Lifestyle: Annie Fay Blog

April 2020 Books

5/3/2020

All (abridged) summaries taken from Good Reads. Notes are my own.

#1: The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh

Summary:
For the first time an award-winning Harvard professor shares his wildly popular course on classical Chinese philosophy, showing you how these ancient ideas can guide you on the path to a good life today...The Path upends everything we are told about how to lead a good life.

Notes:
- “While we have been told that true freedom comes from discovering who we are at our core, that “discovery” is precisely what has trapped so many of us in the Age of Complacency. We are the ones standing in our own way,” (13).
- “As you make room for interests, opportunity open up to you...By being responsive to how your interests change over time, you will not be locked in—you will be more able to alter your life and your schedule to allow for growth,” 81).
- “Triggering events of any sort—whether they make us giddy or jealous or furious—are external,” (129).
- “The opposite of mindlessness and complacency is not mindfulness. It is engagement,” (194).

Personal Rating:
5.5/10

#2: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Summary:
It is about a London lawyer named John Gabriel Utterson who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and the evil Edward Hyde.

Personal Rating:
2/10

#3: Dracula by Bram Stoker

Summary:
Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. It introduced Count Dracula, and established many conventions of subsequent vampire fantasy. The novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and a woman led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.

Personal Rating:
3/10

#4: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer

Summary:
For Milo, everything’s a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only because he’s got nothing better to do. But on the other side, things seem different. Milo visits the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping), learns about time from a ticking watchdog named Tock, and even embarks on a quest to rescue Rhyme and Reason! Somewhere along the way, Milo realizes something astonishing. Life is far from dull. In fact, it’s exciting beyond his wildest dreams.

Personal Rating:
10/10

#5: The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the Horse by Charles Mackesy

Summary:
"A wonderful work of art and a wonderful window into the human heart," Richard Curtis.

Notes:
- “The truth is I need pictures. They are like islands, places to get to in a sea of words.”
- “What do you think success is? asked the boy “To love,” said the mole”
- “Sometimes I think you believe in me more than I do,” said the boy “You’ll catch up,” said the horse”

Personal Rating:
10/10

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March 2020 Books

4/5/2020

Comments

All (abridged) summaries taken from Good Reads. Notes are my own.

#1: Marcel the Shell: The Most Surprised I’ve Ever Been by Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate, Paintings by Amy Lind

Summary:
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is walking on the blanket when he is unexpectedly launched high into the air. Tumbling through space, the bird's-eye view offers our small friend not only a glimpse of the important things in life--his beloved Nana who sleeps in a fancy French bread, a stinky shoe, and a monstrous baby--but also a much bigger picture. Sometimes the most wonderful discoveries are the ones we least expect.

Personal Rating:
10/10

#2: Marcel the Shell with Shoes on: Things About Me by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp, Paintings by Amy Lind

Summary:
From wearing a lentil as a hat to hang-gliding on a Dorito, Marcel is able to find magic in the everyday. He may be small, but he knows he has a lot of good qualities. He may not be able to lift anything by himself, but when he needs help, he calls upon his family. He may never be able own a real dog . . . but he has a pretty awesome imagination.

Personal Rating:
10/10

#3: i’ll be your blue sky by Marisa de los Santos

Summary:
The New York Times bestselling author revisits the characters from her beloved novels Love Walked In and Belong to Me in this captivating, beautifully written drama involving family, friendship, secrets, sacrifice, courage, and true love for fans of Jojo Moyes, Elin Hilderbrand, and Nancy Thayer. On the weekend of her wedding, Clare Hobbes meets an elderly woman named Edith Herron. During the course of a single conversation, Edith gives Clare the courage to do what she should have done months earlier: break off her engagement to her charming, yet overly possessive, fiancé...Shifting between the 1950s and the present and told in the alternating voices of Edith and Clare, I’ll Be Your Blue Sky is vintage Marisa de los Santos—an emotionally evocative novel that probes the deepest recesses of the human heart and illuminates the tender connections that bind our lives.

Personal Rating:
8.5/10

#4: The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson

Summary:
A woman inherits a beloved bookstore and sets forth on a journey of self-discovery in this poignant debut about family, forgiveness and a love of reading. Miranda Brooks grew up in the stacks of her eccentric Uncle Billy’s bookstore, solving the inventive scavenger hunts he created just for her. But on Miranda’s twelfth birthday, Billy has a mysterious falling-out with her mother and suddenly disappears from Miranda’s life. She doesn’t hear from him again until sixteen years later when she receives unexpected news: Billy has died and left her Prospero Books, which is teetering on bankruptcy—and one final scavenger hunt.

Personal Rating:
8.5/10

#5: No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg

Summary:
No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to Capitol Hill and mass street protests, her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.

Notes:
- “This is the time to wake up. This is the moment in history when we need to be wide awake,” (118).

Personal Rating:
10/10

#6: Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Summary:
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.

Notes:
- “The space next to the man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill...your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you,” (131).

Personal Rating:
6.5/10

#7: The Power Notebooks by Katie Roiphe

Summary:
Katie Roiphe, culture writer and author of The Morning After, shares a timely blend of memoir, feminist investigation, and exploration of famous female writers’ lives, in a bold, essential discussion of how strong women experience their power.

Notes:
- “Strong interpretations or opinions or worldviews are somehow better received if they are couched in approachability...Especially if the writer is a woman,” (59-60).- “Fantasies of quasimaternal power involve a tricky kind of subjugation to someone else’s difficulties; it is an antique female idea of taking care of things, assuming control, but at the same time erasing one’s own desires,” (88).

Personal Rating:
8.5/10

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February 2020 Books

3/1/2020

Comments

All (abridged) summaries taken from Good Reads. Notes are my own.

#1: Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

Notes:
- I have read "Little Weirds" twice now and absolutely love it. In terms of form, Slate redefines what it means to write short stories, and creative nonfiction short stories at that. "Little Weirds" is made up of dozens of vignettes about vulnerability, heartbreak, love, wildness, and beauty. Her nuanced way of viewing herself and the world around her is inspiring and I'd recommend this book to anyone.

Personal Rating: 10/10

#2: You'll Grow Out Of It by Jessi Klein

Summary:
In YOU'LL GROW OUT OF IT, Klein offers - through an incisive collection of real-life stories - a relentlessly funny yet poignant take on a variety of topics she has experienced along her strange journey to womanhood and beyond.

Notes:
- “When you encounter a man wearing loafers with no socks, run,” (68).
- “We were falling into the exciting tingle of fake intimacy through email, where a few personal overshares, blended with a sprinkling of coy, overly specific compliments, mimic the sensation of falling in love (when in fact usually you are only falling in love with yourself and your ability to write a really top-notch flirty email),” (70).
- “... I had been cuckolded. (I know this is not technically the definition of the word cuckolded but it’s a fun word and it somehow feels right in this context),” (75).

Personal Rating: 7/10

#3: Normal People by Sally Rooney

Summary:
Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.

Notes:
- “If he silently decides not to say something when they’re talking, Marianne will ask “what?” within one or two seconds. This “what?” question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them,” (26).
- “...the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them,” (72).
- “Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct,” (112).

Personal Rating: 9/10

#4: Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose

Summary:
Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today.

Notes:
- “Those guys who, of course, don’t exist...These tiny people turned me onto ingenuity...They were, for example, the characters in Mary Norton’s The Borrowers; a series of books I don’t remember reading but on whose illustrated covers I imparted my own stories...The Borrowers were, I made myself believe, living among us: snatching up my spare buttons and refashioning them as tabletops or winter sleds...They repurposed our excess was the point,” (14-15). Reading this, I was astonished at how an experience I thought was unique to me (as I've imagined this exact same thing) might be more universal/shared. I had this same realization later when I read the line, “...imagine furniture mounted on ceilings...” (176).
- Semaphore, anthropomorphic, acquisitive, alcove, moonbeams (I always record words I like)
- Thinking of things the way they were is another way of writing: “Thinking about someone I was in love with—how he’d peel an orange and hand me a slice...” (19).
- “...questions that can only occur in cars,” (25).
- “A vacant stare does not mean vacancy. It’s the inverse of invitation, and yet,” (26).
- “...make stuff instead of make sense...” (61).
- “She always feels like...she’s meant to be going to a museum, so sometimes she does. Like she’s meant to be ordering a pastry. So, often, she does,” (148).

Personal Rating: 8/10

#5: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Summary:
A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.

Notes:
- verisimilitude
- “It is certain that species are vanishing without ever having been known to science. To think about this is to imagine the space inside our heads expanding but the places outside shrinking, as though we were literally devouring them,” (187).

Personal Rating: 7/10

#6: Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist by Albert Camus

Summary:
In 1957, Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Albert Camus gave a speech entitled "Create Dangerously," effectively a call to arms for artists, in particular those who came from an immigrant background, like he did. Camus understood the necessity of those making art as a part of civil society. A bold cry for artistic freedom and responsibility, his words today remain as timely as ever. In this new translation, Camus's message, available as a stand-alone little book for the first time, will resonate with a new generation of writers and artists.

Notes:
- “This ideal of global communication is, in fact, the ideal of every great artist,” (20).
- “...the suppression of creative freedom is not, perhaps, the right way to overcome servitude, and until we can speak for all, it is stupid to take away the power to at least speak for some,” (27).

Personal Rating: 8/10

#7: The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe

Summary:
Set in a Roman Catholic Europe of violent passions and extreme oppression, the novel follows the fate of its heroine Adeline, who is mysteriously placed under the protection of a family fleeing Paris for debt. They take refuge in a ruined abbey in south-eastern France, where sinister relics of the past - a skeleton, a manuscript, and a rusty dagger - are discovered in concealed rooms. Adeline finds herself at the mercy of the abbey's proprietor, a libidinous Marquis whose attentions finally force her to contemplate escape to distant regions. Rich in allusions to aesthetic theory and to travel literature, The Romance of the Forest is also concerned with current philosophical debate and examines systems of thought central to the intellectual life of late eighteenth-century Europe.

Personal Rating: 5.5/10

#8: Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

Summary:
A sharply intelligent novel about two college students and the strange, unexpected connection they forge with a married couple.

Notes:
- sanguine, verdant

Personal Rating: 8.5/10

#9: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

This is a book I've continued to revisit since I first read it in fourth grade. I doubt a summary is necessary but I'll leave my notes and personal rating below (:

Notes:
- “You won’t make yourself a bit realer by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there’s nothing to cry about,” (176).- “”Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come today. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything, only don’t cry!”” (185).

Personal Rating: 10/10 (obviously!!)

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April 2020 Books

#1: The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh

#2: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

#3: Dracula by Bram Stoker

#4: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer

#5: The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the Horse by Charles Mackesy

March 2020 Books

#1: Marcel the Shell: The Most Surprised I’ve Ever Been by Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate, Paintings by Amy Lind

#2: Marcel the Shell with Shoes on: Things About Me by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp, Paintings by Amy Lind

#3: i’ll be your blue sky by Marisa de los Santos

#4: The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson

#5: No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg

#6: Citizen by Claudia Rankine

#7: The Power Notebooks by Katie Roiphe

February 2020 Books

#1: Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

#2: You'll Grow Out Of It by Jessi Klein

#3: Normal People by Sally Rooney

#4: Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose

#5: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

#6: Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist by Albert Camus

#7: The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe

#8: Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

#9: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Categories

Archives

April 2020 Books

#1: The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh

​#2: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

#3: Dracula by Bram Stoker

#4: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, illustrated by Jules Feiffer

#5: The Boy, the mole, the fox, and the Horse by Charles Mackesy

March 2020 Books

#1: Marcel the Shell: The Most Surprised I’ve Ever Been by Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate, Paintings by Amy Lind

#2: Marcel the Shell with Shoes on: Things About Me by Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp, Paintings by Amy Lind

#3: i’ll be your blue sky by Marisa de los Santos

#4: The Bookshop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson

#5: No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference by Greta Thunberg

#6: Citizen by Claudia Rankine

#7: The Power Notebooks by Katie Roiphe

February 2020 Books

​#1: Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

#2: You'll Grow Out Of It by Jessi Klein

​#3: Normal People by Sally Rooney

#4: Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose

#5: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

#6: Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist by Albert Camus

#7: The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe

#8: Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney

#9: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Categories

Archives

#2: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

#1: Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

#3: Normal People by Sally Rooney