Author: Hannah Kent
I spent a week in the summer of 2016 driving around Iceland with my family. I was enthralled with the beautiful landscape and couldn’t help but fall in love with the land and it’s people. On my return from Iceland, while looking for my next audio book, I found that “Burial Rites” was one of the most highly recommended books that you could listen to. I quickly got myself a copy and started listening.
First off, this is a rather long narrative, clocking in a little over 12 hours. Christie Morven does an amazing job of conveying the pathos in the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir's sad and difficult life in mid-nineteenth century Iceland. I couldn’t help but reflect on the rather comfortable life we live today and how our ancestors must have had to struggle, especially in places like Iceland which are frozen stiff for half the year.
The basic premise is as follows. There’s a grisly murder that has been committed in an Illugastaðir farmhouse in Northern Iceland. Agnes Magnúsdóttir along with two others have already been convicted of the murder. The verdict is for her to be executed, but they have to figure out where and by whom. The District Commissioner Björn Blöndal decides to bring Agnes back to the region where the crimes were committed. However, these parts of Iceland do not have the facilities to house a criminal and so Agnes is placed in prison-foster-care with a local farmer. The stark reality of life in a remote farm in Iceland and the oddity of this arrangement make for some rather interesting episodes. The story of Agnes’ life unfolds as she tells it to her priest Reverend Tati and the farm wife Margrét. Most of the dialogue is set in badstofas - traditional communal bedrooms in Iceland - and most of the family is within earshot.
The book is rather dark and Ms. Kent does an admirable job to recreate the environment replete with knitting, childbirth, death, blood, piss and other gore. This book is definitely not for the faint of heart. The only reason to re-live those times is to appreciate how good we have it in our little corner of the world.
I was tempted to speed up the narrative, but quickly abandoned that as I got to enjoy Christie’s soft and clear voice as the story unfolded. Her musical pronunciation of the Icelandic names adds a richness and authenticity to the story that enhanced my enjoyment of the book.
Author: Atul Gawande
I am always puzzled at how Indian Doctors write so much better than Indian Engineers. It certainly helps that they have many more interesting stories to tell, but Atul is a master at taking something relatively simple, like “checklists” and writing a great book about its importance. In this one, he tackles our Mortality. He starts out by telling us what the current state of affairs is in the US for people who are on death’s door. Yes, we do spend a ton of money on just the last 6 months of a person's life, knowing fully well that it is not going to be effective. Atul characterizes this as a "multi-trillion dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets”. However, the even more frustrating consequence is that we are making the elderly miserable in the process. In the last years of their life on this planet, most people feel that their nurses and doctors are taking away their control and turning them into babies.
If you have parents or loved ones who are approaching their sunset years, I highly recommend this book. It highlights the importance of having a conversation with them and understanding what is important to them as they get older. Maybe there are certain things like eating food or going to the bathroom by themselves that they just don’t want to give up. If that is the case, figure out the best way to arrange their care with their desires in mind. Just prolonging their life at the cost of making them miserable does not make sense at all.
Author: Jonah Lehrer
I read Jonah Lehrer’s book titled “Imagine” in 2012 and loved it. I and everybody in the world soon came to know that Jonah had made some serious mistakes in this book. A journalist from Brooklyn figured out that Jonah had made up some quotes from Bob Dylan and within a matter of days, he was publicly shamed by all of his peers. His book, Imagine, was pulled from all bookstores. I had read the book from the library, and desperately wanted to get my own copy, as I still liked the book. Thankfully, it was not hard to find one on eBay and I quickly ordered it for myself.
I didn’t realize how badly Jonah was doing until I read “So you’ve been shamed” by Jon Ronson. Through this book, I also learned that Jonah was writing another book and I was eager to get my hands on it. I checked out the reviews, and was pained to see that the New York Time, Guardian, etc. all had panned the new book. Nevertheless, I wanted to see what it was like for myself and checked out a copy from my local library.
Jonah opens with a note on how he has taken every precaution possible to make sure that he has the right quotes this time. And there are numerous memorable quotes in the book like the one from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet — “Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek!”,
The book is filled with plenty of anecdotes on different aspects of love and attachment. Jonah rolls through many experiments that seek to understand the parent-child attachment. He concludes the obvious, that there is no substitute for spending quality time with your kids. You can’t write them letters or have long conversations with them, so the only thing that works is playing with them, touching them, singing to them, etc.
Moving on to adulthood, he tackles marriage by recalling Darwin’s own admission that marriage would curtail his freedom and ability to travel the world and make important discoveries. Despite all of this warning, Darwin got married to Emma Wedgwood and she ended up helping him by reading his drafts and providing valuable feedback. They read books to each other and watched earthworms play in the dirt!
Jonah briefly takes on religion and our “love” for God. He doesn’t go into any depth here, nor does he offer up his own opinion and we are left with “you either know Him or you don’t”. One place where Jonah spends a good deal of time on is the Grant Study that conducted a bunch of medical and psychiatric tests on 268 Harvard students from the class of 1939 and followed them for the rest of their life. These were some of the most privileged and fortunate men, and the striking thing was that they didn’t end up with the “happily ever after” ending that you would expect. George Vaillant spent a good chunk of his life studying these individuals and he wrote that even the ones who ended up wealthy, had their “full share of difficulty and private despair.” He concluded that “Happiness equals love. Full stop”.
I felt that Jonah saved the best for last, with the story about Frankl, the psychiatrist in Vienna who survives the horrors at Auschwitz and writes about it later. I loved the quote from Frankl, saying that "life can be pulled by goals as sure as it can be pushed by drives.” It is quite impressive to read how Frankl found purpose all through his life. The love for his wife Tilly, helped him survive the horrors he experienced in the concentration camp and after he got out, his purpose was to write the book that was stolen from him. If there is one strong conclusion that will remain with me, it is immortalized in this quote from Nietzsche: "He who has the why to live can bear with almost any how".
Author: Jon Ronson
The first time I heard Jon Ronson’s voice was while listening to a This American Life podcast. The subject was something called a "Psychopath Test” and Jon was reading an excerpt from his book on the subject. I found myself enthralled with the sincerity of his narration and got the feeling that he was telling me a story. I so thoroughly enjoyed the book that when I saw that he had another book out, I went looking for the audiobook just to hear his voice again.
I obtained the audiobook from the library and it was in the form of CDs, which are pretty much extinct now. I went through the rather painful process of converting these CDs into an Audiobook for the iPhone. It is such a complicated process that I am not sure I can replicate it. Once it was done, however, it made it very convenient for me to listen in my car and Jon did not disappoint. His very sincere tone makes you feel that he genuinely believes every single line that he was written in there.
Jon has seen examples of people being shamed on the internet and he starts his quest to find out the biggest, baddest shaming out there, so we can learn from it. There are several examples in the book and I don’t want to take anything away by revealing the details. To make it personal Jon starts out with his own tale of a spambot impersonating him on twitter. While I am sure this was frustrating and annoying to Jon, it is really trivial relative to how the other people’s lives were destroyed as a consequence of their public shaming.
Jonah Lehrer was a superstar writer who had authored several popular books until it all came crashing down when it was discovered that he had made up some quotes from Bob Dylan. Justine Sacco made a tasteless joke on AIDs and South Africa on twitter and within an instant this was broadcast to the entire twitter-verse and she became unemployable. Lindsey Stone posted her crude gesture at Arlington cemetery on her Facebook page and was vilified that it turned up on every google search for her name. There’s also the story of the two geek engineers who shared a joke about “dongles” in a Tech Conference and suddenly found themselves ejected from the conference. They were “outed” by Adria Richards and this particular story has multiple twists that I will not reveal here.
There are several other entertaining stories as Jon seeks them out in the quest to find out how you put your life back together after one of these events. While the book is entertaining — and I highly encourage you to get the audio version — there aren’t too many useful lessons that you can draw from it. Read it to be warned of the perils of the hyper-social lives we lead today.
