People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have and it may just never be enough;
Give the world the best you have anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it’s all between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.
From Do It Anyway: The Handbook for Finding Personal Meaning and Deep Happiness in a Crazy World
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According to the author, Mother Teresa was so moved by these commandments that she hung them on a wall in her orphanage in Calcutta.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, is a story of betrayal, love, and redemption set in modern Afghanistan. Amir, son of a wealthy Afghan businessman, is best friends with Hassan, the son of the household servant. Amir lacks the courage to defend his friend from the brutality of local bullies; this action and the resulting guilt and shame changes the destiny of both families.
The Kite runner spans over three decades of great upheaval in Afghanistan. We in the West knew so little about this country until the events of September 11th propelled the US to invade and oust the fundamentalist Taliban. There was a monarchy, then a democracy, the Soviets invaded, then they were expelled, the Northern Alliance and infighting among Afghan tribes brought destruction to Kabul, the Taliban – punitive, oppressive order. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans fled Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. Most travelled first to Pakistan. Those who could, including in this novel Amir and his father, came to the U.S, where the immigrant story is so familiar – former generals and surgeons working gas pumps to stay alive. All hope is placed on the younger generation to succeed.
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In Jonathan Safran’s Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close we are introduced to 9 year old Oskar Schell, a highly intelligent, inventive, precocious boy coming to grips with the loss of his father who died when the World Trade Center collapsed on 9-11. Oskar discovers a mysterious key in his father’s closet with the word “Black” written on the envelope that holds the key. He decides to interview every person in NYC’s five boroughs with the last name of Black, and sets off every weekend, on foot to find them. At the same time a parallel story is unfolding with Oskar’s grandparents, their diary entries and letters that help them come to terms with their own fractured lives, having lived through the bombing in Dresden.
Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close is wildly creative. It reminded me at the beginning of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. But Extremely Loud is much richer, and the characters’ lives in more need of repair. There is a parallel too, in the Twin Towers and the destruction of Dresden, two generations apart. This book is sad and wonderful, funny and despairing, and vibrantly alive. Highly recommended.
Artemis Fowl is brilliant, inventive, cunning, devious, and the mastermind of a vast criminal empire. He is only twelve years old. His father lost and presumed dead, his mother suffering from a nervous breakdown, Artemis sets out to restore his family’s fortune by trapping a fairy from the underworld of magical creatures and holding her ransom for fairy gold. Unfortunately for Artemis, he picks the wrong fairy to kidnap – Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon (Lower Elements Police Reconnaisance) Unit. When Holly’s comrades come to rescue her, things don’t exactly meet up with Artemis’ plans, or theirs.
I had little choice. Knowing how much I love Harry Potter (having read each book at least five times) and scifi/fantasy, my friend Suzanne and her three kids handed me their copies of the Artemis Fowl series and insisted that I read them. Well, it pays to have friends who know you well. These books by author Eoin Colfer are a hoot! Colfer describes his book as “Die Hard with fairies.” Yep, that sums it up pretty well. Sort of like James Bond, Encyclopedia Brown, and Grimms all rolled up in one. Highly entertaining. Artemis Fowl is the first in an ongoing series. In Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident Artemis teams up with Holly and the LEP to save his father from the Russian “Mafiya” and fight off a goblin rebellion. In Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code Artemis gets the whole world into trouble by using secret fairy technology to try to extort money from a evil industrialist.
Ireland by Frank Delaney is the story of a young boy, Ronan O’Mara, who in 1951 at the age of 9 encounters an itinerant storyteller, who regales Ronan and others with magical tales, blending myth and fiction, of Ireland’s past. Ronan is so taken with the storyteller and his stories that he starts a quest to find him, a difficult undertaking as the storyteller has no address – the storyteller wanders the countryside, staying with people who will feed him and give shelter in exchange for telling stories. Thus starts a life long passion for Ronan – collecting the folklore of Ireland, and uncovering Ireland’s history.
The book’s plot structure of Ronan’s search for the storyteller is a convenient container for the true gems of this novel – wonderful, colorful stories covering the breadth of Irish history, from the making of the 5000 year old tomb at New Grange, the legend and fact of St. Patrick, Strongbow and the invasion of the Anglo-Normans, Daniel O’Connell and the repeal of the penal laws, to the 20th century troubles. In every breath of this novel, the Irish gift of gab is celebrated. I listened to the audiobook version of this book and I must say that this is most captivating audiobook I’ve heard to date. (Available also at Audible.com.)The author, Frank Delaney, does the narrating. With his various Irish accents he brings the stories alive in a way only possible through the spoken word.
In Tehran, Iran, for two years during the late 1990s, literature professor Azar Nafisi conducted a secret class in her home for 7 women students. The class was about literature and read from works of Nabokov, Henry James, Fitzgerald, Jane Austin, and others. Reading Lolita in Tehran is professor Nafisi’s memoir of those years and those that came before, as Nafisi struggled to teach literature whose very characters and stories more often than not offended the Islamic authorities. Reading Lolita alternates between being a social history of modern Iran and the challenges for women to retain their dignity in a repressive Islamic state, and an inquiry into the power of fiction to open our eyes and give our lives meaning. Nafisi follows the lives of her students – their stories, fears, struggles, and triumphs – as each comes to terms with their lives and roles in the world. Ultimately many, like Nafisi, will choose to leave Iran, rather to continue to live in a culture where so much of their lives are proscribed.
Reading Lolita in Tehran is beautifully written. Anyone who cherishes literature will not only appreciate the subject matter, but the lyrical manner in which it is written. Highly recommended.