by Johann Hari

The idea is that depression and anxiety are over-medicalized, and that they should be solved culturally rather than with pills. His heart’s in the right place, but it seemed like the examples all involved people with quite obvious problems, and lo and behold, they felt better once they’d solved their problems. That’s not “depression.” That’s having a problem.

I bookmarked this for personal reasons:

“When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment…. So you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless – that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself that it’s your fault… If it’s your fault, then it’s under your control.”

by Thomas Cahill

I just couldn’t stay focused on hardly any of this.

Tom Lake

by Ann Patchett

I was really caught up in this story; I found myself thinking about it constantly whenever I was away from it. The backstory, that is, with the young Lara. The realtime story about the older Lara with the three daughters was OK for framing, but otherwise a bit of an annoying interruption. Also, I admit I have Issues and hate reading about happy families, lovey-dovey sister relationships, mother-daughter relationships – I know this and I cut the book a lot of slack, but the Nelson family was just so smarmily perfectly loving. The word “smothering” came to mind towards the end. She didn’t need to draw them that way to get the contrast across.

Back to the positives. I loved the young Lara. I loved her independence and quick straightforward snappy approach to everything. Ann Pratchett is really wonderful. The setup got me hooked. I loved high school Lara and her friend Veronica. She knows how to make characters likeable but not too cardboard cut-out. I loved that Lara was obviously smart and liked books but wasn’t totally precocious nor a stereotypical bookish nerd. I liked that Lara was kind of naive but not totally stupid about the adult world.

I’m saying nothing about the plot. You can get a plot summary anywhere.

A couple of things about the ending could have been better but it’s not worth spoiling anything.

by Stephen King

The movie was better.