Simple Genius by David Baldacci

Former Secret Service Agents Sean King and Michelle Maxwell become partners in solving the suicide of a scientist that happened on the property of Camp Peary, a CIA facility in Virginia.

Before partnering up, Michelle walks into a bar, searches for the biggest, toughest guy she can find, and picks a fight with him. She may even win but instead lets herself be beaten unconscious. Sean rushes to the hospital, but after learning what he can suggest, she voluntarily commits herself to a psychiatric facility where Horatio Barnes, a psychologist and old friend of Sean, treats her.

Sean gets started on the Camp Peary investigation while Horatio begins treatment to find the childhood roots of Michelle’s death wish,

The two mysteries eventually come together with secret codebooks, high-speed chases, and violence.  The plot twists and turns as expected but isn’t as compelling as some of Baldacci’s others.  

Quotes

“There’s a chromosome that goes haywire when you turn thirteen. It commands you to live in filth.”  (ok, the truth is here that Michelle keeps her truck a little filthy)

“People who attempted to end their lives, no matter how amateurishly they might do so at first, often got better at it, with the result that on the third, fourth or sixth try, they ended up on a slab with a coroner poking around their remains.”

How To Read Literature Like A Professor, by Thomas C. Foster

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In Thomas Foster’s book, “How to Read Literature like a Professor,” we are introduced to literary basics, symbols, themes, and contexts to show how to make your everyday reading experience more rewarding and enjoyable.

His focus on memory, symbol, and pattern claims that these features separate the professional reader from the rest of the crowd. It tells us the obvious that many books can be enjoyed for their important stories, but there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. Foster suggests that seeing these hidden truths is natural to the professor.

·        Memory. If the story seems familiar, it may be on purpose. It will add meaning if you consider how it is different.

·        Symbols. An excellent example of a symbol could be the scar on Harry Potter’s forehead. Why is it on the forehead? Where else in literature was someone marked this way? What does its shape mean? Interpreting the symbols adds to the story.  

·        Patterns. If an author uses the exact phrases and words in different events, it may signal a connection. When certain characters follow a pattern, it tells us that an explanation needs to be looked for.

When the same ideas appear repeatedly, the concept’s repetition is likely a symbol. Foster tells us that repetition is intertextuality explaining that all texts depend on one another.

Foster’s book asks the broader questions of literature, how and why we react to it, the creative process, and the purpose of reading itself.

I have referred to the book several times over the years.

Quotes

“Education is mostly about institutions and getting tickets stamped; learning is what we do for ourselves. When we're lucky, they go together. If I had to choose, I'd take learning.” 

“Always" and "never" are not words that have much meaning in literary study. For one thing, as soon as something always seems accurate, some wise guy will come along and write something to prove it's not.” 

“We - as readers or writers, tellers or listeners - understand each other, share knowledge of the structures of our myths, comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it.” 

“Reading...is a full-contact sport; we crash against the wave of words with all our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources.

Becoming Michelle Obama, by Michelle Obama →

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Michelle Obama starts her book, “Becoming Michelle Obama,” saying:

“I’m an ordinary person who found herself on an extraordinary journey. In sharing my story, I hope to help create space for other stories and voices to widen the pathway for who belongs and why.”

When Michelle started the Presidential campaign in Iowa, it turned out that how she saw herself became how she began to see the people who had turned out to listen to her. When she stood up to speak to a small group gathered in a home to her hear talk, she said:

“Let me tell you about me. I’m Michelle Obama, raised on the South Side of Chicago, in a little apartment on the top floor of a two-story house that felt much like this one. My dad was a water-pump operator for the city. My mom stayed at home to raise my brother and me.”

Michelle said she liked her own story and became comfortable telling it. She said that she realized that she was telling the people who had come to listen to her, despite the difference in skin color, that they reminded her of her own family.

In talking about her neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, Mrs. Obama writes, “Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s a vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.” Maybe this insight is partly why we see her as a meticulous planner. It is reflected in her approach to her studies in high school and at Princeton and her approach to the various professional jobs she held. Being a planner was her method of pushing through potential failure.

 Michelle wrote about her first impressions when she met Barack, telling us that she was fascinated with how different he was and how they were opposites in many ways.  She said she was a planner obsessed with checking the boxes on her to-do list, and he was spontaneous. He must have also seen the differences and the story of their first kiss shows him seeking her approval carefully rather than just sweeping her off her feet.” She said about that event, “he was looking at me curiously, with a trace of a smile. “Can I kiss you?” he asked. And with that, I leaned in, and everything felt clear.”

Mrs. Obama writes about her critics. “I was female, black, and strong, which to certain people, maintaining a certain mindset, translated only to ‘angry.’ It was another bad cliché that’s been forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room, an unconscious signal not to listen to what we’ve got to say.”

The book surprised me with how much I enjoyed it—a different, must-read book.

Michelle’s Quotes

“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something, and that’s the end.” 

“If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.”

“Becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.”

 “Do we settle for the world or work for it as it should be?” 

“Failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.”

The Enemy, A Jack Reacher Novel, by Lee Child

It is the first of 1990 and the Berlin Wall has come down. On New Year’s Eve a General and three subordinates arrive in Washington DC on their way to from Germany to Fort Irwin California, but they stop off overnight. The General travels 289 miles south to check into a seedy motel to have sex where he is later found dead.

Military Police Major Jack Reacher from the nearby North Carolina Army base comes to investigate and the scene leads him to investigate a strip joint across the street.  He winds up beating up the owner but doesn’t find any answers.  Later, back at the base, Reacher gets another call: the general’s wife has been brutally killed during an apparent burglary of their Virginia home. Reacher teams up with Lieutenant Summer, an attractive black female MP, and they go to investigate.

Next a body of Special Forces soldier whom Reacher saw at the strip joint is found naked, dead and mutilated near the base. It turns out to be the same soldier who signed a complaint against Reacher about the fight at the club. The Special Forces think Reacher did it and plan to kill him.

With all this activity going on Reacher and his brother Joe go to Paris to visit their dying mother. More dead bodies show up. With Reacher out of the country the base commander issues a warrant for Reacher’s arrest.

With the Berlin Wall coming down the Army sees changes coming, with what seems to be the end to the Cold War the Army is facing a massive restructuring of purpose and personnel. It seems that Reacher’s reassignment to the North Carolina base and the new base commander may be connected to these changes and Reacher wonders if the death of the two-star general and the others may be too.

Child’s “The Enemy” weaves it story well. It gives us some insight in to Reacher as we learn more about his mother’s life.

The 8th book in the Jack Reacher Series. See more about those books and about Lee Child at BJ’s Favorite Authors. Click here

Quotes

“The Reacher brothers' need for caffeine makes heroin addiction look like an amusing little take-it-or-leave-it sideline.” 

“Everybody has a choice in life.”

 “This was like July 13th, 1943, the pivotal day of the Battle of the Kursk. We were like Alexander Vasilevsky, the Soviet general. If we attacked now, this minute, we had to keep on and on attacking until the enemy was run off his feet and the war was won. If we bogged down or paused for breath even for a second, we would be overrun again.” 

Put A Cherry On Top, The Secrets of Creating An Artful Life, by Ben Buhunin

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Amazon said about Ben Behunin’s book, “Put a Cherry on Top, The Secrets of Creating an Artful Life,” that “This book will encourage you to return to the place in your own life where you lived without fear and believed you were an artist.” The book's message seems to be that we have the power to change the world around us and that we can change whatever we do into a work of art.

The cover and left-hand pages tell us this is a coloring book, and some may color in it, but most of us will likely enjoy the quotes and artwork.

About one-fourth of the book is a memoir about Behunin’s story of becoming a potter and then a writer. It begins with his first year of high school, his service for his church in Germany, and his return to work in a pottery shop. We learn of his marriage and how he made a living as a potter and then was drawn into writing.

My wife brought a copy of this book from her “women only” book club. She told me about Ben’s life story, which he had presented at the monthly club meeting.  Ben quickly adds converts to his skills in pottery and writing. A local radio show in Salt Lake City heard about him from a lady in San Diego who had learned of his work at her book club.  

A very inspiring book.

Ben Behunin Quotes

“There is more to a boy than what his mother sees. There is more to a boy than what his father dreams. Inside every boy lies a heart that beats. And sometimes it screams, refusing to take defeat. And sometimes, his father's dreams aren't big enough, and sometimes his mother's vision isn't long enough. And sometimes the boy has to dream his dreams and break through the clouds with his sunbeams.” 

“We have to bloom where we are planted, enjoy the sunlight while we can, and thank the heavens for the rain that not only beats us down but feeds us and makes us stronger.” 

― Ben Behunin, Remembering Isaac: The Wise and Joyful Potter of Niederbipp