Lydia Schultz > Recent Status Updates

I'm gonna give this another 50 pages or so... it's tough to make a reader care about characters they already know are doomed from the start, and Russell isn't really cinching it for me. All these people are charming, yeah, but they're not quite believable as people. Their identities seem so linked to their nationalities - which I'm sure has a story purpose, but doesn't do much for making them particularly compelling.

I'm having some trouble getting into this. It's a little more contemporary than I usually go and the style/tone of the prose is giving me some trouble: a little overbearing, overwritten, maybe slightly cold, too. Something a little un-artful. But I don't mind it, and can see myself getting into it more as I read on, so I'll stick with it

I really like the quote from Ursula Le Guin on the back cover: "not at all 'poetic' - quite the contrary. It is prose of the very highest order; it is pure prose."

what a bizarre little book. I love it

this has been ridiculously enjoyable so far. it's like watching the movie but slower and there's more of it.

more out of Dora and less out of Michael, if you please

I'm giving up. It's been a while since I started a book I just straight up didn't like. Maybe I was predisposed to dislike it because of the way it was recommended to me (by some unsympathetic, smug professors who told me I could learn from it). But I want to read a book with characters and dialogue, not one pretentious woman lecturing about cheese and gardening and taking smug pleasure in her own everything.

makes me want to go backpacking through english countryside

this book does some things that irritate me but then just as often it brings me back around again

on 12/21, the Winter Solstice, this felt apt: "Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light."

some really beautiful passages in this book... "She went directly to the breakwater and stood there watching the waves as they dashed themselves to pieces. Like her son, she too went to take counsel with the sea whenever she had something to think about."