3.5 stars overall. 5 stars for the Kiki/Carlene friendship. 1 star for Howard.
My vocabulary is extremely limited and this book took great pleasure in3.5 stars overall. 5 stars for the Kiki/Carlene friendship. 1 star for Howard.
My vocabulary is extremely limited and this book took great pleasure in proving that to me by using words like cernuous, indecorously, invidious, tetchily, frowsty, and fillip.
I have once again felt vindicated by my decision to not stay in academia as a career.
I was impressed by how seamlessly the point of view flowed from one family member to another.
P.S. Remember that time I met Zadie Smith in real life and temporarily locked us both out of the venue where she was speaking? Yeah, good times. I'm very smrt....more
Sweet. I'm liking all the new books with older women as main characters with agency and depth. I also really like the name Tova.Sweet. I'm liking all the new books with older women as main characters with agency and depth. I also really like the name Tova....more
I rarely stumble upon this NPR series when flipping channels on the radio, but every time I do it pulls me in. This compilation had the same power. A I rarely stumble upon this NPR series when flipping channels on the radio, but every time I do it pulls me in. This compilation had the same power. A more polished but just-as-honest version of the Storycorp series....more
I can't decide which character was my favorite, or which character I most resembled, and in my book, that's a pretty great problem to have.
Odd as it I can't decide which character was my favorite, or which character I most resembled, and in my book, that's a pretty great problem to have.
Odd as it sounds, I'd recommend this to fans of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Same slow and deliberate pacing that allowed me to fall into a quiet soothing rhythm as I read, with perfectly crafted sentences and vivid sense of place, same humanness shining through every page.
I'll let it settle a bit, but this might just end up in my top-10 list....more
Having watched the movie first, reading this was like a visit with old friends. A snuggle-in-and-get cozy sort of read, perfect for a long flight to JHaving watched the movie first, reading this was like a visit with old friends. A snuggle-in-and-get cozy sort of read, perfect for a long flight to Japan. ...more
Simple and complex in the same breath. Whenever you wonder what it takes to be human, turn to this.
P.S. Given that the name Harper is makingMy Review
Simple and complex in the same breath. Whenever you wonder what it takes to be human, turn to this.
P.S. Given that the name Harper is making a comeback, Calpurnia, Jem, Dill & Atticus should also be given some serious consideration.
Favorite Quotes
Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season; it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill.
Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.
[Atticus' closing remarks to the jury. Bawl.]
He put on his hat. "Now I may be wrong, of course, but I think he's very alive. Shows all the symptoms of it. Go have a look at him, and when I come back we'll get together and decide.
Holds the reader at arms length from the characters; felt a bit like eavesdropping, or like watching the story unfold in a snow globe. An unusual stylHolds the reader at arms length from the characters; felt a bit like eavesdropping, or like watching the story unfold in a snow globe. An unusual style that somehow worked.
Favorite Quotes
...she doesn't want to become the kind of person who thinks that good news can only come from calls one was already expecting and callers one already knows.
He feels naked when speaking about things he really loves.
The most annoying thing about it is that once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything.
A good marriage is, at least, one part conspiracy.
If something is good and universally acknowledged to be so, this is not reason enough to dislike it.
As someone who is so often - despite all of the intentions to the contrary - controlled by emotion, I saw a lot to envy in Don's approach to My Review
As someone who is so often - despite all of the intentions to the contrary - controlled by emotion, I saw a lot to envy in Don's approach to the world.
Don't we all wish that love were just a bit more rational?
Favorite Quote
Fault! Asperger's isn't a fault. It's a variant. It's potentially a major advantage. Asperger's syndrome is associated with organization, focus, innovative thinking, and rational detachment...Emotions can cause major problems.
And it dawned on me that I had not designed the questionnaire to find a woman I could accept but to find someone who might accept me.
[Rosie] You changed yourself for me? [Don] Only my behavior.
I want to read every novel Rainbow Rowell has ever written. Oh, wait. I just did. Damnit, hurry up and publish Landline already!
Favorite QuoMy Reviews
I want to read every novel Rainbow Rowell has ever written. Oh, wait. I just did. Damnit, hurry up and publish Landline already!
Favorite Quotes
There's a chill in the air that lifts my heart and makes my hair stand on end. Every moment feels meant for me. In October, I'm the star of my own movie...October, baptize me with leaves! Swaddle me in corduroy and nurse me with split pea soup. October, tuck tiny candy bars in my pockets and carve my smile into a thousand pumpkins.
[p136-7 = one of the best explanations of a breakup, ever]
It's always weird to go from my mom to Mitch. It doesn't seem like I should have been able to get to this life from my old one, like there aren't even roads between those two places.
She laughed. It was better than he could have imagined. Like a giggle falling off its chair.
I didn't know love could leave the lights on all the time...I thought it took more naps...Or blinked. I didn't know it could just go on and on like this without falling off an edge.
Well, shit. This book was just about perfect in every way. Except for the excessive use of the term of endearment "sweet pea", but I'll forgiMy Review
Well, shit. This book was just about perfect in every way. Except for the excessive use of the term of endearment "sweet pea", but I'll forgive it.
Recommended reading for fans of StoryCorps, or you know, all humans.
Favorite Quotes
The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.
You're in a pickle. You did things you didn't hope to do. You have not always been your best self. This means that you're like the rest.
Because no matter how experimental he is, his life isn't an experiment.
When bad things happen, often the only way back to wholeness is to take it all apart.
Acceptance asks only that you embrace what's true.
Even if you get the dream, you don't know if it will stay true.
Jump high and hard with intention and heart.
That both things could be true at once--my disbelief as well as my certainty--was the unification of the ancient and the future parts of me. It was everything I intended and yet still I was surprised by what I got.
Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will. I have learned this over and over and over again.
Nobody's going to do your life for you.
What do you do when you don't know what to do about something? I talk to Mr. Sugar and my friends. I make lists. I attempt to analyze the situation from the perspective of my "best self"--the one that's generous, reasonable, forgiving, loving, bighearted, and grateful. I think really hard about what I'll wish I did a year from now. I map out the consequences of the various actions I could take. I ask what my motivations are, what my desires are, what my fears are, what I have to lose, and what I have to gain. I move toward the light, even if it's a hard direction in which to move. I trust myself. I keep the faith. I mess up sometimes.
I'll never know, and neither will you of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
This is how you get unstuck...You reach. Not so you can walk away from the daughter you loved, but so you can live the life that is yours--the one that includes the sad loss of your daughter, but is not arrested by it. The one that eventually leads you to a place in which you not only grieve her, but also feel lucky to have had the privilege of loving her....more
This is one of the few books that I strongly believe is made infinitely better by watching the movie (many many times) first.
Two Things I Liked BetterThis is one of the few books that I strongly believe is made infinitely better by watching the movie (many many times) first.
Two Things I Liked Better about the Book
Fezzik (the Giant) & Inigo Montoya (the Spaniard) are the definition of best friends in this book and it makes me feel all warm inside to have gotten to know them better.
The narrator cracks me up, especially the long intro involving his hatred of all books and reading when he was younger.
Favorite Quote
I am not trying to make this a downer, understand. I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops. But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. ...more
This is when I become convinced that we should archive and catalog everything that has ever existed, so that when something amazing happens that no onThis is when I become convinced that we should archive and catalog everything that has ever existed, so that when something amazing happens that no one could have ever predicted, we can follow all of its minute details from creation to fruition, just like Rebecca Skloot did for Henrietta Lacks.
Tying Henrietta's story to the rampant unethical experimentation on unknowing, underprivileged people led to the most compelling, though not the most surprising, insights.
Side note: Somewhere near the halfway point, when the story became much more about the discovery and research process and its effects on Henrietta's descendants, and less about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, I started to wonder why the author didn't write herself in as more than a shadow on the wall. It made her start to seem, I don't know, a bit strange? But maybe that's just because I've come to expect that all authors wish to make themselves the main character in their own books. I dunno.
Favorite Quotes
All cancers originate from a single cell gone wrong and are categorized based on the type of cell they start from.
Hennie made life come alive � bein with her was like bein with fun.
Day yelled back, thumping his silver cane of the floor like an exclamation point.
Some of the stories were conjured by white plantation owners taking advantage of the long-held African belief that ghosts caused disease and death. To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies, then covered themselves in white sheets and crept around at night, posing as spirits coming to infect black people with disease or steal them for research. These sheets eventually gave rise to the white hooded cloaks of the Ku Klux Klan.
As normal cells go through life, their telomeres shorten with each division until they're almost gone. Then they stop dividing and begin to die. This process correlates with the age of a person: the older we are, the shorter our telomeres, and the fewer times our cells have left to divide before they die. By the early nineties, a scientist at Yale had used HeLa to discover that human cancer cells contain an enzyme called temoerase that rebuilds their telomeres. The presence of a telomerase meant cells could keep regenerating their telomeres indefinitely. This explained the mechanics of HeLa's immortality...
Like I'm always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different. ...more
I finished this book with tears running down the sides of my face, pooling on my pillow, smeared on my clothes and dripping into my hair. There is so I finished this book with tears running down the sides of my face, pooling on my pillow, smeared on my clothes and dripping into my hair. There is so much power in these stories and it makes me wonder how many other stories, told by ordinary people about ordinarily extraordinary lives, there are to be heard.
Favorite Quotes:
If you go with the statement, "Well, God has more work for you to do," then the flip side is "God didn't have any more work for all those other people." And I don't believe that...What I came to was randomness. There is chance in our world. It impacts all of us in big ways and small way.
The stuff of life was meager. There was one chair. The apartment was stuffy. Who wanted to talk about Olinsky's when the Vietnam War was raging and we wanted to go out there and change it? And how dare you scratch my Bob Dylan record! But in the end we want to say to them, "Thanks for teaching us to talk. Thanks for teaching us to be of the world and in the world and to make our way. Thanks for teaching us to be alive! And thanks for staying inside of us."
It feels like something in your brain opens up, and you can expose parts of yourself too fragile to expose to the noisy world.
I always feel guilty when I say, "I love you" to you, and I say it so often. It's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio - and it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house. ...more
To live and work in a place where everyone is pregnant must be chaotic, and yet this book was quite calming.
The whole time I was reading this, every To live and work in a place where everyone is pregnant must be chaotic, and yet this book was quite calming.
The whole time I was reading this, every metaphor I thought of had to do with drowning. And I guess that's what it was like for the main characters Son, Rose & Cecilia. They all seemed to hold onto secrets like they were holding their breath under water. In the end, you weren't sure if they drowned or became fish to survive...
Favorite Quotes:
Lorraine watched the boys shooting up out of the water like beach balls that had been held under against their wills.
This is what you're going to have to do: you're going to have to be the one to remind me how God works, how He gives us what we need. You're going to have to be that thing for me and I'm going to be it for you. I can't miss Rose and miss you too. It's too much. It's too much for anybody.
If people do have more than one life in a lifetime, they should be careful to make sure the different versions of the past never overlap.
[M:]issing people was a full-time job, being sorry about what was gone was going to take every waking minute now... ...more
She was a fixer of lives - as so many women are - whereas he was a fixer of machines.
There were some aspects of the old arrangements Favorite Quotes:
She was a fixer of lives - as so many women are - whereas he was a fixer of machines.
There were some aspects of the old arrangements in Africa which were very appropriate and comfortable - if you were a man, which of course Dr. Maketsi was.
She remembered somebody saying that at night we are all strangers, even to ourselves... ...more
This one made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The easiest way to sum up the plot is "Practical Magic." The magical powers are somewhat believable, This one made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The easiest way to sum up the plot is "Practical Magic." The magical powers are somewhat believable, with a woman who "has to give people things" and a child who "knows where things belong". Claire's power is the best though: she makes magical food out of magical plants. Makes me want to grow a magical garden!
Favorite Quotes:
Suddenly there were hundreds of oranges rolling everywhere, into the bread section, under people's carts, and Bay could almost hear them laughing, like they were suddenly struck with the joy of freedom.
Big clouds, white and gray like circus elephants, began to lumber across the sky with the wind.
Magnified details of everyday life mixed with universal themes of love, family, death...A book to lose yourself in.
Favorite Quotes:
She was grateful Magnified details of everyday life mixed with universal themes of love, family, death...A book to lose yourself in.
Favorite Quotes:
She was grateful for the opportunity to sit on the porch with her father...looking at the lake and listening to the vast breeze work its way through the treetops, a grander version of the way Akash used to sigh when he was a baby, full of contentment, in the depths of sleep.
...that the entire enterprise of having a family, of putting children on this earth, as gratifying as it sometimes felt, was flawed from the start.
I fell in love with Deborah, the way young girls often fall in love with women who are not their mothers. ...more
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