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I have SO MANY QUESTIONS about how this society functions that I can barely concentrate on the story.

"Amsterdarn"!!!!!

Ryan: "I love the picture of the pointing finger: I love to study it. I don't even care what it's pointing toward. I don't look where the finger instructs me to look. I look at the finger."

Which immediately brought to mind: "Remember that haiku is a finger pointing at the moon, and if the hand is bejeweled, we no longer see that to which it points." A quote I've seen attributed to James W. Hackett and RH Blyth.

"And that is one of the particular beauties of poetry as opposed to, say, the novel. A poem really has no beginning and end, although it does appear to. All parts of a poem exist as a sort of plasma, simultaneously apprehended, existing in the mind all at once, as soon as we have become familiar with them."

Ryan writes about Joseph Brodsky, a man "sentenced in a sensationally absurd Soviet trial to five years of internal exile in the frozen North," and I put this book down and pick up Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, which is right next to me because I've been reading it since 2023, slowly, because of the war crimes, and of course he's in there, so I reread his three poems.

"Probity" count: 3

"Nonsense exists only in relation to sense. It uses the rules of sense but comes to different conclusions."

In his introduction, the editor calls this book "a triumph." I'm sorry, sir, I think you mean the work is a triumph; the book is something you made by putting Ryan's work into an order you refuse to disclose.

Reread! I intentionally ordered a used copy of this so I wouldn't feel bad about underlining all my favorite parts, but this withdrawn copy from the Denver Public Library looks like no one ever read it! Will I be able to write in a near mint book? Woof, I guess we'll see.

One of the pieces in this box is styled to look like a Little Golden Book, and the text inside is so small I need a magnifying glass to read it.

ANOTHER pet death. I saw this one coming and skipped ahead though. In the bound book with the sage green cover.

This sentence is bananas and isn't any less bananas in context:

"The possibility of the empty house enveloped me like a sleeping bag and tugged the drawstrings of my crotch tight."

Jesus Christ even the anthropomorphic bees are homophobic? Could we just not.

The pet death in this just wrecked me, and I wish I could have opted out. It's on the last four or five pages in the huge booklet you read like a newspaper that has a green suburban street on the front page.

"And so eventually I got on the internet and looked you up."

Eddie absolutely looking the Prince up on Wikipedia and going straight for the "personal life" section.

"We call it a society. It involves coming to accommodations with others."

Libby doesn't think I can finish this before my loan is up. Racing against time to prove her wrong.

“Hello!” she shouts. “I’m a therapist!”

The last two Tchaikovsky books I read barely even mentioned bugs, so I momentarily forgot about his bug thing. This one, though, is literally wall to wall bugs, and the narrator finds them disgusting. So not a good time for the bug haters, but for the bug lovers, there's also an apocalyptic amount of bug harm, so I guess no one's happy.

"It was bugs on bugs on bugs, bugs by land, air and sea, bugs all the way down."

Back to the atrocities of war.

Farhrenkrug brings God into this cookbook and my eyes narrow.

"He would have thought that he'd get better at losing everything."

I have a week to read this. I think I can do it.

“Eat the rich,” I said.

Zachary Quinto shout-out.

From "Just Thinking":

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.

I hate it when Carl comes up with a plan all "that just might work!" and then doesn't tell us what it is.

I overlook a lot of stuff in these books, but I will not forgive this jammed up sentence:

Akuma started to ramble through clenched teeth.

"Love the earth like a mole"