Behind The Shock Machine, by Gina Perry.

I have a dumb story to tell about how I came to buy this book.

I’d been eyeing this book for a while, but because I had absolutely no business buying any new books at the time (thanks to the pile of unread books on my nightstand that had just arrived from The Book Depository), I just suppressed my longing for it. And boy, was I longing to read it: I’m a nerd, and I really needed to read some non-fiction that wasn’t about personal development or the brain.

And then I got a shiny new credit card in the mail to replace my expiring one. The instructions on the accompanying letter said to sign the back of the new card immediately, and then use it in order to confirm that it was, in fact, working.

Well…

When it comes to certain kinds of instructions, I am perfectly willing to be obedient.

(See what I did there? Oh, wait, too early in the review)

Anyway, that’s how I ended up buying Behind The Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments on a miserably rainy Sunday afternoon.

From the back cover:

In the summer of 1961, a group of men and women volunteered for a memory experiment to be conducted by young, dynamic psychologist Stanley Milgram. None could have imagined that, once seated in the lab, they would be placed in front of a box known as a shock machine and asked to give electric shocks to a man they’d just met. And no one could have foreseen how the repercussions of their actions, made under pressure and duress, would reverberate through their lives. For what the volunteers did not know was that the man was an actor, the shocks were fake, and what was really being tested was how far they would go.

When Milgram’s results were released, they created a worldwide sensation. He reported that people had repeatedly shocked a man they believed to be in pain, even dying, because they had been told to – linking the finding to Nazi behaviour during the Holocaust. But some questioned Milgram’s unethical methods in fooling people. Milgram became both hero and villain, and his work seized the public imagination for more than half a century, inspiring books, plays, films, and art.

For Gina Perry, the story of the experiments never felt finished. Listening to participants’ accounts and reading Milgram’s files and notebooks, she pieced together an intriguing, sensational story: Milgram’s plans had gone further than anyone imagined. This is the compelling tale of one man’s ambition and of the experiment that defined a generation.

I can’t remember when I first heard about the Milgram shock experiments, but the last time it entered my consciousness was when I was listening to a random Radiolab podcast about a year or so ago, and a guest had spoken dismissively of it. Whoever it was, he was saying that he tends to get very impatient whenever anyone tries to comment on the inherently obedient nature of human beings by reference to the Milgram experiments. Milgram ran his experiments under many different conditions, this guest explained, and he had found that the rate of obedience was drastically lower under other conditions.

But people only ever remember that one condition with the high rates of obedience. People only ever remember that subjects had willingly shocked a man, had willingly gone to the maximum voltage, because they were told to do so.

I’m guessing that the mystery Radiolab guest (a mystery because I no longer remember who it was, and which episode I’d been listening to) would approve of Gina Perry’s book. Behind The Shock Machine does exactly that: it takes us behind the scenes and introduces us to the cast of characters involved in the infamous experiments – Milgram himself, his staff (including the ‘experimenter’ and the ‘learner’, both of whom kept their involvement secret from their families), and most importantly, the volunteers who signed up to participate in what they thought was an innocuous study of memory and learning.

The book also dives into the problematic ethics of what Milgram subjected his volunteers to. I’m not sure I’m exaggerating when I say that the social psychology scene of the 1960s was a bit like the Wild West.

I asked if it bothered him, if he wondered what Milgram was doing when he saw how upset subject became. “No, we were all ethically dead at that time,” he responded, and laughed. I laughed along, but was taken aback at his honesty.

And let’s not even get me started on whether or not Milgram’s results can be relied upon. Gina does a much better job of dissecting the various problems with Milgram’s experiments than I ever could. Suffice to say that, just like that mystery Radiolab guest, I’m going to get very impatient with anyone who tries to make sweeping statements about human behaviour by referencing the Milgram experiments.

The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern.

This is what it says on the back cover of The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern:

The Circus arrives without warning.

No announcements precede it…

It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.

Colour me intrigued. Tell me more, oh beautifully designed book.

Audrey Niffenegger says it’s marvellous, and therefore it must be true.

Has anyone noticed that a book’s full synopsis tends to be on the inside of the front cover these days?

In 1886, a mysterious travelling circus becomes an international sensation. Open only at night, constructed entirely in black and white, Le Cirque des Rêves delights all who wander its circular paths and warm themselves at its bonfire.

Although there are acrobats, fortune-tellers and contortionists, the Circus of Dreams is no conventional spectacle. Some tents contain clouds, some ice. The circus seems almost to cast a spell over its aficionados, who call themselves the rêveurs – the dreamers. At the heart of the story is the tangled relationship between two young magicians, Celia, the enchanter’s daughter, and Marco, the sorcerer’s apprentice. At the behest of their shadowy masters, they find themselves locked in a deadly contest, forced to test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love…

So, to recap: the storyline contains magic, romance, and a freakin’ circus that appears mysteriously, and then only opens at night.

Do I really need to say anything more?

I mean.

COME ON.

I obviously love this book, and I think you should read it. Never mind that the conclusion leaves me feeling a little dissatisfied: it feels like everything was resolved a little too neatly and conveniently. I can’t really put my finger on it; I just have this sense of “Wait, explain that to me again? How would THAT work?”

But it doesn’t change the fact that The Night Circus is a highly enjoyable little tale, and a very pleasant bit of escapism.

I’ll end with an exchange that occurs towards the end of the book, an exchange that left me thinking, “FUCK YEAH”. I think you’ll agree with the sentiment if you happen to be a person who likes stories.

“I tell stories,” he says. It is the most truthful answer he has.

“You tell stories?” the man asks, the piquing of his interest almost palpable.

“Stories, tales, bardic chronicles,” Widget says. “Whatever you care to call them. The things we were discussing earlier that are more complicated than they used to be. I take pieces of the past that I see and I combine them into narratives. It’s not that important, and this isn’t why I’m here – “

“It is important,” the man in the grey suit interrupts. “Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.”

The Rules of Inheritance, by Claire Bidwell Smith.

First, imagine both of your parents being diagnosed with cancer within months of each other. Then, imagine that you are still a teenager in high school when this happens.

Claire Bidwell Smith doesn’t have to.

Claire Bidwell Smith – an only child – was just fourteen years old when both of her parents were diagnosed with cancer within months of each other. “I’ve already come to the conclusion that I will probably be parentless by the time I am thirty,” Claire writes in her powerful debut, The Rules of Inheritance.

Defying a conventional framework, this memoir is told in nonlinear fashion, using the five stages of grief as a window into Claire’s experience, at once heartbreaking and uplifting.

Heartbreaking and uplifting: that just about sums it up, yep. In elegant prose that perfectly captures the grief and loneliness of loss, Claire describes what it is like to lose her mother at the age of eighteen, and then her father at the age of twenty-five. Stories about grappling with teenage angst in the face of her parents’ illnesses are intertwined with those describing the aftermath of her parents’ deaths, as grief sends her straight towards the false solace of alcohol, a troubled young man, and travel.

If you’re the type to cry over a book, then I would suggest having a box of tissues handy while you’re reading The Rules of Inheritance. Claire’s words burst with raw emotion. The grief and anger and regret leap right off the page and sock it to you in the gut.

And the loneliness. Oh God, the loneliness.

This is the point at which I had to stop, close the book, and stare at the ceiling for a little while:

But suddenly, sitting here in the car, phone in my hand, it all comes crashing down. This thing that I’m fighting every day, all the time.

In this moment, twenty-eight years old on a cool Los Angeles night, my thumb is ready to press a button, the button that will connect me to that person, the person you call when something like this happens.

Except I don’t have that person anymore. They’re all gone.

I’m nobody’s most important person, and I don’t have a most important person. The tears are streaming down my cheeks now.

This is it. This is the thing of it.

The thing that leads me to those moments when every part of me is screaming.

I’m nobody’s most important person.

Happily, this is not a permanent state of affairs: Claire eventually finds her happy ending, and her “most important person”. In turn, she becomes somebody’s “most important person”.

By the end of the book, you just can’t help smiling when you realise just how far she’s come.

If there’s one thing I’ve come to believe in my twenty-six plus years on earth, it is that life generally sorts itself out. We read stories like Claire’s to remind ourselves of this fact. So read The Rules of Inheritance. Read it, then go and give your loved ones a big fat hug.

Plan B, by Jonathan Tropper.

I fucked things up last week. I fucked things up in a spectacular, breathtaking manner, and in the ensuing retreat into my cave, where I could weep and lick my wounds in peace, I finally got around to reading my copy of Plan B by Jonathan Tropper.

It immediately reminded me of Joan Didion’s famous words: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Stories teach us how to live.

Stories can also serve as further confirmation of truths that I was only starting to guess at, truths that were brought home to me while I was in the process of fucking things up with someone I care deeply about. If my life was a Looney Tunes cartoon, then that particular moment was not unlike the anvil dropping on Wile E. Coyote’s head. I’ve been dwelling on the past. I’ve been viewing my life through the lens of the past, sifting through old hurts and picking at the scabbed over wounds. Every single thing I’ve said or written about lately is just another tired rehash of all of the ways in which life has fucked me over … or at least, all of the ways in which I think life has fucked me over.

Because it’s all about perception, isn’t it?

I’ve become the very thing that irritates the hell out of me: the girl who can’t stop banging on about past heartbreaks.

My first reaction to all of this was to stop writing completely. It’s an unnatural state of being for someone who is constantly thinking in words, but it’s the right thing to do for now. It’s time to stop thinking, to stop spending so much time in my own head, and just be in the moment.

But I will write about this gorgeous book. The protagonist, Ben, reminds me of myself: he, too, has a tendency to dwell on the past.

“In his debut, acclaimed bestselling author Jonathan Tropper captured the anxiety and humour of a group of friends as they near their thirtieth birthdays and have to come to terms with a milestone that they never thought would be like this. Ten years ago, they went into the world full of dreams for the future. But now, Ben’s getting a divorce, Lindsey’s unemployed, Alison and Chuck are stuck in ruts, and Jack is getting more publicity for his cocaine addiction than his Hollywood successes. Suddenly, turning thirty seems to be both more meaningful and less than they’d imagined it to be.”

When I first read that synopsis, I (correctly) predicted that this book would probably hit a little too close to home.

“[Thirty] It’s a weird age, isn’t it?” Don said…”Leads to a lot of annoying introspection.”

Preaching to the choir, brother. Okay, fine, I’m still a few years away from that momentous birthday, but I’m already caught up in the introspection that comes with realising that your life isn’t exactly where you thought it would be when you’re that close to thirty. The really funny thing, though, is that I’m really looking forward to turning thirty, if only because I’m utterly convinced that a) I’ll have all my shit sorted out by then, and b) I’ll be exactly where I want to be at that age: happily married, hopelessly in love (and loved hopelessly in turn), and about to start a family.

I may dwell on the past a fair bit, but I am also an optimist who believes things generally work themselves out. I’m a bundle of contradictions, yep.

But enough about me: let’s get back to the book. Plan B confirms my suspicion that Jonathan Tropper tends to work from a template, and that template was first established in this novel.

Let’s see:

Funny, self-deprecating Jewish protagonist with a mild inferiority complex? Check. – that would be Ben, the one who’s recently divorced and nursing unresolved feelings for his ex-girlfriend, Lindsey.

Overbearing but well-meaning mother, and emotionally absent but equally well-meaning father? Check – even if both make a single, very brief appearance in this novel. Mr. Tropper will go on to expand on the big dysfunctional family archetype in his later novels.

The perfect chance encounter between the protagonist and his romantic interest, one that is full of flirty banter and laughter? Check – Ben and Lindsey as college students, sitting out in the snow, and the “Peanut Story”.

Highly dramatic and near impossible to believe storyline? Check – Ben, Lindsey, Allison and Chuck kidnap Jack and whisk him away to Allison’s family’s vacation home in a small lakeside town in a desperate attempt to save him from himself.

The only thing missing here is the open-ended conclusion. Unlike in his other novels that I’ve read (How To Talk To A Widower, and my all-time favourite and Mr. Tropper’s best book yet, This Is Where I Leave You), things are neatly resolved in Plan B. Which is nice, really. It ends on a positive and hopeful, albeit bittersweet note, and you can’t help feeling positive and hopeful about your own life too as a result. There are so many lessons to be drawn from this book. The past is the past, and should really just stay there, because what really counts is the present. Nobody ever really feels like a proper adult. Stop over-thinking, because it leads to nothing good. Friendships evolve, and in some cases this means that it ends. Life is short; make the most of what little time you have.

Which brings us right back to the original lesson (or at least, the one that I’ve chosen to take from this book): the past is the past; stop dwelling on it. There are so many things to look forward to.

Look forward.

Oh, and expect a hell of a lot of angst and introspection in the lead up to the big three zero.

My favourite parts:

Thirty…shit.

Crows feet, jowls, love handles. I’ve started to see myself through the eyes of the teenagers I pass on the street, repeatedly shocked by the realisation that they see me as older. So many of the things I’ve eaten with impunity for years suddenly give me indigestion. Nothing feels new anymore. Everything I see just reminds me of something else. I know now that there are certain things I’ll never do in my life. A shirt I still think of as new turns out to actually be seven or eight years old. Seasons are quicker, holidays vaguely disturbing. Statistically speaking, I’ve used up more than one third of my life span, the healthiest third. And where are the tradeoffs? Where’s the authority? The wisdom? The confidence that was supposed to have come with adulthood? I’m only experienced enough to know that I’m as clueless as I ever was.

–

No one spoke for a while. The weather was cooperating with our moods, with pregnant, gray storm clouds that obliterated the sky. “It’s just that, you try so hard to get it right, you know?” I said. “To get your life to this point you’ve imagined in your head and you tell yourself that if I can just get to there, I’ll be happy. You all accuse me of living in the past, but the truth is I’m thirty years old and I’m still counting on the future to bail me out. And that’s a crock. You can spend years working toward something and get killed before you reach it, so what’s the point?”

“Because you probably won’t,” Lindsey snapped at me. “Chances are you’ll live until you’re ninety, which is a lot of time to spend in an unhappy life. Peter Miller may be dead, but look at how many people he affected before he died. He lived in the present. You’re worried that you might be wasting your time trying to achieve something when you might die tomorrow. You should be worried about getting your life together as quickly as possible so that if you did die young, at least you’d have lived. You’re young, you’re healthy…”

“Health,” I said, “is just the slowest possible rate at which one can die.”

Lindsey twisted around in her seat to glare at me. “Shut up, Ben,” she said. I did, for a minute.

–

And on that note, I’m off to get my life together. Properly, this time: with my eyes fixed firmly on the present, and the not-too-distant future.

The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

First, three things:

1. My friend Zoe had sent me this link yesterday: Your Brain on Fiction…

2. …which was perfect timing, really, because I’d been reading a hell of a lot of non-fiction lately (and the library just sent word that the copy of ‘Proust Was A Neuroscientist’ that I’d reserved is ready for pick-up, ruh roh), and I am in dire need of a good dose of fiction.

3. And then I ended up staying home sick today, and an overly-optimistic attempt at working from home fell magnificently apart when I realised that sitting upright for longer than 10 minutes made me dizzy. Back to bed it was, yep.

So what’s a girl to do?

Answer: Break out that Penguin Threads edition of The Secret Garden that she’d bought as a self-Christmas present last year.

From the inside cover:

After the death of her parents in India, sullen and self-absorbed Mary Lennox is sent to live on her uncle’s estate on the Yorkshire moors. Exploring the grounds, Mary discovers a walled garden, locked up, abandoned, and in ruins; and in a distant room in the house she finds a cousin she never knew existed – Colin, an invalid, ignored by his father and expecting to die. Mary and Dickon, the housemaid’s spirited brother, befriend Colin and set about restoring the garden, which opens up a world of magic, reconciling the children to the world of life. Originally published in 1911, The Secret Garden, an extraordinary novel that has influenced writers such as Eliot and Lawrence, highlights the transforming powers of love, joy and nature, and of mystical faith and positive thinking.

(emphasis mine)

I’d read this book as a child, and I wish I could tell you more than just that, that I’d read it as a child (and that yes, I struggled with the Yorkshire dialect then as I did today). I wish I could remember who gave me my first copy of this book, or if I’d discovered it on my own among the meager offerings in my school library. I wish I could remember how old I was when I first read it, but like most things about my childhood, I can’t recall any of these details. But what I can tell you is this: The Secret Garden had a lasting impact on my very character. I only realised this today while lying in bed sweaty with fever. These words from the final chapter, “In the Garden”, ring very true for the 26 year old me, and I can only imagine its impact on the child that I was.

One of the things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts – just mere thoughts – are as powerful as electric batteries – as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live.

 

Much more surprising things can happen to any one who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place.

Where you tend a rose, my lad,
A thistle cannot grow.

It might seem simplistic to trace my generally optimistic nature to a single book (and it probably is – lots of other factors have contributed), but if there’s one thing I know, it is that books teach us how to live. It definitely couldn’t have hurt for a lonely little girl to have discovered this book and all that it could teach her, just when she needed it most.

The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr.

“The Internet has wrecked my ability to read,” I declared rather dramatically to my friend Jill. “I swear, I can’t seem to sit still and just read. My concentration keeps running away on me.” We were at the secondhand book market at Federation Square at the time, about two years ago, and I remember catching a knowing smile on the face of a nearby eavesdropping bookseller. I remember thinking, at the time, that this man knew exactly what I was talking about.

Nicholas Carr definitely knows what I’m talking about – he wrote a whole book on the topic. The Shallows is a book about “how the internet is changing the way we read, think and remember”.

From the back cover:

“In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr draws on the latest scientific research to show that the net is literally rewiring our brains, inducing only superficial understanding. As a consequence there are profound changes in the way we live and communicate, remember and socialise – even in our very conception of ourselves. By moving from the depths of thought to the shallows of distraction, the web, it seems, is actually fostering ignorance.”

You need to read this book. We have been plunged into an “ecosystem of interruption technologies”, and we need to understand exactly how this is affecting our brains and our ability to concentrate and think deeply. In extremely readable, elegant prose, Nicholas takes us through the concept of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to adapt itself physically in response to the skills which we cultivate (or ignore) each day, and how the neuroplastic nature of the human brain is the reason behind our dwindling capacity for deep thinking and analysis, as well as the loss of the ability to spend extended periods of time concentrating on a single task or long-form article, thanks to our daily use of the internet and its various interruption technologies.

It’s all rather scary and true. I mean, even in writing this post, I found myself jumping from tab to tab, after typing only a few sentences. Read this book, and spend some time thinking about all the ways in which the internet has transformed the way we think. (Pro tip: it’s a scary exercise)

My absolute favourite part of the book, though, has to be Chapter Four: “The Deepening Page”. It is essentially a love letter to the act of reading, in the form of an elegant overview of the history and evolution of writing and the early publishing industry, and how books and the act of reading transformed human consciousness in the years following the invention of the letterpress. Dude’s a man after my own heart, alright.

And speaking of love letters to the act of reading, his essay “The Dreams of Readers” in the “Stop What You’re Doing and Read This!” collection is also well worth a read. I may or may not have squealed in delight and recognition when he started talking about how the love of a book’s words cannot be separated from the paper the words are printed on, that “our love of reading manifests itself in a romantic attachment to the physical book.”

FUCK YES.

(I’ll calm down now)

–

Other recent books of note:

Making Ideas Happen, by Scott Belsky, Nice Girls Just Don’t Get It, by Lois P. Frankel and Carol M. Frohlinger, and The 4-Hour Work Week, by Timothy Ferriss. I’ve been on a major self-improvement kick lately, and the various strategies, tactics and tips I’ve cherry-picked from these books seem to be helping. I think, anyway – I haven’t exactly been keeping track of my efforts, I’ll admit. The one thing I recommend, though, is this: stop checking work e-mails first thing in the morning. THIS TOTALLY WORKS.

Also, if I had to recommend only one book out of the three, it would have to be Making Ideas Happen, a.k.a. this year’s bible (last year’s was The Happiness Project). The book outlines “a systematic approach to creative organisation and productivity” – perfect for those of us with a lot of ideas and no real clue as to how to see them through to execution.

(And as it turns out, it’s also for those of us who are aspiring Organisational Queens. So, me.)

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. I picked up this book in the hopes of feeling inspired to be better, to “stay hungry, stay foolish”. It’s working. A fascinating read: the man was slightly unhinged and all the more brilliant for it. Where would we be without Steve Jobs, seriously?

How to Talk to a Widower, by Jonathan Tropper. I’ll admit: I adore Jonathan Tropper’s writing, and his strange ability to create protagonists I can’t help falling in love with. If all Jewish boys are like his protagonists, then dear God, send me a good Jewish boy. I’m not sure what this says about me, given how flawed his characters are, but there it is anyway. I want to end up with a Jonathan Tropper protagonist. I enjoyed this book, but not as much as I enjoyed This Is Where I Leave You. There are enough commonalities between This Is Where I Leave You and How To Talk To A Widower that you end up feeling like the latter was really a trial run for the former, but hey, I’m not complaining. Not when you get prose such as this:

“It’s life, that’s all. There are no happy endings, just happy days, happy moments. The only real ending is death, and trust me, no one dies happy. And the price of not dying is that things change all the time, and the only thing you can count on is that there’s not a thing you can do about it.”

“At this point in my life, I’m not looking for any happy endings. I’m just looking to get things started.”

–

This is the Reader Participation portion of the post: what have YOU been reading lately? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments!

This Is Where I Leave You, by Jonathan Tropper

What would you do if you crept into your house on your wife’s birthday to find her in bed? Having sex? With your boss?

And what if you were holding a lighted birthday cake covered in hot melted wax?

Well? What would you do?

And things only get worse for Judd Foxman when the death of his father brings his entire family together for the first time in years. Conspicuously absent – Judd’s wife, Jen, whose affair with his boss has recently become oh-so-excruciatingly public.

Our hero Judd joins his folks as they reluctantly submit to their father’s dying request: to spend seven days mourning together. In the same house. Like a real family.

As the week spins out of control, grudges resurface, secrets are revealed and old passions reawakened. Judd tries to make sense of the mess his life has become while trying not to get sucked into the regressive dramas of his dysfunctional family.

To sum up: an extramarital affair, a death, and then having to sit shiva with your very dysfunctional family.

Oh, and your cheating wife? She’s pregnant.

And you thought you were having a bad day? Please.

Incidentally, the answer to that question – What would you do? – leads to one of the funniest scenes in This Is Where I Leave You. That’s the thing about this book: the subject matter is incredibly bleak, and yet you find yourself chuckling (or actually collapsing into giggles in public, as I did) over a clever little sentence here and a beautifully written passage there.

This passage was the point at which I became that strange girl in the coffee shop who is giggling to herself for no apparent reason.

(I’m probably going to hell for laughing that hard over that last sentence)

The way I see it, Jonathan Tropper is a fucking genius: his words make you laugh, even as your heart breaks a little for Judd, who is desperately trying to come to terms with his newfound loneliness, and for the rest of his beautifully flawed family and all the ways that life has taken its toll on them. That’s the other thing about this book: the characters are incredibly real, they are hopelessly flawed, and yet you can’t help but love them, even as you wince at all the ways that life has fucked them over and all the things they are doing wrong.

Wendy taught me to curse, matched my clothing, brushed my hair before school, and let me sleep in bed with her when bad dreams woke me up. She fell in love often, and with great fanfare, throwing herself into each romance with the focus of an Olympic athlete. Now she’s a mother and a wife…and calls romantic love useless. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they’ve become. Maybe that’s why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.

I finished the book in a single Sunday afternoon; that’s how much I loved it. I really hope you’ll give this book a chance. I think it’s just so incredibly good, you know?

Some of my favourite lines and passages from the book:

“It’s just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.”

 

And I’m dying to tell her that I’m a nice guy. I’m the last nice guy. And I haven’t been kissed or rubbed in months, and I’m as horny as a high school kid, but I’m also dying to fall in love, and if you let me, I’ll fall in love with you, and cherish you, and listen to your dreams and your hurts and I’ll be faithful and funny and I’ll never forget your birthday or make out with your girlfriend and blame it on too many shots, or come home from guys’ night out drunk and smelling of strippers. That’s what I want to tell her, but instead I say, “Can I have an envelope for that?” and if you want to know where all the good guys are, we’re standing right in front of you, lacking the balls to actually make ourselves heard.

 

“Can I offer you a piece of unsolicited advice?”

“Sure.”

Tracy turns to face me. “You got married right out of college. You’re terrified of being alone. Anything you do now will be motivated by that fear. You have to stop worrying about finding love again. It will come when it comes. Get comfortable with being alone. It will empower you.”

But my absolute favourite bit in this book: Chapter 6. I FREAKIN’ LOVE CHAPTER 6. Dear God, please let me meet my future husband like that; let it be all witty banter and flirtation and inexplicable boldness between us, amen.

Hi, my name is Raihana, and I am a hopeless romantic.

This next bit is another favourite (it comes a very close second to Chapter 6). Come to think of it, part of the reason why I love this book so much is probably because I can kind of relate to Judd, a little. Sorta. Kinda.

Um.

This:

I want very badly to be in love again, which is why I’m in no position to look for it. But I hope I’ll know it when it comes. My father’s watch jingles loosely on my wrist, my mother’s words resting unseen on my skin. YOU FOUND ME. It gives me hope.

In conclusion, I am a sap, and you should read this book. Any questions?

Something for a Monday morning: And Now You Can Go, by Vendela Vida.

I talked very briefly about this book here.

The lines that took my breath away:

My mother makes one trip to the airport with both of us. We are quick with good-byes. I hug my mother, hug Freddie. Freddie says she’ll e-mail, my mother says she’ll call. These are lies we tell each other. After we’ve spent time together like this, we run fast, with long strides, struggling to increase the distance. We don’t look back until we have news to report. News to report means our lives are separate and distinct, that something can happen to one of us and not all three.

Outside on the sidewalk I stand on tiptoe and hug him…I hold him for minutes. Buses pass. People stare. I hug him and hug him and know it’s not enough. I think, The next person I love, I will love better. When I’m ready to love, when it’s someone else, none of these people but someone else, I will love better. I will give everything back. They won’t even know what hit them.

What He’s Poised To Do, by Ben Greenman

There is a note written in blue ink on the inside of the front cover of my copy of What He’s Poised To Do. It says “Jan 2012. Started reading this in San Francisco. Finished reading this in the Ferry Building. Blue Bottle Coffee, after writing postcards to friends.”

That was a good day.

I wasn’t supposed to buy books in New York (I’d already signed up for a used bookstore crawl in San Francisco and there are only so many books one can cram into a suitcase without incurring the dreaded excess luggage charge), but I’m glad that I ended up breaking that rule – the cover and title had caught my eye that day. This collection of short stories is, in a word, stunning. Okay, no, one more word: haunting. This is a haunting collection of stories about people trying to seek a connection, trying to find some measure of intimacy, understanding – love, even. The stories span cities and decades, but are united by one common thread: the characters write to each other. They write actual letters and postcards and notes to each other – how lovely is that?

“The stories … are united by a shared sense of yearning, a concern with connections missed and lost, and a poignant attention to how we try to preserve and maintain those connections through the written word.”

Amen to that.

Some of my favourite lines from the book:

I have hope, but I am unsure whether I am to act on it or not. If I act, there is the possibility of gain but a greater possibility of loss. The sweetness of hope will last only until I take action, at which point it will vanish. I force my mind to realise this. Is hope a spiritual state? – Hope

Time had taken its toll on the young bodies we remembered using for disreputable ends. – What We Believe but Cannot Praise

I felt lonely, and in full possession of my loneliness. It was the first time I had owned anything of value. – What We Believe but Cannot Praise

“These aren’t wartime conditions,” Sophie said. “And yet we are not at peace,” her mother said, with the mixture of twinkling irony and dead seriousness that Sophie recognised as a sign of pain processed in such a way that it did not become poisonous – or, as she preferred to call it, of intelligence. – Down a Pound

—

Other recent books of note:

The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman. I read this in Los Angeles, having purchased it on the used bookstore crawl in San Francisco. The characters are all so sad. Why are they so sad? But oh, such beautiful, heartbreaking stories about the staff of a newspaper based in Rome. Judging by how many pages I’ve folded over, to mark some passage or line that I loved, this book might be worth a post of its own at some future date.

I Totally Meant To Do That, by Jane Borden. A hilarious collection of essays by a Southern debutante turned New York hipster. I related to it, sort of, because I guess you could say I had a privileged upbringing in Malaysia, but then I gave it all up to make my own life in a whole other country.

And Now You Can Go, by Vendela Vida. I’m about halfway through this book, which I (indirectly) found through the lovely Holly Burns. It’s kind of bleak, so I’m reading this in teeny tiny doses. Bleak, but well-written – I’m looking forward to finding out what happens to the protagonist.

The Art of Uncertainty: How to Live in the Mystery of Life and Love It, by Dennis Merritt Jones. This was an impulse purchase from a couple of days ago – just my luck that my favourite bookshop in the city is a few doors down from the ramen joint that’s nearest to where I work (and I eat ramen at least once a week these days). I confess: this is one book I don’t really want to be seen reading in public (and yet I’m writing about it on this very public platform – go figure), because it’s just so … hippie. It’s so positive and optimistic and … happy. And I’m supposed to be a cynical realist, right? Wait, I’m usually full of hope and optimism these days. IDENTITY CRISIS MUCH? Anyway. While the language of this book is probably a little bit too earnest and hippie-dippie for me, I actually believe in the key messages. The book is turning out to be a handy summary of the key things I learnt last year. Which is nice. I could use a little refresher course.

 

The Night Bookmobile, by Audrey Niffenegger.

A very, very early Christmas gift from my friend Jill:

…The Night Bookmobile tells the story of a wistful woman who one night encounters a mysterious disappearing library on wheels, which includes every book she has ever read. In seeing her history and her most intimate self in this library, she embarks on a search for the bookmobile. But over time, her search turns into an obsession as she longs to be reunited with her own collection and her memories.

There was, at the time, the tiniest of chances that, by the time Jill returned to Melbourne from a two-week vacation in the motherland (otherwise known as Malaysia), I would already be out of the country. And so: we met up for a coffee on a rainy Saturday afternoon, so she could give me my Christmas present (and my belated birthday present – we’re really not punctual with our gifts).

I squealed loudly with delight, right there in Seven Seeds, when she handed the book over. Seriously, you can’t take me anywhere. The thing is, The Time Traveler’s Wife is one of my all-time favourite books (I read somewhere that Audrey wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife as a bit of a ‘break’ from another, massive art project), and there is a beautiful little note from Neil Gaiman on the back cover:

The Night Bookmobile is a haunting tale. I probably recognise a little bit too much of myself in the protagonist, Alexandra: a woman who finds comfort (too much, perhaps) in books. Sounds familiar, alright. I’ve been saying for a while now: I need to stop hiding behind my books. I need to put them away, to actually go out on a Friday or Saturday night, instead of lounging around at home, feet up on my desk, nose buried in a book.

All in due time, as my friend Alice told me last night, during our marathon phone conversation.

Still: the idea of a bookmobile containing every single thing I have ever read in my life? AWESOME.

(Also scary, when you think about it, but I won’t spoil the novel for you)