Julie > Recent Status Updates

Today is the last day to enter the giveaway for IN ANOTHER LIFE- in celebration of its 10 Year Publication Anniversary! https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

Friends, in celebration of the 10 Year Anniversary of my novel IN ANOTHER LIFE, I am giving away 5 signed copies. Enter via the Goodreads Giveaway page! Here's the link you can paste into your browser: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

"The challenge for those of us who are not chosen and instead watch love pass us by is to learn from it, marvel at it, and not grow bitter and incapable of love ourselves."

I'm in such a reading slump Started and abandoned 3 novels in the past week. Is it my attention span? I just can't seem to settle into a good read...

I have a break between library holds, so I'm picking up where I left off several weeks ago and this time I'm completely absorbed in this story!

100 pages in and I don't want to put it down!

I know
someone who saw a famous
lounge singer carried
out of a Vegas hotel
on a stretcher with a broken
light bulb in his ass.
Be that guy.
Don't be Jesus, be the Shroud.
Don't be the savior, be the stain.

from Rhapsody

I know
someone who saw a famous
lounge singer carried
out of a Vegas hotel
on a stretcher with a broken
light bulb in his ass.
Be that guy.
Don't be Jesus, be the Shroud.
Don't be the savior, be the stain.

from Rhapsody

'It seems wrong
to curl now within the confines
of a poem. You can't hide
from what you made
inside what you made

or so I'm told."

from Curl

Setting aside for now- too many library reads with due dates commanding my attention. This is good, just very slow moving. Perhaps I should have saved it for those long winter nights...

So far behind with reviews, it makes me panicky. :-D

Ah jeez. This is such a disappointment. But I'm more than halfway. Shall persevere to the end. Gah.

Early 17th Century: The Jesuits make a good impression in Beijing, while in Rome, Galileo pisses off the Pope with his heliocentrism....

My beloved Cathars (stars of my first novel, In Another Life) take center stage as the book enters the 12th century....

“Destiny is all!” Ch 8 starts with Charlemagne and ends with Æthelstan. Couple hundred years and a whole lotta history!

I love the descriptions of Skellig Michael, how the monks there felt themselves to be in a liminal space between earth and heaven. I haven't been-I just feel that tours of this fragile place are so destructive- but I've seen it from a distance and can imagine how, in the 6th century, it must have seemed like the edge of the world.

Nero: debauched freak. But crikey. The parallels between the end days of the Roman Empire and the current state of the Western world? Chilling. Post-modern moral relativism is ghastly.

My very first audio book! I've decided I need to cut back on listening to political podcasts and take my precious walking time to learn something :-)

Yes, I'm rather late on the uptake of this one!

This is not the searing page-turner that Kingdom of Ice is. Fascinating but a bit plodding. Still, a great read. I appreciated the deep dive, as it were, into ritual cannibalism and Māori approach to vengeance/justice.

Setting aside for a few days for a book with a more pressing library due date.

Struggling to find my way here, but I'm committed to the end. Beautiful prose in search of a plot...

Hooray for long holiday weekends- I'm finally caught up on book reviews!

Rereading for a new book club

I skipped the intervening 6 books in the series because I saw this in the library and needed a filler read while I waited for a few of the dozens of books I have on hold to arrive. A few pages in and I’m hooked. And thanks to an opening flashback, I don’t feel like I’ve missed anything (authors: not a good idea if you want readers to invest in your backlist!)

This is slow-going for me. I'm hanging in there because I'm invested in the characters, and the setting itself is so full of suspense.

Perhaps because the world is so very loud right now, I am enjoying the peace and simplicity of this very lovely, and loving, novel.

I was nearly turned away from reading this by a friend who found it tedious and warned me away. It's slow, yes, but gentle and so lovely. The dialogue keeps it sparking along.

"Oh, the hunger for words pure as clear water
that shall slake the pain of or parched tongues
and, splashed against our brows, shall let us see.
In such a moment locusts reinstruct our rapture.
Cold and mute, we are led up from the dark worlds
into a sunstruck glade loud with rilling water.
At the song's start, the raw tongue stammers out
an urge toward paradise, a version of ease."