Mark Robison > Recent Status Updates

Goodreads sure seems to be trying to kill itself by making posting an exercise in frustration. Tips: Input star rating and dates read before entering text. Write your text somewhere else and then copy-paste. Avoid using built-in author/book link feature. (It works if you refresh the page after adding each link.) My main method now is to enter one step (rating, dates, text), refresh the URL, do another step, repeat.

* Escape: 3 stars. Most of these early "stories" seem to be the author figuring things out. This one is about a woman who leaves her husband of 12 years, runs into a bit of an obstacle, and goes back. He doesn't even realize she's left.

* Interrupted Story: 3 stars. Yet another story about a rational, intellectual man who the main character is attracted to but who also doesn't understand simple human interaction. "He was a difficult man, distant, and the worst thing was that he spoke candidly of his weaknesses: where could I attack him, then, if he knew himself?" The author seems at a loss as to the best way to help men not be so stupid.

* Fever Dream: 2 stars. Too abstract for me.

* Jimmy and I: 3 stars. A brief sketch in which the author mulls whether to analyze men in light of Hegel's theory of contradictions or simply that they're "a bunch of animals."

* Obsession: 4 stars. Expansion of idea in her first story where a young woman has an affair with a rational man enamored of his own intellect who felt "the more he suffered, the more alive he was."

And: "He’d said to me, continuing another cold thought: 'You eat chocolate as if it were the most important thing in the world. You have a horrible taste for things.' He ate like someone crumpling a piece of paper."

From the first pages, I realized this is a classic and I want to remember each story.

* The Triumph: 5 stars. First story, published at age 20. A young woman loves but feels inferior to the man in her life who is an intellectual bully. Until she has an epiphany. "A warm ray of sunshine enveloped her. She laughed. He'd be back, because she was the stronger one."