The Paradox of Choice - Barry Schwartz

 My niece shared this with me and while dated, it presents some thoughtful ideas on the over abundance of choices in our modern lives and the impact it has.  I marked several passages and was convinced of his case within the first 50 or so pages after which it got very repetitive.  In writing up my review I discovered I'd already read the book in 2010 (sigh).  

Quotes:

"a majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives.  There you have it--the paradox of our times."

"...we evaluate positive experiences on the basis of how good they feel at their best, and how good they feel at the end."

"...we all hate to lose...loss aversion."

"Once something is given to you, it's yours.  Once it become part of your endowment, even after a very few minutes, giving it up will entail a loss [endowment effect]."

"[On Regret]...we don't close the psychological door on the decisions we've made, and as time passes, what we've failed to do looms larger and larger."

"...to give away or throw away something would force you to acknowledge a loss [sunk costs]…being sensitive to sunk costs is a mistake.  That's over."

"...[we] get used to --adapted to-- each of our sources of pleasure, and they stop being sources of pleasure.  Because of adaptation, enthusiasm about positive experience don't sustain themselves."

Published: 2004  Read: July-August 2021  Genre: Non-fiction, philosophy

Going Solo - Eric Klinenberg

 Sub-title: The extraordinary rise and surprising appeal of living alone

I started reading this sometime back in 2020 and struggled to get through it but finally finished in August 2021.  The author did field research on people living alone in developed countries and interprets the results for their impact on future housing, urban living, and society as a whole.  

Quotes:

"In 1917...the writer Anna Alice Chapin identified a building nearby as "the first all-bachelor apartment house erected in town.  It is appropriately called 'the Benedick' [from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing], after a certain young man who scoffed at matrimony."

"The big thing that changes with age in terms of living alone is that the word 'dying' and 'alone' start to become associated with each other...nobody worries about dying married."

"...a deputy investigator for the Los Angeles County Public Administrator...is one of a hundred full-time employees at the county public administrator's office, which investigates cases in which someone dies and no one claims the body or the estate.  She is sort of like a detective for people who die alone.  Her job is to comb through the remains of their lives, searching for next of kin.  Emily and her colleagues get about 3,000 cases like this each year."

"Pearl is a prototype for a robotic personal assistant, with origins in a collaborative research and design experiment...at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford universities."

Published: 2010  Read: August 2021  Genre: Non-fiction, sociology

The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich

 I had put off reading this for quite a while because I hadn't cared very much for one of her previous books, The Master Butcher's Singing Club, that I had read back in 2003.  

A sacred and powerfully spiritual native american drum is found by an antique collector and the story tells of its impact on her life and of those who created it.  Again, not a great read for me.  I find her writing disjointed and unsatisfying.  

Quotes:

:For it seems to me that my sorrow is deep in my bones and I have to break everyone to let it out.:

"Life will break you.  Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.  You have to love.  You have to feel.  It is the reason your her on earth."

Published:   2019     Read: August 2021  Genre: Fiction

The Midnight Library - Matt Haig

 I think this might be my favorite read so far this year!  A 30 something woman welcomes death as a way out of what she perceives as a miserable life.  She finds herself in the midnight library - a purgatory where infinite rows of books representing all her possible lives allows her to chose the ones she regrets having missed.  As she re-lives her life with various different choices she gets to experience the "what-ifs" that plague the results of our actions.  

Quotes:

"There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe.  So it gets very messy.  And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything.  Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living."

"That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair.  Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut.  Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you."

"She realized that you could be as honest as possible in life but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.  As Thoreau wrote 'It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see'."

Highly recommended unique way of exploring the "could have been" of life.

Published: 2020  Read: August 2021  Genre: Fiction, Philosophy

The Girl Who Smiled Beads - Clemantine Wamariya

 Sub-title: A Story of War and What Comes After

with: Elizabeth Weil

A very sad tale of a young Rwanda woman who at age 6 was caught up in the genocide.  She and her sister moved from one refugee camp to another over several years before getting asylum in the U.S. The author is a recognized speaker and activist who completed college at Yale and appears happy and successful.  The story reveals her true feelings of loss, anger, fear and distrust as a result of her journey.   A powerful read that left me wanting to know more.

Quote: "Taking care of loved ones in my world was not based on affection.  It was based on the fear of losing them."

Published: 2018  Read: August 2021  Genre: Memoir