This is a self-help guide to reducing your stress levels by choosing to care only about those things that are important to you.
What I Liked
I found this a very odd book to read. In almost every chapter, I found myself disagreeing with his evidence and examples, often thinking they proved the opposite of what he was trying to use them to prove, yet at the same time agreeing with some of the premises. It felt more like he had some solid ideas throughout, just not very well developed. Like, for instance, that we have limited bandwidth to care about things and therefore we should not care about a lot of unimportant stuff (hence the title), finding problems you like to solve (i.e., what you love), prioritizing better values for ourselves in line with what we love, and certainty being an enemy of growth (so you should risk failure more).
What I Didn’t Like
Most of his examples are Millenial-style rants, not actual evidence to support his arguments, and it is a lot of work to come to the familiar conclusion “don’t sweat the small stuff and it is all small stuff”, except with swearing.
The Bottom Line
Not worth reading but at least I got a reading badge for it.
A professor is killed, and a young student in love with him confesses to the murder. But there are lots of other more likely suspects.
What I Liked
Eustis won the 1947 Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and it is easy to see why it won. The sense of place is strong, and a strong foreboding all the way through the novel adds some suspense. There is more than a hint of psychological darkness lurking in the shadows.
What I Didn’t Like
There are some parts that just don’t hold up. The understanding of mental health disorders was not very rich, and the interactions of the two protagonists are misogynistic to read (he continually calls her fatty and comments when she drinks a beer that there too many calories). There’s also an underlying current that women are nothing without a man. Hard to read in 2019, even as historical. The red herrings are clear by midway through the novel, and the solution / foreshadowing is obvious, leaving the last 40% of the novel just “get to it, already”.
Jack Reacher is still in the military and gets transferred out of Panama just before New Year’s Eve, 1989. The Berlin Wall is falling, Panama is heating up with Noriega, and Reacher is watching grass grow at his new post, until a General drops dead at a seedy motel.
What I Liked
The story gives more of Reacher’s back story, and it is interesting to see the “man alone” working within a command structure with others. And it is an interesting premise — what do you do in the military when the future looks like you’re about to become obsolete? The supporting characters were good, and it was nice to see Reacher with his brother and mother. At the end, there is a twist about an error Reacher makes early on that comes back to bite him, and it is a great element to keep. The aftermath is kind of abrupt, with who went where and what happened next, but hard to avoid in a “flashback” style story.
What I Didn’t Like
The premise for the story is a little far-fetched, but when they get to the final reveal, the real specific motive is ridiculous as the people involved would never have done what they did, at least not on paper, and not openly. Reacher stumbles around in the dark long past where certain lines of enquiry should have been obvious, particularly for the identity of a specific witness. And the killer.
A historical librarian gets a chance to catalogue the books at a remote island home for a summer in Northern Ontario and encounters locals, free time to figure out her life, and a pet bear.
What I Liked
This book was given to me back in my teens, a gift of quality literature as it had just won the Governor General’s Award for fiction. I knew nothing about it as I started to read it. And I was relatively shocked to see “high literature” include bestiality and graphic descriptions of oral sex performed by the bear on the main character. The historical parts were awesome, as was the descriptions of the island and the passage of the summer.
What I Didn’t Like
I found the romanticization of the relationship with the bear a bit odd, as was the depersonalization of her other sexual partners during the summer. I also felt there were gaps in the ending — we saw what she intended to do, not what she actually did once she was back in Toronto.
The Bottom Line
Bestiality is a strange theme for an award-winner.
The book is a collection of two sets of stories — the first set is part of the Kinsey Millhone series and set throughout the Alphabet series in time; the second set is about Kit Blue.
What I Liked
The first part, with Kinsey Millhone, includes an introduction about how she created Kinsey (4/5), nine shortstories, and a conclusion about the history of the genre of the hard-boiled PI (3/5). The shortstories are fun to read, but there isn’t much “Kinsey” in them. Too little time to dwell, mostly focused on “wham bam, here’s a clue, here’s a solution”. One I rate at 4/5, five more at 3/5, and another three that aren’t very good at all.
Between the Sheets — Great opening where woman shows up to confess to murder she hasn’t reported yet, and when she goes back, the body is gone (3/5);
Long Gone — Missing wife, lots of kids, clues are pretty obvious (3/5);
The Parker Shotgun — Cool premise, quick solution, fair with the clues (4/5);
Non Sung Smoke — Find a one-night stand, have him get killed, throw in some drugs (3/5);
Full Circle — Cute ending to a simple case of who killed a young woman in a horrific car accident that Kinsey witnessed (3/5); and,
A Little Missionary Work — Two celebrities ask for Kinsey’s help with a fake kidnapping, but Kinsey reverses the con in the end (3/5).
The second part includes an introduction about Grafton’s not-so-idyllic early life, and how “Kit Blue” is a younger version of herself (3/5). The remaining thirteen stories work quite well as a collection of slices of Kit’s life, although individually I rate one as 5/5, five as 4/5, and three as 3/5, with another four below the line:
That’s Not An Easy Way To Go — Kit realizing she’s become the mother to her alcoholic mother (4/5);
Lost People — Kit reflecting on her alcoholic parents, displaced from their own lives (3/5);
Clue — Slice of life with mother visiting and Kit’s relief when she leaves (3/5);
Night Visit, Corridor A — Kit visiting mother in hospital (4/5);
April 24, 1960 — Kit dealing with news of her mother’s death on Kit’s birthday, and being irritated by her husband trying to comfort her (4/5);
The Closet — Kit cleaning out her mother’s closet after she’s gone and trying to figure out what it represents, if anything (4/5);
Maple Hill — Kit walking through an empty house saying goodbye to all of it (5/5);
Jessie — a housewoman talking about Kit’s mother (4/5); and,
A Letter From My Father — Kit reading a letter and sharing her own views of their life together (3/5).
What I Didn’t Like
Three of the Kinsey stories aren’t great:
Falling Off The Roof — A mystery book club with murder on its mind (1/5);
A Poison That Leaves No Trace — Quick case of a dead sister looking to know if her niece killed her mother (2/5); and,
The Lying Game — Old trope about a liar and a truthteller, you can only ask one question (1/5).
Four of the Kit Blue slices don’t stand alone very well:
A Woman Capable of Anything — Kit Blue watching a sleeping alcoholic mother (1/5);
A Portable Life — Kit coming to terms with the past being destroyed (1/5);
The Quarrel — Kit listening to her father explain his new wife’s behaviour (2/5); and,
Death Review — Kit’s working in a hospital as a medical secretary, spotting glimpses of her mom in the other patients (2/5).
