Grace B > Recent Status Updates

Although not intentionally humorous, I’m finding this book to be really amusing and highly enjoyable. It’s incredible that it’s a bit over 300 years old and still SO readable and contemporary-feeling. It uses no slang so there’s nothing unfamiliar in the language to decipher. I really like it so far!

So many ways I see myself in these characters (and so many ways I do not as well).

SMALL complaint: I feel he had the kids’ ages wrong in the timeline for when they were in Florence. How could Hallie have been 14 but Lang was in college? And if Hallie was 14, how could Barney have been in grad school? And how could this have been 20 years before 1972? Lang and David were born in March 1938…

Just beautifully written

Charity is like a real-life friend. At times impossible to love, at times impossible not to love.

Stegner’s prose remains pitch perfect.

The serpent in Eden metaphor…striking.

I’m more than a little uneasy about how parenting/children are depicted. Is it because Stegner is a man? Is it because of the era? Is it because of Charity’s very rigid, stereotypically New Englander attitudes about intellectualism? Even GREAT men were once children, and children ARE people. This is the one real complaint I have about this book.

Being able to shrug off the difference between $3 million and $4 million in 1933 is pretty wild.

Also childbirth from a father’s perspective is pretty harrowing.

Every time it mentions Aunt Emily’s knitting, I’m struck with the urge to take up knitting again.

This is a marvel of a book—really loving it.

Despite my only other Stegner attempt having been a DNF, this one came highly recommended by several people.

I have always loved academia fiction and the vibe of university life and a university town, so I am extremely taken in by the first couple chapters, by the idealistic, hungry Morgans and the gregarious, magnanimous Langs. Excited for this one!

At this point I’m absolutely mesmerized by this book. The writing is so spare and minimalistic, as though told by a midwestern farmer, and the things being described in this very straightforward, calm way are intense emotions, incredibly dramatic situations, cruelty, resentment, vengeance, and what it means to love, lose, and experience hurt. It is like nothing I’ve read. Brings new meaning to “modernism.”

This book is getting nuts. Digging into the politics of academia and literary formalism via an insolent, cheating grad student. I literally had no idea this was coming. What a wild ride.

Never mind, I have zero sympathy for Edith.

Chapter 7 on Stoner’s love of literature, the written word, and the English language was really glorious. This book does a beautiful job of illuminating the private ways that we are each so unique.

Edith is really stressing me out. Half the time I’m like, What’s wrong with her? And half the time I’m like, Oh, dear, I might be just like her.

I really, really like his writing.

Overwritten, unrealistic dialogue, preachy, weak literary devices (like making the people of the Cove more knowledgeable about scripture than the minister). Even with all that, I’m enjoying my re-read.