I have been a huge Murakami fan since I found out about him.
Last year, I went through a phase where I read a bunch of his books back to back. So it should come as no surprise that I wanted to read
After Hours
as soon as it came out. While the book was good and a little weird, it didn’t measure up to typical Murakami at all. He is normally so incredibly fantastical and his
stories are so involved, so amazing, so mind-blowing that you cannot put the book down. This was an easy read but it wasn’t nearly as amazing as most of the other books by him. Yet, I cannot wait for the next one.

I have read Mitchard before but I must say, Twelve
Times Blessed was one of the worst written books I’ve ever read. The
character is not believable. She is annoying and the whole story is
flawed in so many ways that I don’t even know where to begin. To be
fair, I did get strongly affected by the story
and felt deep love for my husband who I swore to appreciate more. I
spose one cannot ask for much more from a book.



Having said all of that, I also read A
Theory of Relativity and I absolutely loved it. Much more realistic,
more interesting. The characters were easier to relate to. The story was
still a bit more melodramatic than I would have liked it to be, which is
annoying cause it didn’t need that extra drama. It was a beautiful
enough story as is.

Paulo Coelho never ceases to amaze me. While his latest, The
Witch of Portobello, is a bit weirder than usual in my opinion, it’s
no less thought provoking than his usual. Here are a few excerpts that
spoke to me.

“What is a teacher? I’ll tell you: it isn’t someone who teaches
something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in
order to discover what she already knows.”

…

“I’ve always been a very restless person. I work hard, spend too much
time looking after my son, I dance like a mad thing, I learned
calligraphy, I go to courses on selling, I read one book after another.
But that’s all a way of avoiding those moments when nothing is
happening, because those blank spaces give me a feeling of absolute
emptiness, in which not a single crumb of love exists. My parents have
always done everything they could for me, and I do nothing but
disappoint them. But here, during the time we spent together,
celebrating nature and the Great Mother, I’ve realized that those empty
spaces were starting to get filled up. They were transformed into pauses
– the moment when the man lifts his hand from the drum before bringing
it down again to strike hard. I think I can leave now…”



…

Everything is at once so simple and so complicated! It’s simple because
all it takes is a change of attitude: I’m not going to look for
happiness anymore. From now on, I’m independent; I see life through my
eyes and not through other people’s. I’m going in search of the
adventure of being alive.

And it’s complicated: Why am I not looking for happiness when everyone
has taught me that happiness is the only goal worth pursuing? Why am I
going to risk taking a path that no one else is taking?

After all, what is happiness?

Love, they tell me. But love doesn’t bring and never has brought
happiness. On the contrary, it’s a constant state of anxiety, a
battlefield; it’s sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if
we’re doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.

All right then, peace. Peace? If we look at the Mother, she’s never at
peace. The winter does battle with the summer, the sun and the moon
never meet, the tiger chases the man, who’s afraid of the dog, who
chases the cat, who chases the mouse, who frightens the man.

Money brings happiness. Fine. In that case, everyone who earns enough to
have a high standard of living would be able to stop working. But then
they’re more troubled than ever, as if they were afraid of losing
everything. Money attracts money, that’s true. Poverty might bring
unhappiness, but money won’t necessarily bring happiness.

I spent a lot of my life looking for happiness; now what I want is joy.
Joy is like sex – it begins and end. I want pleasure. I want to be
contended, but happiness? I no longer fall into that trap

…..



Reprogram yourself every minute of each day with thoughts that make you
grow. When you’re feeling irritated or confused, try to laugh at
yourself. Laugh out loud at this woman tormented by doubts and
anxieties, convinced that her problems are the most important thing in
the world. Laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation, at the fact
that despite being a manifestation of the Mother, you still believe God
is a man who lays down the rules. Most of our problems stem from just
that – from following rules.

….

“…Like love for example. People either feel it or they don’t, and
there isn’t a force in the world that can make them feel it. We can
pretend that we love each other. We can get used to each other. We can
live a whole lifetime of friendship and complicity, we can bring up
children, have sex every night, reach orgasm, and still feel that
there’s a terrible emptiness about it all, that something important is
missing.”

Next to my family, my favorite way to spend time is to read. With the
exception of horror and fantasy, I read and enjoy almost every kind of
book. But every now and then there’s that one book that comes along and
stops my whole life. When I find one of those, nothing else much
matters. I completely fall into the story. I take the book with me to
the bathroom. I take it in the car. I read it while I am waiting for the
microwave. I read it as I walk from room to room. I don’t put it down
for a second. I am so engulfed in these characters’ lives that I don’t
want to miss a moment of it.



Today was one of those days and My
Sister’s Keeper was that book. I can’t even remember why I put this
book on hold. I think I saw it at Walmart (in one of the very rare
occasions I sadly visited this establishment whose politics and employee
treatment I vehemently oppose) and I had heard of the Jodi Picoult many
times before and wanted to read her. I can’t tell you what made me pick
up the book last night over the 22 books I have checked out. But I can
tell you that since I picked it up, I didn’t put it down until I
finished it. I spent a good time crying afterwards just to get all the
pent up emotion out.



Jodi Picoult has a way with words. Not only does she create the most
relatable characters, but she knows how to take emotions and wrap them
around such simple, natural words that you wonder why no one else
thought to express that emotion in that exact way before. It’s like you
know exactly what she means.

This story is tragic. It’s horrifying. It’s a situation no parent ever
wants to be in. From the outside, you can take sides, you can judge. But
when you see the story from all the points of view, you can see the
conundrum so well. You know there’s no easy answer here. Even from the
very beginning, you know it’s not going to end well. But still, like the
parents, you keep hoping. But the author doesn’t disappoint. She doesn’t
cop out. She doesn’t create a Hollywood ending. To the contrary, all the
way to the very twist at end, the story holds true to its point.



Life is too short and no one gets to have a say at how things turn out.

We
Are All Welcome Here is Elizabeth Berg’s newest novel. (There’s a
newer one coming out in May.) I am a huge fan of hers and was thrilled
to find this book at the library. To be honest, it wasn’t a favorite of
mine. While I thought the story was beautiful and touching, it wasn’t as
strong as many of her others. Berg has a distinct skill of writing about
women and not making it cheesy or fluffy.

Three little books from Anna Quindlen, another powerful and strong
female author: Peing
Perfect, How
Reading Changed My Life and A
short Guide to a Happy Life. I was interested in all of these books
but didn’t want to pay the list price for such a small book that I knew
would be an hour read.

Thanks to the Palo Alto Library, I finally got my
hands on them and was able to read the lovely little stories which
really should have been essays and not books of their own. To be fair,
the reading book did recommend many awesome books to me that I love.

And finally I just finished Anna Quindlen’s latest book, Rise
and Shine. Since the story was about two sisters and took place in
New York, I really looked forward to reading it. Quindlen is a fantastic
author so, of course, the book wasn’t bad. However, it wasn’t great
either. I felt that she has done and could have done a lot better. The
characters were just not three-dimensional enough.
I didn’t feel
sympathetic towards either of the sisters and felt like some of the
major plot points were either implausible or unnecessarily dramatic. I had a pretty hard time getting into the story and I kept waiting for it to get more interesting and for something to happen. And when it finally did, I compeltely didn’t believe it. It felt like a cop-out. However, when I got to the end of the book, the last two lines spoke to the core of the story and made me remember why I love her so much.

Another fantastic female author and one of my very favorites is Jane
Smiley. And I am delighted that I’ll be getting to hear her talk this
week (cross fingers). Now I need a new book by Anne Tyler and I will be
all set.

I can’t even remember where I read about Paradox of Choice. All in all, it wasn’t the most interesting book I read. I
flipped through a lot of the pages but did read many passages with a
lot of interesting thoughts. There are a lot of passages from this one
and honestly each deserve their own posts, but I figure let’s document
this first, I can always come back to them.

Participants in a laboratory study were asked to listen to a pair of
very loud, unpleasant noises played through headphones. One noise lasted
for eight seconds. The other lasted sixteen. The first eighteen seconds
of second noise were identical to the first noise, whereas the second
eight seconds, while still loud and unpleasant, were not as
loud. Later, the participants, were told that they would have to listen
to one of the noises again, but that they could choose which one.
Clearly, the second to be repeated. Why? Because whereas both noises
were unpleasant and had the same aversive peak, the second had a less
unpleasant end, and so was remembered as less annoying than the first.



…



When asked about what they regret the most in the last six months,
people tend to identify actions that didn’t meet expectations. But when
asked about what they regret the most when they look back on their lives
as a whole, people tend to identify failures to act. In the short run,
we regret a bad educational choice, whereas in the long run, we regret a
missed educational opportunity. In the short run, we regret a broken
romance, whereas in the long run, we regret a missed romantic
opportunity. So it seems that we don’t close the psychological door on
decisions we’ve made, and as time passes, what we’ve failed to do looms
larger and larger.

Lots of food for thought.