Adventure (Jack London)

Not Jack's best work, but notable mostly for the unconventional heroine Joan Lackland. The book itself is a weird mixture of antiquated and modern world views. A good read after you struggle past the first couple of chapters.

---

Quotes:

I was brought up the way most girls in Hawaii are brought up. They live in the open, and they know how to ride and swim before they know what six-times-six is.

"Mine was a business proposition, not a marriage proposal," she interrupted, coldly angry. "I wonder if somewhere in this world there is one man who could accept me for a comrade."

There are only three things I am afraid of—bumble-bees, scarlet fever, and chaperones.

Lost Horizon (James Hilton)

I decided to read this after seeing it quoted in The Geography of Bliss. I haven't seen the movie, but i remember both my parents talking about that. It was certainly important to them and many people in their generation. It is a beautiful book, possibly the model for many Star Trek episodes and many other books that came after it.

---

Quotes:

Conway found himself quite unable to restrain an admiring glance at Miss Brinklow. She was not, he reflected, a normal person, no woman who taught Afghans to sing hymns could be considered so. But she was, after every calamity, still normally abnormal, and he was deeply obliged to her for it.

And as for the war, if you'd been in it you'd have done the same as I did, learned how to funk with a stiff lip."

Chang answered rather slowly and in scarcely more than a whisper: "If I were to put it into a very few words, my dear sir, I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excess of all kinds--even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself.

I can only add that our community has various faiths and usages, but we are most of us moderately heretical about them.

"The jewel has facets," said the Chinese, "and it is possible that many religions are moderately true."

His attitude may be summed up by saying that, as he had not died at a normal age, he began to feel that there was no discoverable reason why he either should or should not do so at any definite time in the future.

"Yet it is, nevertheless, a prospect of much charm that I unfold for you--long tranquillities during which you will observe a sunset as men in the outer world hear the striking of a clock, and with far less care. The years will come and go, and you will pass from fleshly enjoyments into austerer but no less satisfying realms; you may lose the keenness of muscle and appetite, but there will be gain to match your loss; you will achieve calmness and profundity, ripeness and wisdom, and the clear enchantment of memory. And, most precious of all, you will have Time--that rare and lovely gift that your Western countries have lost the more they have pursued it.

"Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue,"

There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything; when one took things for granted merely because astonishment would have been as tedious for oneself as for others.

"It is significant," he said after a pause, "that the English regard slackness as a vice. We, on the other hand, should vastly prefer it to tension. Is there not too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be better if more people were slackers?"

Although we have no bigotry on the point, it is our custom at Shangri-La to be moderately truthful, and I can assure you that my statements about the porters were almost correct.

We are a single lifeboat riding the seas in a gale; we can take a few chance survivors, but if all the shipwrecked were to reach us and clamber aboard we should go down ourselves. . . .

I suppose the truth is that when it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive."

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) (Alexander McCall Smith)

In which Mr J L B Matekoni tries his hand as a detective, with mixed results.

---

Quotes:

we cannot always choose whose lives will become entangled with our own; these things happen to us, come to us uninvited, and Mma Ramotswe understood that well.

Their words of farewell were polite—the correct ones, as laid down in the old Botswana customs. Tsamaya sentlê: go well. To which the reply was, Sala sentlê: stay well; mere words, of course, but when meant, as now, so powerful.

Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other—and land, of course.

Nice cars have nice drivers; bad cars have bad drivers. A person’s gearbox revealed everything that you could want to know about that person, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

The Order of Odd-Fish (James Kennedy)

This book is weird and awesome.

---

Quotes:

A giant cockroach had walked into the room,

Ken Kiang started an ambitious program to ensure that all underprivileged schoolchildren had “postmodern yet easy-to-manage” hairstyles.

A phone call from Ken Kiang had summoned his “Fleet of Fury.” Ken Kiang had engineered the planes himself—sleek, terrifying machines, bristling with spikes and weaponry, the kind of planes that left no doubt about how evil their commander was.

“HERE’S to villainy!” cried Ken Kiang, lifting his glass. “Here’s to wicked work well wrought! Here’s to outrage, injustice! Violence and venom! Marvelous murderers and cutthroat criminals! I embrace you all, brothers! I’m one of you now!”

“It’s a very honorable and pointless tradition,”

“Puttering, Muddling, and Mucking About: An Inquiry into Idleness. Quite well known in the field.”

Actually, the Belgian Prankster hung out at the Country Kitchen in Muscatine, Iowa.

ZZZ, a massive-headed Brazilian physicist.

“‘She is the Ichthala,’

“What you recognize, Jo, are just your little corners of the world. The real world, the total reality of the world, is a thousand times larger than that. What you had thought of as your world—and what people in Eldritch City think of as their world—are just small, disconnected bits of the actual entire world. According to my theory, there are thousands of these regions, all hidden from each other. Most of the world is still unexplored!”

“As an Odd-Fish, it is not my job to be right,” said Sir Oort. “It is my job to be wrong in new and exciting ways.”

Ken Kiang wasn’t a hero in the sense that he would, say, save a child from a fire—the very notion nauseated him—but he was a hero in that he was willing to stake everything on a hopeless gamble.

Fortunately, most people are not exposed to the temptations that destroy souls, and so they muddle through their small lives harmlessly, a little frustrated but more or less content, enjoying the humdrum happiness that is the lot of the common man.

Any idiot can fire a gun and kill someone. It takes real evil to ruin a soul.

“Having an enemy is a delicate art. It demands dedication and a certain style. If you handle it right, it can even be good for you.

“Your words are as empty as your sting, Sleeping Bee!” retorted Zam-Zam. “Your feast shall be of the ashes of defeat, and on those, you shall feast heartily! Your corpse shall be torn to bits by my thousand children, who shall raise each morsel to their mouths, chew your disgraced innards with contemptuous joy, and excrete them with a smirk! I have spoken!”

For Ken Kiang, it was never enough to win. It was the verve, the showmanship, above all the arrogant stunt that mattered—the crucial cherry on top that said, “Not only have I won, but I won with enough leisure to toss in this final, outrageous flourish.”

One of his languages was based on tasting patterns of spices, so that books were read by eating them, page by page;

The Belgian Prankster lounged in a booth, surrounded by fawning psychoanalysts.

Jo stopped. She didn’t know what she was feeling. It wasn’t fear or hatred or even disgust. It was a horrible tingle of joy.

“I’m Aznath, the Silver Kitten of Deceit.”

“Outstanding Schwenkmanship, old boy!” roared Colonel Korsakov, slapping Ken Kiang on the back. “Never knew you had it in you! A top-drawer Schwenkrider, eh? You must tell me your secret!”

Although a disgrace to Eldritch City in general, and the Order of Odd-Fish in particular, it will be noted the butlers all wore irreproachable ascots.”

Many times, Ken Kiang had heard the saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” It would be too tidy to say that for Ken Kiang, the road to heaven was paved with bad intentions. Still, his intentions had always been the worst; yet now he was as close to happiness as he was ever likely to get.

The Geography of Bliss (Eric Weiner)

I liked this. It could have easily devolved into a series of national clichés (the British are glum, the Swiss are precise like their watches, etc). But Eric Weiner is a much better writer than that, he has extensive international pedigree, and genuinely cares about the people he meets in these different places. I recommend this one.

---

Quotes:

I’ve always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is finding the right corner.

I had no marketable skills, a stunted sense of morality, and a gloomy disposition. I decided to become a journalist.

We humans are creatures of the last five minutes. In one study, people who found a dime on the pavement a few minutes before being queried on the happiness question reported higher levels of satisfaction with their overall lives than those who did not find a dime.

“When Americans say it was great, I know it was good. When they say it was good, I know it was okay. When they say it was okay, I know it was bad.”

Believe it or not, most people in the world say they are happy. Virtually every country in the world scores somewhere between five and eight on a ten-point scale.

Worst of all was Freud. While not technically a brooding philosopher, Freud did much to shape our views on happiness. He once said: “The intention that Man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.” That is a remarkable statement, especially coming from a man whose ideas forged the foundation of our mental-health system.

Rusty handled a bong the way Yo-Yo Ma handles a cello.

A sense of calm sneaks up on me, a feeling so unusual that, at first, I am startled by it. I don’t recognize it. But there’s no denying its presence. I am at peace.

A lot of Switzerland works on the honor system, like the little rest huts that dot the Alps. There’s food inside. You eat the food and leave some money behind.

Or consider this statement: “In general, people can be trusted.” Studies have found that people who agree with this are happier than those who do not.

One study found that, of all the factors that affect the crime rate for a given area, the one that made the biggest difference was not the number of police patrols or anything like that but, rather, how many people you know within a fifteen-minute walk of your house.

Choice translates into happiness only when choice is about something that matters.

Karma pauses one of his pauses and then answers with a suggestion, a prescription. “You need to think about death for five minutes every day. It will cure you, sanitize you.”

Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use.

All of the moments in my life, everyone I have met, every trip I have taken, every success I have enjoyed, every blunder I have made, every loss I have endured has been just right. I’m not saying they were all good or that they happened for a reason—I don’t buy that brand of pap fatalism—but they have been right. They have been . . . okay. As far as revelations go, it’s pretty lame, I know. Okay is not bliss, or even happiness. Okay is not the basis for a new religion or self-help movement. Okay won’t get me on Oprah. But okay is a start, and for that I am grateful.

When Ambition is your God, the office is your temple, the employee handbook your holy book. The sacred drink, coffee, is imbibed five times a day. When you worship Ambition, there is no Sabbath, no day of rest. Every day, you rise early and kneel before the God Ambition, facing in the direction of your PC. You pray alone, always alone, even though others may be present. Ambition is a vengeful God. He will smite those who fail to worship faithfully, but that is nothing compared to what He has in store for the faithful. They suffer the worst fate of all. For it is only when they are old and tired, entombed in the corner office, that the realization hits like a Biblical thunderclap. The God Ambition is a false God and always has been.

France’s most famous epicure, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, believed that food is the mirror to our souls: “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.”

I don’t believe in such miracles, but others do, and my life is richer as a result.

happiness is a choice. Not an easy choice, not always a desirable one, but a choice nonetheless.

As a rule of thumb, the more fucked-up a country, the more said country insists on crisp bills.

And what are the cultural ingredients needed for democracy to take root? Trust and tolerance. Not only trust of those inside your group—family, for instance—but external trust. Trust of strangers. Trust of your opponents, your enemies, even.

The Soviets denied God’s existence yet tried to improvize a spirituality.

“Not my problem” is not a philosophy. It’s a mental illness.

In Britain, finding out someone’s name isn’t pro forma. It’s an accomplishment.

dogs and gardens, the two pillars of English happiness. Especially dogs.

Maybe this is how enlightenment happens. Not with a thunderclap or a bolt of lightning but as a steady drip, drip, drip until one day you realize your bucket is full.

There it is again: that Hindu belief that all of life is maya, illusion. Once we see life as a game, no more consequential than a game of chess, then the world seems a lot lighter, a lot happier.

Paradise is a moving target.

only a fool or a philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

I wonder if happiness is really the highest good, as Aristotle believed. Maybe Guru-ji, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, is right. Maybe love is more important than happiness. Certainly, there are times when happiness seems beside the point. Ask a single, working mother if she is happy, and she’s likely to reply, “You’re not asking the right question.”

Karma Ura, the Bhutanese scholar and cancer survivor. “There is no such thing as personal happiness,” he told me. “Happiness is one hundred percent relational.”