Month: September 2015

Exploration into the meaning of art and the ephemeral nature of love + a satirical look at the business of art, with a colorful cast of characters and a relatable heroine.

For someone else, it could be a great life: interesting, exciting and relatively free of worry. The problem is that it doesn’t happen to be the life I want. It isn’t the way I planned it. Somehow the scripts got muddled up. I, Annie, am supposed to be living in a little village outside Tavistock with the love of my life, running a company that we set up together. Somehow or other I got ejected out of my story halfway through and ended up in another person’s life; I don’t want to be here a second longer. I am too old, too scared for this existence. It’s meant for a younger, braver kind of person…the lonelier she got, the less adventurous she became.

The Improbability of Love is written by Hannah Rothschild (yes, those Rothschilds), the current chair of the London National Gallery’s Board of Trustees. She is very passionate about art and that is reflected in in her writing. She has written a few blog posts about her inspiration for this novel and you can find those at this link.

Annie, a chef who is truly an artist when it comes to food, is down-on-her-luck and her life has veered way off course. She thought she was in a relationship with the love of her life. When she is unceremoniously dumped, she is forced to start over again in London. One afternoon she buys a quaint little painting in a junk shop, in hopes of impressing a new suitor. The suitor stands her up and the painting remains in her possession. Her innocent purchase of a valuable work of art (fictional piece, real painter) sets off a chain of events and puts her in the sights of a powerful art dealer who is desperate to repossess the painting and keep its tainted history a secret.

I have noticed that the moment people become rich and achieve their earthly desires they enter a painful, spiritual vacuum. Few wealthy people turn to religion. What’s the point when it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven? Instead they often look to the soothing power of beauty. Art makes mortals feel closer to heaven…I once met a cynical painting by Courbet who said the rich bought art because they had run out of other things to spend their money on. A Corot claimed that it was copycat syndrome—just do as others do. Nothing drives men crazier than the inability to possess.

The book begins at a London art auction, “the sale of the century.” We are introduced to a colorful cast of bidders, each who have very different motivations for wanting to add The Improbability of Love to their assets. The prologue is overwhelming with all the character introductions, but I urge you to stick with it! The story actually begins six months before the auction, with Annie finding a painting in a junk shop. The bidders are slowly weaved into the story along the way, some with bigger parts than others. The bidders all have over-the-top personalities, but have just enough character to be endearing.

The difference between a good and a great work of art was down to an almost indistinguishable series of largely unidentifiable factors: the élan of a brushstroke; the juxtaposition of colours; the collisions in a composition and an accidental stroke or two. Like a rolling stone gathering moss, a painting gathered history, comment and appreciation, all adding to its value. In its relatively short life, Annie’s little painting, all eighteen by twenty-four inches, had accrued so much admiration and history that it had become surrounded by a halo of accumulated desire, bumping its value up to dizzy heights.

With its multi-dimensional ingredients, this male enhancement gel also works to avail the victim’s mastercard generic viagra penile tissues with affluent blood supply in order to provide them required energy to attain the desirable shape and format. Low vitamin D increases the risk of viagra discount sales having heart problems will decrease. Our services http://amerikabulteni.com/2012/03/21/oz-hakiki-mad-menden-reklamcilara-damn-good-advice/ cialis prescription are very dedicating to endow with the best hormone physicians,” said Dr. Plateau stage The amerikabulteni.com on line levitra moderate stage creates about peak sensations and determines the length of sexual act. The writing was wordy and dense. There was an academic quality to it at times. I had to use my dictionary and Google Translate a little more than usual! For those reasons, I think people who aren’t very interested in art history or culinary pursuits may have more trouble getting into this novel than those who do enjoy those topics. I was a Fine Arts major (one class away from an Art History minor) and I spend way too much time looking for new recipes to try, so this book was right up my alley. This book would have made an excellent required reading in my college classes, because it really brings the philosophical questions about art to life. What is art? What is the difference between good art and great art? What makes art valuable? What does art teach us about mankind and ourselves as individuals? What is it about a painted piece of canvas that can spark bidding wars and violence? Who do the great works really belong to? As we learn in The Improbability of Love, a piece of art is more than just its physical form; it carries a piece of each of its owners with it.

My little theory is that at the heart of all human anxiety is the fear of loneliness. It starts with their expulsion from the womb and ends with a hole in the ground. In between it’s just a desperate struggle to stave off separation anxiety using any kind of gratification—love, sex, shopping, drink, you name it. My composition is about the fleeting, transformative respite over aloneness that love offers despite the cold certainty that this reprieve is only transitory.

Much like the painting, the book deals with the transient, and sometimes cruel, nature of love. All the characters are somewhat broken due to the fickleness of love: Evie who fell apart after her husband’s death, Annie who is just going through the motions after Desmond left her, Jesse whose love for Annie seems destined to remain unrequited, Rebecca Winkleman who is in an nontraditional marriage with a man who she doesn’t want to live without, Memling Winkleman whose passion for a woman could put an end to the art dealing empire he worked so hard to create. It also handles familial love, particularly that between a child and a parent: Annie’s enduring love for her alcoholic mom who constantly disappoints her (“Annie’s urge to care and protect her mother is as strong as Evie’s need to self-obliterate.”), as well as Rachel’s compulsive need to please to her father (“He was a monster, but he was her monster, an inextricable part of her past, present and future.”)

If I tell you that the man’s face is composed of only seven strokes of a brush you’ll laugh and remonstrate that this can’t be so; but that is why my master is a genius and why his star is still in the firmament of great artists nearly three hundred years after his death. He understands the alchemy of red and pink and pearly white. More importantly, he understands mankind, and he can, like great artists, translate our innermost joy and fear into something tangible.

This wasn’t a novel I raced through, but one that I had to put down every once an a while and let simmer. The story is mostly written in third person omniscient (the narrator slipping seamlessly through each character’s life), but there are occasional first person views from the painting itself. It even talks to other paintings when it gets the chance! I was put off by this at first, but it was actually pretty neat. It was an interesting perspective through which to view the paintings history. Imagine all the crazy stories artwork could tell if they were sentient! I really liked the direction the novel took, once we found out the secrets that were hiding in the painting’s provenance. Discovering the mystery of the painting’s history, despite the lengths taken to keep it a secret, was really exciting. I was really disappointed when I realized there were only a few more pages left at that point! The book was little heavy on the set-up and a little light on the wrap-up.

Don’t be shocked by this apparent self-reverence. As you know, my canvas is covered with the brushstrokes of a genius and overlaid with centuries of desire, love and avarice. Each of my owners added an intangible but indelible stratum: the first was my master’s outpourings; the second was his friend Julienne’s fraternal affection and these two were followed by the admiration of the great and the downright ugly; even young Annie added a little bit of magic. These layers of appreciation, though invisible to the human eye, are detectable to those with particular powers of intuition and sensitivity

This is one of those book where the more I think about it, the more I like it. If you have some time and you are really interested in fine art and culinary art, I’d recommend this book. If you liked the subject matter of this novel, you might want to check out the movie Woman in Gold.

Satisfying, realistic update and pleasant read, but lacks the magic of Me Before You.
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(Me Before You spoilers ahead)
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“Eighteen months. Eighteen whole months. So when is it going to be enough?” I say into the darkness. And there it is, I can feel it boiling up again, this unexpected anger. I take two steps along, glancing down at my feet. “Because this doesn’t feel like livinåg. It doesn’t feel like anything.” Two steps. Two more. I will go as far as the corner tonight. “You didn’t give me a bloody life, did you? Not really. You just smashed up my old one. Smashed it into little pieces. What am I meant to do with what’s left? When is it going to feel—” I stretch out my arms, feeling the cool night air against my skin, and realize I am crying again. “Fuck you, Will,” I whisper. “Fuck you for leaving me.”

Me Before You ended on an optimistic note, but After You begins with Louisa in a really dark place. Eighteen months after the end of Me Before You, she is waitressing at an airport bar, she is not speaking to her family and she drinks too much. At her lowest point, a person from Will’s past appears and helps give her life purpose. After You is about Louisa working through her grief and learning to live again.

“But that’s just a fairy-tale ending, isn’t it? Man dies, everyone learns something, moves on, creates something wonderful out of his death…I’ve done none of those things. I’ve basically just failed at all of it.”

Not much actually happens in this novel, aside from one shocking bombshell. Since the main story arc is Louisa confronting her grief, a lot of the subplots seem like ways to lengthen the novel (hi-jinks with Mr. Garside, feminism, silly misunderstandings etc.). In that way, it kind of reminded me of The Rosie Effect, except I didn’t end up despising any of the characters after reading this one!
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So here is the thing about being involved in a catastrophic, life-changing event. You think it’s just the catastrophic, life-changing event that you’re going to have to deal with: the flashbacks, the sleepless nights, the endless running back over events in your head, asking yourself if you had done the right thing, said the things you should have said, whether you could have changed things had you done them even a degree differently. My mother had told me that being there with Will at the end would affect the rest of my life, and I had thought she meant me, psychologically. I thought she meant the guilt I would have to learn to get over, the grief, the insomnia, the weird, inappropriate bursts of anger, the endless internal dialogue with someone who wasn’t even there. But what I now discovered is that it wasn’t just me. I had become that person and in a digital age I would be that person forever. It was in that faint swivel of heads when you walked through a busy street—“Is that—?” Even if I managed to wipe the whole thing from my memory, I would never be allowed to disassociate from Will’s death. My name would always be tied to his. People would form judgments about me based on the most cursory knowledge—or sometimes no knowledge at all—and there was nothing I could do about it… Now, when I read newspaper stories about the bank teller who had stolen a fortune, the woman who had killed her child, the sibling who had disappeared, I found myself not shuddering in horror, as I once might have, but wondering instead at the part of the story that hadn’t made it into print. What I felt with them was a weird kinship. I was tainted. The world around me knew it. Worse, I had started to know it too.

I like how Moyes chose to start this novel in a realistic way, even though it is painful to see how much Louisa is struggling. Will’s shadow is constantly lurking in Louisa’s mind. Louisa had tried to follow his wishes and “just live,” but she is just going through the motions and she keeps others at an arms-length. It can be so frustrating watching her self-sabotage, but I like how she didn’t become a completely new person after Me Before You. Her family is also dealing with the after effects of Louisa’s involvement with Will’s controversial death. Will Louisa every be more than “The One Who” again? Will she be able to make amends with her family? Will she ever be able to live life to its fullest, like Will would have wanted? With the help of a few new friends, Louisa will discover that moving on doesn’t mean she loved Will any less.

You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they’re not living, breathing people anymore. It’s not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It’s just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a hole. I don’t know. It’s like you become . . . a doughnut instead of a bun.

I liked the love interest that is introduced. They don’t have the quick banter that Will and Louisa did, but he is a nice, patient guy. The relationship allows Louisa to work through her fears of disrespecting the relationship she had with Will and the fear of forming a deep connection with another person.

There’s only one response, and I can tell you this because I see it every day. You live. And you throw yourself into everything and try not to think about the bruises.”

The feminism aspect seems a little bit out of place and like most superficial treatments of the subject, there is an overreliance on the hair grooming discussion! However it did serve its purpose in giving Louisa and her mom parallel arcs. While Louisa is weighing her responsibilities for her new charge versus moving forward with her life, Louisa’s mom discovers feminism. Like some people do when they discover something new and exciting, she throws herself into it and takes it to a weird extreme. While navigating their new experiences, Louisa and her mother learn that you don’t have to choose between taking care of yourself and being there for your loved ones. Louisa’s father, who was struggling with the change in marital dynamics, learns that just because his wife takes time for herself doesn’t mean that she will leave him behind.

“You don’t have to let that one thing be the thing that defines you.”

Jojo Moyes is an excellent storyteller. I love how she is able to inject humor in not-so-humorous situations and I love her subtle use of foreshadowing. I don’t think that this was a necessary sequel, but Louisa and her family are likable enough to make this a satisfying update to the story and a pleasant read. I am actually a little curious about the course of Louisa’s life after this novel, not matter how mundane the circumstances!

You never know what will happen when you fall from a great height.

Darkly humorous horror story, in the same vein as Cabin in the Woods., with a uniquely modern retail setting. Social commentary on corporate culture and consumerism. Best consumed in physical book form.

It was dawn, and the zombies were stumbling through the parking lot, streaming toward the massive beige box at the far end. Later they’d be resurrected by megadoses of Starbucks, but for now they were barely the living dead. Their causes of death differed: hangovers, nightmares, strung out from epic online gaming sessions, circadian rhythms broken by late-night TV, children who couldn’t stop crying, neighbors partying till 4 a.m., broken hearts, unpaid bills, roads not taken, sick dogs, deployed daughters, ailing parents, midnight ice cream binges. But every morning, five days a week (seven during the holidays), they dragged themselves here, to the one thing in their lives that never changed, the one thing they could count on come rain, or shine, or dead pets, or divorce: work. (love that opening!)

The Cuyahoga County, Ohio location of Orsk, an “all-American furniture superstore in Scandinavian drag, offering well-designed lifestyles at below-Ikea prices,” has been plagued with vandalism for six weeks. When the opening staff arrives every morning, they are greeted by broken mirrors, shredded mattresses, and couches that appear to have been smeared with feces. On the day of the couch incident, three employees stay overnight to patrol the store and hopefully catch the intruder who is sabotaging their store. The problem ends up being bigger and more dangerous than any of them could have expected!

I was mostly interested in Horrorstör both as an occasional IKEA visitor (which is really pretty hellish on weekends!) and a former graphic designer for large retailer. This book’s main claim to fame is its beautiful design, structured similarly to an IKEA catalog. The review at this link has some good pictures of the interior pages. I read it on the Kindle Voyage (e-reader, not a tablet), so I probably lost something by not reading it in physical format. A couple of the illustrations were hard to read because of a restrictive zoom feature, but I was able to read the text on most of the pictures. I really did appreciate the intricate detail that went into the catalog concept; the book included a map, coupons, and an order form. Each chapter was separated by a catalog page with a product illustration and a humorous marketing blurb. The products became more twisted as the story escalated! The featured item also played a key part in the chapter, which I thought was a really fun detail.

Inside the store there were no windows, no skylights, no wall clocks, no way of telling the time or the temperature. Like a casino, Orsk existed in an eternal now.

The author also excelled at describing the store as a living, breathing entity: “Orsk was an enormous heart pumping 318 partners..through its ventricles in ceaseless circular flow.”, “…she walked backward through Orsk, starting at the rear (the checkout registers) and moving clockwise through its entire digestive tract toward its mouth (the Showroom entrance at the top of the escalator).”, “The store was stirring, restless, growing slowly. Emptied of people, Orsk felt dangerous.” Horrorstör was at its best when it was poking fun at corporate jargon and retail psychology. I thought it was clever that even the ubiquitous hex key played a role in the story!

The Cuyahoga Panopticon was a real place,” Matt said. “You’ve never heard of it?” “I don’t have a strong grasp of Ohio’s extraordinary history.” “It was a big deal back in the nineteenth century. The warden—Josiah Worth—was a total maniac. He believed that nonstop surveillance would ‘cure’ criminals. The prison was round, with a guardhouse in the center, so that the prisoners—he called them penitents—never knew if they were being watched. Zero privacy. It was called a panopticon. Underneath the cells were three sub-basements where the penitents worked. Giant labyrinths full of mindless tasks designed to rewire their brains.” He shrugged. “Just like Orsk…Orsk is all about scripted disorientation. The store wants you to surrender to a programmed shopping experience. The Cuyahoga Panopticon was the same thing. The warden believed he could cure a criminal brain using forced labor, mindless repetition, and total surveillance. This was back when people believed that architecture could be designed to generate a psychological effect”

This response sometimes leads to heart failure or bulk cialis death in patients who suffer from heart disease. Getting plagued by continuous tiredness. 5.A sense regarding purchase cialis from india helplessness in addition to a large inability to focus along with indecisiveness. 6. Medicines used to treat ED actually have some proven clinical benefits treating pulmonary hypertension i.e. high cute-n-tiny.com viagra sale blood pressure in the lungs. There are certain properties that are overnight cialis special and this is one of them. The author is not subtle about drawing parallels between working for a big corporation and imprisonment/being reprogrammed. [spoiler]I especially liked the employee evaluation form contrasted with the prisoner evaluation form.[/spoiler] Given the theme of the book, I had to laugh when the Cuyahoga Panopticon came up! One of my old bosses told me there were once plans to remodel our office space to include a giant glass watchtower in the center, like a panopticon. It was probably just corporate urban legend, but I wouldn’t be 100% shocked if there was some truth to it! 😀

“This is crazy. Let’s leave this for the professionals.” “I am a professional,” Basil said. “This is what being a professional means. You can’t just walk away from a disaster and hope someone else cleans it up.”

I would have preferred more of the satirical elements, but they were overtaken by the horror aspects in the second half of the novel. I wish the story hadn’t gone the [spoiler]paranormal route with the haunted store + gross-out tactics[/spoiler]. The horror part of my imagination isn’t very well-developed. At one point there was a seance and I had no clue what was going on, but I knew it was disgusting. The descriptions were grotesque, but the book was so lighthearted that I didn’t find the book very scary. As far as level of horror, It vaguely reminded me of Goosebumps! I could totally see it working out great as a movie, starring former SNL comedians like Kristen Wiig.

In a way, the chair was her friend. It freed her from all the illusions. It showed her the truth. She was alone. No one was there to help her. All her life she had run from the one thing she’d been born to do: wear a uniform and work a register. It was time to embrace her true nature. The problem was the liars. They said she could do anything she set her mind to, they told her she should shoot for the moon because if she missed she’d be among the stars, they made movies tricking her into thinking she could achieve heroic things. All lies. Because she was born to answer phones in call centers, to carry bags to customers’ cars, to punch a clock, to measure her life in smoke breaks. To think otherwise was insane. The chair didn’t lie to her. The chair cured her of madness. The chair showed her exactly what she was capable of, and that was nothing.

I just realized that I forgot to mention the characters, which is probably pretty telling! The characters are caricatures, but recognizable as real people that you may have worked with but weren’t very close to: the brainwashed-by-corporate store manager, the sarcastic employee who does the bare minimum, the positive employee who considers her coworkers her family, the flirty employee who has an odd obsession with the supernatural. I did like the Amy, the main character. She is in a rut and having a hard time seeing her way out. She has a good sense of humor, so it is hard not to root for her to get her life together. I also liked how Basil, the store manager, became more than just a corporate drone.

In the end, Amy thought, everything always comes down to those two choices: stay down or stand up.

I probably won’t be able to visit IKEA ever again, without feeling a little unsettled (scripted disorientation!)! Horrorstör is an average story made more interesting by its retail setting and unique design. It is not very deep or subtle, but it is a quick read and entertaining way to spend an evening. (Especially in October!)

“What really knocks me out is a book that when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you feel like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.” – Holden Caulfield (pulled from the Soup Snakes essay)

I love Mindy Kaling way too much to be completely objective about her books! Why Not Me? picks up where the first book left off, taking place primarily during the production of The Mindy Project. I really enjoyed listening to this book. I love Mindy’s observations and honest insights and I laughed a lot. It is fluffy and entertaining, with a good mix of humor and important life lessons. Mindy realizes she is a role model and includes really sensible advice for young women, especially those in their late teens and twenties. It is more even in tone than Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, which had a few chapters that read like straight biography.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a woman. Or perhaps you’re a gay man getting a present for your even gayer friend. Maybe you accidentally bought this thinking it was the Malala book. However this book made its way from the “Female Humor/Brave Minority Voices/Stress-free Summer Reads!” Section of your bookstore to your hands, it doesn’t matter…If my childhood, teens, and twenties were about wanting people to like me, now I want people to know me.

Why Not Me? is a collection of essays divided in four sections:
For the Ladies – Essays about beauty and friendship (“Try to befriend a cinematographer and have him or her light you wherever you go.”)
Take This Job and Love It – Life lessons about success and the ups and downs of working on The Mindy Project. Bad Sport was a favorite in this section.
Love, Dating, and Boys Who Ru(i)n The World – Relationships, most notably Soup Snakes, a touching essay about her “weird as hell” relationship with B.J. Novak.
All the Opinions You Will Ever Need – Confidence and self-acceptance. I loved her Harvard Law School Class Day Speech. There is a section of it which is sort of a love letter to the USA and it is really heartfelt.

• If you believe in yourself and work hard, your dreams will come true.
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• If you believe in yourself and work hard, you have a fighting shot at having your dreams come true.

One of my favorite essays was A Perfect Courtship In My Alternate Life, about an imaginary version of Mindy in an alternate life as a Latin teacher in New York. I wasn’t sold at first, but I gradually became more captivated by fake Mindy’s fantasy relationship with Sam, a grumpy history teacher. It became one of my favorite essays, because of how down-to-earth and ridiculously detailed her fantasy life was! Perfect romantic comedy in essay form. I also loved One of The President’s Men, which was about her relationship with one of President Obama’s aides. As someone whose perception of the White House has also been 100% shaped by Aaron Sorkin and a fan of celebrity gossip, I just enjoyed living vicariously through Mindy on that one!

The truth is, if I were going to lose weight successfully, I would have to think about what I eat constantly. I cannot imagine a life more boring and a more time-consuming obsession than being preoccupied with watching what I eat. I mean maybe being in a coma would be more boring, but then at least you’re free to dream about all your favorite foods.

Mindy’s writing style is conversational, so Why Not Me? is perfect for audiobook. She is the voice narrator and it was great, because it feels like a phone conversation with an extremely successful and hilarious friend. It is a little less than 5 hours long, much shorter than most audiobooks. I did check out the ebook too, because I hate missing out on the pictures! The chapter “A Day in the Life of Mindy Kaling” is really dependent on captioned photographs (and that chapter wasn’t in the table of contents for my audiobook, so I am not 100% sure it was there!).

(On the ending of a relationship) Sometimes a story just needs an ending, and I used to not be creative enough person to think of an ending to a romantic story that isn’t a wedding or a death. This story didn’t end in fireworks, because the truth is, fireworks are something from my twenties. I could have made fireworks, but I chose to make a nuanced memory of a person who is neither a hero nor a villain in my life.

Why Not Me? is a fast and entertaining read (or listen). I’d probably listen to it again if I needed something to cheer me up!

If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And if you don’t got it? Flaunt it. ’Cause what are we even doing here if we’re not flaunting it?”

“I think our generation is obsessed with too much. We keep wanting to trade up, and if you think about Schopenhauer, the futility of striving and the ultimate emptiness of human desires…”…Evelyn had thought the weekend in the Hamptons, at Nick’s house that he owned and didn’t rent, with her friends who had gone to Sheffield and Enfield and St. Paul’s, Harvard and Dartmouth and Tufts and HBS, was enough. Yet she had taken the train when she was supposed to take the bus, and the bus wasn’t good enough so they were discussing a helicopter, and then the helicopter would be subordinate to a plane, and there was never enough, and nothing was ever good enough. Always, the more danced around, taunting her.

Twenty-six-year old Evelyn has always felt like an outsider among her old money peers. When she lands the recruitment job at the high society social media site People Like Us, she gets the opportunity to solidify her place with the 1% and finally earn her mother’s approval. On the blind pursuit of status and wealth, Evelyn’s actions get more and more ridiculous as she robotically ascends the social ladder. As her credit card debt mounts, her family encounters legal trouble that threatens the social status she has worked hard to build. Set in New England at the cusp of the the 2008 Great Recession, Everybody Rise is a cautionary tale about the the perils of social climbing and living in excess.

The world always said to just be yourself, but it turned out when Evelyn was herself, no guys were at all interested, so she was left with games of make-believe, expressing enthusiasm for whatever the men wanted to do, be it rock climbing or going to a cheese-beer pairing or a Knicks game.

I was so bored for the first third of the story, which in an almost 400 page book is a long time to be disinterested. Between the extravagant descriptions of wealthy people’s properties and the main character’s complete lack of personality, I was really struggling to get through the book. Evelyn might have been more interesting if we could get inside her head, but viewing her through a detached narrator was dull. I had a difficult time understanding how such a bland person managed to surround herself with such well-pedigreed friends, not that they were all that interesting either. The friends all have a role to play, especially Charlotte and Scot as the reality checks.

The four years since her Davidson graduation had gone by at once too slowly and too quickly, and Evelyn found herself in her mid-twenties without the life she had expected to have.

The turning point for me was the flashback to a boarding school term abroad in France (Chapter 11/33%). That chapter gave a brief glimpse of the moxie and sense of humor that might have attracted people to Evelyn. It also got more interesting when the Camilla, an A-List socialite and alpha female, started to play a bigger role. Camilla is a textbook frenemy, but Evelyn is too busy single-white-femaling her to notice! Evelyn’s ennui will be relatable to many, but her thought processes gets more and more absurd as the novel goes on (and on and on and on). Evelyn is a social chameleon of sorts, but she is not a natural at it and makes plenty of awkward missteps. Once she gets a taste of the affluent lifestyle, Evelyn gets caught up in a world that is not her own and loses all sense of self and empathy.

You couldn’t cover up the smell of new money, sharp and plastic as a vinyl shower curtain just out of its box. You could try, layering over it with old houses, old furniture, and manners that mimicked those of people who’d been living this life for centuries. But unless your fortune was generations old, too, it—you—would never count in the same way.

What is erectile dysfunction? Formally known as male disorder or Erectile Dysfunction. order cialis online The Nutritional Content of Acai cialis samples http://amerikabulteni.com/2014/02/02/philip-seymour-hoffman-dead/ is nothing short of amazing. generic tadalafil cheap These medications might not fix your erectile dysfunction immediately. Millions of men around the world have problem attaining erections in the bed when they are busy with their females. cialis generika 5mg Evelyn’s mother Barbara is an interesting character. She went to great lengths to attempt to worm her and her family into the old money crowd and has always encouraged Evelyn to ingratiate herself with the elite. The sections with Evelyn and her mother have a distinctly 1950s-1960s feel. My visions of many of the scenes appeared Mad Men-esque, which is fitting given Evelyn and her mother’s outdated view of the American aristocracy!

Everybody rise, everybody rise, everybody rise. That was exactly it, she thought. Upstairs, and outside, and in every street and every avenue of Manhattan, everybody was getting higher on a tide of money and ambition, swimming frantically and trying not to drown. And she? She didn’t have the energy to even tread water anymore.

I liked how the author took me from waiting for Evelyn to get her comeuppance for a large percent of the book, to making me feel sympathy for her. Many people can relate to changing an aspect of themselves or hiding something to prove themselves with a particular group, though maybe not to the same extremes as Evelyn [spoiler](ex. Preston’s secret)[/spoiler]. The book also addressed the double standards that exist between the classes [spoiler](ex. the differing attitudes towards Evelyn & Jamie post-tryst, consequences for Evelyn’s father vs. those on Wall Street)[/spoiler]. Evelyn’s story ends, just as Wall Street’s downturn is about to begin. Towards the end, I got the sense that the author was worried the reader wouldn’t get the point of the book and she really hammered the point home.

She had been waiting, she thought. Always waiting. In New York, waiting for her life to be replaced by some other, more interesting life on offer. Waiting for money that she felt ought to be hers to flood in and elevate her position, from some male source, her father, Scot, Jaime. Waiting to be recognized and accepted in the social scene, starring on Appointment Book. When she thought about it, she had always imagined her future self in pictures with her face on others’ bodies, in others’ dresses, at others’ parties, in others’ poses. Now, back home, she had been biding time, waiting for some sign about what her life’s goal ought to be. Maybe it didn’t work like that. Maybe you had to change things step-by-step.

I was expecting something a little more juicy or something with a sense of humor, but it was more of a mildly entertaining moralistic tale with a very slow-start.

The same song in a different key; her trying to create a life that other people had deemed worthwhile, Evelyn fighting to prove herself once again.

*Beaumont, TX mention in Chapter 7. Not sure if Evelyn would have thought her father’s job was so glamourous, if she actually saw where he was staying!

Well-paced and action-packed young adult western, featuring an ornery, tough-talkin’ female lead. I usually groan inwardly when my husband puts a western on the TV (I prefer my movies have a more lively color palette…embarrassingly superficial, I know!), but I loved this book! I would have passed it up, if it weren’t for the good reviews that popped up in my newsfeed. The gorgeous cover didn’t hurt either! This book was a good reminder to branch out of my comfort zone more often.

The thought of being confined to town—standing behind a grocer’s counter or waiting at home for a husband to return—is stifling. Every day the same. Marrying for security and nothing more. I can fire a rifle as good as any man. ’Parently I can kill another just as dead too. I don’t see why I should act like I can’t just ’cus it ruffles everyone else’s feathers.

A gang of outlaws murders Kate Thompson’s father and burns down her home. Left with nothing, she decides to avenge her father’s death. Disguised as a boy named Nate, Kate hops on her horse and rides through the dangerous, blood-soaked Arizona wilderness to seek vengeance and hopefully find out why the notorious Rose Riders targeted her father.

Vengeance Road is set during 1877, in the Arizona Territory. A helpful map is provided in the beginning, so it is easy to follow the journey. The plot is linear and the whole story plays out very cinematically. The story is told from Kate’s point-of-view, in a cowboy dialect. The dialect made me feel even more immersed in the Old West setting.
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“You know, I lost my ma in a bad way. Not to a gang of outlaws but to a band of Indians. It were ages ago, and it hurt for a long, long while. Still does on occasion. But the hurt fades with time. You always feel it, but it becomes a duller sting, ’stead of sharp. Course, that’s assuming you don’t ride the road of vengeance. You got good intentions, Nate, but that path’s like rubbing salt in the wound. Yer cut’ll never scab over.”

Kate reminded me a little of Jo in Little Women, which was probably intentional since Little Women is mentioned halfway through the book! She is brave and unapologetic, but she also has a good heart. Kate ends up reluctantly teaming up with a few equally stubborn characters who have their own motivations. I loved the banter between them all. Kate’s observations made me laugh, especially when it came to Jesse Colton’s squinty eyes! There is real danger lurking behind every shadow and there are more than a few violent shoot-outs. This author does not shy away from the gritty parts of the Wild West! A romance does begin to emerge, but it happens naturally at a regular pace. It never overwhelms the main plot or engulfs the characters. Kate isn’t the type of character that pines after a guy and mopes around. She simply doesn’t have time for that!

And this is where we differ, me and the Coltons, ’cus for them, walking out of those mountains matters. But I only want to avenge my father’s blood. It ain’t like I gotta live through it to be successful.

Kate learns that it is okay to ask for help and that maybe getting revenge isn’t as fulfilling as you would think. The author’s notes at the end are also worth a read, because she reveals the details of the legend she was inspired by. Vengeance Road is an entertaining book that leads the reader to some surprising and unexpected places! It also made me realize how thankful I am for Google Maps and that we don’t have to rely on landmarks, like “oddly shaped tree next to three rocks.” 😉 I would recommend to anyone who is looking for some entertaining, action-filled escapism and doesn’t mind when things get a little rough!

[spoiler]I thought I’d feel better when it were all said and done. I thought I’d feel like the world had reset, like things made sense. But I’m still just as alone, just as mad Pa were taken from me, just as furious it can’t be changed.[/spoiler]

“You are not so singular in your suspicions that you know but little. The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know. . . . Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.”

I have always loved the preceding John Adams quote, written in a letter to his granddaughter Caroline. I struggle with feeling that I know less as time goes on, especially when it seems that most everyone around me is so certain about everything! Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing by Jamie Holmes appealed to me because of its premise: it is not about what you know, but how you handle what you don’t know.

This book is surprisingly short! It ends on page 232 (72%) and the remainder of the pages are endnotes. Nonsense deals exclusively with the topics of ambiguity and uncertainty. It has a similar feel to books by Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point), Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) and Steven Levitt/Stephen J. Dubner (Freakonomics), in that it uses case studies and experiments from a wide variety of fields to justify its thesis. Throughout the book, the author provides possible solutions to counteract our intrinsic need to avoid ambiguity.

Let’s say for example, you see a white crow. At first you’re a little surprised. You peer at the bird with heightened attention, and then eventually you switch into the more domineering mind state that making decisions requires. You can assimilate the experience and decide the bird is a dove. Or you can accommodate it and recognize that albino crows exist. The rub, as Proulx’s collaborator Steve Heine told me, is that “assimilation is so often incomplete.” We act as if we’re sure the bird is a dove, but the feeling that it’s not is still there in the unconscious, leaving us trapped in a similar middle ground as the doomsday believers were, stuck between assuming we’ve understood and sensing we haven’t. One way we respond to these lingering anxieties is by finding comfort in our social groups and passionately emphasizing our ideals. Proulx and Inzlicht called this reaction affirmation. Affirmation is the intensification of beliefs, whatever those beliefs might be, in response to a perceived threat.

The book is divided three parts The first part is about how the human brain responds to uncertainty. This section was really interesting because of the experiments showing that humans automatically seek order after being exposed to randomness, even when they are not consciously aware of the exposure. Not only did the test subjects find patterns more effectively after seeing incorrectly colored playing cards, their political positions intensified.

When the world is less predictable, people are more likely to jump to conclusions or entrench their existing views. That’s the problem with striving for certainty or making rashly informed judgments of trust to escape from ambiguity. Urgently fixating on certainty is our defense mechanism against the unknown and unstable. However, what we need in turbulent times is adaptability and calculated reevaluation.

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“Openness to outside influences and the frequency of travel abroad, he found, was correlated with simultaneous gains in achievements in business and religion. Most strikingly, he also discovered that the more diversity there was in Japanese society, the more creative the society was two generations later in the areas of medicine, fiction, poetry, and painting. Diversity can be painful initially, it seems, but it pays off decades later. While at first most immigrants occupy a marginal position in society, as Simonton explained, “after a generation or two not only do they become integrated but their culture becomes part of the ‘melting pot’—as we start eating pizza or chow mein.”

Part 3 highlights how embracing ambiguity can be asset. My main takeaways from this chapter were that it is important to investigate your successes as well as your failures and that deconstructing objects to their most form can lead to great ingenuity.

Nonsense is definitely relevant to today’s world. The need to reconcile ambiguity is probably one of the driving forces behind the growing divisiveness in the United States, which seems to get more heightened as the 24-hour news cycle and the internet makes the world feel more chaotic. On a lighter note, it also might explain the intense emotions during the white/gold or blue/black dress debacle! Like any book of this nature, it is not a complete picture and it relies heavily on anecdotes. However, it does provide yet another lens with which to see the world and makes one much more comfortable with the concept of uncertainty. It made me view the contentious arguments that erupt on social media in a different light and has made me more reflective over my own knee-jerk reactions. It is a fun and quick read and I think it would be a useful book for everyone to read.

For Chekhov, morality lay not in our relationships with what we know, but how admirably we deal with what we don’t…It’s a morality distinct from IQ and common notions of confidence or self-control. Chekhov showed that not knowing doesn’t leave us without a compass, in some relativist nether land. Owning our uncertainty makes us kinder, more creative, and more alive…”It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense,” [Anton Chekhov] once wrote. “Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything . . . and if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees—this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.”