Rock Star in Seat 3A

Jill Kargman's The Rock Star in Seat 3A is a fast paced, quick, summer read.

At Hazel's 30th birthday party dinner, the guests play a game. Would significant other give a free pass should they meet their favorite celebrity crush and who would it be? Hazel has been lusting after Finn Schiller, a moody rock artist that records by band name Void, even though it is not a band, ever since she was a moody teenager.

An unexpected upgrade on her flight to L.A. puts her idol next to her in First Class. Stormy weather makes for a violent trip cross country. Will the plane go down? Will she and Finn survive to start a new life on an abandoned island? Or will they make it safely to L.A., fall madly in love and...

I liked that the novel included quotes at the start of each chapter, such as "You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams." ~ Dr. Seuss

I also liked Kargman's words: ""We are on different pages of different books on different shelves in different languages..."

Um

After finishing my Goodreads review of Hope: A Tragedy, I read some other user reviews.

One included quotes. Decided to share these here also.

Why did the chicken cross the road? Because he was a schmuch... because he thought there might be something better on the other side. 

Why did children always draw the sun smiling? he wondered. It's a giant ball of fire, kids. It's rage and fury. Whatever it's doing, it isn't f-ing smiling.

Most of the book's reviews were positive. Among those that were not, someone likened it to Dick & Jane Readers. Um...

I was thinking: Edgar Allen Poe or Dr. Seuss, myself.  As mentioned, the novel did not use quotation marks.  If Kugel was thinking about strange tapping noises coming from the attic, his thoughts might mimic either or. Does not everybody start using song lyrics when speaking? Or thinking? Common or popular words that somehow pop into our minds. 

Has not every one at one time or another said, "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my?" Or on a ship with weather (as the airline pilots say) started humming or singing the theme to Gilligan's Island? Said, "May the force be with you." 

So that if Auslander had written: "Monkeys, squirrels and deer, oh my," in context of story events, it would elicit a chuckle of recognition.  Or maybe I never advanced beyond Dick & Jane Readers.

I also never once thought about Woody Allen when reading the novel. Several readers did.  Mainly readers who did not like Woody Allen. They were mainly the ones with low ratings for the book. Interesting. Very interesting.

Hope: A Tragedy

Blurb on the back of Shalom Auslander's novel: Hope: A Tragedy says: "Can the darkest events of the twentieth century and of all human history be used to show the folly of hope? And can the result be so funny that you burst out laughing again and again?"

So many dark events, not sure I could say one was more evil than another. I also can not say that I burst out laughing "again and again", but most definitely burst out chuckling or laughing aloud several times. I also can not seem to turn more than a few pages without thinking: Ooh, love that, need to copy the quote. Have so many bookmarked pages, starting process of recording while still turning those pages.

What is that? he wondered.
A scratching?
A rapping?
A tap-tap-tapping.

Pondering what his father's last words might have been: Mistakes have been made?

Kugel had a theory. Kugel ws certain that whatever last words, a person chose to utter in his final moments, everyone shared the same final thought, and this was it: the bewildered,dumbfounded statement of his own disappointing cause of death.
Shark?
Train? Really? I got hit by a train?
Malaria? Fuck off. Malaria?

Crucifixion? thought Jesus. Get out.
Hemlock? thought Socrates.
Wrapped in a Torah scroll and burned alive? thought Rabbi Akiva. You have got to be shitting me.

Kugel didn't like attics. ~ "...full of ghosts and regret and longing and loss; worse yet was the implication in all this emotional hoarding that the past was preferable, to the present, that what came before beasts whatever comes next, so clutch it to your chests in mourning and dread as you head inot the unknowable but probably lousy future." ",,,photos of people whose names one can no longer recall..."

Most of Kugel's boxes were filled with books. Science, philosophy, art, literature, the philosophy of science, the science of literature, the art of philosophy, the science of art, books about other books and the books about those books about other books..."

"...atoning for something I didn't do, something my parents didn't do, something done just about before I was ever even born..." (I related to this, because I find it silly when groups demand apologies now for things done long ago by dead people long gone from the planet.)

"There comes a point where you realize that this is it; more of your life has been written than there is left to write, and you're not all that enthused about the pages you've got so far."

Problems

Problems are put before us to solve them, my mother often said. Working on finding a solution to a problem, I read: "Sometimes problems seem quite thorny, but they have a rather simple solution that was staring you in the face the whole time." Yes, I thought, how easy is this: put a vacation hold on my mail, get a bus ticket, go east to visit family, return with money saved by not paying rent here, to get out. (See Homeless in Long Beach blog for details on why I am fit to be tied.)

I did go to SS online a while ago; did not find answer about giving up apartment while on vacation. I think I am obligated to tell the government if I am going to be absent from my apartment for a period of time. What a pain. I knew homeless people collecting SS who did not have a fixed permanent address, just a P.O. box. Why oh why can't I? No, do not want to live on the streets again. Body would not take that anymore. Just need to stop paying 2/3 of income for rent, so that I can save to get out of this place.

Hope: A Tragedy could read as a depressing novel, yet I found it funny. Perhaps ironic ending.

Kugel asks a policeman: Should I be worried?

You should only worry, said Sergeant Frankel, about the things you can control.

If I could control them, said Kugel, they wouldn't worry me.

Exactly, said Sergeant Kugel.

Winston Churchill's last words were this: I'm so bored with it all.

No use, wrote, Van Gogh in his suicide note, I shall never be rid of this depression.

Goodbye, wrote Sid Vicious.

Bad father staying?

Ellipsis?

According to Free Dictionary online, it is an omission of a word or phrase necessary for a complete syntactical (?) construction but not necessary for understanding.  Oh, I see. I do that all the time. End a sentence with ....

In Hope: A Tragedy, Kugel was pondering last words. "A period, sure, if you 're lucky. An exclamation mark,  okay. A question mark probably; that seemed the punctuation all stories, collectively and individually should end with after all.
Not an ellipsis, though.
Anything but an ellipsis."

Was a good father leaving as bad as a bad father staying? (Could substitute husband, or mother for father.)

George Eastman's suicide note read: Why wait?
Well, yeah.
Sure.
There was always that.

...he remembered reading that prisoners, locked in tiny cells, often walked in circles for hours,either trying not to become infirm or trying---this was the greater challenge---to remain normal human.

According to Professor Jove, it was the knowing that there had been a happy time, a place of joy and peace and security, that made the sudden absence of it all so agonizing...Not the agony of what was,but the agony of what was o longer; this was the source of all life's pain---not the fear of a hell to come, but rather the knowledge of an Eden that is no more.

Pessimists don't start wars.

I marked page 179 on a scrape paper and "subpar" but could not find the sentence using it. Some of the last words, Shalom Auslander included in his novel were written as such:

Alice

It was subpar

Born 1955 Died 2028

Tombstone style.

I think that is all the quotes I wanted to savor.

When I was younger I said the body is prisoner for the soul; death should be a celebration; longed to be free of my body's constraints. Now that I am much older, nearer death's door, I do not remember feeling that way. This book has me thinking about tombstone words for me, although there will be none ~ want cremation. I guess I would like my last words to be something like:

*We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun...

*Terry Jacks' tune.

Moon Walk

Was not sure if I read Moon Walk, Michael Jackson's One & Only Autobiography, His Life, in His Words, so checked it out of the library. What I liked about the book is how photographs were sprinkled through out the pages rather than having them all together in a special section towards middle or end of book. What I did not like, was that the featured photos did not always identify the people, and seemed out of sequence with the story.

Michael said: "One thing I know about children is that if they don't get the love they need from their parents, they'll get if from someone else and cling to that person, a grandparent, anyone."

"I'm a person of the present, and I have to ask, How are things going now? What's happening now? What's going to happen in the future that could affect what has happened in the past?

...there are people out there who don't actively hold you back as much as they work quietly on your insecurities so that you hold yourself back."

"I believe in wishes and in a person's ability to make a wish come true. I really do." "...a wish is more than a wish, it's a goal. It's something your conscious and subconscious can help make reality."

Michael Jackson wrote or said a whole lot more than that. The book was first published in 1988. My library copy was re-issued in 2009. Most of the book was enjoyable to read; other parts got boring to me. I learned that MJ had a problem with acne; had more than one plastic surgeries on his nose and a cleft put in his chin.

Personally I think he should have left the nose alone. I guess, at the time, his self-esteem was so low due to the acute acne, he was looking to improve his looks. Since the book was written long ago, no information on a lot of things I would have liked to hear him talk about in his own words. He wrote about some stars losing their lives due to drugs at an early age. The potential lost; world would never know what else they could achieve, we would never get to see them perform again.

When he was writing the book, he could not have imagined he would be yet another star whose life ended too early, tragically.

Escape by Barbara Delinksy

Escape by Barbara Delinsky

"Have you ever woken up in a cold sweat, thinking that you've taken a wrong turn and are stuck in a life you don't want?"

Thus begins Escape by Barbara Delinsky. Emily a thirty-two year old lawyer, who along with her attorney husband, is on a fast-track to achieve a dream they shared when they meet in college. When she awakes to the start of another hectic day she wonders if people dream of "hitting the brakes, backing up, and heading elsewhere," possibly reinventing or rediscovering themselves, possibly going back to an old lover. The morning starts badly when she receives a text message from her husband informing her he can not attend an important firm dinner with her that evening.

Things get worse, until Emily has a melt-down at work and impulsively decides to escape. She has no clear idea where she will go or what she will be doing, making packing for her impromptu trip a bit of a problem. Escape is a recurring theme throughout the novel, not just Emily's escape, but for other characters as well. Jude, the old lover, escaped a confining life, or used his escape as a way to run from problems he did not wish to solve. Recurring dreams about coyotes eventually lead Emily back to a town where she spent a summer and met Jude.

After escaping New York city, when her thinking clears, nerves calm down, she believes that summer may be where she took a wrong turn, creating the life she was stuck in and maybe did not want.

Barbara Delinsky has nine other published novels, some on the New York Times bestseller list.  Her writing style makes for easy reading and Escape mostly held my attention throughout. It did not turn out to be the type of novel I expected, which was something more supernatural or otherworldly. It was more about marriage, motherhood and relationships. My favorite quote from Escape is what Emily's mother told her: Tombstones don't list jobs; they list relationships...".

308 pages copyright 2011 published by Doubleday division of Random House, Inc.
www.doubleday.com
www.barbaradelinksy.com

Murder One by Robert Dugoni

Murder One by Robert Dugoni

David Sloane's law partner instigated an intervention due to David's despondency after the murder of his wife. His associates suggested he take some time off from work, vacationing someplace warm. David was indecisive, until one evening while channel surfing he came upon the movie The Shawshank Redemption. This inspired him to rent a house in Zihuatanejo to rest and heal from his wife's murder. The Mexican town was not quite the sleepy seaside town depicted in the movie, but it worked wonders for David's psyche.

Returning home, he accepts a invitation to speak at a charitable event. He planned a quick escape after his speech due to anxiety socializing. As he is leaving he bumps into an attorney, Barclay Reid, whom he defeated in a civil law case a year earlier. One thing leads to another and  David becomes involved with a woman for the first time since his wife's passing. Complications arrive when a upper level drug dealer is murdered. Both Sloane and Reed are suspected of what some consider a vigilante killing.

about pain: "Feeling it every day . . . it's not a bad thing. That's how we heal."
 ,,,he no longer feared the unknown. He'd come to realize it was not knowing the future---the unexpected---that made life worth living.

"Ultimately he had refrained from shooting Anthony Stenopolos, but he could not deny that he had felt the primal urge for revenge, and it had been as strong as any he'd ever had, though not as his instinct to protect Jake. And that was what had ultimately stopped him. It had not been his conscience or some burst of morality, good triumphing over evil. No, the reason he had not pulled the trigger had been something much more practical than divine." (taking care of step-son more important than revenge)

368 pages
copyright 2011
published by Touchstone a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc
$24.99
www.robertdugoni.com

Mary, An Autobiography

Was not sure I read Mary, An Autobiography by Mary E. Mebane, so checked it out of the library. I was quite sure that I had, remember rock piles and such from first chapter. Seems I would have reported it on my Mary website. Maybe I reported it on my now defunct Mary Blogger blog and it got lost in transition.

Not knowing what to read, back then, I started on a quest to read books by authors named Mary due to having a website devoted to the name. Yes, I did read it; worth reading a second time. Mary grew up in an era when she had two strikes against her ~ a black female. Yet she bucked the odds, went to college, rather than settle for the expected role wife, mother, domestic ~ cleaning houses for white people, returning home to do the same.

She had one person early in life who told her the equivalent of Yes You Can; the rest of the world around her told her over and over again in many ways: no you can not. In her words:

I am going to do great things in life, I secretly vowed.
No, you aren't the said the world around me. You're going to accept your lot just like the rest of us. Black women have always had it hard. Who are you to be so different?


The constrictions, the restraints, the hidden threats that we lived under, that were the conditions of our lives, inevitably prodcued mutations in the natrual human flowerng. To me we were like plants that were meant to grow upright but became bent and twisted, stunted, sometimes stretching out and running along the ground, because the conditions of our environment forbade our deverloping upward naturally.



Protest is the most effective way of stoping unfair treatment. People who treat you unfairly don't want others to know.

This reminded me of a Richard Bach quote about our "true family":

Some people find themselves in the wrong grouping of human relationships.
...sometimes the wrong grouping is not the result of a conscious choice--of marriage with a stranger. Sometimes one is part of the wrong grouping because he or she was born into it....



Protest is the most effective way of stoping unfair treatment. People who treat you unfairly don't want others to know.

Some people never grow up.


They were grown, and grown people weren't supposed to do things like that. When you got grown you did the right things just like you had been taught in Sunday school.

The Long Way Home

A quote from Karen McQuestion's novel, The Long Way Home:

"Remember, when the universe aligns it does so for a reason. There are no coincidences."

A Facebook friend posted a t-shirt image that read "Who's Pete Sake?" One of her friends thought that hysterically funny. I pondered, thinking it should read "What's Pete's sake?" I picked up The Long Way Home, turned two pages and read: "Men. For Pete's sake."

Coincidence? Can not recall last time I heard or read the expression, yet it seems a silly universal alignment, eh.

The story involves four newly acquainted strangers, who take an impulsive road trip from Wisconsin to Las Vegas Nevada. Jazzy asks the other ladies if they ever pretended they were in a movie and  music was the soundtrack. She explains how that works, tuning in a Queen song, narrating, (and the camera zooms...). My mind wandered, wondering what Queen song it would be. Only title came to mind was We Are The Champions. Soon find out that it was the tune the ladies were singing along to.

It is probably a spoiler to say that one of the women is physic. Ah, those voices in the head (calling Gloria, Gloria...). After a thought comes to her to do something she ponders:

"Was it her own thought or something from outside her? It wasn't always easy to tell."

I can relate to that.

Good advice even for non-physic's:

Stay still...
Be open to the possibilities.

Another woman found "..an amazing number of friends confessed to having mystical experiences." Visions, voices, communications from the dead, yes, I know many who experience them. As with the physic in the book, I believe we all have ESP, some develop it, others unaware. A belief that does not help when hallucinations are the product of an unwell mind.

Also relate to: "Being ignored was the worst of all."

"A crescendo," Laverne repeated, trying it out. What a beautiful word. She'd never said it aloud before, culd have gone her whole life without saying it...

Ah, me too. Reading it in the novel, I said it out loud. Decided it a great game to play when reading ~ words I have read hundreds or thousands of times, yet never spoken. No time like the now to start speaking them aloud. Of course, with me, who knows if my pronunciation will be accurate.,,