Cassandra > Recent Status Updates

Just read the most perfect chapter. I don’t even want to go on.
#ICantGoOnIllGoOn

Mother's day present from my pretty damn fabulous husband and first of all, I'm on page 100 and hadn't noticed. It flows so well, I feel like I've just begun. Also, from what I understand of Ayn Rand, this is the anti Ayn Rand, especially with regards to this chapter. Really enjoying it so far.. feels like it came to me when I needed it, like an idea.

She just described the desert, where I live and breathe, as I have never seen it described before. Oh, what adoration befalls me... :)

Oh man, this book is just killing me in all the best ways. The gender neutrality is brilliant and I am so, so hoping that they never reveal the main character's assigned gender. So good!

In my wishableness, I thought to read this slowly. That has clearly not been my reality, and I regret nothing. It's like she wrote this book For Me. I might reach the final page and simply start right over again. <3

Barely into this book and already completely smitten. I hope to digest it slowly, like a delicious cup of coffee, avoiding the end for as long as possible.

This book (so far) is just one of the many reasons I will ALWAYS look for books at thrift stores. Only two chapters in, and I know it's going to be one that stays with me, that I contemplate long after I've closed the cover. Never even heard of the author, this beauty beckoned to me from the $1 fiction section. So excited!

OMG, this book doesn't just talk about a Chagall. Chagall is IN this book! Jubilation! :)

Chapter 3, listening to the audio book, and finding the profuse biblical references and admonishments much easier digested when spoken to me than read by me. Do not enjoy some of the whiney voices of narrator, but I am enjoying the parenting epiphanies I seem to be having. Feeling certain there will be some good take-aways from this book.

Many moments, so many tiny dogeared pages (I know, but it's so good!). But today.. this one. This one right here:
"Life is very fast, Otto."
"I know that. I've seen that with my children - they were infants in diapers a couple days ago; now they're ready to leave the house."
"This is a way to make it slow."

Ok, so I skipped over some of the more florid poetry. But the works of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) have really grabbed me, especially Vashti. Thank you, Pima County Public Library.

First Chapter only, but Robert Greenberg's enthusiasm is infectious and delightful. Even without discussion of the wind serenades, I think I'm going to enjoy this!

"The light could be in any room; all that was needed was to touch the switch. All rooms were dark until light came. "

What an incredible metaphor!

only on page 13, and I love this book. not only did they remember to describe what the In-Between smells like, it has a sound, AND they've wrapped in the Little Prince. It's like a map of my brain.

So much better than the first time I tried to read this. What a difference 10 years makes!

My grandmother was from Ukraine. She used to spit every time she heard the name "Stalin" and hurl unspeakable Ukrainian insults. I knew it was awful, but I really had No Idea.

Unbelievably saddened by the text-to-world connections of this book today, connections that are still immediately relevant because of historic and current events. "There's only us, there's only this, no day but today," keeps flooding my brain and I can't figure why.

This today: "Maybe the difference between speech and music isn't all that great. We infer a lot from the tone of someone's voice, so imagine that aspect of speech pushed just a little further. The weird cadences of a Valley girl, for instance, might be viewed as a species of singing. The malls of Sherman Oaks are a setting for a kind of massed choir."

Only one chapter in, and have already enjoyed more than a couple guffaws and been moved to tears. I'm going to love this book.

Loved the book, almost entirely ruined the movies for me. Can't imagine what the screenplay writer was thinking.

So much anguish! "All of these interwoven fantasies, then, may have a single, transparent source: they may be the expression, denial, and symbolic of the feeling that he was unloved and unwanted... They are the heartfelt - and unanswered - cry of a child for his parents' love. "

Absolutely loving this book

Enjoyable, but finally realizing why it's taking me so very long to read. Immediatly following reference to Gillian Beer, Gopnik refers to "Middlemarch" (fictional work by George Eliot) as a "mirror of, or practical application of, 'The Origin'". This casual manner of name-dropping occurs throughout and is frustrating for one w/o Gopnik's breadth of knowledge.

"It was the first instance of what would become typical Darwin reasoning: what looks big, beautiful, and designed is just chance plus time..."