Don't Overthink It, by Anne Bogel
Anne Bogel is the author of “Reading People” and “I’d Rather Be Reading” and is known for her Podcast, “What Should I read Next” as well as her blog “Modern Mrs. Darcy”.
This book, “Don’t Overthink It: Make Easier Decisions, Stop Second-Guessing, and Bring More Joy to Your Life”, tackles life problems of indecision and fear of making the wrong decision. She says that people spend their lives constantly overthinking their decisions believing they are just wired to do it that way.
Anne says that you overcome negative thought patterns that are repetitive, unhealthy, and unhelpful and replace them with positive thought patterns that will bring more peace, joy, and love into your life. Her answer is to just say no. No to overthinking.
The book presents thing you can do that can make an immediate difference and will result in freeing up energies consumed by overthinking. Her approaches are practical based on her own life experiences.
Quotes by Anne Bogel
“A good book, when we return to it, will always have something new to say. It's not the same book, and we're not the same reader”
This same review can also be found in the Book Reviews Matter Section
“People read for a multiplicity of reasons. Nearly forty years in, I can tell you why I inhale books like oxygen: I'm grateful for my one life, but I'd prefer to live a thousand --and my favorite books allow me to experience more on the page than I ever could in my actual life.”
”When we share our favorite titles, we can't help but share ourselves as well. Shakespeare said the eyes are the windows to the soul, but we readers know one's bookshelves reveal just as much.”
“We can’t know what a book will mean to us until we read it. And so we take a leap and choose.”
“You’re sad because whatever you read next can’t possibly be as good as the book you just finished. You despair because nothing you read can possibly be as good, ever again.”
Anne Bogel is the Podcaster of
Modern Mrs Darcy
Caught, by Harlan Coben
Dan Mercer is a social worker known as a friend to troubled teens. He walks into a trap set by Wendy Tynes, reporter and anchor at NTC News, who believes that Dan is just another child rapist and that her methods to trap him are justified.
Wendy is single and will never forgive the women who were driving drunk and killed her husband. She sees herself as fair-minded with an instinct for right and wrong. When Dan calls her, insisting on his innocence, her instincts tell her not to listen.
Dan is soon also tied to the disappearance of a seventeen-year-old Haley McWaid, and Wendy should see this as confirmation of his guilt, but it leads to her doubting her instincts about the motives of the people around her.
Wendy’s efforts to understand what happens to lead her to Ed Grayson, one of the fathers of families whose child has been abused. Ed tries to get Wendy to help him kill Dan Mercer. Wendy is soon looking into Ed and his associates, and the plot twists and turns and gets complicated.
The story is about the motives of the people around Wendy and the community shocked by what happens. The plot ends with a hard look at the true nature of guilt and forgiveness.
See More about Harlan Coben in the Favorite Authors Section
The Boy From The Woods by Harlan Coben
The private investigator’s name is Wilde. As a very young boy, he was found by some hikers in the Ramapo Mountain State Forest 24 years ago. He didn’t remember ever not being in the forest and didn’t know his name but somehow had learned English. Taking the name Wilde seemed logical.
Now in his 40s, he has a godson, Sweet Water High School student Matthew Crimstein, who is worried about a classmate Naomi Pine who has gone missing. Wilde is trying to help but learns that Naomi’s problems may be linked to another high school associate, Crash Maynard, whose TV producer father, Dash Maynard, is close friends with reality TV star–turned–presidential hopeful Rusty Eggers.
Naomi is found but then a week later disappears again, and about the same time, Crash disappears too. They are assumed to be together, but a ransom note arrives and demands incriminating videotapes of Rusty Eggers that Dash and Delia Maynard have hidden for 30 years.
Wilde seems a little weak as the investigator in a Coben plot, but the story holds our attention and brings some big surprises at the end.
The Boy from the Woods Quotes.
Matthew had learned an awful truth: You grow immune to cruelty. It has become the norm. You accept it. You move on. - Chapter 1
Someone once told Hester that memories hurt, the good ones most of all. As she got older, Hester realized just how true that was. - Chapter 3
Laila was gorgeous. There was no way around it. She dazzled in the fitted gray business suit that hugged where it should, which in her case was everywhere. - Chapter 3
beating in her chest. Age was a funny thing. You're in high school again when your heart starts beating like this. - Chapter 4
A child comes out hardwired. That was what you learned as a parent - that your kid is who he is and what he is and that you, as a parent, significantly overstate your importance in his development. A dear friend once told her that being a parent is like being a car mechanic - you can repair the car and take care of the car and keep the car on the road, but you can't fundamentally change the car. If a sports car drives into your garage for repairs, it isn’t driving out an SUV. Same with kids. Chapter 5,
See More about Harlan Coben in the Favorite Author Section
Dark Sacred Night, by Michael Connelly
A Ballard and Bosch novel with a lot of focus on LAPD Det. Renée Ballard, who works the night shift referred to as The Late Show. Ballard’s focus on her work is much like Bosch’s with high intensity. She finds Bosch looking through some old case files late one night with no one’s permission, and then she learns he is a retired LAPD working cold cases for the San Fernando PD. When he leaves, she looks at the file detailing the unsolved 2009 murder of Daisy Clayton, a 15-year-old runaway.
Ballard wants in on the cold case and begins working with Bosch. An investigation into another hard case by Bosch that involves killing a 52-year-old gang leader has put the detective marked to be killed by the violent gang Varrio San Fer 13. Bosch plays the double role of being the hunter and the hunted.
Bosch and Ballard working together, bring a new dimension to the drama and well-plotted crime investigations of Michael Connelly.
Quotes
“For every noble movement or advancement in the human endeavor across time, there were always betrayers who set everything a step back.”
“Neither spoke, neither made a sound except for the deep exhalation of breath. First, he felt her hips shudder, and soon after, he desperately reached up and pulled her into an embrace as his own body created that one moment that takes all other moments away—all fear, all sadness—and leaves just joy. Just hope. Sometimes love.”
“There was something deeply affecting about that. Something unfair went beyond the general unfairness of death at the hands of another. She wondered how men would live if they knew that their size and nature made them vulnerable to the opposite sex in every moment of their lives.”
A Book on Inclusion by Dr. Suess
From there to here,
From here to there.
Funny things are everywhere.
\\\\\\\///////
Black Fish
Blue Fish
Old Fish
New Fish
Some are red. Some are blue. Some are old. And some are new. Some are sad. And some are glad. And some are very, very bad. Why are they sad and happy and bad? I do not know, ask your Dad.
What is the meaning of this book? One answer would be a positive message of inclusion. This blog has a separate tab for Dr. Suess’s books
The Wrong Side Of Goodbye, by Michael Connelly
After thirty years with the LAPD, Harry Bosch started working as a private investigator and works as a volunteer in a small town in the LA area.
Bosch’s reputation has followed him and a reclusive billionaire, Whitney Vance who is near the end of his life, seeks out Bosch to help him determine if he has an heir that can be found. Vance’s one regret is in his youth was that he fell in love with, Vibina Durate, a Mexican girl and with family interference he had left her.
Vance learns that Vibina, who was pregnant when Vance left her, had a child named Dominick Santanello and that he had been killed in Vietnam. He also learns that Dominick had also fallen in love with a Mexican girl and left her behind when he went to war, and she was pregnant.
With a fortune at stake Bosch has to watch his every move because he believes that massive business empire Vance had built would never want a heir found.
At the same time he is tracking a serial rapist for the small police department he volunteers at and it is a complicated baffling case that also holds the readers interest from start to finish.
Quotes
“It had been Bosch’s experience that when you looked back at a life, you used a magnifying glass. Everything was bigger, amplified.”
“Artists are supposed to stay hungry.” “That’s bullshit. That’s a myth invented to keep the artist down because art is powerful. You give an artist both money and power and they’re dangerous.”
The Hit, by David Baldacci
As you would expect in a book titled “The Hit,” it is about a plan to kill a target by, in this case, not one but two assassins. Both Will Robie and Jessica are highly trained killers, but one has gone “rogue” and is killing members of the CIA, the agency that trained them both. Robie is assigned to track her down and bring her in, dead or alive. His direct reports feel that hiring a killer to kill a killer is their only and best solution.
Reel’s targets seem unconnected, with one being a handler and the other the Deputy Director of the CIA. Still, we eventually learn of a larger conspiracy that, if not stopped, could send shock waves through the U. S. government and around the world.
Reel and Robiestartarareoppositeesidese,s but it turns out both sides may be their enemy.
For More on David Baldacci, see the Favorite Authors
Quotes
“toward the small pond that he had seen before. The walls of fire ended there. An instant later, the remains of the cottage exploded. He ducked and rolled again from the concussive force, almost pitching into the right side of the wall of fire. He rose and redoubled his efforts, thinking he would reach the water. Water was a great antidote to fire. But as he neared the edge of the pond, something struck him. No scum. No algae on the surface, although the ground around was full of it. What could kill green scum? And why was he being forced to run right toward the one thing that could save him? Robie tossed his gun over the top of the wall of flames, pulled off his jacket, covered his head and hands with it, and threw himself through the wall of flames on the left side.”
“The motorcades drifted down the street with Canadian police providing the traffic security. There were several Canadian Mounties on their horses; they looked resplendent in their red uniforms. But they were also brightly colored sitting ducks when it came to an actual armed confrontation.”
“What happened to you as a child, particularly something bad, changed you, absolutely and completely. It was like a part of your brain became closed off and refused to mature. As an adult, you were powerless to fight against it. It was simply who you were until the day you died. There was no “therapy” that could cure it. That wall was built, and nothing could tear it down.”
One Summer, by David Baldacci
Jack Armstrong is living out his death sentence, an incurable disease, and is determined to use his last bit of strength to stay alive until Christmas Day so he can spend this last one with his wife, Lizzie, and their three children. On Christmas Eve, Lizzie decides to drive in a blizzard to refill his medicine and is killed coming back in an accident. Jack cannot care for his children alone, so his choices are grim. His mother-in-law makes everything even more complicated, splitting up the family from coast to coast, leaving Jack in a care center to die alone. Then a miracle happens, and healing takes place, not just physically. As Jack gets better, he finds new strength and is determined to reunite his family. He gets a clean bill of health and then takes his children back and leaves to go to the summer home where Lizzie grew up; through the summer, he struggles, but he finds himself and his family.
The plot is predictable and is nothing like Baldacci’s usual thriller books, but the characters seem real, and it still holds your attention.
Quotes
“Life is crazy and maddening and often makes no sense.”
“Because life doesn't work that way. You can do everything perfectly. Do everything you think you're supposed to be doing. Fulfill every expectation that other people may have. And you still won't get the results you think you deserve. Life is crazy and annoying and often makes no sense.”
See More about David Baldacci in the Favorite Author Section
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott
“Thirty years ago, my older brother, who was ten years old, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird”.
This short story tells where the title for this book came and the approach to the book seems to follow the same formula: looking at each part of the whole. The Chapter titles tell how her approach to writing is said.
Getting Started, Short Assignments, Shitty First Drafts, Perfectionism, School Lunches, Polaroids, Character, Plot, Dialogue. Set Design, False Starts, Plot Treatment, How do you Know When You’re Done?
Anne Lamott is a novelist, non-fiction writer, essayist and memoirist. Her nonfiction works are largely autobiographical, mixed with observations about daily life and filled with humor.
Her father was a writer, and her early life accounts and his influence are her unique side. In this book, she transitions into her chapters on writing techniques from her own life story and the advice her father gave her brother. The book took its name from that advice where he counseled him to tackle his story on birds, one bird at a time.
Her writing advice is pretty basic, but it just feels different. She can offer straightforward advice in such an easy-to-read, free-flowing style that is so effective. You find yourself relaxing and just enjoying her language and her perspective on the process.
Some authors seem to put an unusual word or phrase into the dialog to "wake you up,” but Anne naturally evolves from instruction to the language of life itself.
Anne Lamott Quotes
“Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
“If people wanted you to write warmly about them they should have behaved better”
“Writing is about paying attention and to communicate what is going on”
“Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining.”
“Listen to your broccoli and it will tell you how to eat it.”
The Black Box (Harry Bosch #16), by Michael Connelly →
The case started in 1992, a few days after the acquittal of the cops who beat up Rodney King incited an eruption of violence in Los Angeles. In the heart of the violence, in a South-Central alley, Danish photojournalist, Anneke Jespersen, was shot dead. Bosch and his partner, Jerry Edgar, briefly examine the body, but there’s not enough time to pursue the case with all that is happening. The only clue that Bosch finds is a single 9mm brass shell casing.
Twenty years later, while working cold cases in the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit, Harry Bosch links the bullet from a recent crime to the crime in the white reporter’s file from 1992. The patient had gone cold since Harry first was involved and was then handed off to the Riot Crimes Task Force and never solved. Matching the shell casing to both crimes suggested that the reporter’s death may have been more than random violence.
Bosch begins to search for the one piece of evidence that might pull the case together and refers to it as the “black box, “ which will explain everything. Forensic technology connects the shell casing to a gun used in the Iraq war. Still, departmental politics flare-up over white Bosch spending time finding the killer of a white reporter from the South LA riots where so many blacks were killed.
Bosch won’t stop his search until he solves the crime. The twists and turns from finding a single shell casing in the beginning to the conclusion of this story are fascinating.
Quotes From: The Black Box
“keep your quid pro quota shit. I only told you about Story because he’s dead. You can put me back in.”
“The best and fastest way to break a conspiracy was to identify the weakest link in the chain and find a way to exploit it. When one link was broken, the chain would come loose.”
“It was no longer an unexplained blip on his radar. There was now something solid there that needed to be explained and understood.
Stay Close by Harlan Coben →
The story starts with Ray taking a picture and then pondering what he thinks he sees on the ground, and the result is a view of the mystery itself.
“Sometimes, in that split second, when Ray Levine snapped a picture and lost the world in the strobe from his flashbulb, he saw the blood. He knew, of course, that it was only in his mind’s eye, but at times, like right now, the vision was so real he had to lower his camera and take a good hard look at the ground in front of him.”
Megan Pierce, a former stripper who went by the name of Cassie, had left her life and relationship with Ray Levine behind her right after her client Steward Green disappeared and was assumed dead. She rebuilt her life, becoming a mother of two children, married to a successful lawyer, and living in suburbia.
Megan, who seems bored with her new life, goes to a business meeting in Atlantic City and, during a break, goes to her former club, La Crème. She meets up with and learns from Lorraine Griggs, a former colleague, that Stewart Green might still be alive after 17 years and that on the same date he disappeared, Carlton Flynn has just vanished in ways that seem to tie in with Green’s disappearance.
Detective Jack Broome is working on a group of cold cases that all have similarities to the Steward Green case, and his path has led him to search for Cassie, now Megan. The most current victim’s father has hired two young killers, Ken and Barbie, to search for the killer of Carlton Flynn. The entry of these two sadistic killers into the plot brings a twisted, scary threat to unexpected players in the field.
Coben’s story of what comes from looking into cold cases is not new, and in some ways, this plot is predictable, but the story has some real irony, and it holds your interest with surprises coming to the very end.
See the Favorite Authors Section for more about Harlan Coben
Quotes from Stay Close
“Hope could be a wonderful thing.”
“A voice flat enough to fit under a door crack.”.
“Some people, no matter how easy the path they are given on the walk of life, will find a way to mess it all up.”
Watchers by Dean Koontz →
The Watchers by Dean Koontz has been given much credit for establishing Dean Koontz as a best-selling author.
A novel about a dog is, of course, a good formula, but this thriller holds your attention through every page.
Travis Cornell, a former Delta Force operative, and Nora Devon are the critical characters next to Einstein, the dog. Travis starts going into a remote canyon near his home to escape his depressing life. He meets up with two genetically engineered creatures that have escaped from a top-secret government lab. One is a golden retriever with enhanced intelligence who saves him from the other creature, known as the Outsider, a one-of-a-kind monster obsessed with killing the dog. Travis gets away and takes the dog home, where he learns of the dog’s superior intelligence.
Nora Devon is stalked by a dangerous man when Travis and Einstein save her, not just once in the park but again later. They become fast friends.
Federal agents have been called in to find the lab escapee,s and the Outsider is tracking the dog leaving a trail of gruesome death on the way. Travis, Nora, and Einstein go on the run to get away.
Vince Nasco, a professional killer, has been hired by Russians to kill several targets that worked at the lab, and he gets drawn into chasing the dog.
Quotes from Watchers by Dean Koontz
“I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather...the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it-very loose; the line of the law-so you can stretch this way or that, rearrange the arc of it, so you are always short of the blatant theft or cold-blooded murder-safely on the right side.”
“It's so damn hard to bloom... to change. Even when you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it's hard. The desire to change isn't enough. Or desperation. Couldn't be done without...love,”
“You've taught me that we're all needed, even those who sometimes think we're worthless, plain and dull. If we love and allow ourselves to be loved, a person who loves is the most precious thing in the world, worth all the fortunes that ever were. That's what you've taught me, fur face, and because of you, I'll never be the same”
See the Favorite Author Section for Dean Koontz
Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard Nixon, by Robert Sam Anson →
Anson, the Author, captures the ten years after Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and starts the overview with Nixon talking to his aide Kenneth Clawson about his life, saying. So you are lean and mean and resourceful. You continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years, you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance." Followed by the comment, “a man doesn't cry.” The dialog ends: "There was a silence, and quietly Clawson began to weep. When he looked up, Nixon was weeping as well."
Anson’s view of Nixon’s Exile leans toward a preoccupation with the dark and weak side of the man. He uses a passage from Nixon’s very insightful book “Leaders” where he described Abraham Lincoln as a ''supreme idealist'' who nonetheless ''broke laws,'' violated the Constitution, ''usurped arbitrary power,'' and ''trampled individual rights'' in his quest to preserve the Union. ''His justification was necessary,'' wrote Nixon, and he generalized: ''Whatever the field, the crucial moral questions are, in effect, those of the bottom line.''
If Anson expected his book to show Nixon as a man who wouldn’t quit and reinvented himself in the eyes of the public and became a valuable source for advice on foreign policy, then he failed because his focus seemed preoccupied with showing Nixon as petty and somewhat of a ridiculous figure.
He was critical of the Frost interview of Nixon but didn’t acknowledge that the interview itself showed how the public’s fascination with Richard Nixon had never stopped.
Nixon’s many post-Watergate books suggest that Anson missed the point that despite his weaknesses, Nixon had much of value and interest to say.
Most Controversial Quote
“When the President does it, that means that it's not illegal.”
Richard Nixon Quotes
“Only if you have been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”
“If you take no risks, you will suffer no defeats. But if you take no risks, you win no victories.”
“You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I'm innocent. You've got to believe I'm innocent. If you don't, take my job.”
“Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines.”
“You must never be satisfied with losing. It would help if you got angry, terribly angry, about losing. But the mark of the good loser is that he takes his anger out on himself and not his victorious opponents or teammates.”
“We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another — until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard and our voices.”
“Defeat doesn't finish a man; quit does. A man is not finished when he's defeated. He's finished when he quits.”
This quote below says it all, and the fact that he said it is amazing
“Always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
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The Drop by Michael Connelly →
Bosch is on the DROP, which stands for Deferred Retirement Option Plan, which allows him only to work three more years but is seeking an extension to keep doing what he considers his mission in life, catching killers. The reference also seems to reference several aspects of this story; some will be more immediately recognized, like the drop of one victim from a tall building.
Bosch and his partner David Chu are working in the Open-Unsolved unit of the LAPD's homicide squad handling cold cases. They are almost desperate to get back to work when the lieutenant makes her way around the squad room like Santa Claus, parceling out the assignments like presents to the squad’s six detective teams. “Christmas came once a month in the Open-Unsolved Unit. The cold cases were the lifeblood of the unit.”
The first case is the 1989 murder of college student Lily Price who was strangled to death. DNA from a tiny blood smear on her body is matched to recently-paroled child sex abuser Clayton Pell, but Pell was only eight years old when Price died. Bosch and Chu track Pell to a halfway house for sex offenders, where they meet therapist Hannah Stone.
Pell agrees to meet, and it is learned that during his childhood, his mother dated a man known as "Chill," who sexually abused him and beat him with a belt which could be a way his blood transferred to Price's body since it is likely that a belt was used in the strangulation.
The Price investigation has to slow down to make way for the second case, the death of attorney and business consultant George Irving, who has fallen from a hotel room balcony at Chateau Marmont. George is the son of Irvin Irving, formerly Bosch's nemesis at LAPD, now a city council member and Bosch's frequent foe in power struggles. Irving specifically requests Bosch to investigate his son's death because, despite their antipathy, he believes Bosch is a dedicated detective who will find out the truth no matter what.
As expected, Bosch solves both the cold cases by finding a deranged killer who has been loose in the city for three decades and a political conspiracy that goes back into the dark history of the police department.
