Family Saga and Meaning to be a Good Person – Part 2 - Reading 1

Andrew Ridker, The author of The Altruists.

You may read the first part:

- The Rainbow Before Evening : Family Saga and Meaning to be a Good Person – Part 1 - Reading 1

I read all through the book. I did not see any funny and smart.

I just felt piety to those characters, seems they are not mature, not smart and wise about life. “Am I loosing the sense of humor?”

I was thinking that I was stressful, my anxiety level was getting higher. I was about frustrated because I also had to google some terms from this novel that I was doubt about the definitions and the concepts.

This book was wrote by a millennial author, a young man in her twenties. It is his novel.

Since I review another book which is Altruism:

- The Power of Compassion.

Finally, I agree that The Altruists is super funny and super brilliant.

Flowers in the city garden

This novel is ironic and tragicomic about moral life, and the concepts how to be a good person with the naïve thought.

The author fascinated about two differences. We can see how two generation, between baby boomers and millennials, between dysfunctional family and campus life, in this novel. He gives the readers good measurements of compassion.

The author is very smart, even the characters seems kind of un-mature persons, but he created their personality exactly like in the theories or concepts that we learn either in the Sociology Class or in the Psychology of Personality.

The terms in the book are also terms in the textbook, and some concepts might from his faith.

Family Saga and Meaning to be a Good Person – Part 1 - Reading 1

The Altruists, a novel

I picked this book with several reasons, some of them because I like:

- the cover with clean white
- the pictures
- and reviews stated, “Super brilliant, Super funny”.

The first chapter I did not see any funny but sad, because this chapter was about their burning house, meanwhile whole family plus a couple client were in the house.

The end of the first chapter, the author put some conversations among them, when they were seeing the fire fighters doing their job from the outside of burning house.

Seemed the author left the clues for readers by putting two words in bold fonts. I kept in my mind those words.

The next chapters jumped back and forward, reminding me to words with bold fonts.

They are the “theme” of this novel.

Fruit from a wild flower

This book is about the a family, Alters. Arthur Alters is a father, “professor at a Midwestern college, he can’t afford his mortgage, he’s exasperated his much-younger girlfriend”.

Maggie is a main characteristic, a daughter, who “a would-be do-gooder trying to fashion herself a noble life of self-imposed poverty”.

Ethan is his son, an introvert gay.

# To be continued to part 2