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Jan Priddy

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Jan’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (1192)
currently-reading‎ (2)

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dnf‎ (49)

giveaway‎ (18)
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net-galley‎ (2)
not-in-this-lifetime‎ (2)

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Jan is Currently Reading

Jan Priddy is currently reading

The Wall

by Marlen Haushofer

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in May 2025

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Jan Priddy said: "

When I woke up on the tenth of May I thought about my children as little girls, skipping hand in hand across the playground. The two rather unpleasant, loveless and argumentative semiadults that I had left behind in the city had suddenly become quite

When I woke up on the tenth of May I thought about my children as little girls, skipping hand in hand across the playground. The two rather unpleasant, loveless and argumentative semiadults that I had left behind in the city had suddenly become quite unreal. I never mourned for them, only ever for the children they had been many years before. That probably sounds very cruel, but I can't think who I should lie to today. I can allow myself to write the truth; all the people for whom I have lied throughout my life are dead (31).

My favorite passage. There are a couple more nearly this good.

This would have been an excellent short story (5 stars), or even a novella (still 4-5). The author's main character is concerned about all the right things concerning finding herself entirely alone (5), the hints dropped are effective (4), but while her interior monologue contains powerful sentences, mostly it just goes on and on (1). First published in 1963, this is an important book in second wave feminism perhaps (3-5) but one that meanders more than it needs to (1-3). The MC has a powerful awakening to the confinement of her previous life—the wall is emblematic of that. An allegory of that invisible confinement of women in her time (and still in mine)—the transparent wall we run toward and which batters our faces. I hoped she would go beyond but the story does not, and for me, the musings that take up bits and pieces of her time failed to hold my attention. I know all this; I lived through that time, came of age already understanding what this women discovers. The survivalist details are a significant aspect, and I know all that too.(view spoiler)

Oh! I nearly forgot. A pet peeve: the cover. The cow on this cover is wrong. There is an important cow in this novel, and Bella is described immediately as gray-brown, and that description of her coloring is repeated. The cover cow is likely from the landscape painting, but really, would it have been difficult to find a cow as the author describes and photoshop her in? I looked. Finding pictures of gray-brown Austrian cows was the work of seconds. In a word: easy. ...more "

progress:

(page 143 of 239)
"I am struggling with this. It's a combination of bad translation and my own research while writing a novel where most all animals in the world have died, leaving only insects, arachnids, & eleven women (actually 12 women, but only 11 speak). She never makes cheese or yogurt or any sort of fermented food? She salts meat but doesn't worry about running out of salt? The work of dressing a deer or gathering cut hay?" — Feb 20, 2026 07:07AM

Feb 15, 2026 06:15AM · see review

Jan Priddy is currently reading

The Mind of the Maker

by Dorothy L. Sayers

bookshelves: currently-reading

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progress:

(page 149 of 229)
"Not the ment her outraged defense of Lord Peter's atheism." — Feb 15, 2026 06:23AM

Jan 13, 2026 06:01AM

Jan’s Quotes

“...love is fusion in the sun's core. Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death. Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you to Holly, who breathes like the sea. This time I whisper it, at about the violin's volume: "I love you." No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.”
― David Mitchell

2 likes

“That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

650 likes

“Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cuts, soothed whatever stung. His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

7 likes

“Forgiven doesn't mean no regret. We'll always regret the wrongs we've done. It just means you're not punishing yourself for it.”
― A.J. Hackwith, The Library of the Unwritten

tags: forgiven

37 likes