Reading Roundup - August, September, October

Parenting With Love and Logic by Foster W. Cline, Jim Fay (3 stars)
Parenting books are so particular to what you are experiencing and struggling with at the moment as a parent. This just didn't fit my need right now, I guess, and I didn't love it. It did give me a few new ways to think about situations with my kids, and overall I like the approach of letting kids fully own their decisions and their consequences. But there were just some model dialogues that seemed so ridiculously unrealistic when I thought about applying them with my kids, and some that seemed like the parents could really come off as jerks. I also thought the authors were incredibly blase about not getting kids fed. I totally understand an eight year old being able to handle the consequence of being hungry if they are outrageously inappropriate about food or something. But they seem to think a two year old will somehow comprehend the lesson inherent in dinner being taken away the second time they throw a bowl on the ground. Like - when they are hungry at 2 am they will think to themselves - wow, I'm really going to start taking table manners seriously. Have they ever been around hungry children? They are irrational, impenetrable, unable to communicate- or reason-with little stinkers. I think it's one of the least likely times for children to learn or internalize any lesson, in my experience, but they seem to think it's a great consequence to all kinds of things - we'd love for you to join us for dinner as soon as your chores are done, etc. Anyway, there were some things I liked, but did not revolutionize my parenting.

Double Take by Kevin Michael Connolly (2 stars)
The memoirs of a 23 year old guy born with no legs. He's a remarkably tenacious person and seems like a good guy. But a really great writer, unfortunately, he is not. And 23 years is not quite enough life to generate book-worthy memories. Of course he has some interesting insights and experiences to share as a consequence of his disability, and there were parts I enjoyed, but his age and inexperience as a writer definitely tainted the book.

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World by Tracy Kidder (4 stars)
Paul Farmer is just a remarkable person. It is so refreshing to read about someone who lives life with so much integrity and allows inequality and suffering and injustice to trouble his soul and motivate him to so much good. It is amazing to see how much good one person can do, how many lives he can save, how much suffering he can alleviate. It is also an unsettling reminder of how little first-world money can make such a real difference in third-world suffering. It is one of those books that will leave you measuring indulgent kitchen-counter projects in terms of how many lives could literally be saved if you just sent the check to Farmer's organization Partners in Health instead. But not everyone is Paul Farmer, who seems to have boundless empathy, intelligence, energy, courage, and charm, and the book does struggle with the question of how normal people can run the organization he has started going forward. It also touches on the cost to his family of living such a driven life. But overall it is a very well written, inspiring biography of an incredible man. Incidentally, Ophelia Dahl, daughter of everyone's favorite wacky children's author Roald Dahl, plays a significant role in his life and work, and hence the book, which feels like a cool, real-life cameo.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (5 stars)
When I was about 14, late one night I was reading Les Miserables and I got to the part where Fantine smiles and she is missing her two front teeth. I cried that night like I thought my heart would literally break, because the world is so cruel and unfair, and there is so much suffering, and there are so many poor people with faces to grind upon. I thought maybe a book wouldn't ever make me cry like that again, because I'm not 14 anymore. And I regretted that.

The Book Thief made me cry like that. Because war is so horrible, and there are people at this very moment whose lives are being ruined by it, and people can be so evil, and yet people can be so good even in the face of it all. So I give it five stars, because it is cathartic to feel and care that deeply about suffering, if only for a little while. I think it's one of the best things literature can do for us, actually.

I have to admit that I was fairly skeptical of a popular YA holocaust book, because I'm a snob like that and generally resist all three categories. But folks, this book is really, really good. Sometimes the writing reminded me of Vonnegut. The characters are compelling, the story is beautiful and wrenching, and amazingly the take on Nazi Germany felt fresh. There were times that I really liked that it was being narrated by death, and a few places it felt a little forced. But really, you should read it. It's exceptional.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (4 stars)
This book is fascinating. It's in the vein of a Malcolm Gladwell book but I enjoyed it more than Blink, for example. I think I liked that the author is himself a scientist and is reporting his own peer-reviewed, scholarly findings. But his tone is so friendly and conversational, it strikes a very pleasant balance of credible and trustworthy yet interesting and accessible. He goes through all sorts of situations in which people act... predictably irrational. One that stayed with me was the study (not done by him) in which Asian women, embodying two stereotypes in relation to math (Asian = good, women = bad) were given a math test. One group was primed before the test with questions related to their sex, and the other with questions related to their race. Amazingly, the questions affected their test scores, and those with their gender on their mind performed measurably worse. The significance of this is pretty amazing, especially when we like to think that if we just give people opportunities to succeed and break out of a bad situation, if they don't make it it's their own lazy fault. The messages we hear about ourselves really, really matter even if we wished they didn't. I was also fascinated by the experiments he conducted on how people cheat, under what circumstances, and to what extent. There is also an interesting chapter on the differences between business and social interactions, and why it is such a terrible idea to mix the two. Overall a really fun read with challenging ideas.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (3 stars)
This was a very fun book to read; I think I just went in with expectations a little too high. As has been much discussed, it is really six stories, with most cut in half, so it's structured like ABCDEFE'D'C'B'A'. Each story is in a very distinct style, covering time periods from mid-1850s to a distant post-apocalyptic future, and I enjoyed each one on its own. Necessarily each is relatively short and limited in its story arc, however. So you'd expect the trade off would be that they all inform each other in a really compelling, fascinating way and that they come together to make a sum greater than the parts. My big disappointment was that I didn't feel that happened. There are some connections, but they mostly seemed to be gee-whiz coincidences. There were thematic ties between all the stories of oppression and the way humanity's lust for power causes all sorts of evil. But at the end, the structure felt like an ambitious project that turned out a little gimmicky. One of the characters actually expresses this exact concern in reference to a musical piece he's writing that is structured in the same way as the book, and I'd have to agree.