What I Thought About Sophie Kinsella's "Wedding Night" [Migrated Post]

“Young people! With their hurrying and their worrying and their wanting all the answers now. They wear me out, the poor, harried things. Don’t come back, I always tell them. Don’t come back. Youth is still where you left it, and that’s where it should stay. Anything that was worth taking on life’s journey, you’ll already haven taken with you.”

Blurb: Lottie just knows that her boyfriend is going to propose, but then his big question involves a trip abroad — not a trip down the aisle. Completely crushed, Lottie reconnects with an old flame, and they decide to take drastic action. No dates, no moving in together, they’ll just get married . . . right now. Her sister, Fliss, thinks Lottie is making a terrible mistake, and will do anything to stop her. But Lottie is determined to say “I do,” for better, or for worse.

When I pre-ordered the book back in April, I was having high hopes for another round of Kinsella’s frolicsome adventures. I mean, when I read her previous standalone, I’ve Got Your Number, which was released on Valentine’s Day last year, I consumed all 448 pages within less than 48 hours. I was hooked – as I’ve always been to her novels after Madeleine Wickham decided to get herself a pseudonym. Wedding Night was nothing short of a fun ride, but the plot was unexpectedly weak.

It all began when 33-year-old Lottie mistakenly thought that Richard, her boyfriend of three years, was about to propose during their fancy lunch at the Savoy. She even bought him an engagement ring. After having long-term boyfriends in the past who are downright commitment-phobic (the very mention of “marriage” scares them away), Lottie just knew Richard was The One. Of course, miss Daisy-doo was utterly crushed when she found that Richard’s ‘big question’ was not about getting engaged, but whether she’d agree to have a trip abroad together, which, by itself, is already a major milestone to any serious relationship.

So she dumped him.

Suddenly single again, Lottie got in touch with her one-time summer love, Ben, who reminded her of their pact to get married if they’re still single at thirty. Memories of teenage love and endless sex flooded both minds. Without giving the absurd idea much thought, Lottie and Ben jumped straight to the altar and jet off to Ikonos for their much-anticipated honeymoon. The Greek island was where they first met, and to make up for the lost fifteen years since they last crossed paths, they waited till they’ve landed on the island to have the most incredible sex of their lives, or, in their words, “to consummate our marriage” through one steamy wedding night. Little did they know each of them are at a terrible place in their individual lives, and their closest peeps know better than to let them run along in such a hasty marriage.

Two self-proclaimed control freaks are determined to go very, very far for their loved ones: Lottie’s elder sister, Fliss, who always manage to talk Lottie out of her crazy post-breakup Unfortunate Choices (including tattoos and joining a cult), and Ben’s longtime friend and business colleague, Lorcan, who has spent the last four years helping Ben stay out of trouble in his career.

How will the wedding night unfold? And what happens to Richard? Guess you have to find out for yourselves. I’m not spoiling.

I trail away into silence. I’ve just shared details of my condom use with my son’s teacher. I’m not sure how that happened. Fliss

I thought that switching first-person narratives of Lottie and Fliss in alternate chapters was fun. It was a fresh element to Kinsella’s novels. I got to put myself into the sisters’ heads during the same situation, even though they’re very much alike and both resonate with the bubbly-clumsy female protagonists of Sophie Kinsella. However, I also felt that there’s a slight disadvantage to this narrative structure: The main characters, i.e. the sisters, did not turn out as memorable as those in her other books. I sympathize with Lottie’s mishaps as much as Fliss’s hellish divorce, but by the end of the book, it dawned on me that the whole plot, though comical as ever, is less believable than the ones I’ve enjoyed on her other books. Though characters didn’t fall flat, I thought they can be developed further to advance the story in a steadier, more natural pace.

I also felt that the conclusion was a bit rushed. By the end of the book, some of the characters are left hanging even though I still care whatever happen to them in the end. The main characters, however, have grown so much from where they began, but I felt that the pacing from Chapter 30 onward was like a sprint: They pick up on their new epiphanies very quickly, and change the major courses of their lives in what felt like an instant.

Despite the rushed ending, I flipped more than half of the book last night without pause, and that’s what I love about Kinsella: Her writing style is so easy to follow that you can’t help but tag along with these characters. Man, her characters. They’re always so relatable, like the dumb women we become when we are in love. Taking aside the abrupt ending, I’d recommend Wedding Night as a light beach read and for its hilarious condom jokes ;)



Love, Stace

The Road to Success [Migrated Post]

We all know that there is no one-way road to achieving success. Even if there is such an established, perfectly-constructed system, no one has ever succeeded, not even those who have achieved success, in clearly showing others how to get there, though Varun Chablani has made a close call in the clever illustration below.

If we only take a closer look, you’ll find that the successful person just decides to succeed.

Success Story

The successful person is the first and the last to know nothing but to catch the one train in time to get himself toward Success.

Looking at the illustration, the successful person starts his humble beginnings at Opportunity and go straight to the railroad station before he misses his train, disregarding the appeals of Bohemianism (draft beers) or the endless spin of Conceit (self-engagement). Once on board under the Right System, the successful person takes no second glance at Hotel Know It All, an imprisonment appealingly masked as knowledge, because he has admitted himself to knowing nothing but catching his train.

Only by withholding his good habits and virtues could the successful person bypass Bad Habits and Vices in order to get into the promised land of the System, wherein the biggest and the only hurdle before success is overcoming the Lack of Preparation tunnel, a dark path where the successful person has chosen to learn True Knowledge and gain wisdom.

Once the successful person saw the light at the end of the tunnel, he becomes successful by autopilot: His train follows his soul beyond the Gate of Ideals across the straight, unobstructive path toward Success, while those who have never gotten onboard in the train could only get to Weak Morals at best, unless they finally choose to make the wise decision to succeed.

Then again, we all know that there are far too many successful people who have been welcomed into the promised land, gained wisdom, and practiced morality without getting onboard in their trains, right? Those who get back on their feet after falling into Failure have found the harder road toward Success by their own ideals.

The Public Secret

I’m currently reading the dean of personal development’s spoken word 1956 record The Strangest Secret, which has sold Earl Nightingale over 1 million copies worldwide even during his time.

Inspired by Napoleon Hill’s 1937 opus Think And Grow Rich, Nightingale wrote the book in honor of history’s most prominent successful persons, their succeeding contributions, and the strangest, yet most remarkable secret of all time, which has preceded these successes in the past as well as the extensive successes achieved today: We become what we think about.

This secret is synonymous with the message written on some of the best-selling self-help books in the industry today, namely Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret and the Hicks’ Ask And It Is Given.

Nonetheless, in Nightingale’s own words, success is defined by “the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” By this definition, he has devoted a whole chapter to explore the intrinsic value of success, which I think is convincing because let’s face it – success feels better achieved by effort than when it is given.

This chapter is, arguably, a quotation-filled minefield that reflects how we often corrupt the very power of human thought in our lives by thinking in negative terms. Take a look at these clips:

A man’s life is what his thoughts make of it. Marcus Aurelius

A man is what he thinks about all day long. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. William James

We need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question was real and it will become infallibly real by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion, that our interest in it will be those which characterize belief. William James

If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly ascertain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich. If you wish to be learned, you will be learned. If you wish to be good, you will good. Only you must then really wish things and wish them exclusively and not wish at the same time a hundred other compatible things just as strongly. William James

If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth. Mark 9:23

This is one of the greatest laws in the universe. Fervently do I wish I had discovered it as a very young man. It dawned upon me much later in life and I found it to be one of the greatest, if not my greatest discovery, outside of my relationship to God. And the great law briefly and simply stated is that if you think in negative terms, you’ll get negative results. If you’ll think in positive terms, you will achieve positive results. That is the simple fact which is at the basis of an astonishing law of prosperity and success. In three words, ‘believe and succeed’. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale

Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt. William Shakespeare

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them. George Bernard Shaw

In other words, the secret acts like a mirror.

To live a successful life means creating our own reality, and doing so deliberately by using the power of thought.

Mirror, Mirror

You’ve probably picked it up from Chablani’s illustration, as well as from your own observations throughout the history of mankind: The road to success is, more often than not, a long and lonely one.

As someone who is prone to overthinking, I believe that I’ve created my everyday reality and am responsible for all my setbacks. It’s comforting to say personal achievements out loud, yet looking forward, it’s all too scary to realize them in the first place.

How you decide to succeed, therefore, makes all the difference.

Right now, at 23, I’m lucky to say that the rest of my life still offers a relatively thick block of blank canvas for me to fill. Because I’m aware that every decision I make, both the major and the minor ones, will eventually make a life that constitutes the sum total of my thoughts, I intend to exceed fulfilling my needs by going after my wants quietly.

I envision a life brimming with abundance of my own ideals, and by ideals, I don’t see material gains as much as I see time-tested virtues I particularly value become practiced and crystallized into reality, namely integrity and perseverance.

I’ve had enough of feeling guilty for rejecting others for fear of the attempt. Reframing fear as a motivator and maintaining love as my drive has served me well so far.

I hold Bob Dylan’s definition of success true, which I also believe was a precursor to Steve Jobs’ lifetime achievements as a father, a brother, a husband, a thinker, an innovator, and a hungry fool: “What is money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.”

Oh, what freedom it is to desire what you already have.

“Success is going to bed at night in peace,” affirmed Stanley to me once, and I couldn’t agree with him more.

So tell me: What does success mean to you? Share your story on the comments section below.



Love, Stace