My in-progress progress notes included:

This is the third book in a row I've read that has a story about Rosa Parks in it. When she came up in one book, I wondered if I had read this book before. When she came up in this book, honestly, I had to roll my eyes a bit. Not at Parks in particular, but at the different interpretations, meanings, and explanations of her refusal, arrest, courage, and trial.

I liked the first third of this book.

As a fan of BJ Fogg and his research, I am fascinated and interested in habits and how they can improve people's lives. I actively try to fix my bad habits, and have been for years. I actively try to create good habits, and have been for years. Fogg's Tiny Habits workshop was instrumental in my journey.

So, when I was hit with a particular bad depression, my routines helped me cope. When I mentioned the depression, and the depth of it, Matthew handed me his copy of this book. I realized I already had a copy, so I read it instead.

Which is to say, I finished it this time.

The first third of the book is good. It has applicable information on how someone can improve their life (gah, the plural possessive for a singular noun! killing me!) by recognizing and improving their habits. The first third of the book is fantastic.

The middle third was okay. The last third was pretty much filler. I would argue a new reader could ignore the last two thirds and still take away the best parts of this book.

That said, the book is still worth reading. Especially if you have no history or background in the power of habits and habitual thinking.

At boot camp, he had absorbed habits for loading his weapon, falling asleep in a war zone, maintaining focus amid the chaos of battle, and making decisions while exhausted and overwhelmed. He had attended classes that taught him habits for saving money, exercising each day, and communicating with bunkmates. As he moved up the ranks, he learned the importance of organizational habits in ensuring that subordinates could make decisions without constantly asking permission, and how the right routines made it easier to work alongside people he normally couldn’t stand. And now, as an impromptu nation builder, he was seeing how crowds and cultures abided by many of the same rules. In some sense, he said, a community was a giant collection of habits occurring among thousands of people...
Location: 164

So he sought help from a physician whose tolerance for experimentation outweighed his fear of malpractice.
Location: 258

This is a rare individual indeed. One could argue, a physician who does the right thing.

Parks’s husband was opposed to the idea. “The white folks will kill you, Rosa,” he told her.
Location: 3,402

This is the third book in a row that gives a different description of what Rosa Park went through. I find the different portrayals fascinating. I also find her being quoted / discussed so frequently fascinating.

There’s a natural instinct embedded in friendship, a sympathy that makes us willing to fight for someone we like when they are treated unjustly.
Location: 3,419

Studies show that people have no problem ignoring strangers’ injuries, but when a friend is insulted, our sense of outrage is enough to overcome the inertia that usually makes protests hard to organize.
Location: 3,420

Our weak-tie acquaintances are often as influential—if not more—than our close-tie friends.
Location: 3,456

The Dresden Files, book 15

This is the third of my three favorite Dresden Files books, along with Dead Beat, book 7, and Changes, book 12.

All three of these books have the common theme of Harry being reflective of his choices, of contemplation of his part is the larger scheme of things, and self-doubt without the self-immobilization that often accompanies self-doubt.

Also in this book, ADVENTURE!

And ACTION!

And romance! Okay, less this one, but still some of this one.

The twist at the end, the mystery of the why of the plot, is great. As is the double twist of Goodman Grey. I hope he comes back in future books.

One of the difficulties with the arc of Dresden, however, is that he keeps getting stronger. He was already in the top six wizards in terms of raw strength. With his training of Molly, he developed finesse. And with the alliance with Mab, he has the power. Where do you go from here? I don't know, but I'll keep reading. If only Butcher would keep writing them. It's been three years and he's off onto a different series.

Strongly recommended if you're a Dresden fan, this is one of the good books. I, of course, believe the series is worth reading, just get through the first couple books to really enjoy them.

“Scared that some bug-eyed freak is going to come calling and kill innocent people because they happen to be in my havoc radius.”
Page 28

You always fear what you don’t know, what you don’t understand, and the first step to having understanding of something is to know what to call it.
Location: 1,104

The dead don’t need justice. That’s for those of us who are left looking down at the remains.
Location: 2,311

"I can’t figure out where I could have . . . what else I might have done . . .” I swallowed. “I’m lost. I know every step I took to get here, and I’m still lost.”
Page 148

I understand this confusion. You make the best choices you can, with the information you have at the moment, and, after a while look up, not recognizing where you are or who you've become.

“That’s arrogance, Harry,” he said gently. “On a level so deep you don’t even realize it exists. And do you know why it’s there?”

“No?” I asked.

He smiled again. “Because you have set a higher standard for yourself. You think that because you have more power than others, you have to do more with it.”
Page 150

“The damned don’t care, Harry. The only way to go beyond redemption is to choose to take yourself there. The only way to do it is to stop caring.”
Page 150

“One ought not hire an expert and then ignore his opinion,”
Page 170

Indeed.

“Because... fear is a terrible, insidious thing, Waldo. It taints and stains everything it touches. If you let fear start driving some of your decisions, sooner or later, it will drive them all."
Location: 3,153

I would rather have faith in the people I care about than allow my fears to change them — in my own eyes, if nowhere else.
Location: 3,157

“You need to decide which side of the road you’re going to walk on,” she said gently. “Turn aside from your fears—or grab onto them and run with them. But you need to make the call. You keep trying to walk down the middle, you’re going to get yourself torn apart.”
Location: 3,163

“It’s about knowing yourself. About understanding why you make the choices you do. Once you know that, you know where to walk, too.”
Location: 3,166

“Things are not always as bad as they seem. Sometimes, the darkness only makes it easier to see the light.”
Location: 4,137

Focus on the task at hand, Harry. Sort the rest out when you have time. Yeah, sure. But isn’t that the kind of thinking that got me into this mess in the first place?
Location: 4,285

Doesn’t matter how pretty you are. What’s important is how pretty you feel. No one feels pretty when they hear “no” often enough.
Location: 4,751

“Complicated?” she asked. She shook her head. “It isn’t complicated. You just open up and let someone in. And whatever comes after that, you face it together.”
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“Lava quod est sordium!”
Location: 5,042

“You think your power is what shapes the world you walk in. But that is an illusion. Your choices shape your world. You think your power will protect you from the consequences of those choices. But you are wrong. You create your own rewards. There is a Judge. There is Justice in this world. And one day you will receive what you have earned. Choose carefully.”
Location: 5,070

“The world always thinks that the destruction of a physical vessel is victory,”
Page 406

“Sometimes the bad guys win one.”

“Sometimes they seem to. But only for a time.”
Page 406

“How can you know that?”

“I can’t know,” he said, his face lighting with a sudden smile. “That’s why they call it faith, Harry. You’ll see.”
Page 406

Hope lets you do things you would otherwise never be able to do, gives strength when everything is darkest.
Page 426

“Belief in a story,” Uriel said, “of good confronting evil, of light overcoming darkness, of love transcending hate.” He tilted his head. “Isn’t that where all faith begins?”
Page 441

“Terrifying,” he said, smiling. “And for a little while . . . like being young again. Full of energy and expectation. It was amazing.”
Page 451

Sometimes you realize you’re standing at a crossroads. That there are two paths stretching out ahead of you, and you have to pick one of them.
Page 454

The Dresden Files, book 14

While this isn't in the top three of my favorite Dresden books (those all have Harry thinking about past actions, about life and the choices one makes, and about maturing during those reflections), this is a good, action-packed Harry Dresden book.

I enjoyed it the first time I read it. And the second. And the third. I'm unsure what the count is for this read, but it is at least the fourth read. Yay Butcher.

Aspects I really like about the book revolve around Demonreach and Kris Kringle (I mean, hello, Dresden has freaking Santa Claus on his side, how cool is that?). The major aspect I didn't like about the book is the lack of reset on Harry's powers. I mean, think about it, he died. Before he died he was becoming more and more and more powerful. He was already the sixth strongest wizard alive in the first book, at this point, with his growing into his power and other wizards dying off, he's probably closer to the top spot (but isn't, hello, Merlin). Dying could be a huge reset button, allowing more growth.

But that's not how it is. Instead, he's still mighty powerful, and still attracting even more powerful enemies, and, well, isn't that how Dresden likes it, poking his finger in the eye of the enemy?

Definite read is you're a Dresden fan. Marsters narration is amazing, if you like audio books.

“Life’s about more than breaking even,” I said.
Location: 1,963

“Sometimes I think that’s where most of us are,” I said. “Fighting off the crazy as best we can. Trying to become something better than we were. It’s that second bit that’s important.”
Location: 2,264

I missed my dog. I missed the familiarity of having a place that I knew, that was a shelter.

I missed my life.

I’d been away from home for what felt like a very long time.
Location: 2,420

I understand this very much.

“I know the world seems dark and ugly sometimes. But there are still good things in it. And good people."
Location: 2,460

So at the end of the day, I really didn’t know what was going to happen to me in the future. Heh. Why should I be any different?
Location: 2,532

“That I was your brother, Harry,” he said. “That I loved you. That I knew a few things about denying the dark parts of your nature. And that we would get through it.” He put his elbows on his knees and rested his forehead on his hands. “That we’d figure it out. That you weren’t alone.”
Location: 2,631

I always thought it would get easier to be a person as I aged. But it just gets more and more complicated.
Location: 2,642

“Like life is short,” he said. “Like you don’t know when it’s going to end. Like some things, left unsaid, can’t ever be said.”
Location: 2,672

Fire isn’t always an element of destruction. Classical alchemical doctrine teaches that it also has dominion over another province: change. The fire of my tribulations had not simply been pain to be endured. It had been an agent of transformation.
Location: 3,018

“He might not give you much choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” I said. “That’s the thing, man. There’s always, always a choice. My options might really, truly suck, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a choice.”
Location: 3,705

“Totally unfair.”

“I had this teacher who kept telling me that if I was ever in a fair fight, someone had made a mistake,” she said.
Location: 3,714

I reminded myself that just because someone is courteous, it does not necessarily mean that they aren’t planning to vivisect you. It just means that they’ll ask whether the ropes holding you down are comfortable before they pick up the scalpel.
Location: 3,813

“Maybe you’re right; I don’t know. But until I have a better idea, it’s smarter to keep reminding myself that I don’t know, rather than assuming that I do know, and then translating anything I learn to fit my preconceptions.”
Location: 4,407

“No one just starts giggling and wearing black and signs up to become a villainous monster. How the hell do you think it happens?” She shook her head, her eyes pained. “It happens to people. Just people. They make questionable choices, for what might be very good reasons. They make choice after choice, and none of them is slaughtering roomfuls of saints, or murdering hundreds of baby seals, or rubber-room irrational. But it adds up. And then one day they look around and realize that they’re so far over the line that they can’t remember where it was.”
Location: 5,231

Power corrupts — and the people being corrupted never seem to be aware that it’s happening.
Location: 5,252

"Will you not always be imperfect?”

“Now you’re catching on,” I said.
Location: 5,787

“I think it’s a cruel world. I think it’s hard to find love. I think we should all be happy when someone manages to do it.”
Location: 5,789

Graves aren’t for the dead. They’re for the loved ones the dead leave behind them. Once those loved ones have gone, once all the lives that have touched the occupant of any given grave had ended, then the grave’s purpose was fulfilled and ended.
Location: 5,876

“What value has life when it is so easily kept?”
Location: 5,991

"Nothing I have to say can possibly make this task any easier for you. The only way to do it is to do it.” He lifted his chin. “You don’t need help, Warden. You are the help.”
Location: 6,482

And that’s when it hit me. I mean, when it really, really hit me. It was up to me. There wasn’t a backup plan. There wasn’t a second option. There wasn’t any cavalry coming over the hill.
Location: 6,490

The only good thing about having your back to the wall is that it makes it really easy to choose which way you’re going to go.
Location: 6,502

When women have a conversation, they’re communicating on five levels. They follow the conversation that they’re actually having, the conversation that is specifically being avoided, the tone being applied to the overt conversation, the buried conversation that is being covered only in subtext, and finally the other person’s body language.
Location: 6,556

There were probably a lot of women who didn’t communicate on multiple wavelengths at once. There were probably men who could handle that many just fine.
Location: 6,563

“Later. Bad habit to get into,” Thomas said. “Life’s too short.”
Location: 7,218

Molly rode shotgun with me, holding her backpack on her lap. Molly was a big believer in shaping the future by way of carrying anything you might need in a backpack. Tonight it looked particularly stuffed.
Location: 7,349

I understand this.

But all things wither away eventually.
Location: 7,521

And this.

As if some freak who had never loved enough to know loss could tell me about pain.
Location: 7,847

That grain of sand might be the last remnant of what had once been a mountain, but that which it is, it is.
Location: 7,887

But you can’t go around changing your definition of right and wrong (or smart and stupid) just because doing the wrong thing happens to be really convenient. Sometimes it isn’t easy to be sane, smart, and responsible. Sometimes it sucks. Sucks wang. Camel wang. But that doesn’t turn wrong into right or stupid into smart.
Location: 8,208

You never know what you have until it’s gone. Peace and quiet and people I love. Isn’t that what everyone wants?
Location: 8,269

"If the balloon goes up, go after whoever I light up first. After that, improvise.”
Location: 8,380

Learn to fight naked and you can never be disarmed. Which is fine, I guess, as long as there aren’t mosquitoes.
Location: 8,456

Fire’s tricky and fickle. Without focus, it’s just chaos, the random release of stored chemical energy.
Location: 8,631

“No. You’re on the wrong side,” I said. “Maybe more than one.”

“That’s what every conflict sounds like,” he said. “Not everyone can be equally right, Harry.”

“But believe you me, everyone can be equally wrong,”
Location: 8,769

“Everyone wants to have a friend,” he said quietly. “Is that so bad?”
Location: 8,807

Winter’s nature was beautiful violence, stark clarity, the most feral needs and animal desires and killer instinct pitted against the season of cold and death—the will and desire to fight, to live, even when there was no shelter, no warmth, no respite, no hope, and no help.
Location: 8,883

“Being able to choose to tell lies isn’t a freaking superpower, Maeve,” I said. “Because it means you can always make the wrong choice. It means you can lie to yourself."
Location: 9,272

“But one does not place all one’s hopes with any one place, person, or plan."
Location: 9,343

Sometimes the things that are good for you, in the long run, hurt for a little while when you first get to them.
Location: 9,510

The Dresden Files, book 13

Okay, if you've been following along in all my Dresden Files reviews, you know that I've read these books numerous times. This particular reading is the rereading having reread all the books in order, unlike my usual rereading of picking up the books in the series I like and just rereading those. As a result of this re-read the whole series plan, I'm reading Dresden books that are part of the series, but not necessarily ones I'm really excited about reading.

Which is to say, Harry is in this odd state, the "Ghost" part of the title of the book, and has "not long" to make things right. Except it is hard for someone who is used to being in control, who is used to having power, who is used to brute-forcing his way through things, to actually have no control, no power, no forcing function.

And it makes things awkward. I don't feel Butcher actually conveys how the loss of power, vitality, life actually feels, however. Dresden is still Dresden, even without his ability to do, well, anything.

I enjoyed the book. If you're reading the series, keep going. It's still good, just not a great Dresden book.

I felt like I had when I was a kid, when I was full of energy and the need to expend it doing something enjoyable.
Location: 238

Tough to blame the kid. I’ve been a young man. Boobs are near the center of the universe, until you turn twenty-five or so. Which is also when young men’s auto insurance rates go down. This is not a coincidence.
Location: 1280

“Excalibur, Durendal, and Kusanagi, yes, yes,” Sir Stuart said, his tone a little impatient. “Of course I know the Swords of the Cross.
Location: 1358

Killing — or, more accurately, making the choice to kill — isn’t something we’re good at lately. Ending the life of another living creature used to be part of the daily routine. Chickens were beheaded by the average farm wife for dinner. Fish were likewise caught, cleaned, and prepared for a meal. Slaughtering pigs or cattle was a regular event, part of the turning of the seasons. Most people on earth — farmers — worked and lived every single day with lives they knew they were going to choose to end, eventually.

Killing’s messy. It’s frequently ugly. And if something goes wrong, it can be wretched, seeing another being in mortal agony, which means there’s a certain amount of pressure involved in the act. It isn’t easy, and that’s just considering farm animals.
Location: 2042

Unremarkable. Complacent.” His mouth twisted and his voice turned bitter. “Mediocre. Mediocrity is a terrible fate, Harry.”
Page 189

What do you do to make up for failing everyone in your life? How do you make it right? How do you apologize for hideous things you never intended to happen?
Location 3688

“We’ve all got choices,” I said calmly. “At the moment, yours are limited. You gonna play ball?”
Location: 3734

Every flat, open space had been covered in spray-painted graffiti, which I guess we’re supposed to call urban art now. Except art is about creating beauty. These paintings were territorial markers, the visual parallel to peeing on a tree. I’ve seen some gorgeous
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... nothing — something that had been a waste of the resources it had consumed. Something that had never had a choice in its own fate, never had a chance to be anything more.
Page 287

"Death should be a learning experience, after all, or what’s the point?”
Location: 4967

“Complicated. Think of your spirit-self as a seed. Your soul is the earth it grows in. You need both when you die. The way I’ve heard it . . . they sort of blend together to become something new. It’s a caterpillar-butterfly thing.”
Location: 5143

One mistake at the end of my life couldn’t erase all the times I had stood unmoved at the edge of the abyss and made snide remarks at its expense.
Page 380

Pain isn’t a lot of fun, at least not for most folks, but it is utterly unique to life. Pain—physical, emotional, and otherwise—is the shadow cast by everything you want out of life, the alternative to the result you were hoping for, and the inevitable creator of strength. From the pain of our failures we learn to be better, stronger, greater than what we were before. Pain is there to tell us when we’ve done something badly—it’s a teacher, a guide, one that is always there to both warn us of our limitations and challenge us to overcome them.
Page 412

badinage
Location: 6814

noun, humorous or witty conversation: cultured badinage about art and life.