December 2018

🎧 The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll 
🎧 Inside the O’Briens by Lisa Genova

November 2018

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
Is God Anti-Gay? by Sam Allberry
Waking the Dead by John Eldridge
How We Love by Milan and Kay Yerkovich
Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg

Favorite Quotes:

How We Love


"Anger may be the only emotion you feel safe to express because it is."

"..so marriage has to be a safe place to show emotions, especially the ones you were discouraged from showing as a child."

"Have you ever noticed how hard it is to have an emotional connection when no emotions are apparent?"


"INFP, the most sensitive, idealistic, insightful, and conflicted of all the types..."

11.18.2018 🎧 Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Eilis is described as "hesitant and slow" (as a customer shopping).
She seems to usually feel like others know what to do and she doesn't.
She pretends to be sick to miss a dance.

In a sense, she's doing exciting things and making new connections and learning a lot. In another sense, she's just letting life happen to her, doing what she must, and not sparing a thought for more. I've come to see her as a wonderful example of an unhealthy enneagram 9.

Here are a couple more quotes I pulled out. I notice now that all of them are 9ish things to which I relate.

"For each day, she thought, she needed a whole other day to contemplate what had happened and store it away, get it out of her system, so that it did not keep her awake at night, or fill her dreams with flashes of what had actually happened, and other flashes that had nothing to do with anything familiar, but were full of rushes of color, or crowds of people, everything frenzied and fast." 

"She would not try to postpone any further what she had to do, but the prospect of [telling others what she had decided to do] still filled her with fear, enough for her once more to put both ideas out of her mind. She would think about them soon, she thought, but not now."

"But she realized that it would be best to do nothing."

Was there ever a truer summation of my numbed out, void of all intention, tendencies than that second to last on?! Oh, the thought of making anyone else unhappy is just too scary, so "I think I'll just think about that later."

I was really, really  hoping that we would see some growth in her by the end. I mean, even if it had to be the decision between 2 love interests, pick boldly, and pick for yourself! But until the very end, we never knew what she wanted. Did she even know what she wanted? I felt defeated along with her. Such behavior in another is so obvious. Lord, have mercy.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

“This was an all too familiar social scenario for me: standing alone, staring into the middle distance. It was absolutely fine. It was absolutely normal...I tried so hard, but something about me just didn’t fit. There was, it seemed, no Eleanor-shaped social hole for me to slot into. I wasn’t good at pretending, that was the thing.” For Eleanor, “After what had happened in that burning house, given what went on there, I could see no point in being anything other than truthful with the world. I had, literally, nothing left to lose. But by careful observation from the sidelines, I’d worked out that social success is often built on pretending just a little.” (chapter 71)

“...obviously, in principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.” (chapter 94)

“Social interaction, it appeared, was surprisingly expensive. The travel, clothes, the drinks, the lunches, the gifts…” (Chatper 67).

When the sales clerk tries to persuade Eleanor to buy heels: “Why are these people so incredibly keen on crippling their female customers? I began to wonder if cobblers and chiropractors had established some fiendish cartel.” (67)

“He wasn’t using a knife, but was holding a fork in his right hand like a child or an American.” (61)

October 2018

🎧 P.S., I Still Love You ⭐️⭐️⭐️
🎧 Always and Forever, Lara Jean⭐️⭐️⭐️
🎧 Hillbilly Elegy ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 

I'm Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sanchez

When Julia is worried that saying in her college application that her parents are undocumented, fearing it could lead to them getting deported, her teacher says, “Trust me...we’re in Chicago, not Arizona. That doesn’t really happen here. Not like that. No one is going to read your essay and track your parents down.”  (Chapter 13)

I had high hopes for this book. Maybe it was disappointing to me because I expected the Mexican-American narrator to be just a little more...well, likeable. (Yeah, a likeable protagonist is important to me.) The story does portray the life of a daughter of immigrants, and raises many important issues (privilege, the role of religion, sexuality, abortion, freedom vs duty to family). This alone made the book worth reading. I guess I just didn’t really like the way these issues were raised. Julia as a narrator was very one-sided in her depiction of these things. It’s not that I minded her opinion, but that she thought her view was the only sensible, and couldn’t imagine anyone with a brain disagreeing with her. Obviously this is a YA book, and maybe this is just an accurate depiction of the way a teenage narrator thinks? But I would have hoped a book intended for a teenage audience would find a way to inspire appreciation for at least a little bit of nuance!

Similarly, I wanted to appreciate that this book portrays mental illness (depression). But it was very disturbing to me that until late in the story, I could not tell for sure if the character was dealing with depression, or was just being an angsty and self-pitying teenager.

What brought the book up to three stars for me was Julia’s gift for metaphors. I want to read through this and write down all of her “it was like…”s and her “I would rather”s. Here are a few of my favorites:

“It makes me feel like all my insides are being vandalized.”

“Her perfume smells like a dusty flower in summer twilight.”

“I feel like a three-headed alien in my own home.”

“...makes me feel as if something were filling my chest with sarm syrup, as if all my bones were being slowly removed from my body.”

“I would rather poke my eyes out like Oedipus than sit through another episode of that garbage.”

THUG

We bookworms know the book is better...BUT the movie was gooooood. I thought the casting was flawless, each actor gave a magnificent performance, and the scene at the end when Starr finds her voice was even more powerful on the screen. Also, I don't know when I've ever cried so much in public.