The Marriage Portrait - Maggie O'Farrell

 In 1560 a 13 year old daughter of the Medici family is promised in marriage to the 24 year old son of another Italian family.  At 15 she is married to Alfonso Ferrara and her purpose is to produce an heir.  His two-faced personality is a shock to the girl and has disastrous effects on her life.

I bought this in LaGuardia airport for a trip home from a conference and finished it on a delayed flight out of Dallas.  O'Farrell's writing is rich without being cloying, intensely evocative without unnecessary words.  I was captivated from the first pages.  Great read for a overly long trip.

Published: 2022  Read: July 2023  Genre: Historical Fiction

Homestead - Melinda Moustkis

 This was different.  A young woman, just 18, visits her sister in Alaska before statehood and meets a man homesteading 150 acres.  After meeting him in a bar, she goes out with him once and with both of them wanting to move on with their own personal plans, he to create a home on land he hopes to own and she to escape her stateside home, agree to get married.  Not an auspicious beginning.

They confront their differences in goals and dreams, through having children, building their home and planting the crops required to meet the homestead requirements.  Through their eyes we see the origins of a new state with all its possibilities and the life of those early inhabitants.  There is a parallel of a growing community of pioneers with the growing understanding in a relationship.

The writing style was awkward many times, like the author was struggling in a new venture just like her characters.  

Published: 2023  Read: July 2023  Genre: Fiction  

The Silent Patient - Alex Michaelides

 There is nothing so satisfying as escaping into the pages of a good book for a few hours or a day.  A friend had recommended this to me, not giving any clues to the story, just that it was a good read.  How right she was.  I'll not give away anything either.  Let's just say I did not figure it out, an unusual experience for me.  Enjoy.

Published: 2019  Read: July 2023  Genre: Fiction

Enlightment Now - Steven Pinker

 Subtitle: The case for reason, science, humanism and progress.

I've enjoyed other books by Pinker and this one came highly recommended.  It makes a case for the world situation being much better than we think because we have reached and are exceeding the goals of the intellectual movement called the Enlightenment.

I read the first 100 pages, had several sticky tags, but I just couldn't keep reading.   It was laborious and repetitive and written in 2018, so pre-Covid it felt naive.  I'm putting it aside and I'll see if I can finish it some other time.

Quotes:

"conatus (effort or striving) defined as 'an endeavor to persist and flourish in one's own being' which was a foundation of several Enlightenment-era theories of life and mind."

"Human cognition comes with two features that give it the means to transcend its limitations.  The first is abstraction....the second ..is its combinatorial, recursive power."

"The nature of news is likely to distort people's view of the world because of a mental bug that psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind." 

"Autobiographical memory.  Though we tend to remember bad events as well as we remember good ones, the negative coloring of the misfortunes fades with time, particularly the one that happened to us.  We are wired for nostalgia.  Two other illusions mislead us into thinking that things ain't what they used to be: we mistake the growing burdens of maturity and parenthood for a less innocent world, and we mistake a decline in our own faculties for a decline in the times."

"As we care about more of humanity, we're apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen."

Published: 2018 Read: July 2023  Genre: Social Philosophy Non-fiction