E. M. Keller > Recent Status Updates

I really need a history lesson on the Spanish Civil War. It's the way I thought this was World War I until I googled "What is the setting of For Whom The Bell Tolls" 😅 this is why I'm such a Penguin Classics stand with their long introductions - I need to be taught the book before I start reading

"Yes. There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer...The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next."

Not a huge fan of this author, but enjoying the story

"Gardens remind us that everything is connected and that "everything" includes us."

Let's play a game called, "how many times do I have to read about how beneficial meditation is before I actually start practicing it??"

Let's play a game called "how many times do I have to read about how beneficial mediation can be before I actually start practicing it?"

Definitely finding some useful information in here but sometimes the over-casual tone in a book like this is so cringe. It makes me trust the author less. Like yes totally for making science writing accessible but sometimes it goes too far

My goodness I just love this. I feel like I know these people. My people aren't Appalachian, but they're country and it makes me so sad and so happy to read this thinking of my grandma and Papa and Aunt who have passed and the farm that's been sold and the large family gatherings that happen less and less as time goes on

Rereading one of my childhood comfort reads from my dear Annie

"Now those moments seem proof that self-love is an instinct, as animal as any other function of the self. The ferocity of my affection could not be erased, only suppressed under total vigilance. My self-hatred was not self-generated. It was an expression of the environment outside of my body, which, it eventually turned out, I could change." (111)

Oh goodness, finally feeling some form of physical anxiety while reading the scene with the white dress for the fancy dress ball. Why can't she just give up this life and marry Frank instead??

Oh brother, THIS GUY STINKS!!!!

"Town and prairie were lost in the wild storm, which was neither Earth nor sky. Nothing but fierce winds and a blank whiteness. A lamp could shine out through the blackest darkness and a shout could be heard a long way, but no light and no cry could reach through a storm that had wild voices and an unnatural light of its own." (122)

Me after it's been cold for about 2 weeks: "This must be how Laura Ingalls Wilder felt in The Long Winter. I should reread that"

Okay but who thought it would be a good idea to put smiling women on the cover 😣

Ok well I'm devastated

Natalie would have had such a great Tumblr blog in 2013

If I'm being fr I am not reading this anymore lol it is low key boring, but it was my Grandma's favorite book so I'll read it some day

So far this is very different than Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Like some of these sentences are just doing TOO MUCH girl.

"For both advocates and critics, unshaven armpits and legs served as a symbolic reminder of women's labor—in this case, the repetitive, expensive, and often invisible labor of maintaining hair-free flesh. The question whether such efforts were a trivial nuisance...or the very embodiment of women's oppression...would shape discussions of women's bodily choices for decades to come [after the 1970s]" (118-119).

"Even as fashion and custom allowed some women unprecedented freedom of movement, new forms of self-regulation and constraint were coming into being. In a remarkably short time...'body hair became disgusting' to middle-class American women, its removal a way 'to separate oneself from cruder people, lower class, and immigrant'" (79.)