theirresponsiblereader's Reviews (607)

Most people think of themselves as “good,” but it’s not always easy to determine what’s “good” or “bad”—especially in a world filled with complicated choices and pitfalls and booby traps and bad advice. Fortunately, many smart philosophers have been pondering this conundrum for millennia and they have guidance for us. With bright wit and deep insight, How to Be Perfect explains concepts like deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism, ubuntu, and more so we can sound cool at parties and become better people.

Schur starts off with easy ethical questions like “Should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?” (No.) and works his way up to the most complex moral issues we all face. Such as: Can I still enjoy great art if it was created by terrible people? How much money should I give to charity? Why bother being good at all when there are no consequences for being bad? And much more. By the time the book is done, we’ll know exactly how to act in every conceivable situation, so as to produce a verifiably maximal amount of moral good. We will be perfect, and all our friends will be jealous. OK, not quite. Instead, we’ll gain fresh, funny, inspiring wisdom on the toughest issues we face every day.

The most important part of becoming better people, I’ll say yet again, is that we care about whether what we do is good or bad, and therefore try to do the right thing. If we love a problematic person or thing too much to part with it altogether, I think that means we have to keep two ideas in our head at the same time: I love this thing. The person who made it is troubling.

All the dying that summer began with the death of a child, a boy with golden hair and thick glasses, killed on the railroad tracks outside New Bremen, Minnesota, sliced into pieces by a thousand tons of steel speeding across the prairie toward South Dakota. His name was Bobby Cole. He was a sweet-looking kid and by that I mean he had eyes that seemed full of dreaming and he wore a half smile as if he was just about to understand something you’d spent an hour trying to explain. I should have known him better, been a better friend. He lived not far from my house and we were the same age. But he was two years behind me in school and might have been held back even more except for the kindness of certain teachers. He was a small kid, a simple child, no match at all for the diesel-fed drive of a Union Pacific locomotive.

“… He’s a vet. Korea. Had a tough time over there. It’s eating at him, I believe. He drinks. He’s hard on his family…”

“Sometimes, Nathan, I think it wasn’t as what we took into the war. Whatever cracks were already there the war forced apart, and what we might otherwise have kept inside came spilling out.”

Chas Smith grew up deeply enmeshed in the evangelical Christian world that grew out of Southern California in the late 1960s. His family included famous missionaries and megachurch pastors, but his cousin Daniel Courson was Grandma’s favorite. Smith looked up to Cousin Danny. He was handsome, adventurous, and smart, earned a degree from Bible college, and settled into a family and a stable career.

Needless to say, it was a big surprise when Cousin Danny started robbing banks. Known as the “Floppy Hat Bandit,” Courson robbed 19 of them in a torrid six-week spree before being caught and sentenced to seven years. When he tried to escape, they tacked on another year. And when he finally got out, despite seeming to be back on the straight and narrow, Cousin Danny disappeared. Banks started getting robbed again. It seemed Cousin Danny might be gunning for the record.

Smith’s Blessed Are the Bank Robbers is the wild, and wildly entertaining, story of an all-American anti-hero. It’s a tale of bank robberies, art and jewel heists, high-speed chases, fake identities, encrypted Swiss email accounts, jilted lovers, and the dark side of an evangelical family (and it wasn’t just Danny; an uncle was mixed up with the mujahideen). It’s a book about what it means to live inside the church and outside the law.

It started with an old lady.

An old lady who had stepped in front of a train.

There were gangsters and bent cops and a contract killer called the Pale Man, but they were not as important as the old lady. And neither was the dead good man who turned out to be a dead bad man.

In the years that followed, some people would forget about the old lady. They would forget that, if it was not for her, none of this would have happened. Nobody would have been murdered. Nobody would have dangled from a meat hook in a cold warehouse. Nobody would have called in the Pale Man.

Quick Reads provide a route into reading that prioritises great story telling and adult-focused content while ensuring the books are written in an accessible and easy to read style. The books are written by some of the most popular authors in the UK – including Andy McNab, Jojo Moyes, Anne Cleeves, Ian Rankin and Benjamin Zephaniah – so they can be a brilliant entry point to new genres, authors as well as the spark to reignite or build up the joy of reading.The Quick Reads programme has collaborated with over 30 publishers to produce a total of 135 titles since 2006 (many still available to borrow from your public library or buy from The Reading Agency’s bookshop) with over 5 million copies distributed and over 6 million library loans.

She pushed a chair into a corner of the room not visible from the street and sat. There was a feel to her life. Danger didn’t usually feel this dangerous. Danger was just background noise. But this was a lot of people trying to kill her. More than normal.

Connie had a problem with Nebraska. And that problem was that it was too close to Kansas.

Kansas, where dark gods waited to rise from their forgotten tombs and bring about the extinction of mankind.

Kansas, where all time travel led to a black void where a pale, wizened figure would greet you, playing a banjo and singing endless choruses of “Achy Breaky Heart.”

Kansas, where Connie had come the closest to death on more than one occasion.

Kansas, her kryptonite.

“I don’t have a lot of other leads, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that when in doubt, point myself toward the nearest adventure and let it work itself out.”

You have no idea how difficult it was for me to not say, ‘Welcome to Jurassic Park!’ to all of you just now.”

“Jurassic Park didn’t end well for anyone in it,” I pointed out. “Book or movie.”

“Well, they were sloppy,” Tom said. “We’re not sloppy. And, they were fictional. This is real.”

KPS is not, and I say this with absolutely no slight intended, a brooding symphony of a novel. It’s a pop song. It’s meant to be light and catchy, with three minutes of hooks and choruses for you to sing along with, and then you’re done and you go on with your day, hopefully with a smile on your face. I had fun writing this, and I needed to have fun writing this. We all need a pop song from time to time, particularly after a stretch of darkness.

“Why isn’t he eating us?” I asked. We were now close enough to Edward that this was not an entirely irrelevant question.

“He’s asleep,” Satie said.I glanced over at him. “Asleep?”

“They sleep, yup.”

“How can you tell when he’s asleep?”

“He’s not eating us, for one,” Satie said. “You can’t see his eyes, for another.”