Books I Read in April

 

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori and Rom Brafman. This book was about why we all act irrationally and how we can recognize irrational thinking and change our course. This was a great book. I’m pretty sure almost anyone would enjoy it. It was a quick read and full of interesting stories, studies, and experiments. It has made me examine how I interact with people. I’m trying to watch out for how I categorize people when I first meet them. I learned that we treat people differently depending how we view them and in conversely, we act out the parts that other people assign. I’m trying to be more open minded and kind to those I meet after reading this book.

Just an example of some of the fun stuff in this book:  a study was done among a group of elderly people. Their hearing was tested and then they were asked to describe how they viewed old people. The answers ranged from negative to positive. For example, frail vs. compassionate. The researchers came back 3 years later and tested their hearing again. The people who had negative views on elderly people had their hearing decline, on average, twice as much as it should have in that 3 year period. The implication is that if we have negative views on ageing, it will actually make us age faster. Crazy, huh?   

I Am A Mother by Jane Clayson Johnson.  I read this on a day I was feeling particularly run down. A day when I felt I wasn’t really cut out for this mothering thing and that I wasn’t contributing much to my family or my community. I read this entire book with tears in my eyes. It spoke peace to my weary, almost broken heart. The little things we do as mothers matter. I need to learn to keep my temper better and more often, but the bad things I do don’t completely discount the good things I do. This book was an encouragement without ever being preachy, but it made me realize I need to be better.  I learned that I need to love more deeply those who come into my home and let that love extend to the world outside. I learned that I must never judge another mother, for it’s guaranteed that she has days where she feels as lost and inadequate as I do. I learned that to be a mother is not to give up your identity, but to become a creation that more closely identifies with Heavenly Father and is becoming like Him. I learned that I can’t “have it all” and I shouldn’t try. And I relearned a truth that I have believed for many years: Whether we have borne children or not, all women are mothers. We all have the calling and ability to reach out to others and nurture, uplift, rescue, and love. 

“Children of the Promise” Series by Dean Hughes. This is a series of five World War 2 based historical fiction books. I didn’t get through all of them in April, I actually finished the last one today, but I thought it would easier to write about them all at once. I read these all in high school and loved them and I’ve spent the last year looking for them at thrift stores. I finally completed my collection in April and could start reading. These novels follow a LDS family living in Salt Lake during the war. I enjoyed the books when I first read them, but I especially liked them after living for 5 years in the Salt Lake valley. The author went to great lengths to be historically accurate. When the characters go somewhere in Salt Lake, the author often tells what streets they take and I had a great time imagining what these familiar roads and neighborhoods looked like 60 years ago.

Many different aspects of the war are represented as different characters are followed to the war in the Pacific, a prisoner-of-war camp in Japan, Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, a secret reconnaissance mission behind enemy lines, and even the battles between Germany and the Russians on the Eastern front. The holocaust was, of course mentioned, but it wasn’t covered in great detail. I was okay with this because sometimes I think it’s is too much for my sensitive brain to process. Long before I started re-reading these books I’d lay in bed at night haunted by how horrible the holocaust was. What I did come to understand through reading these books was that even though we like to think of World War 2 as a “good” war and it’s often romanticized in movies, it was a horror in almost every aspect. It was necessary to defeat a great evil that was spreading across our world, but war is bad. Really, really bad. I couldn’t believe the atrocities that were committed by every nation that fought in the war. A major theme of the book is that all people, regardless of their nationality, have it within them to do horrible things to their fellow man. If we don’t have the courage to stand up against evil in our world and within ourselves, I believe that every one of us has the ability to be vicious and cruel. But another theme was that there are good people in every nation as well. We are all a mix of good and evil and we just have to let the good in us overpower the evil. These stories made me respect even more the people who lived through World War 2. They had a dirty job to do and they did it even though they didn’t want to. We owe the world we live in to them. MapSatelliteShow Labels