Solito

Solito by Javier Zamora
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I can't even review this. Just read it. Gorgeous. Cried my eyes out. Talked about it to everyone nonstop. Just a perfect memoir that will make you want to be a better person and your country a better country.

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Raw Dog

 

Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs by Jamie Loftus
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

DNF. Maybe I thought this was a different book. I get the feeling Loftus did an awesome job of writing a proposal. And it was coming out of COVID where I feel like our idea of good ideas was slightly unhinged. And maybe it would be more my thing with better editing. Cause like it's a hot mess for me. Like over processed. Like bits and pieces are smushed together (outrage! sly observances. travelogue. personal bits that are really, like, too personal. all on in the same sentence). By 30% I didn't feel like it was expanding my world view as much as scrolling through the gram does so I'll leave this to people who jived more with it.

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The Trial

 

The Trial by Franz Kafka
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Yes, 5 stars. Because who but Kafka could write such a surrealistic novel that has characters who appear, seem important, and then are never heard of again; a chapter in the middle of the book that simply ends with "the chapter was left unfinished"; and a subject (the trial) about which the whole book revolves but which the reader, the main character, and apparently author doesn't know what it's about--and yet write it in such a propulsive way that the reader pushes on through stuffy attics, soliloquies about bureaucracy , and bizarre hunchbacked women? I admit I had to read it in doses but it is a novel that worms into my head at night as I try to unravel what it all means. (Personally I think it could be read as more than political). We read quite a bit of Kafka in a Magical Realism class I took and I really love that genre, so I enjoyed this quite a bit. It doesn't surprise me that Orwell made a film of it, the whole thing is very noir.

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Every day over the following week, K. expected another summons to arrive, he could not believe that his rejection of any more hearings had been taken literally, and when the expected summons really had not come by Saturday evening he took it to mean that he was expected, without being told, to appear at the same place at the same time.

“those books must be law books, and that’s how this court does things, not only to try people who are innocent but even to try them without letting them know what’s going on.”

“Everything is so dirty here,”

“So this is the sort of law book they study here,” said K., “this is the sort of person sitting in judgement over me.”

When you’re here for the second or third time you’ll hardly notice how oppressive the air is.

The gentleman is only unwell here, and not in general.”

He isn’t hard-hearted. It’s not really his job to help litigants outside if they’re unwell but he’s doing it anyway, as you can see. I don’t suppose any of us is hard-hearted, perhaps we’d all like to be helpful, but working for the court offices it’s easy for us to give the impression we are hard-hearted and don’t want to help anyone. It makes me quite sad.”

They want, as far as possible, to prevent any kind of defence, everything should be made the responsibility of the accused.

The only right thing to do is to learn how to deal with the situation as it is.

Never attract attention to yourself!

“I had to paint it like that according to the contract. It’s actually the figure of justice and the goddess of victory all in one.” “That is not a good combination,” said K. with a smile. “Justice needs to remain still, otherwise the scales will move about and it won’t be possible to make a just verdict.”

it seemed now, rather, to be a perfect depiction of the God of the Hunt.

It was not so much finding court offices even here that shocked K., he was mainly shocked at himself, at his own naïvety in court matters. It seemed to him that one of the most basic rules governing how a defendant should behave was always to be prepared, never allow surprises, never to look, unsuspecting, to the right when the judge stood beside him to his left—and this was the very basic rule that he was continually violating.

But the priest certainly seemed to mean well, it might even be possible, if he would come down and cooperate with him, it might even be possible for him to obtain some acceptable piece of advice that could make all the difference, it might, for instance, be able to show him not so much to influence the proceedings but how to break free of them, how to evade them, how to live away from them.

The moonlight lay everywhere with the natural peace that is granted to no other light.

Either/Or

Either/Or by Elif Batuman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Picking up from where we left Selin in The Idiot, we follow her through her Sophomore year and summer at Harvard. The emphasis changes from language to contradictions, which makes the writing more thoughtful and probing, and I enjoyed the musings Selin expounds about several books, films, and music. This introspection shows a maturing in Selin, even as she also expands some of her extracurricular activities, including drinking and having sex. For a kid that until that year hadn't even kissed anyone and fell deeply in love with someone solely over email, she sure moves fast, and I couldn't help wondering how someone so smart suddenly gets so stupid. (like lets not go home with some stranger in a foreign land where no one knows where you are!) But that plot-point notwithstanding, it is a novel full of deep thinking that I enjoyed.

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What was the role of chance in literature? The realist novel was predicated on the contingency of everyday life, laying out in its opening pages the accidents of the characters’ birth to a particular historical, geographic, and social milieu. Characters were no longer allegorical, or social types. They were doomed to have “personalities.”

The Repugnant Conclusion said that it was possible to justify decreasing a population’s quality of life, if you made the population bigger.

The physicist said that the girl was an ordinary star, and the boy was a black hole. You couldn’t see the boy, but the girl whirling around him was evidence that he existed, and was holding her in orbit. This seemed like corroboration of “The Seducer’s Diary,” where the seducer disappeared and Cordelia was going in circles. It seemed to me that the elements whirling around me in my own life were also somehow held in place by Ivan’s absence, or were there because of him—to counterbalance a void.

if everyone’s behavior was visibly consistent with what their attitude was supposed to be, then faith would be unnecessary.

And the great advantage of an arranged marriage was that your husband was committing, not to you personally, but to the institution of marriage—to his whole family, as well as to yours. That took a lot of pressure off your looks, which wouldn’t last forever, and off the rest of you, too, because whose personality was enchanting enough to keep a man interested for sixty years?

That was what Russia had done: taken a fork in the road to a different future.

Take My Hand

 

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was an excellent historical fiction piece about the de facto eugenics practices that were brought to bear on marginalized populations in the 1960s and 70s in America. Perkins-Valdez does a wonderful job breathing life into these characters and they feel real and nuanced. She gives dignity to the victims and investigates the complications "help" can cause. Because her characters are so well-fleshed out, it allows the reader to live in the era and situation instead of reading a story that runs parallel with facts and figures. Eugenics in particular is so horrifying to me--that we practiced it here in America and for so long. A book that needs to be read.

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Supercommunicators

 

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is probably more like 3 stars because a lot of the information is self-evident like: to make a person feel like you are interested in them, be interested in them (basically). And a lot of the case studies where deep communication occurred that is cited in the book happened when both parties knew certain rules, and most conversations occur with people who don't know the rules. But it did have some really good questions to ask (both in conversations, and of yourself before and during the conversation). And it actually said NOT to parrot back what the person said which is my most hated thing people do. A worthwhile read because we could all use pointers on trying to understand each other.

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Negotiation, among its top practitioners, isn’t a battle. It’s an act of creativity.

When we discuss our feelings, something magical happens: Other people can’t help but listen to us.

act of exposing ourselves to someone’s scrutiny engenders a sense of intimacy.

which says that communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring, and then matching

We laugh, in other words, to show someone that we want to connect with them—and our companions laugh back to demonstrate they want to connect with us, as well.

if you don’t acknowledge the emotions, then you’ll never understand why you’re fighting,”

This is the real reason why so many conflicts persist: Not because of a lack of solutions or because people are unwilling to compromise, but because combatants don’t understand why they are fighting in the first place.

This explains why looping for understanding is so powerful: When you prove to someone you are listening, you are, in effect, giving them some control over the conversation.

In a Who Are We? conversation, we sometimes latch on to a single identity: I am your parent or I am the teacher or I am the boss. In doing so, though, we hobble ourselves, because we start to see the world solely through that one lens.

The Idiot

The Idiot by Elif Batuman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At first this seemed like nothing more than a rather detailed telling of a Turkish-American's first year at Harvard. Which was a little slow and irritating. Because if you get to go to Harvard, like actually go to class. But about half-way through I realized each episode was an encounter with language, how it can often be a vehicle for miscommunication than for communication, and it became much more interesting. Selin's dorky stumbling through her first years of independence, trying to become a writer, and navigating new relationships and encountering new world views became a sort of cozy reprieve to my day.

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I knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English—not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish, for example, had a suffix,-miş, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth. The suffix-miş had no exact English equivalent. It could be translated as “it seems” or “I heard” or “apparently.” I associated it with Dilek, my cousin on my father’s side—tiny, skinny, dark-complexioned Dilek, who was my age but so much smaller. “You complained-miş to your mother,” Dilek would tell me in her quiet, precise voice. “The dog scared-miş you.” “You told-miş your parents that if Aunt Hülya came to America, she could live in your garage.” When you heard-miş, you knew that you had been invoked in your absence—not just you but your hypocrisy, cowardice, and lack of generosity. Every time I heard it, I felt caught out. I was scared of the dogs. I did complain to my mother, often. The-miş tense was one of the things I complained to my mother about. My mother thought it was funny.

Why was subtraction always harder than addition?

Was it because Balzac’s novels had been read and analyzed by hundreds of professors, so that reading and interpreting Balzac was like participating in a conversation with all these professors, and was therefore a higher and more meaningful activity than reading an email only I could see?

WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM. I had seen this inscription countless times, without really thinking about it. It was a good question. What was man? It occurred to me that I could be less mindful of man, and I seemed to catch a glimpse of freedom.

Love at first sight is possible only because you recognize a type. You’re already looking for him.

She said I had cynical ideas about language. “You think language is an end in itself. You don’t believe it stands for anything. No, it’s not that you don’t believe—it’s that you don’t care. For you, language itself is a self-sufficient system.”

you were so ready to jump into a reality the two of you made up, just through language.

Talking with Dawn felt so different from talking with Ivan that Ivan seemed almost not to exist anymore.

How did you separate where someone was from, from who they were?

I wondered if it was true that different people gravitated toward different kinds of situations.

love really was an obscure and unfathomable connection between individuals, and not an economic contest where everyone was matched up according to how quantifiably lovable they were?

That’s saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too.”

For a moment it felt like we weren’t in the Danube at all but in the river of time, and everyone was at a different point, though in another sense we were all here at once.

Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn’t just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened and, just as I had that thought, I saw a dark shape behind the frosted glass and heard a knock on the door.

Within minutes the sun was blazing as if it didn’t remember a thing.

A Rule Against Murder

A Rule Against Murder by Louise Penny
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another cozy Gamache mystery. I enjoy them because Gamache is such a likable guy and because besides solving a mystery, the books also remind of subtle life lessons like: whether you enjoy or hate life is primarily how you choose to interpret events.

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