by Judith & Neil Morgan

Ted Geisel seemed a fun guy. I kept picturing him as Groucho Marx. This was a good bio that stayed interesting.

by George Loewenstein

“Misery is inescapable. It is not some malfunction or bug in the system. It IS the system.”

by Lisa See

I’m glad I read it to the end, because I did like the resolution and ended up respecting her ability to craft a plot. However, I did not enjoy the majority of the time I spent slogging through this. A lot of horrible things happened. And it felt like we were always flittering from one plot point to another with little change in tone. Drownings at sea, young girls’ flirtations – it all kind of came across in the same monotonous way.

by Kathryn Jezer-Morton

“The stories told on social media are all, in one way or another, stories that support … a regime of neoliberal selfhood: a way of accounting for oneself that emphasizes resilience & individuality… Individuals seek to improve their access to opportunities through the demonstration of various types of fitness. In telling stories like this, we disenchant our lives. We suck all the shading & feeling out of our own experiences.”

I’ve been looking for ways to verbalize this for a long time. The myth of self-improvement. Fooling ourselves that we’re getting better all the time, when really we haven’t fundamentally changed one iota since age 4. “Believe we’re gliding down the highway when in fact we’re slip-sliding away” (Paul Simon).

“It felt ironic to be looking for a redemptive chord on which to conclude a book all about the limitations of telling one’s life story as a series of victories.” To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, “Life is not a victory march.”

Strange married couple survives 117 days at sea on a life raft. The story speaks for itself. I’m not sure the writing was great. The story stuck with the couple, Maurice & Maralyn, from their meeting, through their ordeal, and then too long after their ordeal was past, at which point things just seem to meander to a sad ending with their deaths by natural causes.

by Jerry Z. Muller

Kind of a one-point wonder of a book. The complaints mostly seem to be about how taking actions (rewarding & penalizing) based on metrics leads to gaming the system. I would have preferred the more philosophic angle – how we lose our way when only what is measurable becomes important. Take the example of charities. We’ve gotten used to judging the “effectiveness” of charities based on the percentage of their income that goes to actual programs vs. overhead and fundraising. But why – because measuring actual effectiveness (results) is often hard. But measuring inputs (dollars in, dollars spent on this vs. that) is easy. Hence that becomes the only or most important thing. But that means that if a lot of overhead is NECESSARY to achieving results, the charity still comes out looking bad, regardless of results achieved.

Always remember that what science can measure is not all that exists.

by Olga Tokarczuk

Similarities to DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD, but no plot, and missing the wonderful protagonist.

by J. R. R. Tolkien

Adorable children’s story Tolkien wrote for his second son, or Boy Two, after he lost his beloved toy dog on the beach. A real dog is enchanted into a toy dog, and then goes on adventures, up on the moon and under the sea. In the end he is transformed back into a real dog and sent home to Boy Two.

by Madeline Miller

This is the story about a goddess who lives alone on a beautiful island where she dyes, spins, weaves, and casts spells.

No, just kidding. I wish it was. It’s an outlandish story with violence on almost every single page. Just one random violent thing after another.