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by Craig Wright
The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit―Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness by Craig Wright, Ph.D., I got through my membership in One Day University.
Dr. Wright raises many important questions as he analyses fourteen (14) critical traits of genius. Professor Craig Wright, creator of Yale University’s famous “Genius Course,” explores what we can learn from brilliant minds that have changed the world.
What we often presume about a genius does not match reality. Among other interesting observations, Dr. Wright reminds the reader that Picasso could not pass a fourth-grade math test, and Steve Jobs’s high school GPA was 2.65. He questions why to teach children to behave and play by the rules when transformative geniuses do not.
Examining the lives of transformative individuals ranging from Charles Darwin and Marie Curie to Leonardo Da Vinci and Andy Warhol to Toni Morrison and Elon Musk, Wright identifies more than a dozen drivers of genius, characteristics and patterns of behavior common to great minds throughout history. He argues that genius is about more than intellect and work ethic and that the famed “eureka” moment is a Hollywood fiction. Brilliant insights that change the world are never sudden, but rather, they are the result of unique modes of thinking and lengthy gestation.
I found the book to be a fascinating read and raised more questions for future thought and reading. Professor Wright argues that the habits of mind that produce great thinking and discovery can be actively learned and cultivated. In the book, he explains how. He notes that reading the book will not make you a genius but can “make you more strategic, creative, and successful, and, ultimately, happier.
by Brit Bennett
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett was a true page-turner, and I did not want to stop reading it even when I got to the last page. I am not a fan of sequels, but if I was ever going to change my mind, this is the book I would want to read a sequel.
Ms. Bennett focuses on two twins who run away from home at age 16. They have grown up in Mallard, a fictional town in Louisiana. “In Mallard, nobody married dark,” Bennett writes starkly. Over time, its prejudices deepened as its population became lighter and lighter, “like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream.” The twins, with their “creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair,” would have delighted the town’s founder. One of the women chooses to pass as white while the other does not.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
The question of why people choose to live differently than their origins is one that I often ponder. Growing up in a small town and living in a metropolis raises questions for me as to what my life is now and what was once.
I strongly recommend this book.
by Katherine May
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May is “an intimate, revelatory book exploring the ways we can care for and repair ourselves when life knocks us down.”
Two quotes that resonated with me were:
That’s what grief is – a yearning for that one last moment of contact that would settle everything.
We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall upon us, revealing our bare bones. Given time they grow again.
May writes in a clear voice that conveys the importance of accepting the cycles of life instead of fighting them.
Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a breakup, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.
A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May’s story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath swimming in icy waters, and sailing arctic seas.
Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the serene beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.
I recommend this book without reservation.
The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.
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by David Mitchell
Today, I started reading Cloud Atlas: A Novel by David Mitchell, one of The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary, voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins treating him for a rare species of brain parasite.
The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, the West Coast in the 1970s, an inglorious present-day England, a Korean superstate of the near future where neo-capitalism has run amok, and, finally, a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. What sets Cloud Atlas apart is its unique narrative structure, which boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. This journey reveals how the disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.
As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon. The novel’s diverse settings and cultures, from 1850 Chatham Isles to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii, appeal to readers across the globe, offering a rich and varied reading experience.
by Naima Coster
What’s Mine and Yours by Naima Coster is one of the best books I have read in the last few years. At this moment in my life, family means more than ever. This book explores how families can collapse and find ways to reunite. Although my life circumstances are the polar opposite of the protagonists, the book’s central themes resonated with me.
The focus on integration in this Millenium is a subject that needs to be discussed openly and honestly. The racist response of some of the parents is told in a way that clarifies the pain that that can cause.
Even the parents who favor integration have their flaws, which are passed on to their children.
The children, especially Noelle and Gee, oppose their parent’s actions. The sins of their parents are sowed upon them as well.
I have placed this book on my list of novels for reading later this year or n 2023. Its themes are so strong that a second reading is required to engage with its multiple levels fully.
This is a Goodreads summary.
A community in the Piedmont of North Carolina rises in outrage as a county initiative draws students from the primarily Black east side of town into predominantly white high schools on the west. For two students, Gee and Noelle, the integration sets off a chain of events that will tie their two families together in unexpected ways over the next twenty years.
The debate is Jade, Gee’s steely, ambitious mother, on one side of the integration. In the aftermath of a severe loss, she is determined to give her son the tools he’ll need to survive in America as a sensitive, anxious, young Black man. On the other side is Noelle’s headstrong mother, Lacey May, a white woman who refuses to see her half-Latina daughters as anything but white. She strives to protect them as she couldn’t protect herself from the influence of their charming but unreliable father, Robbie.
When Gee and Noelle join the school play meant to bridge the divide between new and old students, their paths collide, and their two seemingly disconnected families begin to form deeply knotted, messy ties that will shape the trajectory of their adult lives. And their mothers-each determined to see her child inherit a better life-will make choices that will haunt them for decades to come.
As love is built and lost, and the past never too far behind, What’s Mine and Yours is an expansive, vibrant tapestry that moves between the years, from the foothills of North Carolina to Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Paris. It explores every family’s unique organism: what breaks them apart and how they come back together.
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by V.E. Schwab
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab is a page-turner, and one of the rare books I have read that I wish had not ended. On the last page, I wanted the story of Addie to continue now that she had modified her deal with the dark side to save Henry Strauss. It was not that I wished Addie and Henry to reunite; it was to see how Addie’s life with Luc would continue. I recommend this book without any reservations!
Both Jan and I have always enjoyed books and movies about time travel. One of the first books I read after Jan died was The Time Travelers Wife, and now I am reading another book about time travel. If I could travel back in time, I would love to spend tens of thousands of days with her again.
But time travel is not possible. Or is it? Her spirit returns to me whenever I am paralyzed, encouraging me to dust myself off and keep going. Maybe one day we will travel together!
The Goodreads summary includes an overview.
France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets.
Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world.
But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore, and he remembers her name.
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