By Thulasi Muttulingam

It’s a phenomenon that has exploded all over the bookshelves of Colombo bookshops; Self-Help Books.
They have always been there of course, but lately they seem to be EVERWHERE! Not in just select shelves, in out-of-the-way corners as they used to be, say, a decade ago.
If the stacking of the bookshelves are anything to go by, we have a lot of under-confident people in Colombo city, searching for a better way / better meaning in their lives. Nothing wrong with that of course. As a devourer of several self-help books in the past, I know where they are coming from.
So here’s a tip from a world-weary self-help book reader;
Don’t waste your money on self-help books. You’ll eventually have to buy a self-help book on how to stop buying self-help books. The only people those books actually help are the pompous authors of that drivel.
They are really smart these authors. They know only one thing clearly. Their target audiences are under-confident people who probably got that way due to not having enough approbation / appreciation / love in their lives (aka eighty percent of the world’s population according to established studies).
Their works therefore spill over with feel-good drivel on love, kindness and compassion and some real gems on how to achieve success since you don’t know it already and have to shell out several hundred rupees to get it:
Work from your heart!
Love from your soul!
Give it all you’ve got!
Live in the present; don’t worry about the past or the future!
Believe in yourself! (Heh! If you did, why would you buy the book?)
Really valuable gems eh? When ‘The monk who sold his Ferrari’ was being touted as the next best thing to peanut butter some years ago, I rushed to buy it along with some other gullible people searching for ‘meaning’ in their lives.
The blurb on the back gave a lot of promise too. A monk who had gone all the way into the Himalayas to search for the meaning of life and then been compassionate enough to return to tell us mortals the truth.
Inside, several chapters were devoted to each of the above points. Only hermits in the Himalayas knew them before and now thanks to Robin Sharma, the Paramrahasya (mystical super-secret) of working from your heart and loving from your soul is also known to all others who read the book.
Only even those super-secrets unleashed on the world’s population was not enough. Sharma had to write at least nine more similar books.
I noticed on one of my recent forays to the bookstore that his latest offer is: The secret letters of the monk who sold his Ferrari.
Ooh, keep those secrets coming. So long as it’s a secret that no-one ever knew before on how to overcome the travails of life, people will keep buying it.
Never mind that the last book you wrote, filled with promises of changing our lives, did not do the trick. You did manage to sell hope effectively so we’ll buy the next book – hoping THAT has the definitive answer!
Self-help books are a multi-billion dollar industry now. If eighty percent of the world’s population have low self esteem and as such are devourers of self-help books, the other twenty percent seem to be busy churning out more and more books to meet that demand.
In one of my favourite book stores where I hang out frequently, I noticed that the garish covers of the self-help books were taking pride of place everywhere.
There were self-help books on living, self-help books on death and dying, books for mothers-to-be, books for managers with bad employees, books for employees with bad managers…
Yes, we know. There is no human out there without problems, but seriously? When did we get this hooked as a civilization, on reading stuff that makes little or no sense? It’s almost a phenomenon of the Emperor’s clothes now.
People ooh and aah over ‘New Age’ writers, buying their books and gifting it to others as epitomes of critical brilliance – when it’s actually utter drivel. Two of the biggest names behind this phenomenon would be Paulo Coelho and Deepak Chopra. I read only one book of each (and that was one too many) before wondering why they are such a sensation.
Then they came on twitter where I didn’t have to waste money to follow their gibberish. Here are some of their latest tweets:
Coelho: “When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
“Love! Your future depends on your capacity to love.”
“If you see somebody who needs help, help him. One day you might need to be helped too. Either way, the choice is yours.”
Chopra: “Love without action is meaningless and action without love is irrelevant.”
“No fundamental physical substance is the basic building block of the universe. The essential stuff of the universe is thinking non-stuff.”
“Nothing outside of consciousness can be known”
Wow! Profound eh? Doesn’t that just make you stop and wipe away a tear? Hold on! I need to go blow my nose over how much of my money and years of my impressionable youth I’ll never get back again. All those books on how to get rich quick and make friends fast and live life better and here I am, an underpaid, over-worked journalist – with all the issues I ever had and some more to boot.
There’s hope though. If you have read a few self-help books, you’ve read then all. They are all rehashing of the same gobbledegook in different terms and words.
If the current crisis in my life keeps up, I think I will switch from the losing to the winning team in this debacle.
The readers are definitely the losers and I have been one for far too long. It’s better to join the writers who earn millions to re-hash hackneyed terms like ‘love’, ‘passion’ and ‘meaningful living’ and extend them like over-extended rubber bands into meaningless chapters. How hard can that be?
Come to think of it! That’s a great idea. I am going to go write a book on “How to stop reading Self-Help books and get on with your lives in eight easy steps.”
……………….
And when that takes off and lands me a multi-million dollar contract to write more; I’ll write “The ninth step.”

Author: Jaron Lanier

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And The Mountains Echoed

Author: Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations. In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most. Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page.

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A Curious Man

The Strange and
Brilliant Life of Robert ‘Believe It or Not!’ Ripley
Author: Neal Thompson
A Curious Man is the marvellously compelling biography of Robert ‘Believe It or Not’ Ripley, the enigmatic cartoonist turned globetrotting millionaire who won international fame by celebrating the world’s strangest oddities, and whose outrageous showmanship taught us to believe in the unbelievable.
As portrayed by acclaimed biographer Neal Thompson, Ripley’s life is the stuff of a classic American fairytale.
Buck-toothed and cursed by shyness, Ripley turned his sense of being an outsider into an appreciation for the strangeness of the world.
After selling his first cartoon to Time magazine at age 18, more cartooning triumphs followed, but it was his ‘Believe It or Not’ conceit and the wildly popular radio shows it birthed that would make him one of the most successful entertainment figures of his time and spur him to search the globe’s farthest corners for bizarre facts, exotic human curiosities, and shocking phenomena.

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Pacific

Author: Tom Drury
In a triumphant return to the characters that launched his career two decades ago, Tom Drury travels back to Grouse County, the setting of his landmark debut, The End of Vandalism. Drury’s depictions of the stark beauty of the Midwest and the futility of American wanderlust have earned him comparisons to Raymond Carver, Sherwood Anderson, and Paul Auster.
When 14-year-old Micah Darling travels to Los Angeles to reunite with the mother who deserted him seven years ago, he finds himself out of his league in a land of magical freedom.
He does new drugs with new people; falls in love with an enchanting, but troubled equestrienne named Charlotte, and gets thrown out of school over the activities of a club called the New Luddites.
Back in the Midwest, an ethereal young woman comes to Stone City on a mission that will unsettle the lives of everyone she meets—including Micah’s half-sister, Lyris, who still fights fears of abandonment after a childhood in foster care, and his father, Tiny, a petty thief.
An investigation into the stranger’s identity uncovers a darkly disturbed life, as parallel narratives of the comic and tragic, the mysterious and every day, unfold in both the country and the city.

A Memoir By Amanda Knox

When Amanda Knox first hit the news headlines almost six years ago, she was every middle-class parent’s nightmare: a seemingly serious, intelligent student who went to Italy at an impressionable age only to fly spectacularly off the rails. The initial reports suggested she had fallen in with a disreputable crowd in Perugia who smoked drugs, slept around and dabbled in the occult.She had run so far out of control that she had participated in the brutal stabbing of her English roommate, Meredith Kercher.
The tabloids, naturally, had a field day with reports of an orgy gone wrong, of satanic rituals, and of what the judge in Knox’s first murder trial ended up labelling “extreme evil”. But the story struck a deeper chord, too, not least because of the peculiarly twisted version Knox presented of that old archetype, the young English-speaking woman who allows herself to be seduced by Italy’s bounties: the food, the sunshine, the idyllic landscapes, the abundance of great art and of Mediterranean men.
Tina Brown, thinking of her own university-aged daughter, called the story a “chilling eye-opener” and all but urged her readers to lock up their daughters before another could fall victim to the same depravity. The story was eye-catching and deeply troublesome. But, we later discovered, it was also completely wrong.
Knox and her boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito (whose book, Honor Bound, I co-wrote), had been locked up before a scrap of hard evidence was found against them. The forensic evidence the police eventually brought forward could not withstand the scrutiny of independent experts. Neither the prosecutors nor the first trial judge could agree on a motive that made sense of their involvement.
It was an awful murder, but, from an investigative standpoint, it was not a complicated one. The man whose DNA was found all over the murder scene, who had a history of breaking into buildings and wielding a knife much like the one that inflicted the fatal wounds, was a troubled drifter of Ivorian origin named Rudy Guede. He was arrested in Germany three weeks after the crime, extradited, tried and found guilty.
It would have made good sense at that point for the police to admit they had made a mistake and release Knox and Sollecito. But by then their over-hasty conclusions had ignited an international firestorm, so the narrative took an abrupt U-turn. No longer an eye-catching scandal about sex, drugs and murder, it was now a monstrous miscarriage of justice. The prosecutorial frenzy fed the media frenzy, creating ghoulish public images of Knox and Sollecito that were increasingly at variance with the known facts. It took two trials and four years for the Italian court system to set them free.
It is this story – though a less sensationalist, more depressing, version – that Knox tells in her memoir, Waiting To Be Heard, a book just published in the States, but not, as things stand, to be brought out in the UK, because of its libel laws. It is, as she herself writes, about setting the record straight, about correcting the thousands of times she has been talked about – in news stories, on talkshows, in books and documentaries, and in one particularly shameful made-for-TV movie – by people “who do not know me, or who have no knowledge of the facts”.
It is still the story of an innocent abroad, one who saw her year in Italy as a way to “meet maturity head-on” and discover her sexuality. Knox describes how she self-consciously experimented with casual sex and tried to become sophisticated about smoking pot. (One of her Italian roommates looked on sympathetically as she spent whole evenings struggling to roll a joint.) But she is no longer the conniving she-devil depicted in the tabloids.
She fully admits being naive, quirky, young for her age and ill-attuned to the social expectations of another culture. When she and Sollecito stumbled on the murder scene, she had no good idea of how to handle herself other than to make multiple calls to her mother in Seattle, where it was the middle of the night. Her Italian was not good enough to understand what was going on at first, and her over-trusting faith in the police led her to talk too loosely without the benefit of a translator, or a lawyer. She and Sollecito were incautious precisely because they thought they had nothing to hide. “By assuming I didn’t need safeguards,” she writes, “I became vulnerable.”
The police caught her in a lie – she denied that she had smoked pot, then admitted it – and accused her of many other lies, ignoring her exhaustion and confusion, and constructing a case. Even after she had been arrested, she still thought she should play the good girl, doing whatever was asked of her, scarcely believing the police had anything but her best interests at heart. At one point she volunteered that her handcuffs were loose enough for her hands to wriggle free. Her captors’ only response was to tighten them.
Prison forced her to change in a hurry. She became more fluent in Italian, brushed off the unwanted attentions of prison guards and the lewd jokes of her fellow prisoners, and learned to carry herself with precision and quiet authority on the few occasions she got to speak in court. Knox didn’t become suicidal, she writes, but certainly wondered if she might be reduced to that if her prospects for freedom kept dimming. According to the book, she imagined slipping a grocery bag over her head, filling it with gas from a camper stove and tying it round her neck until she passed out.
Knox was not fully aware of the legal machinations swirling around her, or of the role the mass media played in her incarceration – not, that is, until her release, when paparazzi chased her from the courthouse in Perugia and she slept in a safe house selected for her by a former undercover FBI agent before flying back home. (Part of the concern, which she omits from this narrative, was the possibility that her prosecutors would find a reason to re-arrest her before she left the country.)
In short, she grew up. Not in a way any of us would wish on her; not in any way she deserved. And her nightmare is not over. Italy’s high court recently re-kicked the case to the appeals level for a second look, so her legal expenses and her emotional exhaustion would continue to mount.
There is little doubt, given the dearth of evidence, that she will be vindicated in the end. But it is not just the Italian legal system that misjudged her. All of us who feasted on her story contributed in some way to the hysteria that did her such a disservice. Now, at last, she has been given a chance to tell it her own way.
Courtesy: Andrew Gumbel,
The Guardian

Author: John le Carre

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The Woman Upstairs

Author: Claire Messud
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor’s Children, a masterly new novel: the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed and betrayed by a desire for a world beyond her own.
Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, long ago compromised her dream to be a successful artist, mother and lover. She has instead become the “woman upstairs,” a reliable friend and neighbor always on the fringe of others’ achievements. Then into her life arrives the glamorous and cosmopolitan Shahids—her new student Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale, and his parents: Skandar, a dashing Lebanese professor who has come to Boston for a fellowship at Harvard, and Sirena, an effortlessly alluring Italian artist.
When Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies, Nora is drawn deep into the complex world of the Shahid family; she finds herself falling in love with them, separately and together. Nora’s happiness explodes her boundaries, and she discovers in herself an unprecedented ferocity—one that puts her beliefs and her sense of self at stake.
Told with urgency, intimacy and piercing emotion, this brilliant novel of passion and artistic fulfillment explores the intensity, thrill—and the devastating cost—of embracing an authentic life.

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The Other Typist

Author: Suzanne Rindell
Rose Baker seals men’s fates. With a few strokes of the keys that sit before her, she can send a person away for life in prison. A typist in a New York City Police Department precinct, Rose is like a high priestess. Confessions are her job. It is 1923, and while she may hear every detail about shootings, knifings, and murders, as soon as she leaves the interrogation room she is once again the weaker sex, best suited for filing and making coffee.
This is a new era for women, and New York is a confusing place for Rose. Gone are the Victorian standards of what is acceptable. All around her women bob their hair, they smoke, they go to speakeasies. Yet prudish Rose is stuck in the fading light of yesteryear, searching for the nurturing companionship that eluded her childhood. When glamorous Odalie, a new girl, joins the typing pool, despite her best intentions Rose falls under Odalie’s spell. As the two women navigate between the sparkling underworld of speakeasies by night and their work at the station by day, Rose is drawn fully into Odalie’s high-stakes world. And soon her fascination with Odalie turns into an obsession from which she may never recover.
Courtesy Amazon

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Inferno

Author: DAN BROWN
Dan Brown, author of the No.1 international blockbusters The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code, recently completed his new novel, Inferno. Random House will publish it through its sister companies Transworld Publishers, the UK and Doubleday, the U.S. on May 14.
Dan Brown’s long-term publisher, Bill Scott-Kerr, at Transworld made the announcement today in London. Hardcover Inferno will be available at £20.00 and as an ebook and on CD audio from Random House audio.
The Da Vinci Code is the bestselling novel in paperback in the UK since records began (Neilsen BookScan). The book spent more than two years (120 weeks) in the Sunday Times top 10 bestsellers list, with 68 weeks at No. 1. It has been translated into 51 languages.
The Lost Symbol is the UK’s bestselling adult hardcover novel since records began (Neilsen BookScan), with current sales in excess of 1.37m copies. There are 190m copies of Dan Brown’s books in print worldwide.
Following the publication of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s earlier novels, Digital Fortress, Deception Point and Angels & Demons have all gone on to become multi-million international bestsellers. All are published in the UK by Transworld Publishers.
Dan Brown is represented by Heide Lange at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, Inc.
Transworld Publishers is a division of the Random House Group whose parent company is Bertelsmann AG. In Sri Lanka, the book will be available at Chapters Bookstore, #35, Staple Street Colombo 2. The book will be sold at a special discounted price.

Pictures by Saman Kariyawasam

Lady Thatcher was not a woman prone to self-examination and so it was with great humility I accepted the task of protecting her legacy while maintaining a veneer of even-handedness and objectivity. Margaret Hilda Thatcher was born in 1925, the second daughter of Alderman Alfred Roberts and his wife, Beatrice. Her elder sister, Muriel, who has never previously spoken of Margaret, remembers that her mahogany desk was always tidy. Her dentist, Geoffrey Marks, recalls her having near perfect molars. Margaret did not get on well with her mother and there was a terrible family row over whether she should study Latin.

In 1941, Margaret bought her first pink uplift bra which she wore when reading the poems of Rudyard Kipling. She also bought a skirt for £3 16s to celebrate her admission to Oxford to read chemistry. There, she met her first male friend; one hesitates to call Neil Findlay a boyfriend, though I have ascertained to my satisfaction they once went to the ‘flicks’ (her word, I should never be so vulgar). Upon leaving Oxford, she went to a Conservative party conference in Llandudno, where she came to the attention of the Dartford constituency that first adopted her as a candidate. At about this time, realising she was on the rise, she palmed off her new dreary farmer beau, Willie Cullen, on to her sister Muriel to whom she once paid the singular compliment of saying, “You are the only person I know who is more rightwing than me”.

Even though Margaret was defeated at the 1950 election, she did far better than anticipated and decided she ought to marry Denis Thatcher, a man to whom she was not particularly attracted, but had the advantage of both a minor public school education and sharing her fondness for a tipple. They honeymooned in Estoril where Margaret observed many Jews. Margaret was very fond of the Jew, observing that ‘The Jew is a natural trader’, an empathy that stood her in good stead when she was selected for East Finchley.

The arrival of twins, Mark and Carol, took both Margaret and Denis by surprise, but they reacted with characteristic pragmatism. A next-door neighbour, Brigadier Arbuthnot, remembers Margaret handing them over to a nanny, while muttering “that’s the last we’ll hear about those brats for 500 pages until Mark gets lost in the desert”. “It was an act of tremendous love,” the nanny later said, when I twisted her arm.

Margaret was universally acknowledged to be the most attractive of all the women in parliament in 1959 and her sexual charisma would later work to her considerable advantage, not least for Tory grandees such as myself who are still occasioned arousal remembering the occasional sightings of Matron’s stockings. She was much taken aback to find herself in opposition in 1964. “I’m not a natural attacker,” she explained with her customary insight. She first went to America in 1968 where her good manners were much commented on and, having failed to attend the funerals of either her father or mother, she was much perturbed to find many Marxists working within the Department of Education when the Conservatives returned to power. She was deeply hurt by the sobriquet Milk Snatcher and blamed Ted Heath for fostering the politics of consensus.

After the 1974 election, it became clear to Margaret that Ted had to go. It is hard to understate her bravery in putting herself forward against him, as so many people have testified to me and, faced with the prospect of “a filly or a gelding” as leader, the Conservatives stepped into the unknown.

It was still far from clear whether the country would accept a woman prime minister and it was her stylist Gordon Reece and her advertising guru Lord Saatchi who came up with the brilliant idea of keeping her away from the cameras as much as possible. The strategy worked and in May 1979, she strode into Downing Street with the immortal words, “Where there is discord, let me drive a permanent wedge”.

Of the final 300 pages, almost anyone who is remotely interested in monetarism, Ireland and the Thatcher government will have read them countless times before, though I shall attempt to add nuance by saying “on the one hand this” and “on the other hand that”. I can confirm, though, that though she had a deep distrust of black Africans, she was not racist. In private she only made jokes about the Germans and the French.

How the country roared with laughter when Margaret said, “You turn if you want to. This lady’s not for turning” but her good humour aside, she could be steely when required. Several people I have interviewed remarked that she could be quite critical. Yet she felt her criticism was justified and as she was right about almost everything, history may find in her favour. Mine will, certainly.

Margaret was greatly displeased that Ronald Reagan did not back her unequivocally over the Falkands crisis and felt that Francis Pym was pusillanimous as foreign secretary. She also reported that the deaths of British servicemen caused her the worst moments of her entire life, a reaction that showed her characteristic natural maternal sympathies. Unfortunately, there was no space in this volume to record Carol Thatcher’s comment of “Are you kidding?”

Ultimately, the Iron Lady was proved right to hold firm and, as the Argentines surrendered, the clamour went up: “Rejoice. There’s another volume to come next year. It’s a licence to print money”.

- John Crace: Courtesy the Guardian

Author: Austin Grossman

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Attempting Normal

Author: Marc Maron
Marc Maron was a parent-scarred, angst-filled, drug-dabbling, love-starved comedian who dreamed of a simple life: a wife, a home, a sitcom to call his own. But instead he woke up one day to find himself fired from his radio job, surrounded by feral cats, and emotionally and financially annihilated by a divorce from a woman he thought he loved.
Attempting Normal is Marc Maron’s journey through the wilderness of his own mind, a collection of explosively, painfully, addictively funny stories that add up to a moving tale of hope and hopelessness, of failing, flailing, and finding a way. This is his story of the winding, potholed road from madness and obsession and failure to something like normal, the thrillingly comic journey of a sympathetic f***up who’s trying really hard to do better without making a bigger mess, most of us will relate.

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In the Body of the World: A Memoir

Author: Eve Ensler
Playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body—how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body – a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain”.
But Ensler is shocked out of her distance. While working in the Congo, she is shattered to encounter the horrific rape and violence inflicted on the women. Soon after, she is diagnosed with uterine cancer, and through months of harrowing treatment, she is forced to become first and foremost a body – pricked, punctured, cut, scanned. It is then that all distance is erased. As she connects her own illness to the devastation of the Earth, her life force to the resilience of humanity, she is finally, fully – and gratefully – joined to the body of the world.
Unflinching, generous, and inspiring, Ensler calls on us all to embody our connection to and responsibility for the World.

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The Hit

Author: David Baldacci
Will Robie is a master of killing.
A highly skilled assassin, Robie is the man the U.S. government calls on to eliminate the worst enemies of the state, monsters committed to harming untold numbers of innocent victims.
No one else can match Robie’s talents as a hitman…no one, except Jessica Reel. A fellow assassin, equally professional and dangerous, Reel is every bit as lethal as Robie. And now, she’s gone rogue, turning her gun sights on other members of their agency.
To stop one of their own, the government looks again to Will Robie. His mission: bring in Reel, dead or alive. Only a killer can catch another killer, they tell him.
But as Robie pursues Reel, he quickly finds that there is more to her betrayal than meets the eye. Her attacks on the agency conceal a larger threat, a threat that could send shockwaves through the U.S. government and around the World.
Courtesy Amazon

1.What are you reading now ?
Actually five in
the pipeline
‘The Mozart
Conspiracy’ by
Scott Mariani
‘Citadel’ by Kate Mosse (also author of ‘Sepulchre’)
‘Mozart’s Women’ by Jane Glower (the best known Mozart historian)
‘Midnight’s Children’ by Salman Rushdie. After seeing the movie.
‘Dracula the Un-Dead’ by Dacre Stoker, Bram’s grandson I think.

2. Who are your favorite authors ?
Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo

3. What book has had the most profound impact on your life?  
Ven. Walpola Rahula Thera’s ‘What the Buddha Taught’.

4. What book has inspired your life the most?  
The Dhammapada

5. What is the book that has moved you the most?
‘Madame Tussaud’ by Michelle Moran. Contrary to popular belief, it shows a completely different view of the French Revolution and the events which led to it in 1789. Surprisingly you actually end up feeling sorry for Marie Antoinette, derogatively called the Austrian B****.

6. What is your most ‘feel good’ read?
Stephen Clarke’s ‘Talk to the Snail’ – Ten Commandments for Understanding the French. He pokes fun at the French in the most unimaginable manner and it’s hilarious. He’s also authored ‘A Year in the Merde’, ‘Merde Actually’ and ‘Merde Happens’.

7. What was your favorite childhood read ?
‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ by Enid Blyton. It often made me escape into reverie which I actually and seriously did.

 8. Who is your favorite character in a book?
That’s a tough one. I guess Quasimodo in Victor Hugo’s ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’

9. What is your favorite place to read a book in Colombo?
Home, and propped up in bed.

10. How much would you say you spend on books a year?
Shhhh ! My credit cards will be in a better position to answer that. I wouldn’t even want to know …