The Last Lecture: A Book Review

Valentines Day 2009: (Sorry babe, this will be slightly incriminating.) I operated under my friend Robin's Theory this year for Valentine's and I told Marc exactly what I wanted: to go to a movie in the theater. That's it. As he thought things through, he thought that might be hard to pull off this last weekend but promised me he would acknowledge the holiday. On Valentine's Eve, I told him that if we weren't going to a movie, I'd really like a second pair of mary jane sweater slippers, or a cute pair of pj pants, something small. On Saturday, after he'd worked a while at a hockey tournament, after we'd taken the kids to see Madagascar 2, and after I'd gotten impatient that Marc had jumped on the computer the second we walked in the door, he pulled out my Valentine's surprise: a very fun card and a package of Spring Oreos. Thoughtful yes, but if you read Robin's post about her Valentine's Theory, you will forgive me for being a bit disappointed. I had been VERY CLEAR about what I wanted and none of my ideas were honored. While my husband is "practically perfect" , it's possible he's a little slow to pick up on completely obvious hints. So he went to Target and picked up a pair of slippers, some pj pants, a book (The Last Lecture, which is where we're going with this) AND a gallon of milk because we were low and Oreos without milk is unthinkable. When I asked him about the number of purchases he made, he told me I should know by now that when he screws up, he usually goes overboard. On Monday I read The Last Lecture in it's entirety, and I didn't start until 1:45 pm.

The Last Lecture (by Randy Pausch, the 47 year old husband, father and computer scientist who died after a 2 year battle with pancreatic cancer) is a must read. It is fun and humorous yet incredibly deep and inspirational. I had an overwhelming urge to sit and cry for an hour or so after finishing.

Here are some gems I thought might be important enough to write on post-its to place all over the house.

• When you're screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they've given up on you.

• There's really only one way to teach kids how to develop [self-esteem]: You give them something they can't do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.

• Tenacity is a virtue, but it's not always crucial for everyone to observe how hard you work at something.

• Power is in humility.

• Be a better time manager: time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think.

• The only way any of us can improve is if we develop a real ability to asses ourselves. If we can't accurately do that how can we tell if we're getting better or worse.

• Luck is indeed where preparation meets opportunity.

• Earnestness is highly underestimated. It comes from the core, while [being] hip is trying to impress you with the surface.

• Complaining does not work as a strategy.

• When you're frustrated with people, when they've made you angry, it just may be because you haven't given them enough time.

• It's not how hard you hit. It's how hard you get hit. . .and keep moving forward.

• Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.

These are words that might keep me moving forward when things don't seem to be going right. I suggest you pick up the book and see how it speaks to you.

Book Review: Eat Cake

I've had Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns checked out from the library for a month now but because of everything I have on my plate right now, haven't expended my energy to read it--I know it will envelop me and I just can't afford that right now. So, when I took the boys to story time last week, I perused the isles a few times and Eat Cake by Jeanne Ray popped out at me because my old ward's book club was reading it right when we moved. I checked it out and here's what I thought:

THINGS I LOVED

• the cake recipes in the back of the book


• It's simplicity--it was a light enough read that I could definitely put it down when I needed to.

THINGS THAT BUGGED ME

• The first sentence of the book is this: Years ago, I went to a seminar on stress reduction at the Y. That abbreviation means one thing to me: BYU. I pictured her sitting in one of the conference rooms in the Conference center behind Desert Towers and the BYU Creamery. So on pages 12 and 13 when the whole family sat down to dinner with mixed drinks of vodka and oj, I was a little thrown off--I re-read the first sentence and realized she had meant the YMCA. It's hard to change mental images once they've been established, even if after only 13 pages.


• It's simplicity. (didn't I just say that loved it's simplicity? I both love and hate it for that reason.) I don't love books that don't wrap me up in the characters and make me root them on and think about them as real people for days after I'm finished. And I don't love this book because it didn't do just that. In fact, I'm having trouble writing this review even though I just finished it yesterday afternoon. The story was so simple and seemed to wrap complicated real life things (losing a job, caring for a temporarily disabled and estranged father, starting your own business from scratch,) into a tidy little package with a bow and a happily ever after. Not my thing.

Book Review: The Count of Monte Cristo

THINGS I LOVED

• Alexander Dumas is a brilliant writer, and therefore his main character is such--this is a great story of vengeance and redemption.
• The characters were very intertwined--a component in the brilliance and vengeance mentioned above.
• The novel was long enough so that I was very attached to the characters by the end. That's my favorite kind of novel.

THINGS THAT BUGGED ME

• You could tell that it was abridged. Written in that time period and in France, the prose was just too simple (not that I'm completely serious in complaining about the simplicity because after all, that's probably the only way I got through it) and in some places it was just plain obvious that it was abridged. If only I knew French.
• Every woman except one was weak, weak, weak. I'm not even an absolute Feminist and it bugged me that the women were always fainting and screeching and wow, that just got annoying. Thank goodness for the feminist movement otherwise we'd be reading current books with women just like that. YUCK!
• SPOILER ALERT! If you think you'll read this book don't read this bullet point! Dumas depicted very deep love between Mercedes and Edmond and simply hinted that Haydee and the Count shared that same kind of love so when he sailed off into the sunset with Haydee it really bothered me; it didn't seem like a happy ending for the Count after all.

THE ENGLISH TEACHER IN ME

• There were parts where I would be reading along and then thinking "I think this is going to happen next--oh, I just made an inference--if I were to teach this novel, I'd ask this question after we read this portion of the novel so that the kids would make an inference there, too." Maybe that part of my brain will never shut off.

A GREAT POINT

"The Count went outside and saw the horses he had admired. . . three hours earlier. They're really handsome horses, he said. You were right to buy them, although you were a little late.

I had great difficulty getting them, sir, said Bertuccio, and I had to pay a very high price for them.

Are they any less handsome because of that? asked the count, shrugging his shoulders."

• I loved this quote! Something that is lovely isn't more or less lovely because of the time it took to obtain it or it's price or any other factor involved. It's just something great.