The Time Keeper, by Mitch Albom

I started reading this on my own. "L" couldn't get it from her library. I stopped halfway through. I was just kinda bored. 

Dor and Ally fall in love. Dor develops gadgets & gizmos for measuring time. He gets confined to a cave for 6k years, listening to the whispers of souls who want time to slow down, speed up...etc. Essentially, Dor becomes Father Time. I just couldn't get into the characters and the topic. 

The Stranger in the Lifeboat, by Mitch Albom

This is the first faith-based fiction book we've read. Since we are faith-based people, the topic was appealing. 

The chapters rotate from "Sea" to "Land" to "News."

A millionaire, Jason Lambert, takes a bunch of rich & famous folks on a cruise, and the cruise meets with disaster. 

At "Sea," the narrator is Benji, through his letters he's writing to Annabelle -- who Benji says, it's been 10 mths since you left.

Benji also refers to his cousin; he says they grew up together. 

The first letter begins: "To whoever finds this. There is no one left."

On "Land," we find Inspector Lefleur, who is confronted with a guy who says he found a lifeboat washed up, with the name "Galaxy." It washed up on Montserrat, a Caribbean island way far from where Lambert's yacht was last known to be.

In the "Sea" chapters, we hear how the 8 or 9 survivors get along. They pull a man from the water who appears unscathed, and calls himself "the Lord." From this point forward, the millionaire, Lambert, and the Olympian swimmer, Gerri, and an older lady of Indian descent, and a Haitian couple -- they all are in "the same boat" -- literally and figuratively. They need to balance the food and water. No one gets special treatment. 

Meanwhile, we get a peek into inspector LeFleur's life. He and his wife Patrice lost their 4 yr old daughter, she drowned. He is mad at God, and gives up on his faith. 

We ("L" and I) see the lessons of this book as:

 - Even in the face of awful, cruel events, we, as faith-based people, cling to our beliefs. We cling to our faith in each other. And we use our faith to find our way thru grief, cruelty.

 - Also, each person in this world deserves dignity. A millionaire is no better, in God's eyes, than a pauper. 

We like how "the Lord" said, "I go by many names." This means that anyone with faith in a higher power can identify with "the stranger." 

Also, without spoilers, there's a confusing part having to do with the little girl in the boat. With regard to this, we interpret it to mean: There's a bit of God's goodness in all of us. 

The Little Liar, by Mitch Albom

There are many books about WW2, but this one comes at a time when dangerous authoritarianism is rising in the world once again. On pg 260 of this book: "Time passes. People forget. Then we rise again." The "we" means Nazis in the book. It also means, today, those who look upon certain ethnicities as 'lesser-than,' even as SUB-HUMAN. As though there could actually be a "supreme race," as the Nazis thought. This book gets solid thumbs up. Mitch Albom writes concisely, without the need for endless gory details. Albom has a message, and this page-turner hits the nail on the head.

SUMMARY

Much like the book, The Book Thief, whose narrator is "Death," the narrator for The Little Liar is "Truth." Ah, but whose truth is true? And how does one identify any "truth" as truly true? This is the question Mitch Albom examines. For truth always comes with context. Sometimes, a small (or big) lie comes from a place of love. Other times, lies come from a place of innocence. And then there are lies intended to inflict pain, torture... How does one parse these lies? Or "truths"? 

Set in Salonika, Greece, in WW2, a city with the largest population of Jews pre-WW2, we find the Krispis family -- mother, father, oldest son Sebastian (14), youngest son Nico (11), and twin daughters -- plus grandfather Lazarre. As the book jacket tells us: "Eleven year old Nico Krispis has never told a lie." Nico learned from his grandfather never to lie. Thus, on the day in 1943 when Nazis gathered Salonika's Jews and ushered them to the train depot (en route to Auschwitz), a Nazi officer (Udo Graf) who had stumbled upon this "truth-telling Jew," used Nico to persuade "all the Jews" to peacefully board the trains. Udo Graf assures Nico that the trains will relocate his family to a place with homes and jobs. Graf tells Nico: "This is the only way to ensure your family's safety." And so, Nico...lies, though he doesn't know he's lying until it's too late. From that day on, Nico is known as the "little liar."

The four main characters, about whose lives this book swirls, are: Nico, his older brother Sebastian, a girl that both boys happen to like (love?), Fannie, and the monster Udo Graf. 

I could see myself re-reading this book someday. For the express reason of pondering how truth & lies are so interconnected, sometimes told with the best intentions, but with bad results. One example from my life, is how I kept the character of my sons' dad from them post-divorce. I hid so much, so that one day, when it spilled out, they became... disillusioned with me. (And this is why this blog remains anonymous.)

Bossypants, by Tina Fey

Read this one on my own, as "L" has a daughter getting married soon. Too much to do for book club! 

If you like Tina Fey, you'll chuckle throughout this book. Especially key is how Fey zeroes in on how women are treated differently than men (for what we do, don't do, wear, how we mother, or don't have kids, in the workplace... especially in the workplace!). ---- Fey's take on it is summed up in a short chapter about when Amy Poehler was new to SNL. In the writers room, Poehler was doing a "raunchy" joke, and one of the men writers balked. Poehler's eyes "went dark" as she whirled around and replied, "I don't f#¢king care if you like it!" Then she went on with her bit.  --- The point being: Women are judged way too much (everywhere, on everything), and women also care too much what others think...and we (women) need to...ignore the haters and do our work (or love our bodies, hair, pantsuits, etc.). This is way harder than it sounds, whether we're being judged for the work of motherhood or a paid job/career, judged for how we look, etc.

This book came out in 2011, thus, some of it is dated. Overall, I give this book a big thumbs up! For its ability to make me laugh, think, and resolve to care less about a recent incident (work-related) where a man belittled me - in a completely unprofessional way...and I'm betting he'd never talk to a man the way he spoke to me. 

Life continues to offer its lessons...and so, I continue to read! Cheers to books!

Ps. I skipped the chapter about 30 Rock (tv show) because I never watched it ..maybe I'll catch it in reruns someday!