all. In the midst of #2’s - T2’s, I knew there had to be better and more effective ways to parent. I took this workshop with Suzanne in the spring of 1989 driving to the Quarryville area. Mitzi Harris taught it as an adamant teacher and woman with years of experience. Later in the spring of 1992 I took it with again, same Mitzi and this time with Janet, who thought it was too “consequence” oriented. I think that was Mitzi’s approach for I found many areas to be frustratingly “lenient.” I’ve read the book four times and as I wright this feel that I should probably read it again. It is the basis for the “How To” books by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish I have reviewed in my journal and transferred to this platform. Since I experienced this book first, it is the one which truly sticks with me as a breakthrough in my parenting. (So if I’ve really goofed up, I’m sure Mariah and Mistral will let me know!) Warning; this is not the easy-read layman’s book. Most people without a workshop may find it to be too PhD theory packed. For the easy read counterpart, read the Faber-Mazlish books. I think both were important, but this was the foundation and digs into more of the challenge of why these techniques are all important and of consequence.

Pick Up Your Socks ~ by Elizabeth Crary Review from journal, listed as Past Parenting Books, August 1994

This book is in a workbook format, which I read, but did not do the workbook responses. I think I need to do the workbook for this to have impact. It seems to be a rehashing of the P.E.T. and How To ways and perhaps that’s why I didn’t fill in the blanks. Overall pick-up and cleaning I don’t see as a problems. I really don’t make that a priority if the clutter is gone — which it is with the magical Ten Count! In addition, weekly cleaning chores were Saturday mornings before the TV was allowed to be watched. Not really a problem and the girls could keep their rooms anyway they were comfortable with.

Priestdaddy ~ by Patricia Lockwood — Book Group, Maureen Klingaman — June 2020 . . . . . . . Drought

Review will be added later to this placeholder.

Raising Your Spirited Child ~ by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka — Late 80’s - 1990’s . . . . 10

A guide for parents whose child is more intense, sensitive, perceptive, persistent, energetic. Phew! This book is great! The beauty of children is that siblings can be very opposite and the unique natures are baked into their DNA. And a challenge. A spirited child may seem “the bad one” yet in reality their approach to life is different - not better worse - just different. Many qualities of spirited children are revered in adults – yet its very hard to have this in children and parent them. This book helps in understanding the outstanding qualities that those traits will bring to the child, family, teachers and the world at large. This books illuminates how to see the positive, to admire the qualities, to temper the frustration and to know you’re not alone, and it could be worse. A challenging child presents wonderful opportunities. My girls were so different and it was a reality check that their nature was not because of me, (although I wonder if I frustrated them with my nature.) What a life lesson to realize that not all babies sleep 22 hours a day. Not all take naps up to entering school; some stop before their first birthday. To learn in all this was hard work, fun, and very rewarding.

River of Doubt ~ by Candace Millard — Book Group, Fran Scholl — February 11, 2015 . . . . . . . Drought

This was an emotional book group meeting. Fran has had a heart transplant and all the health issues that comes with it, the reason Ike rejected the double lung transplant and decided to take the more comfortable palliative care route, staying at home and comfortable. This is the one year death-week marker for me, in three days on Valentine’s day. I’m fragile and shaky at best at this meeting. We watched a show of Theodore Roosevelt which was a nice addition to the book. I must have purchased the book, not in the Kindle app on my iPad. I was quite shaken of the information at the beginning of the book. I had received a copy of the journal entry referenced below via email as a nice acknowledgement of this my grieving. I don’t remember much of the book at all, but recall that Roosevelt did suffer his grief and remarried and brought the 3-year old daughter back to continue life as a family, and president. Much intervenes in the interim. Facscinating.

From Biography.com — “Theodore Roosevelt’s mother and first wife died just hours apart on February 14, 1884. Each loss was an unexpected shock. His 48-year-old mother, Martha "Mittie" Roosevelt, had been taken ill with what was initially considered a cold, and his 22-year-old wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, had just given birth to their first child, a daughter. During her pregnancy, she hadn't been diagnosed with the kidney ailment that would take her life. That night in his diary Roosevelt marked an "X" and wrote, "The light has gone out of my life." He had once noted of his wife, "I do not think ever a man loved a woman more than I love her," and was so affected by her death that he refrained from mentioning her name for the remainder of his life.

From PenquinRandomHouse — The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron. . . . After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever. . . . Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.

Room ~ by Emma Donoghue — Book Group, Maureen Klingaman — December 2010 . . . 4

Not a lot to say about this. It there some deeply personal experience that gives Donoghue the “right” to even write this? I feel that these deeply horrid stories belong to those who have experienced it first hand or closely through loved ones. And that interactive “room” on the website is really creepy. And I hate the voice of a five year old, Jack, in the written book and on the interactive website. It does not ring true at all. p198 – Everybody’s damaged by something. p263 – Humankind cannot bear very much reality. p310 – Everybody’s got a few different selves. p314 – The soul selects her own society – then – Shuts the Door.

7/1/22 — I wrote the review above in November 2010. The movie version of Room came out in 2015. I thought I watched it, but it is not listed in my film review notebook. The same 7-year book review drought, 2014-2021, is present in my reviews of films and TV series. I noted the titles, and with a handful of exceptions, I could not write a review for them. I do not have Room, the film, in that list so it could be that I just couldn’t bring myself to watch it. The concept is deeply troubling to me. (I hate horror films and don’t watch them. I remember reading Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood as a teen and I insisted that our family start locking our doors at night.) Many reviews of Room are glowing and I didn’t feel that the book group in general reacted the way I had. Their perspectives helped me to appreciate this book and know that seen from others’ eyes, I learn more than remaining a solitary reader. It is why I love the book group so much. I searched for the creepy interactive Room website and couldn’t find it. In that search, I read and listened to some reviews, which are glowing. Let me know your thoughts if you decide to read this one.

Rose Code ~ by Kate Quinn 1990’s . . . . 8.5. Fascinating book with strong women. I enjoyed the audio version with British accents.

GoodReads 1940. As England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call to mysterious country estate Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes. Vivacious debutante Osla is the girl who has everything-beauty, wealth, and the dashing Prince Philip of Greece sending her roses-but she burns to prove herself as more than a society girl, and puts her fluent German to use as a translator of decoded enemy secrets. Imperious self-made Mab, product of East-End London poverty,

Quick chapter notes: Blotchy Blatherings was Oslo’s gossip sheet. 35–Gone with Wind powder fluff. 40–Mabs & Francis married, know Lucy is her daughter, not sister. 41–Harry & Beth 57–Oslo and Phillip quarrel 61–Bit by bit, both cracked the rose open 65–Oslo Mab. Question about Beth (Henry) 66–Beth taken to Clockwork Sanitorium 68–Margaret (Peggy Rock traiter - wasn’t) 69–Mike Maps 2nd husband 2 children fear love 70–Asylum, Jiles was the traitor, not Peg 71–Oslo and Mab to visit Beth 73–Oslo and Jiles engaged 74–Break Beth out.

Quotes p216 Mab blissfully certain she was in love. Blissfully sure that this was the start of something special, something lasting. p218 It had taken her four hours to walk home, limping barefoot through the streets. Three words vibrated through her with every step. Cheap stupid slut. . . That was when she decided she was done being Mabel. Mabel was young and dim and easily fooled. She was going to be Mab instead. Cool, imperious, untouchable Queen Mab. p304 “It’s rubbish.” He tossed Gone with the Wind to the center of the circle. “All that guff about the slaves being happy and grateful—does anyone believe that?” “Scarlett does because it’s what she’s been taught,” Mab pointed out. “It’s mostly her point of view; we can’t see things she doesn’t.” p310 I like melting into the background, Beth already had everything she needed: a home away from her mother; work she loved more than life; Dilly Knox and wonderful friends and a dog who curled on her feet at night. It hadn’t occurred to Beth to want more. It certainly hadn’t crossed her mind that someone wanted her. p 535 “People suspect women of hanky-panky,” Mab corrected. “But they never suspect women of espionage. No one thinks women can keep secrets.” Epilogue p623 Despite the bustle of Bletchley Park today—the camera flashes of the royal visit, the millions of visitors come to marvel at the bombe machines—something of that golden silence still holds over these grounds in a hush of honored and unspoken secrets. There are stories here still untold, without a doubt: stories locked in steel-trap codebreaker minds, behind steel-trap codebreaker lips. Bletchley Park’s walls have been renovated. If only they could speak . . . But some codes will never be broken.

Spoiled Rotten ~ by Fred Gosman 1990’s . . . . 7

With all the working and reading of parenting there are still many stressful times, and times of doubt — are all the parenting books I’ve read a bunch of bull? Am I really goofing up and being nuts and raising two horrible children? This book is more traditional in its actions and consequences (which includes punishment that I don’t agree with) It provides a balance from the “other side” which I needed, but obviously wasn’t a smitten with.

Scarcity, Why Having Too Little Means So Much ~ by Mullainathan & Shafir — Book Group, Deb Meckly — February 2017 . . 10 Drought

This book is a must read if you’ve ever felt that the home shelter women shouldn’t expect to receive pumpernickel bread if only cheap white bread is in the bin this week. Or diapers for their baby. This will help reset the mindset of those who think that these women are lazy. They in fact, must work twice as hard as anyone else just to live safely and healthfully. No one chooses to be poor. Bookmarks - Pages 12, 19, 31, 66, 113, 140, 147, 169, 175, 180, 187, 218

Page 7 · Scarcity captures the mind. Just as the starving subjects had food on their mind, when we experience scarcity of any kind, we become absorbed by it. The mind orients automatically, powerfully, toward unfulfilled needs. For the hungry, that need is food. For the busy it might be a project that needs to be finished. For the cash-strapped it might be this month’s rent payment; for the lonely, a lack of companionship. Scarcity is more than just the displeasure of having very little. It changes how we think. It imposes itself on our minds. Page 13 · When scarcity captures the mind, we become more attentive and efficient. Page 14 · Scarcity captures our attention, and this provides a narrow benefit: we do a better job of managing pressing needs. But more broadly, it costs us: we neglect other concerns, and we become less effective in the rest of life. This argument not only helps explain how scarcity shapes our behavior; it also produces some surprising results and sheds new light on how we might go about managing our scarcity. Page 23 · Deadlines are effective precisely because they create scarcity and focus the mind. Just as hunger led food to be top of mind for the men in the World War II starvation study, a deadline leads the current task to be top of mind. Whether it is the few minutes left in a meeting or a few weeks left in college, the deadline looms large. We put more time into the task. Distractions are less tempting. You do not linger at lunch when the chapter is due soon, you do not waste time on tangents when the meeting is about to end, and you focus on getting the most out of college just before graduating. Page 24 · When time is short, you get more out of it, be it work or pleasure. We call this the focus dividend—the positive outcome of scarcity capturing the mind. Page 31 · This is a basic feature of the mind: focusing on one thing inhibits competing concepts. Inhibition is what happens when you are angry with someone, and it is harder to remember their good traits: the focus on the annoying traits inhibits positive memories. Page 38 · Scarcity alters how we look at things; it makes us choose differently. This creates benefits: we are more effective in the moment. But it also comes at a cost: our single-mindedness leads us to neglect things we actually value. Page 98 · But frugality does not capture the experience of scarcity. The frugal have a principled conscientiousness about money. The poor must be vigilant about trade-offs. Page 98 · Abundance leaves us less able to know the value of a dollar. Page 108 · Borrowing goes hand in hand with scarcity. Page 116 · When working to finish things quickly, the engineers tunneled. Inside their tunnel, a quick fix was just the thing needed. Cutting corners was the perfect solution; the cost would only show up later. Much like an expensive loan, a hastily patched solution looks attractive within the tunnel. It saves us something today even as it creates greater expenses in the future. And we will then have more to do, more things to fix, more bills to pay. Patching is a lot like borrowing, a failure to invest and to commit the resources now so that the job is done correctly. Page 117 · He notes that busy people spend their time on tasks that are both urgent and important. This is what it means to be working on a deadline. We get a burst of output working on the tasks that matter and that are due very soon. We would call this a focus dividend. Page 120 · Scarcity kept them tied to the present, unable to benefit from a glimpse of what the future might hold. A common theme stretches across many forms of the tunneling tax. Scarcity brings about behaviors that make us shortsighted. We ignore the (future) health cost of eating out when we are busy. We do not think about the implications of paying back payday loans (in the future) when we are tight on cash. Page 134 · Why do the vendors eventually fall back? What is it about the scarcity trap that operates so dramatically to alter their lives again, even after they have been given enough money to double their incomes? Page 137 · To be free from a scarcity trap, it is not enough to have more resources than desires on average. It is as important to have enough slack (or some other mechanism) for handling the big shocks that may come one’s way at any moment. . . And with scarcity traps, what would otherwise be periods of abundance punctuated by moments of scarcity can quickly become perpetual scarcity. . . It does not mean that the only way to solve the vendor’s problem is to give her even more money. Rather, this discussion highlights the need for instruments for buffering against shocks. Page 139 · Staying clear of the scarcity trap requires more than abundance. It requires enough abundance so that, even after overspending or procrastinating, we still leave enough slack to manage most shocks. Enough abundance so that even after extensive procrastination, we still have enough time left to manage an unexpected deadline. Staying out of the scarcity trap requires enough slack to deal with the shocks the world brings and the troubles we impose on ourselves. Page 147 · Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.—JACK HANDEY, SNL writer. . . UNICEF estimates that 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. Page 155 · Still, one prevailing view explains the strong correlation between poverty and failure by saying failure causes poverty. Our data suggest causality runs at least as strongly in the other direction: that poverty—the scarcity mindset—causes failure. Page 160 · This is perhaps the most pernicious, long-term detrimental way in which scarcity may tax bandwidth: thoughts of scarcity erode sleep. Studies of the lonely show that they sleep less well and get fewer hours. These effects are quite strong for the poor: they too have lower-quality sleep. And not sleeping enough can be disastrous. Page 180 · Each of these can liberate bandwidth, boost IQ, firm up self-control, enhance clarity of thinking, and even improve sleep. Far-fetched? The data suggest not. Page 187 · When you face scarcity, slack is a necessity. And yet we so often fail to plan for it. Largely, of course, because scarcity makes it hard to do.

Siblings Without Rivalry ~ by Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish 1980’s and 1990’s. . . . . . . 10

Same techniques are covered in the books of these authors’ other parenting gems — Liberated Parents Liberated Children and How to Talk so Kids Will Listen. The difference is those techniques are detailed more in dealing with sibling problems. I do all this, yet at times the girls seemed to truly hate each other and I can only have faith that they will, as adults, share that wonderful sister relationship.

Ike was an only child, so he did not understand all the squabbling that I knew so well being one of five! He really wanted to see that they loved each other and would all their lives, (they do, Ike!) I recall well all the bickering I did with my siblings, but nothing can replace what I now have with Cindy and Richard. We do not take it for granted having lost Pam and Brian in 1980 and 81. How I remember the side-by-side backseat of the weekly trip to the grocery store – Pam, Cindy, and I would insist that the skirt of our coat must be lay atop the others as we quietly replaced that order all during the drive. Well do I remember, as does Richard, when I would playfully sit upon him and make him eat grass clippings, which he would spit out. Ah! Sibling love ♥️!

Silver Sparrow ~ by Tayari Jones — Book Group, Maryann Saylor — September 2014 . . . . Drought to 7/22/21 Kindle edition highlights transferred here 5/12/22. I don’t remember this book at all. Page 16 What she had with my father was a sort of creeping love, the kind that sinks in before you know it and makes a family of you. She says that love like what she has with my father occurs on the God level, not of the world and not bound by the laws of the state of Georgia. Page 22 Mother glanced at her left hand, where she wore her own wedding ring, although her husband, Clarence, was a year behind her and already engaged. She wore the ring to say that she believed in certain things. My mother read Life magazine every week, so she knew that the rest of the country was enjoying free love and unkempt hair, but she didn’t admire the young people who let themselves go. . . She agreed with Willie Mae, who pointed out that men do nothing without a reason. Page 27 And this is how it started. Just with coffee and the exchange of their long stories. Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too. Coffee can start a life just as it can start a day. Page 29 James was an easygoing man, master of his emotions. “The key to life,” he told me once, “is to avoid the highs and the lows. It’s the peaks and valleys that mess you up.” Page 38 There’s only so much that you can chalk up to coincidence. Page 40 It would be too easy to say that I rejected high school before it had a chance to reject me. Page 42 But I lived in a world where you could never want what you wanted out in the open. Page 48 This was just the beginning. Some things were inevitable. You’d have to be a fool to think otherwise. Page 53 · Abandonment doesn’t have the sharp but dissipating sting of a slap. It’s like a punch to the gut, bruising your skin and driving the precious air from your body. Page 75 I let go of a breath I hadn’t even known I was holding. This was what it was to have a friend, someone who knew exactly who you were and didn’t blame you for it. Page 77 “If you have a brother, it’s the worst thing. If your mama has a boy to care for, she will show you the kind of love she is capable of. And once you see that, you will never get over it. You will be lonely for the rest of your life.” | Page 125 You don’t need a dress rehearsal to know how to lay your head on your father’s shoulder, to inhale his tobacco scent. It takes no practice to know how to be someone’s daughter. Page 129 Life is full of things you never figured on.” Page 132 My grandmother took my living hand in her dying one. “I never had no quarrel with the truth. I hope somebody says something like that at my wake.” Page 149 It was not the first time that I had seen my mother cry, but the experience troubled me in the pit of myself. Page 150 People say all sorts of things on their deathbeds. At the very end, they just disappear inside themselves, but a couple of days before, they speak from the heart. | BOOKMARK Page 190. Page 194 The bitter scratch of his unshaven good-night kiss will always, for me, be the sensation of grief. Page 210 Even caught up in a high ponytail, you could see that it was waterfall hair, wild, tumbling, slick, and beautiful. Lord knows it isn’t fair how nature parcels out the goodies. Page 244 Mama said she never doubted that Mary had come to Jesus. The truly saved don’t have to go around talking about it. They just have this quietness about them like they know exactly where they’re going. | Page 247 “You don’t have to get on your knees. He can touch your heart while you are on your own two feet.” Page 260 “You got to learn how to listen sideways to what people are saying to get at what they really mean.” Page 310 There was no way to know for sure who had heard what, so all you could do was live your life like no one knew anything while being scared that everyone knew everything. Page 315 ‘The more I’m trusting you, the more you’re letting me down.’ ” I knew by then that I would never have my mother back, not in the way I had known her all my life. When you have seen your mother shattered, there’s no putting her back together. There will always be seams, chipped edges, and clumps of dried glue. Even if you could get her to where she looks the same, she will never be stronger than a cracked plate. Page 325 If there was anything the last few weeks had taught me, it was that people only told you what they wanted you to know. Asking a straight question didn’t necessarily get you a straight answer. Page 334 God didn’t mean for us to be alone.

Song Yet Sung ~ by James McBride — March 2009 . . . . . . . 6

After reading McBride’s The Color of Water, I am disappointed in this, his third move. A slave chase story of sorts – he crafts his words well, yet I just can’t get past his mosquitoes in the Maryland marshes in the cold month of March. They just don’t breed then; definite sign of a city writer. Also, preposterous quick conclusion with all characters somehow meeting in a movie-like crescendo ending. Still, it did keep my interest enough to keep reading to the end.

Teacher Man ~ by Frank McCourt — Summer 2008

Placeholder for transcription obbly, our certainties whimsical. PAGE 138lwojing (extreme egocentrism)

Thirteen Moons ~ Charles Frazier — Summer 2008 and my selection for Book Group, — January 2014

I read this in 2008 after Ike had exclaimed about it. He was honored when I selected it for the January 2014 book group meeting, where he was too ill to come downstairs to participate. I cannot find my written review from 2008. The 2014 journal entry, before just before my 8-year drought of grief: The characters, Will, Bear, and Featherspoon slowly weave this man’s man novel together in a slow southern way, with hardworking grit and lots of philosophical commentary. It was not as good as I had remembered. The audio CD is narrated by Will Patton in a lyrical and delightful voice. p72–Everybody foot slogging toward the Nightland together. p83–13 moons in 4 seasons. p85–They watched the fire to let their imaginations catch up, “It was a mistake to answer too quickly. . . . We are all kindling for the fire.” p93–Without a place where you belong, you have too many choices before you and therefore cannot go in any direction. It is a fine line between too few choices and too many . . . . Having a place means being bound in many directions. To the land, the animals, and the people. . . . By relations and even the names of places. Such ties are comforting and discomforting. In some ways it is easier to ba an exile than to have responsibilities. But also sadder. I had not bounds and therefore lost in the world. p110–Getting what you want is largely a matter of claiming what you want. p121–Featherstone mellowed, as men have a tendency to do. I think that any attribution of age-induced softening is more a matter of generosity of others than a change in ourselves. Its one of the sweet deals life offers: the older we get, the more we are forgiven the things we did at twenty-seven. p159–Dueling is a kind of courtship, codified and fraught with etiquette, but with the ultimate ceremony designed to effect the irrevocable parting of two lives rather than their wedding.” My favorite quote, which also was Ike’s in this book, “We all, when we’re young, think we’ll live forever. Then at some point you settle for living a great long while. But after that final distinction is achieved, survival becomes at best uncomfortable. Everyone and everything you love goes away. And yet it is your fortune to remain. You find yourself exiled in a transformed world peopled by strangers. Lost in places you’ve known as intimately as the back of your hand. Eternal river courses and ridge lines become you only friends. That is the point when living any farther either becomes ridiculous and amusing or else you fall away and follow all Creation through the gates of death to the Nightland. You’re left with nothing but your moods and your memory. Pitiful and powerful tools.”

The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion ~ by Fannie Flagg — Book Group, Heidi Long — January 2015 8-yr Drought

I remember commenting at book group that I did not think this was nearly as good as Fried Green Tomatoes, which I had read long before I wrote reviews. I have very few highlights on my iPad Kindle version of this book, hand transcribed: p5 – She had made a sacred vow to never bully her children. p6 – Since the hurricane, the insurance on everybody’s house on the Mobile Bay had gone sky-high. But Lenore was adamant about never leaving her home and had announced with a dramatic gesture . . . p9 – Poor thing. She had been stuck in the middle, with all the Poole children and animals on one side and Lenore on the other, calling her night and day, but she never complained. She said, “Hell, I’m a widow. What else am I going to do for fun? p20 – The problem with Lenore has always been trying to figure out what behavior is just ‘delightfully eccentric’ and what’s ‘as batty as hell.’

From the Barnes&Noble review: Mrs. Sookie Poole of Point Clear, Alabama, has just married off the last of her daughters and is looking forward to relaxing and perhaps traveling with her husband, Earle. The only thing left to contend with is her mother, the formidable Lenore Simmons Krackenberry. Lenore may be a lot of fun for other people, but is, for the most part, an overbearing presence for her daughter. Then one day, quite by accident, Sookie discovers a secret about her mother’s past that knocks her for a loop and suddenly calls into question everything she ever thought she knew about herself, her family, and her future.

Sookie begins a search for answers that takes her to California, the Midwest, and back in time, to the 1940s, when an irrepressible woman named Fritzi takes on the job of running her family’s filling station. Soon truck drivers are changing their routes to fill up at the All-Girl Filling Station. Then, Fritzi sees an opportunity for an even more groundbreaking adventure. As Sookie learns about the adventures of the girls at the All-Girl Filling Station, she finds herself with new inspiration for her own life.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek ~ by Kim Michele Richardson — Book Group, Donna Brady — January 2021

Placeholder for transcription obbly, our certainties whimsical. PAGE 138lwojing (extreme egocentrism)

 The Curious Charms of Author Pepper ~ by Phaedra Patrick — Book Group, Sue Hostetter — January 2022 . . . . . . 8

This quaint man, Author Pepper, is teaching me lesson in gathering myself as I enter the 8th year mark of Ike’s death. Author is at the 1-year mark of his wife’s death. He and Miriam were married for 40 years. Author has kept himself walled off from the world and family both physically and emotionally. He finds a charm bracelet of Miriam’s and it leads him to question her, their marriage, and life as he traces her life before he knew her to India, London, a Tiger preserve, back to his children. In the process and after – especially in learning of Sonny Yardley who calls Miriam a murderer – he learns to live again in the knowledge that they did indeed, have a good marriage. Happy. And he learned about gifts, giving them, and why they’re important.

Bookmarks — pages 60, 61, 78, 99, 116, 150, 176 216, 261, 266, 306, 309, 322, 323,

Highlights: 280 “Yes. Yes, I think she did. It was a quiet life. We have two lovely children” “Then you must try to be happy. Would she want you to be sad” “No. but its hard not to be.” p60–“. . reaching out into thin air to place a gentle hand on her mother’s diminishing shoulders. Lucy wanted her brother to show more of an interest in her life and Dad’s.” p61–“She hadn’t want to beg. When she looked back it seemed so feeble. But she begged.” p79–When he’d imagined his death (and he thought about it often now Miriam was gone), his preferred method was to fall asleep and not wake up — though he would want someone to find him straightaway. It would be awful if he bacon to create a stink. And he wanted to look serene, not have his face screwed up in pain or anything.” p116–We studied De Chauffant in class. He’s one of the most influential novelists of the sixties. His novel Stories We Tell is a classic. p150– “The thing was, when you got to his age, it was unlikely that there would be more wonderful days to come. Ones where you stopped and thought. I will remember this day forever.” p266–That evening she barely spoke to him and when he finally asked why she was so snippy, she told him that she had expected a gift." May NOTE p266–Presents are not about asking or saying we want them. We want them to be GIVEN from thoughtful consideration without our needing to say that yes, we do indeed want one. What we want is to know that another person cared enough, to know us enough, from listening to us enough, to really have at least an idea of what would tickle us with delight. That they noticed. Because only then would we truly know that we are chosen, known, loved, and celebrated by another person. That they care enough to want to delight us with their thinking of us. Gifting ourselves never meets that measure. Not even close. p323–“You were never a lost cause, Arthur. Just one who had lost direction a bit.” “Who will I hide from now?” p328–They took their tea in the courtyard. “I am a creature of habit, “ Rajeskh said. “I like to have y tea at the same time each day. I like my newspaper folded in the same way and I take precisely thirty . . . “Then I am spoiling our routine” “You are not smiling it. Your are enhandic it. It is good to shake things up.” Author Rajesh habout his own routines, how they had started as a comfort and became a prison. . . “I remember that Miriam was not one for Routines. I think she was a free spirit.” p330–Here he was, his sandals white from sand and his ankles suntanned. It was unexpected, invigorating. and his wife had le him here. “We worry about out children and then they worry about us,” Rajesh replied. “It is the circle of lief. Enjoy it.”

The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time ~ by Mark Haddon Book Group, Cindy Stoner June 2014 . . . . . . . Drought

Some years before this book group selection, Candy Thompson recommended and enjoyed it. Quirky and odd, I recall really liking it, but somehow didn’t review it. So alas, in the grief drought, I did not review. Trying to catch up on all the books not reviews during this time and rely on links to reviews as reference. This one from SparkNotes:

“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time takes place in the year 1998 in and around the town of Swindon, England. The fifteen-year-old narrator of the story, Christopher John Francis Boone, discovers the slain body of his neighbor’s poodle, Wellington, on the neighbor’s front lawn one evening and sets out to uncover the murderer. His investigation is at times aided, and at other times hampered, by the mild form of autism he lives with. After Christopher hits a policeman in a misunderstanding at the scene of the crime, the police take Christopher into custody. They release Christopher with only a stern warning, under the condition that he promises to them and to his father not to look into the murder any further.

“Christopher chronicles his investigation in a book—the book we are reading—as part of a school assignment. Ignoring repeated warnings from his father, Christopher investigates the crime scene and conducts interviews with the residents of his block. He uncovers a more tangled plot than was first apparent when he discovers that his father and the owner of the slain dog, Mrs Shears, had a romantic affair. He subsequently learns that their affair began in reaction to another relationship, one carried on between Mr. Shears and Christopher’s mother, before she disappeared from Christopher’s life.”

The Dutch House ~ by Ann Patchett — Book Group, Maureen Klingaman May 2021 . . . . . . . Drought

Placeholder until I get to the review and Kindle highlights. Enjoyed this book.

The Four Winds: A Novel ~ by Kristin Hannah — Book Group, Cindy Stoner — May 2022 . . . . . . . 8

One very sad book. Historical fiction on the Dust Bowl and how that affected farmers and working conditions in a time of great loss of topsoil and rain. The interview with the author reveals parallels with the Covid 19 Pandemic. Indeed, the wealthy corporations need a poor and hungry working class for cheap labor; p378 – “Pour, Hungry desperate folks are easier to control.” The story of Elsa and her children, Loreda and Ant paints the reality of the struggles and hardship of being viewed as less-than human. The rich were getting richer on the backs of the people via company stores and, essentially, slave labor. I have added many Kindle highlights below but a few really stand out to set the stage for this book, which I think ends far too abruptly for the weight of the message. Perhaps it is because it wasn’t a happy ending despite being probably very true-to-life. p12 – Elsa’s grandfather Wolcott, “Don’t worry about dying, Elsa. Worry about not living. Be brave.”

1921 —  p6 · The Age of Innocence had awakened something in her, reminded her keenly of the passage of time. p15 · As she sewed, she began to feel a remarkable sensation: hope. p23 · She knew now what she hadn’t known before, hadn’t even suspected: she would do anything, suffer anything, to be loved, even if it was just for a night. p27 · She’d learned how to disappear in place long ago. She was like one of those animals whose defense mechanism is to blend into the landscape and become invisible.

1934 —  p63 · Although she hadn’t seen her parents for years, it turned out that a parent’s disapproval was a powerful, lingering voice that shaped and defined one’s self-image. p66 · There was something she hadn’t known when she went into marriage and became a mother that she knew now: it was only possible to live without love when you’d never known it. p89 · Elsa had made a point of never seeing her family or speaking to them again, but even so, their absence caused an ache that wouldn’t go away. Apparently you couldn’t stop loving some people, or needing their love, even when you knew better. p91 · Rose . . . showed Elsa that grief could be borne one day, one chore, at a time. p95 · “You want too little, Elsa.” “You make that sound like a bad thing.” “You’re a good woman.” He made that sound like a bad thing, p102 · She had thought that making a perfect home was the answer to making a marriage happy.

p149 · Elsa had thought of the plains pioneers, people like Tony and Rose, as indomitable, invincible. People who had come to this vast, unknown country with nothing but a dream and who had tamed the land with grit and determination and hard work. p173 · The sun had burned everything to dust and the wind had blown it all away. Millions of tons of topsoil gone.

1935 — Bookmark, p208 · p218 p226 · “I don’t want money from the government,” Elsa said. She didn’t want them to think she’d come all this way for government handouts. “I want a job.” “Yeah,” Jeb said. “None of us want to live on the dole. FDR and his New Deals programs done good things to help the workin’ man, but us small farmers and farmworkers sorta got forgot. The big growers got all the power in this state.” Bookmarks – p231, 234, 257-8, 263, 280 Poverty was a soul-crushing thing. A cave that tightened around you, its pinprick of light closing a little more at the end of each desperate, unchanged day.

1936 — Page 328 · But he’d saved her children and given them a place to stay. And, strangely, beneath the fierceness she saw in him, she sensed pain. Not loneliness, exactly, but an aloneness she recognized. p334 · “Of course. Fear is smart until…” He headed for the door, paused as he reached for the knob. “Until what?” He looked back at her. “Until you realize you’re afraid of the wrong thing.” p344-5 · The idea of asking for credit when there were no savings to draw upon felt to Elsa like begging. . . Elsa approached cautiously, afraid that she might cry. She understood at last what her grandfather had meant when he said, Pretend to be brave if you have to. p347 · “It’s not weak, you know. To feel things deeply, to want things. To need.” p354 · “Oh. We don’t take cash, missus. Just credit.” “But I have money, finally. I wanted to pay on my bill, too.” “It doesn’t work that way. Credit only. . . . “But … how do I get out from my debt?” “You pick.” The reality of the situation sank in. Why hadn’t Elsa figured it out before? Welty wanted her in their debt, wanted her to spend her relief money lavishly and be broke again next winter. …“We can’t follow the crops?” . . . They couldn’t follow the crops and keep the cabin, which meant they had to stay here, without work, waiting for cotton, living on relief and credit. “So, we’re slaves.” p371 · The things your parents say and the things your husband doesn’t say become a mirror, don’t they? You see yourself as they see you, and no matter how far you come, you bring that mirror with you.” “Break it,” Jean said. p403 · “My grandfather was a Texas Ranger. He used to tell me that courage was a lie. It was just fear that you ignored.” She looked at him. “Well, I’m scared.” p403 · . . . a deep, abiding fear. Courage is fear you ignore. But how did one do that, really? In practical terms. p406-7 · “I loved your dad. I did. But it wasn’t enough for him, and now I realize it wasn’t enough for me, either. He deserved better and so did I.” As she said the unexpected words, Elsa felt them reshape her somehow. “But you know how my life really changed? It wasn’t marriage. It was the farm. Rose and Tony. I found a place to belong, people who loved me, and they became the home I’d dreamed about as a girl. And then you came along and taught me how big love could be.” . . . “I’m sorry,” Loreda said. “For—” “No sorries. We fought, we struggled, we hurt each other, so what? That’s what love is, I think. It’s all of it. Tears, anger, joy, struggle. Mostly, it’s durable. It lasts. Never once in all of it—the dust, the drought, the fights with you—never once did I stop loving you or Ant or the farm.” Elsa laughed. “So, my long-winded answer to your question is this: Rose and Tony and the farm are home. We will see them all again. Someday.” p409 · “Eight years ago, Mexicans picked almost all of the crops in this great valley,” Jack said. “They came across the border, moved into these fields, and picked the crops and moved on. February for peas in Nipomo. June for apricots in Santa Clara. Grapes in August in Fresno, and September here for cotton. They came, they picked, and they returned home for the winter. Invisible to the locals at every stage. p412 · “What?” “I thought … it’s not worth that.” He looked at her. “You’ve unbalanced me, Elsa.” (Jack) p415 · “You see now,” Jack said. “A fight like this isn’t romantic. I was in San Francisco when the National Guard went after strikers with bayonets.” “People died that day,” Natalia said. “Strikers. They called it Bloody Thursday.” p421 · How long could hungry, homeless, starving people stand up for an idea? p423 · “You’re wearing your worried face,” Loreda said when Elsa sat down on the bed beside her. “It’s my love face,” Elsa said, stroking her daughter’s hair. . . . Jack stood. She walked boldly up to him. In his eyes, she saw love. For her. It was young, new, not deep and settled and familiar like Rose and Tony’s, but love just the same, or at least the beautiful, promising start of it. All of her life she’d waited for a moment like this, yearned for it, and she would not let it pass by unnoticed, unremarked upon. Time felt incredibly precious in these hours before the strike. “I promised a girlfriend something crazy.” p425-6 · Love is what remains when everything else is gone. This is what I should have told my children when we left Texas. What I will tell them tonight. Not that they will understand yet. How could they? I am forty years old, and I only just learned this fundamental truth myself. Love. In the best of times, it is a dream. In the worst of times, a salvation. . . . Jack says that I am a warrior and, while I don’t believe it, I know this: A warrior believes in an end she can’t see and fights for it. A warrior never gives up. A warrior fights for those weaker than herself. It sounds like motherhood to me.

The Innocent ~ by Harland Coben — March 2009 . . . . . . . 4

Quick read who-done-it book of no great literary import. Pushed on me by Bill Zapta, teacher (soccer coach and my bias against sports being just surface stuff.) I took Bill’s photo for the third round of the READ poster project I created with Sue Hostetter, librarian, for my Commercial Art class. Many inconsistencies in this book: p161 – “You’ve Got Mail – sure they wouldn’t be using that version of AOL at this point. p304 – Harrisburg, Pa airport ticketing upstairs - it is downstairs. (Do the research, Coben.) p150-51 – Deep pages reflecting what prison does to a person. p158 – He drives his car; but only pages earlier he’d left his car at the Dive Bar because he didn’t want a DUI, so how did his car get back to his house for him to drive to Cingle’s office at midnight, to boot. (His wife’s car was with her at the same hotel. Arg!

The Kitchen Front 6/21 ~ by Jennifer Ryan — Book Group, Cindy Stoner — June 2021 . . . . . . . Drought

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. I remember some things of this book, intrigued about flowers and meaning. It may be notated on the Kindle version on my iPad.

The Language of Flowers ~ by Vanessa Diffenbaugh — Book Group, Sallie Bookman — August 2014 . . . . . . . . . 8. Drought . . Not recalling particulars, so notes are listed below as my highlights on the kindle version I do remember thinking that this book on flowers was interesting since I like to play around with flowers and always enjoyed my flower patch as a memorial for the cats that lived with us over the years and were buried there: Mama, Precious, and Patches.

Part One / Common Thistle — Page 5 · I paused, thinking. I’d planned to gather a response for the girls, something biting and hateful, but I felt strangely forgiving. Page 7 · “This is it, you know,” she said. “Your life starts here. No one to blame but yourself from here on out.” Page 17 · “You have to want it,” Meredith said. “I can only do so much. At the end of the day, you have to want it.” Page 19 · But over time the objects came to read like a string of clues to my past, a path of bread crumbs, and I had a vague sense of wanting to follow them back to the place before my memories began. Page 41 · “I believe you can prove everyone wrong, too, Victoria. Your behavior is a choice; it isn’t who you are.” If Elizabeth really believed this, I thought, there was nothing but disappointment in her future. Page 44 · It was a strange feeling— the excitement of a secret combined with the satisfaction of being useful. . . . a boss with a direct, unemotional style. Page 46 · “Well, Earl is a funny old man. Angry, mostly, but occasionally soft in ways you wouldn’t expect. He told me yesterday he’s old enough to have given up on God and come back around.” Page 52 · You have to want it — You have to want to be a daughter, a sister, a friend, a student, she had told me, again and again. Page 72 · The woman’s eyes flitted between my work and the window. She had the energy of a trapped bird. Page 77 · “I can teach you the flower for hate, if you like, but the word hate is unspecific. Hate can be passionate or disengaged; it can come from dislike but also from fear.

Part Two / A Heart Unacquainted — Page 113 · It wasn’t as if the flowers themselves held within them the ability to bring an abstract definition into physical reality. Instead, it seemed that Earl, and then Bethany, walked home with a bouquet of flowers expecting change, and the very belief in the possibility instigated a transformation. Page 121 · Then, in an instant, all I had was my work. What I lost felt irreplaceable. Page 136 · I spent long afternoons alone in the greenhouses, passing courteous laborers on my walks between my work and the water tower. Page 138 · “I don’t trust myself,” I said. “Whatever you imagine our life would be like together, it won’t happen. I’d ruin it.” Page 159 · “Energy in adversity.” Page 164 · It seemed he was content to keep our life together confined to the flowers and the present moment. Page 164 · About our deepening relationship, I felt fear and desire in equal, unpredictable parts. Page 174 · If he did, on occasion, feel my heart to be an unreachable object, he never mentioned it to me.

Part Three / Moss — Page 254 · The open forgiveness in her eyes, the uncensored love, terrified me. Like Grant, my daughter deserved so much more than I could give her. I wanted her to carry hawthorn, laugh easily, and love without fear. Page 261 · A year after I’d moved in to her home, she was a different woman, softened in a way that allowed suffering.

Part Four / New Beginnings — Page 270 · By the end of July, bold brides carried ceramic bowls of strawberries or fragrant clusters of fennel, and no one questioned their aesthetics but rather marveled at the simplicity of their desire. Page 278 · I knew right then that you felt unworthy, that you believed yourself to be unforgivably flawed.” Page 284 · The thrill of knowing that Elizabeth still wanted me had dulled the pain of the past decade, dulled even my constant aching for my daughter. Page 285 · Caroline and Mark were debating red roses and white tulips, love versus the declaration of love. Page 296 · In that moment, we were the same, each of us destroyed by our limited understanding of reality. Page 298 · More than anything, I realized with surprise, I didn’t want to be alone. Page 307 · And the water tower, Grant promised, would always be mine for a brief escape, a moment of solitude. It was everything I needed to stay. Page 310 · Over time, we would learn each other, and I would learn to love her like a mother loves a daughter, imperfectly and without roots. Victoria’s Dictionary of Flowers, Pages 311 - 318

The Lincoln Highway ~ by Amor Towles — Book Group, Donna Brady — November 2021 . . . . . . . 8

The major theme in this book is the balance of virtue and vice. Not balancing them against each other, but having balance in them, and not to take them to our demise. P13 It was Job who had the oxen and Noah who had the Hamer. p92 Indignation and guilt. p101 Sally was my favorite character who would not believe that Jesus would turn his back on a woman taking care of the house - Martha. Sally on making strawberry preservdes Pages 103,4 · So yes, the making of strawberry preserves is time-consuming, old-fashioned, and unnecessary. Then why, you might ask, do I bother to do it? . . . I do it because it’s time-consuming. . . Time is that which God uses to separate the idle from the industrious. For time is a mountain and upon seeing its steep incline, the idle will lie down among the lilies . . . What the worthy endeavor requires is planning, effort, attentiveness, and the willingness to clean up. . . . I make preserves in the manner that was taught to me by my mother, God rest her soul. She made preserves in the manner that was taught to her by her mother, and Grandma made preserves in the manner that was taught to her by hers. And so on, and so forth, back through the ages all the way to Eve. Or, at least as far as Martha. • • • And I do it because it’s unnecessary. . . For kindness begins where necessity ends.

iPad Kindle highlights. Page 29 · For his father to tear a page from any book was a sacrilege. What was even more shocking was that the page was torn from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays—that book which his father held in greater esteem than any other. Near the bottom, his father had carefully underlined two sentences in red ink. Page 88 · The willingness to take a beating: That’s how you can tell you’re dealing with a man of substance. A man like that doesn’t linger on the sidelines throwing gasoline on someone else’s fire; and he doesn’t go home unscathed. Page 91 · Boys, she would begin in her motherly way, in your time you shall do wrong unto others and others shall do wrong unto you. . . What wisdom the Lord does not see fit to endow us with at birth, He provides through the gift of experience. Page 92 · So there they were: indignation and guilt. Two contradictory forces so sure to confound, I resigned myself to the possibility I might never sleep soundly again. Page 101 · Well, I’m sorry. But if ever you needed proof that the Bible was written by a man, there you have it. . . But I am not willing to believe that Jesus Christ Our Savior—who at the drop of a hat would heal a leper or restore sight to the blind—would turn his back on a woman who was taking care of a household. So I don’t blame Him. Whom I blame is Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and every other man who’s served as priest or preacher since. (More of Sally in my preface.) Page 309 · At every step, there had been someone he could have asked for assistance, someone who could have eased his way by directing him to the right staircase, the right platform, the right train. Yet he had refused to ask a soul. With a grim self-awareness, Emmett remembered how critical he had been of his father’s reluctance to ask the more experienced farmers around him for advice—as if to do so would somehow leave him unmanned. Self-reliance as folly, Emmett had thought. Page 330 · If I learned anything in the war, it’s that the point of utter abandonment—that moment at which you realize no one will be coming to your aid, not even your Maker—is the very moment in which you may discover the strength required to carry on. The Good Lord does not call you to your feet with hymns from the cherubim and Gabriel blowing his horn. He calls you to your feet by making you feel alone and forgotten. For only when you have seen that you are truly forsaken will you embrace the fact that what happens next rests in your hands, and your hands alone. Page 495 · When we’re young, so much time is spent teaching us the importance of keeping our vices in check. Our anger, our envy, our pride. But when I look around, it seems to me that so many of our lives end up being hampered by a virtue instead. If you take a trait that by all appearances is a merit—a trait that is praised by pastors and poets, a trait that we have come to admire in our friends and hope to foster in our children—and you give it to some poor soul in abundance, it will almost certainly prove an obstacle to their happiness. Just as someone can be too smart for their own good, there are those who are too patient for their own good, or too hardworking.

The Love of a Good Woman ~ by Alice Munro — Book Group, Maureen Klingaman — February 2014 . . . . . . . Drought

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7+ years of not writing my book comments. I remember NOTHING of this book. The month Ike died and I know that could not focus nor enjoy books. Kindle highlands on page 20, 24, 26, 32, 38, and 48. On page 59 or 60 I write a comment “this is disgusting” . . . Did I stop reading at page 85 only 18% of the book? (8 short stories, 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature - I must try reading it again. This review updated 7/7/22 from goodreads.com . . .

Alice Munro has a genius for entering the lives of ordinary people and capturing the passions and contradictions that lie just below the surface. In this brilliant new collection she takes mainly the lives of women - unruly, ungovernable, unpredictable, unexpected, funny, sexy and completely recognisable - and brings their hidden desires bubbling to the surface. The love of a good woman is not as pure and virtuous as it seems: as in her title story it can be needy and murderous. Here are women behaving badly, leaving husbands and children, running off with unsuitable lovers, pushing everyday life to the limits, and if they don't behave badly, they think surprising and disturbing thoughts.

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint ~ by Brady Udall — Book Group, Deb Meckley — July 2014 . . . . . . . Drought 9

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. I remember some things of this book, and that I really enjoyed it. The mailman running over Edgar’s head certainly was an attention grabber. This review is from goodreads.com . . .

“If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close. With these words Edgar Mint, half-Apache and mostly orphaned, makes his unshakable claim on our attention. In the course of Brady Udall’s high-spirited, inexhaustibly inventive novel, Edgar survives not just this bizarre accident, but a hellish boarding school for Native American orphans, a well-meaning but wildly dysfunctional Mormon foster-family, and the loss of most of the illusions that are supposed to make life bearable. What persists is Edgar’s innate goodness, his belief in the redeeming power of language, and his determination to find and forgive the man who almost killed him. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint is a miracle of storytelling, bursting with heartache and hilarity and inhabited by characters as outsized as the landscape of the American West.”

The Nickel Boys ~ by Colson Whitehead — Book Group, Deb Meckley — July 2022 . . . . . . . 9

I borrowed both the Kindle version and the Audio from the Woodbury library via the digital app, Libby. The 14 day borrowing was staggered by six days. The audio was about seven hours, relatively short, so I could listen a second time as I juggled back and forth to the Kindle version. This allowed me to highlight and bookmark the written sections as I do so much of, probably too much. The highlighted text on the iPad can then be emailed to myself, which I use to copy and paste into these reviews. My handwritten journal reviews will be the shorter now as I will keep the highlights for this website platform. This is a well written painful story of a reform school for boys in Florida which spelled out the horror of such places, starting with the discovery of unmarked graveyards by college students of archaeology. The story follows one boy, Elwood, like so many were wrongly sent to the school and abused physically, psychologically and sexually. Whitehead’s novel is based on the stories of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. Theofficialwhitehouseboys.org is the website that presents stores of former students in their own words.

Prologue Page 3 · Even in death the boys were trouble. Page 5 · No white crosses, no names. Just bones waiting for someone to find them. Page 6 · If that happened to the harmless places, what do you think the haunted places looked like? Nickel Boys were cheaper than a dime-a-dance and you got more for your money, or so they used to say. Part One Page 11 · The crackle of truth. They didn’t have a TV set but Dr. King’s speeches were such a vivid chronicle—containing all that the Negro had been and all that he would be—that the record was almost as good as television. Page 17 · Through high school, he went back and forth over the matter of whether the dishwashers had let him win all along. He’d been so proud of his ability, dumb and simple as it was. He never settled on one conclusion until he got to Nickel, which made the truth of the contests unavoidable. Page 24 · Mr. Marconi struggled to tell the colored ladies of Frenchtown apart—all of them wore a scowl when they saw him—and Elwood made a competent ambassador. Page 24 · You lose a percentage here and there, but that was in the overhead—kids steal a candy bar today but they and their friends spend their money in the store for years. Them and their parents. Chase them out into the street over some little thing . . . and then the parents stop coming in because they’re embarrassed. Letting the kids steal was almost an investment, the way he looked at it. Page 26 · There are big forces that want to keep the Negro down, like Jim Crow, and there are small forces that want to keep you down, like other people, and in the face of all those things, the big ones and the smaller ones, you have to stand up straight and maintain your sense of who you are. Page 29 · How to get through the day if every indignity capsized you in a ditch? One learned to focus one’s attention. Page 30 · The class focused on US history since the Civil War, but at every opportunity Mr. Hill guided them to the present, linking what had happened a hundred years ago to their current lives. They’d set off down one road at the beginning of class and it always led back to their doorstep. Page 33 . . difficult for Elwood to think that the old woman was afraid of anything. But fear was her fuel. Yes, Harriet had joined the bus boycott. . . Sit-ins were a young person’s game and she didn’t have the heart. Act above your station, and you will pay. Whether it was God angry at her for taking more than her portion or the white man teaching her not to ask for more crumbs than he wanted to give, Harriet would pay. Page 34 · Hard work was a fundamental virtue, for hard work didn’t allow time for marches or sit-ins. . . but Elwood was changed. Closer. At the demonstration, he had felt somehow closer to himself. Page 57 · Elwood saw that he was always simultaneously at home in whatever scene he found himself and also seemed like he shouldn’t have been there; inside and above at the same time; a part and apart. Page 71 · But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door. The GI Bill fixed things pretty good for the white boys he served with, but the uniform meant different things depending who wore it. Page 79 · It occurred to Elwood that he’d never seen a Negro in the small town of Mayberry, where the show took place. Page 82 · The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course. Page 86 · Problem was, even if you avoided trouble, trouble might reach out and snatch you anyway. Page 100 · Nickel was a longtime boxing evangelist, had steered a lobbying group for its expansion in the Olympics. Page 105 · You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other. Nickel was racist as hell—half the people who worked here probably dressed up like the Klan on weekends—but the way Turner saw it, wickedness went deeper than skin color. It was Spencer. It was Spencer and it was Griff and it was all the parents who let their children wind up here. It was people. Page 112 · The fight was as rigged and rotten as the dishwashing races he’d told Turner about, another gear in the machine that kept black folks down. Page 114 · They came for Griff that night and he never returned. The story spread that he was too proud to take a dive. That he refused to kneel. . .When the state of Florida dug him up fifty years later, the forensic examiner noted the fractures in the wrists and speculated that he’d been restrained before he died, in addition to the other violence attested by the broken bones. Page 118 · Location 1473Jaimie kept a quiet profile and conducted himself in accordance with the Nickel handbook’s rules of conduct—a miracle, since no one had ever seen the handbook despite its constant invocations by the staff. Like justice, it existed in theory. Bookmark - Page 121 · Elwood’s beating at the White House had him scarred all over, not just his legs. It had weeviled deep into his personality. The way his shoulders sank when Spencer appeared, the flinch and shrink. He could only stand so much talk of revenge before the reality grabbed ahold of him. Page 124 · Elwood’s aversion was understandable; the visit to the Ice Cream Factory had left its marks. Turner hated the stuff on account of his aunt’s boyfriend, who moved in with them when Turner was eleven years old. (My note: Many one sentence references of sexual abuse. Quiet and slipped into the text with one sentence burrowed and hidden just like it is in real life.) Page 126 · The day after Turner put himself between Mavis and Ishmael’s fists, Ishmael took him out for ice cream. A. J. Smith’s, over on Market Street. “Bring this young man the biggest sundae you got.” Every bite like a sock in the mouth. He ate every miserable spoonful and ever since it struck him that adults are always trying to buy off children to make them forget their bad actions. Had the flavor of that fact in his mouth when he ran from his aunt’s house that last time. Page 144-146 · There were four ways out of Nickel. One: Serve your time. You could also serve time by aging out. Two: The court might intervene. Three: You could die. Fourth: Finally, you could run. Make a run for it and see what happened. It was crazy to run and crazy not to run. How could a boy look past the school’s property line, see that free and living world beyond, and not contemplate a dash to freedom? To write one’s own story for once. To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one’s humanity. Page 154 · There was a fifth way out of Nickel, according to Elwood. He cooked it up after his grandmother came on visiting day. In keeping his head down, in his careful navigation so that he made it to lights-out without mishap, he fooled himself that he had prevailed. That he had outwitted Nickel because he got along and kept out of trouble. In fact he had been ruined. He was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed. Page 165 · That’s what the school did to a boy. It didn’t stop when you got out. Bend you all kind of ways until you were unfit for straight life, good and twisted by the time you left. . . they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal. Bookmark - Page 172 · The capacity to suffer. Elwood—all the Nickel boys—existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. Page 174 · It’s not an obstacle course. You can’t go around it—you have to go through it. Walk with your head up no matter what they throw at you.” Page 178 · You are a colored boy in a white man’s world. Page 191 · Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom. Take him away from his family, whip him until all he remembers is the whip, chain him up so all he knows is chains. A term in an iron sweatbox, cooking his brains in the sun, had a way of bringing a buck around, and so did a dark cell, a room aloft in darkness, outside time. Page 195 · The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change. He never listened, never saw what was plainly in front of him, and now he had been plucked from the world altogether. Page 206 · A drive through a blighted neighborhood snuffed out by that same immense exertion, or another boy shot dead by a cop: They treat us like subhumans in our own country. Always have. Maybe always will. Page 212 · “The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in solitary confinement happens to me every day. It’s when I wake up.” Mr. Johnson spent twenty-seven years in solitary confinement.

The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates ~ by Wes Moore — Book Group, Michelle — September 2022 . . . . 9

I enjoyed this book and see why the opportunity of education, mentors, and supportive family makes all the difference. I listened to the audio, adding the kindle version via the Libby library app loan. At times it was confusing to me as to which Wes Moore was on deck.

Chapter 3 - Location 775 Public school vs Riverdale Country School where JFK attended as a child. 793 My mother saw Riverdale as a haven, a place where I could escape my neighborhood and open my horizons. But for me, it was where I got lost. 844 In 2008, there were 417 homicides in New York City. In 1990, there were 2,605. 889 Later in life I learned that the way many governors projected the numbers of beds they’d need for prison facilities was by examining the reading scores of third graders.

Part II - Choices and Second Chances 1039 When my conversations with Wes had begun years earlier, we’d said only what we thought the other wanted to hear. What the other needed to hear. But over time it was hard to keep up the act, and our conversations drifted toward an almost therapeutic honesty. “When did you feel like you’d become a man?” 1050 “From everything you told me, both of us did some pretty wrong stuff when we were younger. And both of us had second chances. But if the situation or the context where you make the decisions don’t change, then second chances don’t mean too much, huh?” 1055 “I guess it’s hard sometimes to distinguish between second chances and last chances.”

1114 She whispered to herself, “Don’t ask a question unless you are ready to hear the answer.” 1117 She wasn’t only upset about the drugs, she was upset about the lying. 1174 I found in hip-hop the sound of my generation talking to itself, working through the fears and anxieties and inchoate dreams—of wealth or power or revolution or success—we all shared.

Chapter 5 Location 1369 She looked at me as if for the first time. The days when she could physically intimidate me were clearly over. She turned around and walked out of the room. She was devastated. She was losing her son, and she was not sure how to turn the tide. We didn’t know it at the time, but once alone, we both started to cry. 1477 My grandparents knew that I was at a crucial juncture in my life. These forks in the road can happen so fast for young boys; within months or even weeks, their journeys can take a decisive and possibly irrevocable turn. With no intervention—or the wrong intervention—they can be lost forever. My mother made the decision to intervene—and decided that overdoing it was better than doing nothing at all. She felt my environment needed to change and my options needed to expand. Drastically. My grandparents agreed. 1487 As I sat on the other end of the line, listening to my mother talk about “sacrifice,” I had no idea what my grandparents had given up. The five minutes went fast, and Colonel Batt signaled it was time for me to hang up and go to bed. “I love you, and I am proud of you. And, Wes, it’s time to stop running,” my mother said as I hung up. 1788 Our standard motto, “No excuses, no exceptions,” and our honor code, “A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those that do,” were not simply words we had to memorize but words to live by.

Part III - Paths Taken and Expectations Fulfilled 1933 Instead, I asked a question: “Do you think we’re all just products of our environments?” His smile dissolved into a smirk, with the left side of his face resting at ease. “I think so, or maybe products of our expectations.” “Others’ expectations of us or our expectations for ourselves?” “I mean others’ expectations that you take on as your own.” I realized then how difficult it is to separate the two. The expectations that others place on us help us form our expectations of ourselves.

Chapter 7 - The Land That God Forgot Location 2007 “When it is time for you to leave this school, leave your job, or even leave this earth, you make sure you have worked hard to make sure it mattered you were ever here.” Life’s impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It’s what shapes our time here. It’s what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted. 2104 Levy told Wes about Job Corps, a program he was about to enter. Started in 1964 as a federal initiative, Job Corps was designed to help disadvantaged youth. It was part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and was modeled after the Depression era’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Levy was hoping to become its newest recruit. 2161 After completing his academic course work, Wes started on his professional training. He selected carpentry as his vocational specialty. He had always been handy. Years ago, the siding had begun to fall off his mother’s house. His brother, Tony, held the siding level as Wes’s steady hand nailed the replacement into place. The crack of the hammer as it connected with the head of the nail. The way the body of the nail disappeared into the siding. The joy of admiring a finished product. The quiet thrill of a job well done. 2184 He stayed at the Job Corps Center so he could provide a better life for his kids. He stayed for his mother, who sat home watching Tony continue moving in and out of the criminal justice system. He stayed at the Job Corps Center for himself. 2335 But just blocks away from their uncle’s house, scattered evidence of gentrification—driven by the looming presence of Temple University—had started to manifest.

Chapter 8 - Surrounded > 457 Having an advocate on the inside—someone who had gotten to know me and understood my story on a personal level—had obviously helped. It made me think deeply about the way privilege and preference work in the world, and how many kids who didn’t have “luck” like mine in this instance would find themselves forever outside the ring of power and prestige. So many opportunities in this country are apportioned in this arbitrary and miserly way, distributed to those who already have the benefit of a privileged legacy. Many of the kids I grew up with in the Bronx—including guys like Shea, who stayed outside the law—never believed that they’d have a shot. Many in the generation before mine believed that maybe they did, but they had the rug pulled out from under them by cuts in programs like the Pell Grants or by the myriad setbacks that came with the age of crack. Reversals spun them right back to the streets and away from their true ambitions. For the rest of us—those who snuck in despite coming from the margins—the mission has to be to pull up others behind us. That’s what Paul White did for me, and it changed my life. 2493 Even a legacy as ugly as that of Cecil Rhodes—a nineteenth-century imperialist, white supremacist, and rapacious businessman—could be turned around and used by a person like me, someone Cecil Rhodes would’ve undoubtedly despised, to change the world that Rhodes and people like him had left for us. 2509 That semester, fourteen of us left our respective corners of the United States and traveled to South Africa. We went to school together at the University of Cape Town and studied culture and reconciliation—a subject for which post-apartheid South Africa had become a living laboratory. Aside from the formal curriculum at the university, we would spend our time learning the language, learning the country, and learning more about ourselves than we ever imagined. 2526 When these townships were established, Afrikaners, or whites of Dutch ancestry, made up 9 percent of the population. Black Africans, who generally lived on only 5 percent of the nation’s land, made up over 80 percent of the population. These were South Africa’s “projects,” areas where despair and hopelessness were not accidental products of the environment but rather the whole point. 2543 As I moved closer to the home where my host family lived, I couldn’t stop staring at the shantytown. Living in the Bronx and Baltimore had given me the foolish impression that I knew what poverty looked like. At that moment, I realized I had no idea what poverty was—even in West Baltimore we lived like kings compared with this.

Epilogue 2727 “What made the difference?” And the truth is that I don’t know. The answer is elusive. People are so wildly different, and it’s hard to know when genetics or environment or just bad luck is decisive. 2737 When we’re young, it sometimes seems as if the world doesn’t exist outside our city, our block, our house, our room. We make decisions based on what we see in that limited world and follow the only models available. The most important thing that happened to me was not being physically transported—the moves from Baltimore to the Bronx to Valley Forge didn’t change my way of thinking. What changed was that I found myself surrounded by people—starting with my mom, grandparents, uncles, and aunts, and leading to a string of wonderful role models and mentors—who kept pushing me to see more than what was directly in front of me, to see the boundless possibilities of the wider world and the unexplored possibilities within myself. People who taught me that no accident of birth—not being black or relatively poor, being from Baltimore or the Bronx or fatherless—would ever define or limit me. In other words, they helped me to discover what it means to be free. As I wrote at the outset of this book: The chilling truth is that Wes’s story could have been mine; the tragedy is that my story could have been his. My only wish—and I know Wes feels the same—is that the boys (and girls) who come after us will know this freedom. It’s up to us, all of us, to make a way for them. A Call to Action 2792 The words of the author Samuel Beckett summarize the central message of this text: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” In fact, I believe that this describes the ebb and flow of life itself—try again, fail again, fail better. Failing doesn’t make us a failure. But not trying to do better, to be better, does make us fools.

The Queen's Gambit ~ by Walter Tevis — Book Group, my selection! — March 2021 . . . . . . . Drought

This was my selection I remember some things of this book, and that I really enjoyed it, as well the film based on this book. I am at the dawn of end of the book review drought, but still grappling with getting my act together to review books and films. I had heard or read reviews of the film and that it is based on the book. I enjoyed both but found the book, as I often do, to be better than the film. The book made the film better, and likewise the film made the book better. I have the immersive audio/written Kindle version on the iPad to read, listen to, and then watched the film. Entertainment for someone who does not play nor know much about chess.

Vocabulary — p94 precocity, p159 insouciance, p205 précis, p212 antimacassar, p218 sanguine, p240 inchmeal

Bookmarks — p129, p141, p159, p231 I had bookmarked these pages as significant in concepts, writing, and of interest.

Page 232 She would play the Queen’s Gambit. Benny and she had discussed that for hours, months before, and finally agreed that that was the way to go if she should get White against him. She did not want to play against Borgov’s Sicilian, much as she knew about the Sicilian, and the Queen’s Gambit was the best way to avoid it.

This is an interesting critique, The Fatal Flaw of “The Queens’s Gambit” by Sarah Miller, Dec 2020, The New Yorker. It covers the book and the film and Miller doesn't find it to be as compelling and entertaining as I did. Right out of the gate in this review is, “Michael Ondaatje, the author of “The English Patient,” said that he reread it “every few years—for the pure pleasure and skill of it.” I am a great fan of Ondaatje’s The English Patient, so that is enough for me to want to revisit this book and film. Pure pleasure.

The Sense of an Ending ~ by Julian Barnes — Book Group, Kathy Baxter — March 2014 . . . . . . . Drought

3/2014 — Kindle: 41 highlights, 7 notes, 3 bookmarks. You will get the drift, that this is a book I think I’d like to re-read. I have stopped with my notes after chapter one in this review. Normally I’d take those (hand written on scraps of paper and/or marked in the actual book, and then write the review. But these snippets don’t mean much except being pithy quotes, yet out of context from time and memory.

PAGE 3—This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed. . . it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. PAGE 7—This was one of the differences between the three of us and our new friend. We were essentially taking the piss, except when we were serious. He was essentially serious, except when he was taking the piss. It took us a while to work this out. He gave the impression that he believed in things. We did too–it was just the we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us. Hence what we thought of as our cleansing skepticism. PAGE 11—You’ll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life—and truth, and morality, and art—far more clearly than our compromised elders. (My note: Ah, yes. Teenagers always know everything. The ones who are on the trajectory to wisdom embrace what they don't know. Same is true of adults.) PAGE 17—History is that certainty at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation. 24—Poets don’t run out of material the way novelists do, because they don’t depend on material in the same way. (My note: What does this mean?) BOOKMARK Page 44— Mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history. Whereas in the private life, I the the converse is true: That you can infer past actions from current mental states. Page 79—“I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious.” PAGE 82—The more you learn, the less you fear. PAGE 93—But time . . . how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time. . .give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical. Page 104—Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. PAGE 138—solipsistic (a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing (extreme egocentrism)

The Sentence ~ by Louise Erdrich — Book Group, My selection — February 2022 . . . . . . . 9. UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Under Construction to add review - 11/16/22 — Kindle: 41 highlights, 7 notes, 3 bookmarks. You will get the drift, that this is a book I think I’d like to re-read. I have stopped with my notes after chapter one in this review. Normally I’d take those (hand written on scraps of paper and/or marked in the actual book, and then write the review. But these snippets don’t mean much except being pithy quotes, yet out of context from time and memory.

The Tender Bar ~ by J.R. Moehringer— Book Group, Maureen Klingaman — March 2022 and August 2008

August 2008 — Handwritten Review — A coming-of-age story and yet another novel (autobiography) of the value of education, and how all get “trapped” in their family-of-origin and how to break past that. This was an American version of Angela’s Ashes and Tis. It is good to finally see sobriety and acknowledgment of alcohol as “not the answer.” p288 – He was a dedicated craftsman . . . He’d mastered himself. He didn’t work hard merely because he was talented, but because he know that hard work was the right path. He wasn’t paralyzed by the fear of making mistake. (Although later he left his passion as the physical pain and emotional loss-of-love of this passion took hold. Change is good.) p291 – The first step in learning, I decided, was unlearning, casting off old habits and false assumptions.” p304 – “Books seemed to give him, not so much new opinions as new confidence in his opinions. p360 – Drinking and trying were opposite impulses.

March 2022 — Kindle Highlights — Page 33— Grandpa; Priests made him love words, and made it hard for him to say words. My first example of irony. | Page 43 – You don’t mind if I say ‘verisimilitude,’ do you . . . or if I say ‘perspicacious’? | Page 63 – I loved the look of those words, the shapes of them, the subliminal association of their typeface with the pretty face of my mother, but it may have been their functionality that won my heart. Like nothing else, words organized my world, put order to chaos, divided things neatly into black and white. Words even helped me organize my parents. My mother was the printed word—tangible, present, real—while my father was the spoken word—invisible, ephemeral, instantly part of memory. There was something comforting about this rigid symmetry. | Page 71 – Your best is whatever you can do comfortably without having a breakdown. . . I will not worry about something that will not happen. Page 129 – “Dreiser! You want to turn him into a cynic like you? And no one reads Dos Passos anymore. Dos Passos is Dos Passé. If he wants to read about the East Coast, let him read Cheever.” | Page 130 – “Every book is a miracle,” Bill said. “Every book represents a moment when someone sat quietly—and that quiet is part of the miracle, make no mistake—and tried to tell the rest of us a story.” Bud could talk ceaselessly about the hope of books, the promise of books. | Page 133 – “You must do everything that frightens you, JR. Everything. I’m not talking about risking your life, but everything else. Think about fear, decide right now how you’re going to deal with fear, because fear is going to be the great issue of your life, I promise you. Fear will be the fuel for all your success, and the root cause of all your failures, and the underlying dilemma in every story you tell yourself about yourself. And the only chance you’ll have against fear? Follow it. Steer by it. Don’t think of fear as the villain. Think of fear as your guide, your pathfinder—your Natty Bumppo.” | Page 192 – “The most important and beautiful thing we can do in an orderly and civilized society—is patiently wait our turn.” | Page 198 – I understood that my drinks were free, while drinks I bought for others were not. I was glad. I wanted to pay for Cager’s drink. I realized that the same rule must apply when a man offered to buy me a drink. Uncle Charlie would charge the man a dollar as a token. Money wasn’t the issue. It was the gesture, the timeless gesture. Buying another man a drink. The whole barroom was an intricate system of such gestures and rituals. And habits. | Bookmark Page 199 – The euphoria I felt was the same I’d experienced reading the Iliad. In fact the bar and the poem complemented each other, like companion pieces. Each smacked of ageless verities about men. | Bookmark Page 201 | | Bookmark Page 203 – Though I’d been admitted to Yale, acceptance was something more elusive | Bookmark Page 224 – “Make yourself happy,” the priest said. “That’s the way to make Mother happy.” – The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.’ Logan Pearsall Smith.” – “Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around. | Page 225 – It takes just as many men to build a sturdy man, son, as it does to build a tower.” | My Note - Page 226 – And just as many women. But they never get the credit. – Highlight – I stopped studying, stopped going to classes. Most dangerous of all, I stopped worrying. – Also, I was afraid that I might be pleased, that I might take pride in describing the mess I was making of my life. For the first time I suspected a self-destructive streak in myself. . . I caught myself thinking that maybe failing out of college was a prerequisite to becoming a writer. | Page 229 – If I believed in love, she wrote, and she knew that I did, then I shouldn’t abandon my first love, Yale, to mourn my second, Sidney. | Page 230 – She’d been unhappy at Yale, she said. Depressed, homesick, she’d behaved in ways that she now couldn’t believe, and she placed most of the blame on her first love. She’d been sixteen, and he was a much older man, who misused her, and cheated on her. The experience left her disillusioned and cynical, with warped ideas about fidelity. | Page 233 – I opened my copy of Chekhov and my eye fell on the line “We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.” I snapped the book shut and felt the words hit my bloodstream | Page 236 – Frank Sinatra grew up in a bar! No one seemed all that surprised, but I was pounding my fist on my thigh. | Page 243 – He asked what subject I’d chosen for a major. History, I said. He asked why. I told him one of my professors had said that history is the narrative of people searching for a place to go, and I liked that idea. | Bookmark Page 248 – “High seller for the day wins a prize. Today’s prize is a silver candy dish.” – Next day, same thing. I sold about eight hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise, – All that first week I outsold the suffragettes by a wide margin, and Sunday I shattered some long-standing Home Fashions record, the store equivalent of Roger Maris’s sixty-one home runs. I was moving merchandise faster than Lord & Taylor could restock it, and not only Waterford. – My Note Privilege of two things. Being a man, and being white. In that order. | Page 249 – Was it my destiny to be the best clerk in the history of Home Fashions? At different times I’d been worried about harboring some dark attraction to failure. Now I worried about my inexorable success in Home Fashions, and what it foretold. – Even when I didn’t try I sold the stuff like no one else. My Note 😠 Of course. He is ABOVE woman’s work. 😠 We “there there little lady” gals don’t stand a chance. We would never sell at J.R.’s level, because customers believe in the man. Waiters always get higher tips. Do they serve better? Probably not. Oh my, they are paid more too, b/c they have to provide for the family. Their wives only sell and the commissions and tips won’t feed the family. – “Even when I didn’t try I sold the stuff like no one else.” My Note 😠 While woman would be chastised that they didn’t even try. They would be fired for their unproductive lazy ways. | Page 255 – If you think Sigourney Weaver is sexy then you are a homosexual.” My Note 😠 What men really think of women. Ugly. Beautiful. Aliens. Bitches. This perpetuates our cultural bias that women are the worst of humanity. Less than men is a given. Worse, they are the reason for man fall. From Eve into all of time. | Page 256 – A straw poll was held, Elisabeth Shue won, though an old-timer with ears like apricots kept insisting that we were shortchanging Myrna Loy. – “Rilke.” | Page 269 – I didn’t know why fate and free will needed to be mutually exclusive. Maybe, I thought, when we come to our crossroads, we choose freely, but the choice is between two fated lives. | Bookmark Page 281 | Page 282 –I’d just been telling Uncle Charlie, about Publicans satisfying that underrated human need—distraction. Distraction was the name of the game, I told Don, and he said that he couldn’t agree more. He told me how the bar had helped him through many a bad time in his life, how it had become particularly important to him a few years earlier, just after he got divorced, when distraction was the best hedge against depression. | Page 338 – Bob the cop, “Hemingway and Shaw. Here, take Nightwork. Take Nick Adams. . . p342, “Honest mistake,” he said. “Like I told you, that’s why they put erasers on pencils. But J.R., believe me. They do not put erasers on guns.” | Page 383 – Smelly, “mellifluous!”

The True & Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters ~ by Elisabeth Robinson — January 2009 . . . . . . .

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. Handwritten review to be transcribed later.

The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding ~ by La Leche League — August 1982 . . . . . . . 9

In my original 1994 book review journal, I reserved some blank pages for parenting books where I listed a dozen parenting books. Oh, how I took this parenting mantle with serious resolve to try my best to do it right! Little did I realize that these wonderful daughters were not the blank slate that I assumed they were. The first parenting book that I listed after the 1994 Mists of Avalon review was what I titled, How to Breastfeed Your Baby. Upon web searches I’ve discovered that book was ©2004, so the correct book must have been this La Leche League book, first published in 1958. I must have purchased the 1981 edition around the time of Mariah’s birth. (My words then — Along with reading Mothering Magazine, this book got me through, or more accurately, walked with me through two very important and and lovely times in my life.) The beauty of nursing is that time stands still in those connecting moments. Mariah took about 45 minutes to nurse. Over four years later, Mistral nursed in less than five minutes. Both nursed for over a year with nothing else to eat before 6 months. For me, there was no amount of pre-toughening up the nipples to prepare for those painful first weeks. That happened only with the nursing.

The Wisdom of No Escape ~ by Pema Chödrön — Mistral suggested this book to me (thank you, Sug!) . . . . . . . 9

Definitely one that I need to listen to more than the two times I have. Probably would be a book that I’ll purchase the paper copy. I do have many notes from my Kindle version, but like too many of my LONG reviews I think the essence of what Pema is trying to convey is in these first 20+ pages. These words alone make me want to dig into the book again. Also this review that I read on thriftbooks.com — “It's true, as they say, that we can only love others when we first love ourselves. And we can only experience real joy when we stop running from pain. The key to understanding these truisms is simple but not easy: learn to open ourselves up to life in all circumstances. “In this guide to true kindness for self and others, Pema Chödrön presents a uniquely practical approach to doing just that. And she reveals that when we embrace the happiness and heartache, inspiration and confusion, and all the twists and turns that are a natural part of life, we can begin to discover a true wellspring of courageous love that's been within our hearts all along.”

Page 3 · Basically, making friends with yourself is making friends with all those people too, because when you come to have this kind of honesty, gentleness, and goodheartedness, combined with clarity about yourself, there’s no obstacle to feeling loving-kindness for others as well. So the ground of maitri is ourselves. Page 5 · Being satisfied with what we already have is a magical golden key to being alive in a full, unrestricted, and inspired way. One of the major obstacles to what is traditionally called enlightenment is resentment, feeling cheated, holding a grudge about who you are, where you are, what you are. Page 8 · If you think that things are going well, then it’s usually some kind of arrogance. If it’s too easy for you, you just relax. You don’t make a real effort, and therefore you never find out what it is to be fully human.” So he encouraged me by saying that as long as you have these kinds of doubts, your practice will be good. When you begin to think that everything is just perfect and feel complacent and superior to the others, watch out! Page 14 · The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself. The other problem is that our hangups, unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wealth. Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom. Page 20 · This is probably one of the most amazing tools that you could be given, the ability to just let things go, not to be caught in the grip of your own angry thoughts or passionate thoughts or worried thoughts or depressed thoughts. Page 22 · The practice of meditation helps us get to know this basic energy really well, with tremendous honesty and warmheartedness, and we begin to figure out for ourselves what is poison and what is medicine, which means something different for each of us.

Their Eyes Were Watching God ~ by Zora Neale Hurston — Book Group, Sue Hostetter — February 2021 . . . . . . . Drought

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. I remember liking this book as well as being challenged. Will add notes from kindle later. Placeholder in the meantime.

Three Cups of Tea ~ by Greg Mortenson & David Relin — June, July 2008 Hand written notes transcribed.

A book about Mortenson, a mountain climber’s difficult climb to build schools for girls in Pakistan to honor the memory of his sister. Wow! the power of education and will want to check out the website of the Central Asia Institute to www.ikat.org and threecupsoftea.com to see possible donation in the future. Beyond power of education – the power of good will and helping in “enemy (to Bush) countries.” Somewhat slow read at times, but so full of hope and possibility. p30 – prelapsarianparadise | p120 – The true measure of a nation’s success is not gross national product, but “Gross national happiness.” | p150 – “Dr Gregg, you must make time to share three cups of tea. We may be uneducated. But we are not stupid. We have lived and survived here for a long time . . . (on rushing) . . . “We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. We’re a country of 30-min power lunches and 2-min football drills. Our leaders thought their “shock & awe” campaign could end the war in Iraq before it even started. Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. . . That I have more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them.” | p276 – What Greg’s doing is just as important as any bombs that are being dropped — if the Central Asia Institute were not doing what its doing, people in that region would probably be chanting, ‘We hate Americans!’ Instead, they see us as agents of salvation. | p301 “If we try to resolve terrism with military might and nothing else,” Mortenson argued to Parade’s readers, "then we will be no safer than before 9/11. If we truly want a legacy of peace for our children, we need to understand that this is a war that will ultimately be won with books, not bombs.” | p310 – After Bashir watched on CNN “images of wailing women carrying children’s bodies out of the rubble of a bombed building. . . People like me are America’s best friends in the region. I’m a moderate Muslim, an educated Muslim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer? Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one BILLION Muslims against America for the next 200 years.” THE ENEMY IS IGNORANCE. (And perhaps more so, lies.)

Thirteen Moons ~ Charles Frazier 2008 1/14 — Book Group, My selection to honor Ike — January 2014 . 8.5 . Last review before drought

I re-read this book as my book group selection as it pleased Ike that I would choose one of his favorite fiction books. The characters, Will, Bear, and Featherspoon slowly weave this man’s man novel together in the slow Southern way, with hard work and grit and lots of philosophical commentary. It was not as good as I had remembered upon reflection. The Will Patton audio version is beautifully narrated, lyrical and delightful! p72 – Everybody's foot slogging toward The Nightland together. p83 – 13 moons in four seasons. p85-6 –They watched the fire to let their imaginations catch up. . . It is a mistake to answer too quickly. We are all kindling for the fire.” (of life) p93 – Without a place where you belong you have too many choices before you and therefore cannot go in any direction. It is a fine line between too few choices and too many. . . Having a place means being bound in many directions. To the land, the animals, and the people. By relations and even the names of places. Such ties are comforting and discomforting. In some ways it is easier to be an exile than to have responsibilities. But also sadder. I had no bounds and therefore lost in the world. p110 – Getting what you want is largely a matter of claiming what you want. p121 – Featherspoon mellowed, os men have a tendency to. do. I think that any attribution of age-induced softening is more a matter of generosity of others than a change in ourselves. It’s one of the sweet deals life offers the older we get, the more we are forgiven the things we did at twenty-seven. p159 – Dueling is a kind of courtship, codified and fraught of etiquette, but with the ultimate ceremony designed to effect the irrevocable parting of two lives rather than their wedding.

My absolute favorite of all times quote, “We all, when we’re young, things we’ll live forever. Than at some point you settle for living a great long while. But after that final distinction is achieved, survival becomes at best uncomfortable. Everyone and everything you love goes away. And yet it is your fortune to remain. You find yourself riled in a transformed world peopled by strangers. Lost in places you’ve know as intimately as the back of your hand. Eternal river courses and ridge lines become your only friends. That is the point when living any farther either becomes ridiculous and amusing or else you fall away and follow all Creation through the gates of death to the Nightland. . . . You’re left with nothing but our moods and your memory. Pitiful and powerful tools.

Tomato Rhapsody ~ by Adam Schell — Book Group, Kim Weit — April 2014 . . . . . . . Drought

Added 5/11/22 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. Kindle highlights: p25 – nothing is so serious ‘til man think it so. | p47 – every moment a torment caught between the nostalgia of memory and the reality of her non-existence. | p52 – our tale is not a love story, not at all, but a romance, and according to the renowned 14th-century Italian dramatist Pozzo Menzogna, “There’s a significant difference between a love story and a romance.” | p70 – “but goodness of heart, so often is little match for malice of head.” | p153 – between the moments of fast motion, the river needs also to pool into gentle eddies of insight and introspection. | p156 – Bobolito brought Bobo to life, evoking in the young child wellsprings of passion and creativity. | p167 – The mind is a monkey. It leaps from branch to branch, tree to tree. | p169 Bookmark | p188 – apoplectic | p197 Bookmark | p206 – No good thing goes on forever. Indeed, it would no longer be good if it did. | p217 – When startled, the donkey will not bolt and abandon either human or pack; it will simply remain still, assess the situation and then act accordingly. | p218 sagacity, Purim | p242 capsaicin | p251 – They sobbed because life is nothing if not a constant reconciliation with death and sadness and loss that leaves one no choice but to sob—sob or lose one’s mind. | p252 – They laughed because life is noting if not a constant reconciliation with death and sadness and loss that leaves one no choice but to laugh or lose one’s mind. | p287 – temerity, timidity? | p291 – two types of sadness; temporary sadness and the forever kind. | p292 Bookmark, and life is long and the winning is in the living. | p293 – The horrendous feeling that something holy and sacred, something that one values more than his own life, has been ripped from him, and the mind, in a confused and desperate effort to maintain sanity and provide an outlet for the grief, erupts in a torrent of creativity. | p308 – A spontaneous revelation, an all-encompassing feeling, that not only was he loved, but he was made of love. The God was love and all life sprung from this love. | p334 – And know that a life lived for love is a life lived in God. | p336 – They sobbed because life is nothing if not a constant reconciliation with death and sadness and loss that leaves one no choice but to sob—sob or lose ones’s mind. | p337 – They laughed because life is nothing if not a constant reconciliation with death and sadness and loss that leaves one no choice but to laugh—to laugh or lose one’s mind. —— Oh my, these are wonderful quotes, but I do not remember reading this book in 2008 and the story line.

Twilight ~ by Stephenie Meyer — April 2009 . . . . . . . 7

As a high school teacher, I felt I must read this series so I know why it was such a passion for teen girls. I’ll read the sequels, wondering if this is a watered down romance novel with little to make the reader think. Some twists and turns and who-done-it’s late in the 500 page book. Basically it addresses the female need to fantasize about the “dream man” - the one who is sensitive and treats his girlfriend like a princess. That hero, Edward, is a vampire. p54 – “I found myself reveling in the aloneness instead of being lonely.” (Upon Bella’s moving in with her father.) p67 – “I was consumed by the mystery Edward presented.” p140 – “Making decisions was the painful part for me, the part I agonized over. But once the decision was made, I simply followed through—usually with relief that the choice was made. Sometimes the relief was tainted by despair . . . but it was still better than wrestling with the alternatives.”

Untamed ~ by Glennon Doyle — Book Group, Danielle Gentile — November 2020 . . . . . . . Drought

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. I remember some things of this book, and a compelling story of being who one really is. Review to come later.

You’re Wearing That? ~ by Deborah Tannen — Borrowed from Janet — July 2008

Jackie gabe his book to Janed as a Mother’s Day gift. (What a hoot - meta message there!) This is truly a must read for any woman. Great for me being that I am both daughter and mother and I gain insights from both perspectives. XVII – “But any advice or suggestion you offer implies criticism, because someone who is doing nothing wrong does not need suggestions or advice.” (Ouch!) p.3 – “A remark coming from your daughter or you mother is more healing or more hurtful than the same remark coming from someone else.” p.4 – “The challenge in every relationship, every conversation, is to find ways to be a close as you want to be (and no closer) without that closeness becoming intrusive or threatening your freedom and your sense that you are in control of your life.” (For me, fits ML in summer of 08.) p.19 – “If a mother craves information as a way of being close to her daughter, then the ability to offer or withhold that information gives a daughter power in that relationship, power she may use to enhance their closeness or limit it.” p.67 – “. . . the coin of the realm in a girls’ friendships is inclusion and exclusion, the first a precious (if tenuous) gift, the second a fierce punishment. This explains why much of the satisfaction in mother-daughter conversation comes from feeling included, and much of the dismay results in feeling left out.” (I don’t feel so offended with being left out—while other women, ML, feel great weight of that.) p.78 – “Mothers are both readily available and expendable.” (I’m okay with that.) p.82 — Gifts “For most of us, hinting is as explicit as we want to get, because we what we want is not so much the gift as evidence that the person knows us well enough to choose something we’d like, and cares enough to take the time to get it. . . . what we really treasure is the meta message of rapport that comes when someone surprises us with just the right gift.” (Mistral disagrees – she says material people want the stuff! ;) Hoot!) p.92 – “. . . women’s ways of talking often reflect this valuing of someone without our thinking of it consciously.” p.117 – “complementary and symmetrical schismogenisis” p.142 – “Only God my dear, could love you fro yourself alone.” p.188 – “We create not only the world the child lives in but also dictate how that world is to be interpreted.” p.224 – For many of us, our mothers are the measure of the world; if they don’t see us for who we think we are, we wonder whether we’re right about who we are. We look to our mothers as a reality check.” p.230 – “And nothing hurts more—or makes you more angry, since anger is the flip side of hurt—than feeling the the person whose opinion counts the most doesn’t trust your judgment.” p.237 – “Vivian change the way her mother spoke to her by changing the way she spoke to her mother. Meta communication.”

When Breath Becomes Air ~ by Paul Kalanithi — Book Group, my selection — September 2017 . . . . 9 . . Drought

I selected this book for book group three years after Ike’s passing. It is a good book to continue the process of grieving. The words can bring on the cleansing tears. I included the Servant Song (see Epilogue) in Ike’s celebration-of-life service. Ellen Ochs-Gregory sang it and her father, Bill Gregory played the guitar. I always loved the song and it came to me often when Ike was too ill to get out of bed and I’d massage his ticklish feet with gentle firmness, hoping that there was a measure of comfort he felt in my attending.

Page 34 · Suddenly, now, I know what I want. I want the counselors to build a pyre… and let my ashes drop and mingle with the sand. Lose my bones amongst the driftwood, my teeth amongst the sand…. I don’t believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment. Page 94 · A tureen of tragedy was best allotted by the spoonful. Only a few patients demanded the whole at once; most needed time to digest. Page 114 · Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death—it’s something that happens to you and those around you. Page 125 · Yes, I thought, and therein was the paradox: like a runner crossing the finish line only to collapse, without that duty to care for the ill pushing me forward, I became an invalid. Page 131 · I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live. Page 135 · Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability. Page 160 · The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may feel differently. Two months after that, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process. Page 170 · Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Epilogue by Lucy Kalanithi — Page 215 · Paul confronted death—examined it, wrestled with it, accepted it—as a physician and a patient. He wanted to help people understand death and face their mortality. . . . we knew that one trick to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love—to be vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful. A few months after his diagnosis, we sang the hymn “The Servant Song” while standing side by side in a church pew, and the words vibrated with meaning as we faced uncertainty and pain together: “I will share your joy and sorrow / Till we’ve seen this journey through.” Page 219 · Although these last few years have been wrenching and difficult—sometimes almost impossible—they have also been the most beautiful and profound of my life, requiring the daily act of holding life and death, joy and pain in balance and exploring new depths of gratitude and love. Page 222 · “We shall rise insensibly, and reach the tops of the everlasting hills, where the winds are cool and the sight is glorious.”

When Grownups Drive You Crazy ~ by Eda LeShan

I read the library copy and gave it to Mariah to read. I would like to get a copy for her. It helps kids see the reasons parents get “crazy” at times as well as how to deal with and defuse it. Written after the first “Crazy” book, When Your Kids Drive You Crazy. (I was sure that title was was When your Kids, not When your Child Drives You Crazy.)

When Your Child Drives You Crazy ~ by Eda SeShan

I’ve lent this book out, and need to get it back, for it can be used as a reference with little chapters filled with great ideas on some big issues form early childhood through the teen years. It is a good read and best to keep around. Helpful in making me realize that most problems are not as big as they seem. But of course, I’m reminded by Mariah and Mistral that they are really good kids. (They were as children, and continue to be as adults. Amazing bad ass good.)

Wish You Well ~ by David Baldacci — Book Group, Ellen Goodman — November 2014 . . . . . . . 8-year Drought

I cannot remember this book at all. I think someone in the book group may have given me their paper copy as it is not on my iPad. Again, as in Life After Life, the review below makes me think that I couldn’t bring myself to read it.

This review is from amazon.com — “Tragedy strikes the New York-based Cardinal family when their car is involved in a terrible accident. Twelve-year-old Lou and seven-year-old Oz survive, but the crash leaves their father dead and their mother in a coma. It would seem their world has been shattered forever until their great-grandmother, Louisa Mae, agrees to raise the children on her Virginia mountain farm.

But before long their rural idyll is threatened by the discovery of natural gas on the mountain. Determined to protect her home from the ravages of big business, Louisa Mae refuses to sell, but when the neighbours hear of the potential wealth the company could bring, they begin to turn against her. And now the Cardinal family find themselves ensnared in another battle, to be played out in a crowded Virginia courtroom: a battle for justice, for survival, and for the right to stay together in the only place they know as home.

Filled with both rich humour and desperate poignancy, Wish You Well is a tale of family, faith, humanity and prejudice, set against the magical backdrop of the Virginia high rock.”

Placeholder ~ by First Lastname — Book Group, Sallie Bookman — August 2014 . . . . . . . Drought

7/22/21 — Catching up on 7 years of not writing my book comments. I remember some things of this book, intrigued about flowers and meaning. It may be notated on the Kindle version on my iPad.