No Other Tale The Same: Quiet

Society will always be consumed by defining and analyzing personalities. Quiet by Susan Cain provides amazing insights about and sheds some new light on introverts. While some might see being defined as an introvert as a negative, Cain quickly debunks those myths. Introverts are not shy, she explains. They are simply more thoughtful, conscientious and analytical.

Cain's explanation of society's "extroverted ideal" was extremely interesting, and she said it starts in childhood. She gave examples of several case studies where an extroverted parent had an introverted child and worried constantly that the child had a few close friends, didn't want to participate in big class parties and was quieter in class. She said instead of worrying about that, it would be better to appreciate the child's strengths and let them explore their own interests. Cain also talked about how teachers are putting the pressure of the "extrovert ideal" onto their students by placing such great importance on group work all the time. I felt guilty as I realized exactly how true this is.

As adults, this continues as workplaces are designed more and more to be completely open, group work is consistently valued over individual work and it's necessary to "sell yourself" to move up in the workplace. Cain wrote about the importance of valuing all personality types, and about how it's necessary to have a balance. If everyone in a group makes decisions quickly without the analysis (stereotypical extrovert traits), then the group could be headed into a negative direction.

I was given this book to read by a friend of mine who, after decades of friendship, told me she considers herself an introvert. My first reaction was to laugh it off because I too have been living within the extrovert ideal. I told her since she has many friends, is social, and can meet people easily there is no way she could be an introvert (unwittingly implying that introverts are shy and socially awkward). Upon reading this book, however, I realized that one, I'm wrong, and two, introversion is much more than that narrow set of stereotypes I came up with. Introversion and extroversion are largely hinged on where you recharge - with others, or alone. Neither is negative or positive. Society needs all types of people to be balanced.

Upon reflection, I realized that I have several more introvert qualities than I had realized in years. In elementary and middle school, I was alone more often than not. I was content simply reading a book. However, I recognized that I didn't fit in socially. Therefore, when I reached high school, I decided to adapt more extrovert qualities; going up to people and talking to them, speaking more in class, and participating in the school musicals. These actions took me far, and still, today, one of my qualities that I pride myself on is the ability to be able to go up and talk to anyone. Did I always have these qualities in me, or did I force myself to be like this because society prizes the extrovert?

In my opinion, the most important point that Cain made is that no one person is purely introvert or extrovert. Everyone is a mixture in some way. However, this book is incredibly important to be able to look deeper into a personality that has been deemed "second-class" by American society. As Cain stated, Moses was an introvert, Dr. Seuss was an introvert, Rosa Parks was an introvert, J.K. Rowling is an introvert, and so many other amazing thinkers have been introverts. I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have wanted them to change their personality in any kind of way, though even Cain, as an introvert herself, admits that in order to sell her book she had to become a "pseudo extrovert". Can we as a society learn to accept all personalities, or will we only listen to those who present themselves in one type of way?

No Other Tale The Same: Eats, Shoots and Leaves

"A panda walks into the library. He eats a sandwich, then draws his bow and shoots two arrows.

'Why did you do that?' asks the librarian as the panda walks towards the exit.

The panda shows her a badly punctuated book.

'I'm a panda,' he says. 'That's what it says we do.' The librarian looks at the page:

PANDA
Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China.
Eats, shoots and leaves."

Yes, this book is another one meant for children, yet several adults still need guidance on the proper usage of commas. When I taught English I would use this book at least once per year. It illustrates, in hilarious detail, what happens when you misplace a comma.

Here's one example:

One scenario involves the mother and child leaving Grandma and skipping about in the park. The other involves everyone skipping about in the park. Quite the difference!

Here's one more:

This one has to be my favorite. It's so rich visually for children to see how misplacing the comma makes the scenario completely unrealistic.

In my opinion, this book is a must-have for everyone, whether or not you are a teacher. As you can see, my post-it notes are well-worn from years of use. Eats, Shoots and Leaves also has an adult version which entails a good old-fashioned rant about how no one knows how to use commas. This kids' version gives a slightly more gentle approach. Start slow!

No Other Tale The Same: Life After Life

After reading Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, my first impulse is to read it again because I didn't quite understand it all the first time. Atkinson's novel involves a heroine, Ursula Todd - whose story takes us through different lifetimes and time periods by the page. To be more specific, Ursula dies and then is reborn again, on countless occasions. In a sense, she gets second, third, fourth, and so on when it comes to chances.

At first I was reminded of the movie Groundhog Day. However, in that case, Bill Murray's character is aware of the fact that he has several shots to construct his perfect day. Ursula simply has a feeling of deja vu, a sense that she's lived some of these moments before - well, since she has. Atkinson makes the very interesting choice to set the book between 1910 and 1949 in England, making this unique book a work of historical fiction. In fact, the huge unanswered question at the end may just involve a gun and Hitler.

Although I joked that every couple of pages "darkness" would fall, meaning Ursula would die again, this is a very bold choice for an author to make, and I respect it immensely. Now that I have the entire picture, I need to go back and re-read to make sure I understand how the different pieces fit together. As Ursula says to her therapist, "Time isn't circular, it's like a palimpsest". I've never heard that word before. Merriam Webster defines palimpsest as "a very old document on which the original writing has been erased and replaced with new writing" and "something that has changed over time and shows evidence of that change". In this novel, both cases are true. This novel will keep you on your toes! Has anyone out there read it? If so, what did you think?

No Other Tale The Same: The Secret Keeper

The Secret Keeper by Kate Coombs, although written for a very young audience, contains an important message, as do virtually all picture books. Coombs' simple message is that everyone needs balance. She conveys this message through charming words, illustrated with beautiful pictures by Heather M. Solomon.

In this tale, Kalli, the secret-keeper of Maldinga is responsible for keeping all of the villagers' secrets. Each time one of them reveals a secret (like a baker that charges unfairly for his products) that secret becomes a stone or other heavy object in Kalli's hand. She files the secrets away in her drawers and becomes heavier. The villagers, having gotten their deep, dark secrets off their chests, walk away a little lighter. Yet when the villagers aren't telling Kalli secrets, they shy away from her, probably in shame. Only one villager, Taln, the potter's son, never tells her secrets and always talks to her.

Finally, Kalli collapses under the weight of the secrets and isolation and can't take it anymore. The villagers rush to her side and begin to tell her happy secrets (like the old man who says he married his true love). Each secret literally takes wings in Kalli's hands - a butterfly, a bird, etc. Taln tells her he's in love with her, the secret-keeper. This secret becomes a rose.

Kalli finds her balance. She still keeps the villagers' dark secrets, yet she has Taln to help her carry the burden, and the villagers meet annually in the springtime to publicly declare their happy secrets. Why read children's books, one might ask? Often they contain more layers and wisdom than one might imagine. The way Coombs describes dark secrets as literally weighing someone down and happy secrets as literally taking flight is so simple, yet so profound. Good secrets balance out the bad, and Coombs urges her readers to find a balance of both in their lives.

No Other Tale The Same: God's Hotel

Victoria Sweet's God's Hotel: A doctor, a hospital, and a pilgrimage to the heart of medicine delves deep into the harsh truths of modern medicine. Sweet accepts a job at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, the last almshouse in the country, a place that accepts anyone and everyone, that is "low-tech and human-paced" and that even allows time and space for the patients to be outside in the garden. Sweet practices what she calls "slow medicine", a practice that allows her to spend a great deal of time with her patients, to actually figure out what's wrong with them, and to allow healing to happen. It seems revolutionary in an era filled with ridiculous insurance policies, doctors who seem patients for 10 minutes, and systems that continuously force patients to advocate for themselves since if they don't, no one will.

Not only is Sweet a lovely writer, but the way in which she writes about her thought process and discovery is extremely compelling. She signs a two month contract at Laguna Honda and ends up staying for 20 years. During that time she also gets her PhD in history and social medicine and ends up making a pilgrimage to Santiago, Spain. She tests out her theories in her real life practice as much as she possibly can. Yet she also tells the heartbreaking story of how Laguna Honda changes; a team of consultants decrees that the hospital isn't efficient and therefore cuts staff, cuts costs and allows for fewer and fewer doctors to actually be able to do their job.

One of the most fascinating concepts in the book made medicine seem so simple; the System of Fours. "For premodern medicine, the cosmos was made up of four abstract elements - Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. Each of the four elements, in turn, was made up of four qualities - hot and cold, and wet and dry. Thus Earth was cold and dry; Water, cold and wet; Air was hot and wet; Fire, hot and dry. Everything in the universe was made up of a mixture of these four elements and four qualities, but in various proportions, and these included the building blocks of the body, which were the four humors - blood, bile (or choler), phlegm, and melancholia. Blood was hot and wet; and bile, hot and dry; phlegm was cold and wet; and melancholia; cold and dry. Health was thought to be the proper balance of these four bodily humors, and disease was an imbalance." (Sweet 48). According to Sweet, only by taking the proper time and care can doctors diagnose these imbalances, and frequently, the diagnosis won't come from an X-ray.

This is more than just a book; ideally, like Slow Food, Slow Medicine will become a movement. The health care system doesn't value doctors or patients anymore. As Sweet says, "The best doctor walks with you to the pharmacy and stands with you until you drink your medicine...the doctor-patient relationship [is], above all, a relationship." (Sweet 338).

* For more information on Victoria Sweet, click here.

No Other Tale The Same: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Images and descriptions of photographs and bones haunt The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards, a devastatingly beautiful novel about a husband who, with one lie, changes the course of everyone's lives around him. David, an orthopedic surgeon, ends up being the only one available in a snowstorm to deliver his wife's babies. One, the boy, is "perfect". The other, the girl, has Down's Syndrome. It's 1964, and David, believing that this baby girl will follow in his dead sister's footsteps with a fatal heart problem, makes a decision to have Caroline, the nurse, take the baby to an institution and to tell his wife that the baby died in childbirth. He hopes that Norah, his wife, will just move on.

Caroline decides the institution is an inhumane place for Phoebe to grow up and raises her as her own daughter. Phoebe continues to live, learn and grow. "You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy." (Edwards 249). Of course, on the other side of the story, it's impossible for Norah to move on. "He had handed their daughter to Caroline Gill and the secret had taken root; it had grown and blossomed in the center of his family." (Edwards 310). Norah can't stop thinking of what she's lost, and as the years go by, she becomes angrier and more withdrawn while David's guilt completely consumes him.

Every character in this book is flawed, vulnerable and utterly compelling. Memory Keeper is the name of the camera Norah buys for David. Four voices are heard throughout the book; David's Norah's, Paul's (the son) and Caroline's. Paul grows up lonely, angry and confused. He sees his father's obsession with documenting life as a negative. "Camera, his father told him, came from the French chambre, room. To be in camera was to operate in secret. This was what his father had believed: that each person was an isolated universe. Dark trees in the heart, a fistful of bones: that was his father's world, and it had never made him more bitter than at this moment." (Edwards 381).

There is some resolution at the end of this novel, although there's even sadness in the happier ending. This novel compels the reader to look deeper and to marvel at every human emotion and moment. One example is the way Edwards describes snow through David's voice: "It was a moment when all the disparate shards of his life seemed to knit themselves together, every past sadness and disappointment, every anxious secret and uncertainty hidden now beneath the soft white layers." (Edwards 9).

No Other Tale The Same: Something Borrowed

Yep, Something Borrowed by Emily Griffith is complete and utter chick lit. And yes, I 'm not ashamed to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it. There's something about reading a book solely focused on the inner workings of the female mind obsessed with a complicated relationship that is oddly comforting, since, as a woman, we've all been there.

The plot is fairly straightforward. Darcy and Rachel have been best friends since childhood. Darcy is engaged to Dex, whom Rachel met in law school. On her 30th birthday, Dex and Rachel start having an affair. The major twist is that Darcy is actually a pretty selfish person who constantly competes with Rachel and puts her down. The book has you torn between the two friends, wanting Rachel to be with her true love and at the same time, wanting Darcy and Rachel to remain friends and for Darcy to be happy. I won't spoil the end, in case you're due for a quick read. Even though this novel isn't Shakespeare, it's definitely a page-turner. 

No Other Tale The Same: Listening is an Act of Love

Listening is an Act of Love is technically by David Isay, however, the stories in this book aren't his. These stories are the stories of everyday citizens, stories of people who wouldn't necessarily write their stories down. These are stories of people who have lived through history, stories of people meeting their husbands and wives, and stories of people surviving all sorts of live obstacles and challenges. 

The stories themselves are amazing, poignant and most of all, real because they are true. Yet the real story of this particular novel is the story behind these stories, the foundation of Storycorps. Storycorps was founded in 2003 to preserve real life stories. Anyone can record a story by going to a Storycorps booth either with a loved one or alone, and asking/answering questions. People have said in the particular environment that Storycorps has created, stories came out that had never been spoken of before.

Each Storycorps participant gets a CD of their story and the copy goes to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Each week, stories are broadcast on NPR's Morning Edition. People have said that participating in Storycorps made them feel like they mattered, that their lives mattered. What better way to honor the fact that everyone's story is important?

"The essence of America lives not in the headlined heroes....but in the everyday folks who live and die unknown, yet leave their dreams as legacies." - Alan Lomax, 1940

No Other Tale The Same: The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

After finally getting around to reading the first installment of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith, I have mixed reviews. I love several aspects of this first novel (which, by the way, shares the same title as the series - The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency). I love the fact that Mme Ramotswe just up and decides one day she will open up a detective agency, without any background training or credentials, and it works. That's pretty inspirational for anyone thinking of taking on a new profession. All it seems like you need to start a new career is some money saved from your father's goats, an assistant, and some rose bush tea and you're good to go. "There was a teapot, in which Mme Ramostwe - the only lady private detective in Botswana - brewed tea. And three mugs - one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need?"

I also love how Mme Ramotswe keeps proving the skeptical men wrong when they ask how a woman can be a detective, although I don't love how she keeps referencing Agatha Christie as her only example of a talented lady detective. Mme Ramotswe's observations on life are quite interesting as well. "The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought."

Yet some of the book was lost on me. I didn't like the rambling, random thought tangents Mme Ramotswe would go on. Some of the cases she would take weren't very exciting, such as when Mme Ramotswe had to follow a teenage girl to see if she had a boyfriend. I guess I've become too cynical due to all of the modern day CSI type stores. The cases Mme Ramotswe solves are pretty fluffy in comparison, therefore I had a bit of trouble investing too much in some of the storylines. While I like the simplistic, straight-forward way Mme Ramotswe operates, part of me resents the fact that a white British man is characterizing an African woman, even though I know he did live in Botswana. 

Still, the book was extremely charming, and Mme Ramotswe is a genuinely graceful character to read. I love how she's so independent and confident. And of course, even though she refused him the first time, I'll probably have to read the second book to see if Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni (yes, he's always referred to by his full name) and Mme Ramotswe actually get married.

No Other Tale The Same: How My Parents Learned to Eat

How My Parents Learned to Eat by Ina R. Friedman and illustrated by Allen Say conveys the universal message of appreciating other cultures in a very simple, straightforward and charming manner. Everyone can appreciate and learn from this story, despite the fact that it is written for ages five to eight.

A young girl tells the tale of how her parents first learned how to eat - or really, learned to eat in a different way than they were used to growing up. Her mother is Japanese and her father is American, so when they first meet in Yokohama (he is stationed there as a solider), they are afraid to dine together. John is nervous because he doesn't know how to eat with chopsticks. Aiko is apprehensive because she doesn't know how to eat with a fork and knife. They secretly practice the other one's customs, and of course, when they go on their first dinner date, John is prepared to eat at a Japanese restaurant and Aiko is prepared to eat at an American restaurant. They resolve to alternate in the future, and the rest is history. The book ends with the little girl saying that some nights her family eats with chopsticks, and some nights her family eats with a knife and fork. Amazing.

Without sounding preachy, Friedman shows an example of two individuals who, instead of judging one another, strived to understand one another instead. There wasn't the least bit of disgust on either end. Both John and Aiko, with open minds and curiosity, strive to simply understand each other. Yes, it's a simplistic thought, yet what if everyone really took this concept to heart?

Sasha Martin cooked at least one dish from every country in the world in her Global Table Adventure experiment with the goal of creating more peace through understanding culture, one bite at a time. Food connects all of us no matter how differently we eat, and of course, we all know that food is about more than simply nourishment. As John thinks to himself when he finally gets up the courage to ask Aiko to dinner, "It's hard to be happy if you're hungry."

 

No Other Tale The Same: The Buddha in the Attic

Julie Otsuka's style in The Buddha in the Attic feels like a breath of fresh air. Otsuka has chosen to depict Japanese women coming to San Francisco as mail order brides in the early 1900's and then being accused of being traitors to America not as one single tale, but as several first-person voices.

It's an adjustment as a reader. On the one hand, it's amazing that in a short 129 pages, Otsuka manages to share so many stories. It also makes an already sad story very chilling. Yet there's no central character to hold onto. As soon as one name is mentioned, it's never mentioned again. There's also no central plot. The story is instead broken up into different phases of life these women experienced. Otsuka writes about the boat ride over, the women's first nights with their husbands, encounters with white Americans, having babies, watching their babies grow up, and eventually being taken away from their homes. A spare few stories are happy, yet the majority are devastating.

Since there is no central plot, Otsuka's book reminds me of one long poem, lyrical, haunting and evocative. After hearing all these voices in my head I want to find a historical fiction novel about this subject and time period so I can hang onto onto one voice and one story. Does anyone have any suggestions?