Hoyadaisy > Recent Status Updates

I'm currently in a reading slump. Aside from some books on Buddhism, I'm only able to reread favorite books. Why???

Reading again (for the 4,417th time?)

I can't articulate why, but it is my absolute go-to when things are tough or when I want to remember how beautiful the world is under its 441,700,000 layers of grime.

I'm always trying to learn French and always having trouble with it. My daughter suggested reading a book that I've read many times in English. I'm shocked at how much easier this is than any reading I've one. Thanks, daughter!

I lucked out with another crazy-good intro. This one includes the following question: "Is it [art] a tool the universe uses to become aware of itself?"

That's worth the price of the book to me (but I got it for free from our library).

My son is reading this really long book to me. I'm enjoying it, something I'm surprised about, as I would never choose a book described as horror.

It helps that we have no details about The Thing yet, and the the characters are beautifully drawn, and the dialogue is pitch perfect.

I tend to skip or skim introductions because I often find them pointless, tedious, or too long.

Beard's introduction is so good that it makes me want to read every word she's ever written.

Already delighted beyond measure! Virginia Woolf in a tiny jewel of a book. How lucky to have found it!

I always liked the ideas in "Frankenstein," but found the prose a chore. After seven hours of annotating this first chunk for my class, I am regretting assigning this book. Regretting it so hard...

I read this every couple of years. I was sure I would never, ever tire of it. However, my current project of making exhaustive annotations for my online class could be the end of that .

For maybe the 10th time, but this time my son is reading it to me!

I'm the poster-child for everything this author thinks is bad news. Read/learn/improve? Or toss/ignore/fail?

I'm suffering from bad book balancing. I have way too much non-fiction out right now, most of it on a 6/22 due date at the library.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but this is pretty intense.

In this memoir, he returns to the place where he was born as a young writer and discovers the setting for all the fiction to come. It's magic.

Spot on and hysterical.

Conclusion thus far: You don't want to have to interview early Bruce Springsteen. He clearly hates it and lets the interviewer know it--refusing to answer, mumbling a short answer, or rambling kind of incoherently.

I loved the British series (left cold by the American) and wondered if I'd be bored by the book. Not at all. Wicked fun (for those who love a good villain).

I'm in love with Dave Robicheaux!

Oh, how I love Angela Thirkell. If Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen had a love child...

Found most elegant, lowest cost mental health solution ever. "Proportional therapy:" Pair someone with a disproportion (e.g., agoraphobia) with someone with the opposite disproportion (e.g., someone who won't stay IN the house). "One person's behavioral tendency should balance out the other's so that neither person would be able to go to their most disproportional extreme of behavior."

Pp. 32-45: best, best, best (and most touching) send-up of group therapy EVER.

Hy-ster-i-cal! And rings true. "If you want to be considered sane by all the people that get to judge your sanity, all you have to do is stick to doing whatever most people agree is reasonable when anyone else is around to see you."

I'm reading this really, really slowly. I'm using it to motivate myself to meditate. If I pick it up and read it for 10 minutes, I'm so inspired to sit.

Total page turner. Does anyone else read spy thrillers?

Oh, for British novels that begin with sentences like: "It is natural to suppose that the arrival of the new Rector was a rather exciting event for Carlingford." Oh, for novels that proceed with middle-aged rectors confused by all the matrimonial flutterings they incite...

This is, if anything, too good. "Take my mother...and her announcement that my brother is still with us. She's trying to restructure our universe so that Ty doesn't disappear. Like the way a fish will thrash its body on the sand when it's beached, an involuntary reaction, a survival mechanism, in hopes that it might rock its way back into the water. Mom is trying to find her way back to the water."