★★★☆☆ | Science Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A comfort read with some interesting themes:
I respect the neutral gender treatment in the novel, but it kept throwing me off during my reading.
…★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A painful book for me to read — the story of a father losing his 17-year-old son. Mr. Ives – a religious and kind family man – spends the remainder of his life grieving. He relationship with the love of his life withers, he takes no more joy is in existence, he loses faith in God. Some 35 years after his son is murdered, he regains some of his faith through dreams, travel and forgiveness of his son’s killer. It’s a dark, melancholy book. I worried for myself as I watched Mr. Ives grieve over the decades following the loss of his son.
★★★★☆ | Science Fiction | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I enjoyed the writing of this story more than I expected to. I guess I have a weakness for time travel and Universe as Simulation books.
A key theme of the book was the powerful but morally corrupt Time Institute — a secret government agency that developed and used time travel technology to preserve itself without regard for the moral good it could do. The main protagonist joins the agency and uses time travel to safe a life which gets him in huge trouble.
…★★★★☆ | Psychology, Grief and Loss | Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A boating friend gifted me this book after he learned about Connor’s passing. The author’s 26-year-old son died in a climbing accident. He wrote the book as therapy for himself and as a way to help other dads who have lost a child.
The most important takeaway is something I already knew but was good to be reminded: if Connor could somehow communicate with me from the other side, he would tell me to heal up and find a way to be happy again. He would want me to miss him of course, but he wouldn’t want me to give up living. I know that is true.
★★★★☆ | Fantasy | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
An interesting book. After you die, you go to a city where you live so long as someone remembers you from the living world. At this city, life seems to go on as it did on Earth. People work, go out to eat, read books, complain about “life”, and all the while seem not to be amazed at this life after death.
…The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin BrockmeierRead More »
★★★★☆ | Mystery-Suspense | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I can’t remember the last 300+ page book I read in nearly a single sitting. What a terrific story, so well told. So many tie ins to my life: Mallory the protagonist, 18 months sober, the early death of her sister in a car accident.
Books like these remind me of the true joy that comes from reading a good story. I’d give it five stars but for the zany, frumped up ending. This story demanded a simpler, more elegant way to finish such a smooth, entrancing beginning and middle.
★★★★★ | Literary Fiction | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I enjoyed this book so much more than I expected. Perhaps it’s the grief I have been feeling that has opened up new emotional channels. I found myself tearing up at multiple points in reading this book. I really cared for the characters: Lily, August, May, Rosaleen, these beautiful, wise women.
…★★★★☆ | Travel and Nature | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A wonderful introduction to the wildlife and history of Southern Arizona from the state’s most famous poet. This book helped me pass through some awful periods of grief as I healed on our patio underneath the very same desert sun that Shelton loved so much.
…★★★☆☆ | Mystery-Suspense | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A ghost story with two sets of twins and a few surprising twists that I didn’t see coming (but should have). Niffenegger lost points with her depiction of Valentina’s parents (including Elspeth!) with their lack of grieving and too-easily-accepted death of their daughter. Obviously she’s never dealt personally with the loss of a child.
Julia had never thought of death as something that would happen to her, or to people she knew. All those people in the cemetery were just stones, names, dates. Loving Mother. Devoted Husband. Elspeth was a parlour trick; she had never been really real to Julia. Valentina is in that box. It couldn’t be true.
★★★☆☆ | Psychology | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Susan worked with Prince as sound engineer — how cool is that? Probably the most insightful thing I learned from the book wasn’t about music, but art. She described how and why the surreal art movement came to exist: as photography was invented, artists were suddenly disrupted. A photograph would always be more realistic than a painting. Surreal art allows the perceiver to fill in the meaning of the art from their own subconscious, a whole different part of the brain.
Reading the book made me want to dive back into listening to albums again.
★★★★★ | Essays | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Fantastic collection of essays spanning two hundred years of American letters.
★★★★☆ | History | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I read William Manchester’s massive biography of Winston Churchill in the evenings over many months. I think of this an a pleasure read because the writing is so lyrical and evocative of another time and place. So many leadership and life lessons to be gleaned from studying Churchill.
I am patiently waiting to reach the end of the Story of Civilization before resuming this amazing biography of Churchill with the second volume.
★★★☆☆ | Mystery-Suspense | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
★★★★☆ | Reading and Books | Audio | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A delightful, hilarious memoir of running a used bookstore in a small town in Scotland.
★★★★★ | Literature | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A beautiful, wise book touching so many themes: true love, societal pressures, women’s rights, nobility excesses, religious zealotry, jealousy, the fruitless search for the meaning of life, angst over landowner privilege, thinking vs. feeling/living, capitalism vs. communism. Reading Tolstoy is the study of life.
…★★★☆☆ | Philosophy | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
An interesting collection of stories and anecdotes about how ego can be a destructive force in a person’s life.
…★★★★☆ | Philosophy | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Friendship is one of life’s greatest blessings, but are seldom accounted for as such.
True friendship is selfless and must be predicated on virtue with no expectation of gain.
Riches and success tend to change a person. If he forsakes his friends for possessions, he’ll one day wonder who he bought all this stuff for, and will have no one to enjoy them with him.
In the face of a true friend a man sees as it were a second self. So that where his friend is he is; if his friend be rich, he is not poor; though he be weak, his friend’s strength is his; and in his friend’s life he enjoys a second life after his own is finished. This last is perhaps the most difficult to conceive. But such is the effect of the respect, the loving remembrance, and the regret of friends which follow us to the grave. While they take the sting out of death, they add a glory to the life of the survivors.
★★★★☆ | Philosophy | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
A quirky book full of dense wisdom. Thinking in such extremes is interesting. The ending was anti-climactic (and weird).
Highlights
We overestimate what we can do in one year. We underestimate what we can do in ten years.
One of the best feelings in life is to meet someone who grew up in an opposite culture but has your same humor, thoughts, or taste.
…★★★★☆ | History | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I read this before undertaking the epic 11-volume Story of Civilization that Durant wrote over the course of forty years. He boils down the critical themes of history that he learned over the course of his lifetime of study. If you don’t have the time or inclination to read his opus, this is a good primer.
Highlights
Biology and History
Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, … only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way.
…★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
My third book by Amor Towles who is an inspiration to me. He published his first novel, The Rules of Civility, at 47 after spending a career in investment banking in New York. Imagine that!
This one has some dear characters: Emmett, Duchess, Billy, Wooley, Sally, and a few other incidentals thrown in. Duchess is a borderline psychopath that I came to adore by looking at his situation through his own perspective.
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