Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” is one of those books I will not be able to say much about, except that you have to read it.  Just do it.  It’s phenomenal.

Flynn has crafted a story with so many twists and turns that to talk about the plot at all would be criminal.  When I finished, I wanted to talk about it with someone, and in this digital age I can share that exact moment:

@lb_423 YO, you’ve read Gone Girl, right? #holysmokes
— Chris Hannas (@cjhannas) May 3, 2014

Flynn writes the story with two narrators who alternate chapters, a husband who gives his side from the day the book starts and a wife who begins in the past with their first meeting and slowly catches up.  I’ve always been drawn to this type of storytelling, with its inherent tension and anticipation of the payoff moment when the two timelines converge.  And when they do, #holysmokes.

At its heart, the story is about relationships and the complexity that comes with each person pursuing individual and collective interests.

The wife, Amy, talks about her struggle in living her life with husband Nick, and what we’re all seeking in someone else.

“Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood?” she says.  “He gets me.  She gets me.  Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?”

 “So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man,” she continues.  “…And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine.  And your life is a long line of fine.”

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m guessing we’ve all been in that relationship at one point or another.  The “long line of fine.”  It’s the type of situation that makes you wonder if you’re being too picky, if that person should be enough, or whether you’ve realized that fine is not fine.

Later describing her unhappiness, the kind that stems from misaligned priorities, Amy says, “I just wish he thought about me as much as I do him.”  We all have different styles and needs, and that’s one of the great challenges of relationships, right?  How do you get what you need, while at the same time giving what they need?

Flynn is supremely effective at using specific imagery to pound home certain points.  Nick describes himself and the way people perceive him — a key part of the story — by saying, “I have a face you want to punch.”  Eight words and you can’t help but to see that face for the rest of the book.

On a related note, it’s kind of funny that in the movie version, which comes out in October, Nick is being played by Ben Affleck.  Did they even have to audition anyone else?

In summary, if you haven’t already brought up your Amazon or Barnes and Noble account, or grabbed your keys to head out to the bookstore, I question your priorities in life.  Get reading!

I make absolutely no secret that I am a user of the Internet who is fully comfortable sharing information, interacting with others — even complete strangers — without a second thought.  For some people, that’s completely normal, while others are incredibly guarded about their digital lives.  That’s okay too.

In his book “The Circle,” Dave Eggers presents a story that I’m going to dub a reductio ad absurdum argument for the Internet.  That’s where you take an idea, and to expose it’s shortcomings, you argue it to its farthest conclusions and comment on that result.

“The Circle” follows a young woman named Mae who gets a job at the hottest tech company in Silicon Valley (called The Circle), one that has basically brought together every big social media platform under one roof. 

She’s a tech neophyte when she arrives on the kind of campus we’ve come to expect from these companies.  She has email and a few social media accounts, but she doesn’t use them much.  As she gets settled into her job in customer service, she gets gentle reminders from her bosses that she is supposed to be using the products a certain amount.

At one point, she gets called in for a talk that definitely reminded me of Jennifer Aniston’s character being scolded for not having enough “flair” in “Office Space.”  People were upset with Mae for not commenting on or liking their posts, and for ignoring invitations to the nearly constant events on campus.

“I asked you to come in just to, well, to square that with your social behavior here, and the message it’s sending,” her boss says.

Mae vows to do better, and throws herself into a flurry of social media activity.  This is the beginning of the kind of digital creep we’ve all experienced going from the same zero point to wherever we are now.  Think about the times you flip over to Facebook for the first time in a day or two and feel like you’ve missed a mountain of stuff and have to catch up.  It’s not important in the least that you do, but I know I’m not alone in feeling the pull to try to look at it all.

That creep, the acceptance of a new level of connectedness, is pervasive in the book.  It’s Mae’s entire journey as she ascends through the ranks of the company, which gives its employees scores on a wide variety of their activities and an overall ranking based on how much they participate.  She arrived unaffected by social media, but quickly becomes obsessed.

The Circle was founded with good intentions, things like eliminating anonymous online comments to promote more civility and bringing together your million different social media accounts into one spot that would be easier to manage.  The key thing about the book is that it is rooted in reality.  We’ve seen a wave recently of companies ditching anonymous comments, like Google requiring Google+ accounts on YouTube and HuffingtonPost making people sign in with Facebook.  It’s a great idea in itself, but what Eggers does is take those pieces and build on them, showing that when Mae accepts each new thing as normal, they just add a higher level of connectedness and another after that.

The company pioneers things like a series of small cameras placed all over the world.  The goal espoused by one of the bosses is for every bit of information to be available to everyone at all times.  At a company event, the words “All that happens must be known” are shown on a screen.

That evolves to people, including Mae, wearing cameras around their necks every waking hour, streaming their entire lives over the Internet.  Mae talks about certain benefits, like giving up soda knowing that people are watching and being influenced by her actions.  Politicians flock to use the system to show they are not corrupt.

As one of the bosses puts it, “Who would do something unethical or immoral or illegal if they were being watched.”

But as with every other move in the book, what has you nodding in agreement one second has you questioning the other side the next.  Sure, people would be less likely to commit a crime in a world completely saturated with cameras.  But at what point are we giving up our ability to be humans?  I’m not saying I need to carjack someone, but isn’t your ethics a big part of who you are?  Is not robbing someone because there’s a camera fake ethics?

And what about private conversations?  At one point, Mae takes part in a presentation that utilizes the phrase “privacy is theft.”  Should we not be able to have personal secrets, secrets among friends, private moments that are ours?

A few years ago I did a post with audio tapes that my mom’s family sent back and forth to her dad while he was deployed overseas in the army.  In one of them, my grandmother is talking directly to my grandfather (through the tape) and says that while she loves their children and their life as a family, she loves the world they inhabit just as the two of them.

Whether we think about it or not, we have those private lives with a lot of people.  We have moments just being with each other that would be unquestionably altered by a camera around our necks and someone out there in the world somewhere watching on their laptop.  Think about all the things you would never ever say to certain people, either because you don’t want to be seen in that level of vulnerability, or because you fear embarrassment.  Imagine a website where you could go to just watch person after person ask someone on a date and get shot down, or another where you could see every disastrous job interview.

We need to be able to fail at things, to show ourselves to both the people who matter to us and to random people we meet without the fear of having our natural human emotions and experiences turned against us, or even witnessed by others.

Mae’s obsession takes on a new dimension after the company develops a system for full, direct democracy, and tests it out by asking everyone at the company if Mae is awesome.  Hundreds say no.  She is completely unraveled wondering who and why.  Remember all those rumors you’ve heard over the years about Facebook potentially adding a “dislike” button?  Maybe there’s a good reason for that not happening.  While Facebook does portray a certain “best of” for people’s lives that inevitably makes us think everyone else is happier and more successful than we are, I’m okay with people saying why they dislike something in a comment or just ignoring it.  I could be wrong about that.

Eggers uses Mae’s ex-boyfriend Mercer as the counter to her acceptance.  He wants no part of The Circle or any of its services.  So, while Mae is saying things like, “I want to be seen.  I want proof I existed,” Mercer decries what he calls a “sickness” for people like her to need not only their own data, but his and everyone else’s too.

“Like everything else you guys are pushing, it sounds perfect, sounds progressive,” he says, “but it carries with it more control, more central tracking of everything we do.” 

I’ve preached my love of Eggers’ work a lot over the years, but other than “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” this is his best.  I’ve barely scratched the surface in this ridiculously long post.  If you think at all about the way our digital lives are now and will progress and all the issues and implications, you have to read it.  It will make you think a lot about how you interact not only with the online world, but the vast expanse of humanity that is not wired.

Sitting in a coffee shop in the basement of a bookstore in northwest Washington, my friend flipped around her phone screen on the count of three.  It read: “Erudite.  Abnegation.”

We looked at each other, and a smile crept across my face.  Slowly I set my phone down on the table and slid it over to her.  Her face lit up and we both began laughing as she saw the message written on mine:

The main reason for our breakfast meeting was discussing Veronica Roth’s book “Divergent.  In that world, people belong to one of five factions: Abnegation, Erudite, Amity, Dauntless or Candor.  Props to Roth for making the names of the factions describe the basic idea of each one.

The exercise my friend and I did was to write down which one we would pick for each other, and then also predict what the other person was going to say.  So if you were at Politics & Prose a few weeks ago and saw two people WAY too excited about showing each other their phones, it’s because we both gave the exact same answer about me (we picked a primary and secondary faction).

We initially slightly disagreed on my top choice for her, but after I explained my reasoning, she was on board.  The lesson here is that close friends are cool to have.  They get you.  She also pointed out a few specific things she flagged in the text, and of course one of them was one of just three things I had highlighted to that point:

“My father used to say that sometimes, the best way to help someone is just to be near them.”

Must have been the Abnegation trait in both of us that gravitated to that idea.

Kids grow up in one faction, but at a certain age take a test that’s supposed to identify where they really belong.  Then they choose.  The main character, Tris, starts in Abnegation but opts to join Dauntless.

Of course, it’s hard to singularly define humans, and as Tris discovers, the various factions have strayed from their original mission/definition.  Dauntless is supposed to be about “ordinary acts of bravery” and “the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.”

But Tris finds a faction led by people who push recklessness and doing whatever it takes — often at the expense of others — to get ahead.  She likes the way Dauntless is supposed to be, and while those around her may not care, she decides to not let the current state affect her behavior.

“No matter how badly the leaders have warped the Dauntless ideals, those ideals can still belong to me.”

In the course of her Dauntless training, Tris becomes kind of a badass, leading to one of my favorite lines from the book:

“The bullet hit him in the head.  I know because that’s where I aimed it.”

If that’s not confidence in what you’re doing, I don’t know what is.

I’ll leave out any potentially spoiling details for those who haven’t read and either plan to or see the forthcoming movie.

Now to finish the trilogy.

One more thought:  Can we find a way to say to skip seeing movie trailers if we PROMISE we plan to see the movie?  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve scrambled to change the channel in the past few weeks so I could avoid any possible spoiler before I finished the book.  Also, I’m apparently reading every book in which Shailene Woodley will later play the main character in the movie.

A few years ago, I declared a book the most entertaining I had read about suicide.  Today, I give you the funniest book I’ve read about cancer.

Don’t get me wrong, John Green’s “The Fault In Our Stars” is incredibly sad in some parts, but the main character, a teenage girl named Hazel, peppers in phrases and observations that cut beautifully through the cloud of seriousness and sadness that linger in her world.

At one point she is talking about how she has a scan coming up to see the progress of her cancer, but says she has nothing to gain by worrying about what it might find before it actually happens.

“And yet still I worried.  I liked being a person.  I wanted to keep at it.  Worry is yet another side effect of dying.”

Part of the story involves her favorite book, called An Imperial Affliction, which is also told by a girl with cancer and which abruptly ends.  Like most of us when we finish a book, she wants to know what happens later to everyone involved, including the girl’s hamster.

She shares the book with her boyfriend, a fellow teen cancer patient, which leads to him saying something that made me laugh probably more than most people.

“‘I have been wanting to call you on a nearly minutely basis, but I have been waiting until I could form a coherent thought in re An Imperial Afflicion.'” (He said ‘in re.’  He really did.  That boy.)”

Why is that extra funny to me?  Because I have a friend who says, out loud, “re” in conversation.  It goes something like, “Oh hey, re what you emailed me about this morning…”  It is never not entertaining.

There’s a part later where her team of doctors is meeting to talk about the direction of her care.  The main doctor asks how they should proceed.

“And then she just looked at me, like she was waiting for an answer. ‘Um,’ I said, ‘I feel like I am not the most qualified person in the room to answer that question?'”

Out of the heavy, Hazel brings the levity.  But again, there is a lot that speaks to how we process people with cancer, especially when it comes to kids.  One of the things Hazel is very concerned about is not being seen as A KID WITH CANCER.  She does not want that to define her.

At one point, she is looking at the Facebook-like profile of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, who died from cancer.  The girl’s wall is filled with posts you absolutely would expect, saying how much she’ll be missed and how heroically she fought.

“She seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.”

Her boyfriend, Augustus, was a star basketball player before cancer took one of his legs.  He became less of a fan of basketball, and after a comment about how in heaven he could play as much as he wanted, Hazel imagined his reaction.

“If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing basketballs?  Who makes the basketballs in question?  Are there less fortunate souls in heaven who work in a celestial basketball factory so that I can play?”

A great question.  And a really exceptional book.  Also, soon a movie:

On January 1, 2012, my friend Felecia sent me a text message.

It wasn’t “Happy New Year!!!” like several others that day, but rather a very specific instruction: “Read ‘Lush Life’ by Richard Price!”

I keep a .txt file on my computer with the names of books I want to check out, either because they were recommended by friends or just something I happened to come across that looked interesting.  When I don’t have a specific next read in mind, I go to the list and pick one.

Two years after Felecia’s message, I can delete “Lush Life” from the list.

At first much of the dialogue made me feel very un-cool, whether it was the plethora of copspeak or teenage kids from the projects in New York.  After a while though, I really appreciated how immersive and distinctive it made the story, which follows the run-up to a random murder and what happens to all of the parties involved afterward.

Example:

“What the fuck is a dolgier?”
“A dolgier? A do-anything soldier.”

I’m going to start dropping “dolgier” into conversations now.  Get ready.

Price does an amazing job of taking the reader through the experiences of the shooter, a key witness, and especially the detectives trying to solve the case.  It’s not a murder mystery since you know up front who did it, but rather an exploration of how people handle stress, the pressure/fallout of making a name for themselves, and how “doing the right thing” can mean different things to different people involved and at different times.

It’s impressive how he jumps from one person to the next as the story unfolds, almost as if he’s listening when you’re thinking, “I wonder how the investigation is going,” and then flips a switch to take you there.  He also brings up a lot of social issues, especially those of class/racial disparities and how those affect the investigation and how each of the major players interacts not only with each other, but with the city.  Highly recommend this one.

Things I should not do: drink so much soda, sleep so little, wait a month to blog about a book.

The consequences of the first two are evident and possibly related.  The third one results in me not remotely remembering what to say about it.

This example comes courtesy of Tim Tharp’s “The Spectacular Now,” which while a good read did fall a tiny bit short of my expectations.  It follows the story of a SUPREMELY confident — at least outwardly — high school kid named Sutter who has a love for alcohol, himself and a girls who tire of his antics.

As the title suggests, his main focus in life is the present.  He acts accordingly with little forethought or consideration for what those actions might bring.  One afternoon he’s sitting on the hood of his car drinking with his best friend and notes how the day’s nice weather probably means a hot summer is coming, but that he’s not worrying about that.

“I was never big on the future,” Sutter says.  “I admire people who are, but it just never was my thing.”

This is the only section I actually remember highlighting.  I’m not present-focused like Sutter, but I’m also not someone who has peered far into the future with a blueprint for how it’s all going to play out.  I’ve never had a five- or 10-year plan.  I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  I don’t have a bucket list or a piece of paper listing my life goals.  I have plenty of friends who do all of these things, but whenever I think about them, all I can picture is the last five or 10 years and how utterly unpredictable most of it would have been.

What I do know about the future is that I won’t wait so long next time so that I have more to say.  To make up for it now, enjoy this picture of some ducks:

My second book blog post of the day either means that I crushed through the second one in record speed, or I was really behind on blogging and finally got around to writing about both of them today.

I strongly advise you not wager money on the first scenario.

After highlighting a ton of things in “Quiet” I found myself barely flagging anything in Dave Eggers’ “A Hologram for the King.”  That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, but the story didn’t bring out a ton that I felt would make for good discussion here.

In fact, the only thing I picked out that wasn’t some sort of personal reminder to look something up is this idea about a very specific role some people play in our lives.  Alan is the protagonist, a consultant trying to help a big American IT company land a contract at a new city in Saudi Arabia.  He’s divorced with a daughter, and during a trip overseas to try to seal the deal he writes letters to his daughter, Kit.

In this one, he’s talking about Kit’s mother and how whatever the daughter thinks of her, the mother wasn’t always as awful as Kit thinks.

“Whatever she’s done that has displeased you I want you to know that you are who you are because of your mother because of her strength.  She knew when to be the tugboat.  She coined that term, Kit.  The tugboat.  She was the steady, she navigated around the dangers lurking below.”

Just as there are anchors who weigh us down, I like this idea of someone who pulls us along, navigating us through the waters with their strength and knowledge of the environment.

I’ve read several of Eggers’ books, and what I like about them is the way he latches onto and really develops the main character, whose eyes are the ones through which we see the story.  It’s like Eggers is walking down the street, sees someone interesting, then shrinks himself down small enough to jump inside the person’s brain and starts narrating the view.

That said, this was not my favorite of his — “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” is the clear leader — but certainly an interesting story to dip into.

“The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting.  For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamp-lit desk.”

I’ve wanted to read Susan Cain’s “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” for a long time, with great interest about the insight she brings in talking about my personality type.

The result?  There’s no doubt I highlighted more in this book than any other — roughly five times more than the average book.  She both explores and explains the differences between how introverts and extroverts experience the world and points to how embracing your personality type can help tailor your life to be more successful.

“Probably the most common — and damaging — misunderstanding about personality type is that introverts are antisocial and extroverts are pro-social,” she writes.  “Introverts and extroverts are differently social.”

I would bold, italicize and make those sentences bright green if they wouldn’t look too odd on the screen.  In talking to extroverted friends, this is the exact thing I feel like they don’t get when talking about our social lives.  Cain describes a big part of the difference through the way extroverts and introverts “recharge.”  Extroverts draw energy from being around people and feel drained when they spend too much time alone, while introverts can get drained by being around a lot of people and need that alone time to recover.

That doesn’t mean we don’t like being around people or doing social things, but that the environment and timing matter.  Hanging out with a group every day — especially if we work in a more social environment — is what leads introverts to decline the next invitation or seek a one-on-one hangout to relax.  We can be up for doing group things once in a while, but ultimately it’s those smaller groups we prefer.  To my more extroverted friends, that idea can seem crazy, but as Cain writes, “It can be hard for extroverts to understand how badly introverts need to recharge at the end of a busy day.”

She also discusses how people like me really dislike small talk and tend to play the “observer” in taking in what’s going on in the world around us, whether that’s in a group conversation or just sitting somewhere by ourselves.

“When introverts assume the observer role, as when they write novels, or contemplate unified field theory — or fall quiet at dinner parties — they’re not demonstrating a failure of will or a lack of energy.  They’re simply doing what they’re constitutionally suited for.”

That last sentence is a great sub-thesis of the book that I found myself nodding along to over and over.  Cain describes a situation I know all to well, then clearly states that it’s totally fine.  Embrace it, use it.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a group big or small, listening to what other people have to say — the most interesting part of any conversation to me — only to have one of the super outgoing members pause and ask why I’m not saying as much.  An example is a movie outing with a few friends earlier this year during which one girl stopped mid-sentence to say, “We’re not getting much from you over there.”

Cain talks to an introverted student at a very extro-centered school where class participation is considered essential.  But the student tells her that he’s not into making comments during class for the sake of making comments, but rather participates when he really has something to say or disagrees with what others are bringing up.  I wanted to high-five him.  If I have something I think is interesting or adds to the conversation, I’ll say it, if not, I’m perfectly content hearing other people’s contributions.

The book also covers the intersection of the two groups and how they can often work together really well, whether it’s a group of extroverted employees working for an introverted boss, or a couple with different personality types.  Cain shares the story of an introverted woman named Emily and her relationship with the extroverted Greg.  Emily “has always been attracted to extroverts, who she says ‘do all the work of making conversation.  For them, it’s not work at all.'”

Cain describes how in one-on-one conversations, extroverts enjoy talking to introverts because they can “relax more” and are “freer to confide their problems.”  I find this is very true with my own friends.  Whether it’s that their extroverted friends are more interested in small talk or don’t listen in the same way, I have a number of friends who have called me “Dr. Phil” after listening to what is going on in their lives.  That fits with what Cain says is a preference to devote “social energies to close friends, colleagues and family,” and “enjoy deep discussions.”

Introverts, she writes, “Listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation.”

So in a country where Cain says “we see ourselves as a nation of extroverts,” how should we act in professional, educational and social environments?  Should introverts — a third to a half of Americans — be pushed to be more social, bold, outgoing?

Cain says that once we understand introversion/extroversion as preferences for certain levels of stimulation, we can begin to put ourselves in favorable environments — what she calls “sweet spots” — to “feel more energetic and alive.”  Think about your own personality and how your life is structured.  I know that if I am busy every day for two weeks, there’s nothing I like more than seeing a weekend on my calendar with absolutely nothing written down.  That recharge time is something I count down to, knowing I need it to feel truly like myself again.

An extrovert might see those same empty calendar boxes as the source of stress and need to find a way to fill them in order to feel the same way.  So what we have to understand is that difference, and when trying to make plans with the other type to keep in mind that saying no or finding a quieter weekend are not anti-social, but just putting ourselves in a “sweet spot.”

Cain writes that there are “physiological limits on who we are…But should we attempt to manipulate our behavior within the range available for us, or should we simply be true to ourselves?  At what point does controlling behavior become futile, or exhausting?”

Think about any time that you’ve been told to function outside of your disposition.  That could be an extrovert stuck in an office by themselves all day with little co-worker interaction, or an introvert exhorted to spend all their free time meeting groups of strangers.  It’s good to move outside our comfort zones at times, but reverse those situations and everyone is in a zone that allows them to thrive on a day-to-day basis.

Personality is a spectrum, and well all fall somewhere along the way.  We should embrace who we are, as well as those around us, finding the niches that make everyone the best they can be.

Maybe Cain says it better:

“We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers in this world.  One child is given a light saber, another a wizard’s education.  The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of available power, but to use well the kind you’ve been granted.”