Kenci > Recent Status Updates

"Some folks would say there’s not a lot to do in a place like that, but it sure is beautiful in those mountains. I never lacked for something to do. Every walk in the woods was worth taking.”

"The scene that met his eyes was typical of the English countryside as depicted on Xmas cards and in old-fashioned melodramas. Everywhere was snow, deep drifts of it...and up here on the fringe of Dartmoor it had attained a depth of several feet. In the tiny village of Sittaford, at all times remote from the world, and now almost completely cut off, the rigours of winter were a very real problem."

So lovely! I just wish it had been longer. Now I need to watch the movie. And read more epistolary books this year!

“Why is it that people who wouldn't dream of stealing anything else think it's perfectly all right to steal books?”

“If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.”

Beautiful and heartbreaking! As I was reading, the writing reminded me a bit of Eowyn Ivey and Audrey Niffenegger.

"Hello ghosts, Severine says and curtsies to the room. She’s fourteen now and wants to make a good impression, behave like a grown-up; not like the last time they were here, when she was a child and ran around the room trying to catch them like moths in her palm."

I could've done without the sections on author T.H. White. But that's just me. I did enjoy Helen's journey with her goshawk Mabel and learning more about falconry in general. I guess, since this was a journey of grief, I was expecting more on her relationship with her father and childhood anecdotes. Not that she owed the readers any of that. I just thought the bits we did get were especially beautiful and poignant.

"From their first days together, she had warned about not taking that river lightly. About whirlpools and eddies and riptides. That the Mississippi was a dangerous river."

"The day Evie discovered we weren’t really sisters, I pretended to be as surprised as she was, both of us staring wide-eyed at a certificate we’d found tucked inside a copy of Jane Eyre in our mother’s bookcase. Evie was ten then, and no longer aware of anything before Mama and me. But I knew that Evie had come to us almost two years old, and that she had arrived on my sixth birthday. An unexpected gift."

Trying to read at least one non-fiction book a month this year. It's a genre I often neglect, but I have so many on my TBR.

" ‘I love that you know what you need and can ask for it,’ she said. ‘If people could learn just one thing, it’s to know what we need and how to ask for it.’ "

So lovely and so many feelings. I love a great epistolary novel! This one is deserving of all the hype. Mr. Lubeck was my favorite. The audiobook (full cast) was fantastic!

"Grief shared, I think, can produce two outcomes. Either you bind yourselves together and hold on for dear life, or you let go and up goes a wall too high to be crossed."

"Remember: words, especially those written, are immortal."

"Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn...and even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?"

"A big dog would prob’ly like Dr. Seuss. A dog would want a book to have action in it. A cat, on th’ other hand, acted like it didn’t need nobody to read to it, it had already read ever’thing in th’ store by its ownself."

4.54 stars. I was expecting the outcome of this book to be more like The Terror which I read a few years ago, and even though it took an unexpected turn, I still really enjoyed it. I loved the MCs and their friendship. Simmons always deep dives into minute details which can seem a bit much at times, but many of those details always end up sticking with me and adding to the overall atmosphere of the story.

“Richard, weren’t you one of the first to see the monster’s tracks on Lhakpa La when you led Mallory up to that pass in ’twenty-one?”

“The porters knew exactly what the tracks were and who or what had made them,” said Finch in his soft German accent. “They were made by Metohkangmi…a yeti.”

" ‘Brave an’ good is enough right there. Wish I could hear it when you preach my funeral.’ ‘Maybe you can.’ ‘I hope you’ll give me some hand-clappin’ gospel music. Gospel reach down to th’ deep waters of th’ soul an’ turn tears to joy.’ "

"The ghosts of the 4 dead men speak the loudest from the stone to me, and any climber must learn to hear them and to love and respect climbing on the same stones they trod, sleeping on the same slabs where they slept, triumphing on the same narrow summit where 7 men shouted in triumph, and focusing hard on descending safely down the still treacherous section where 4 of them fell thousands of feet to their deaths."

I've been holding off reading this because a new Mitford novel is such an unexpected gift from Jan Karon! I'm going to try not to rush through it.

"We don’t have to do great things to make a difference. We can make a great difference by doing small things graciously."

With the winter storm headed our way, I'm back in my Arctic Era. This winter has been so mild in Oklahoma until now and not suitable for arctic/polar themed reading.

This one has been on my TBR forever, and I loved The Terror. Such a slow burn but worth it.

"The summit of the Matterhorn offers very clear choices: a misstep to the left and you die in Italy; a wrong step to the right and you die in Switzerland."

"THEY ARRIVE ON THE SNOW during the last endless day of summer. Forty-eight hours of light and then, they gather outside to watch their first sunset of the South. The ice shelf they’re standing on is floating, slowly, towards the coast – will one day melt into the sea. There is nothing permanent about this never-ending white."

"The rain fell steadily upon the big house and the small, the moss-grown shingles of the corncrib, the corrugated tin of the barn. It fell with a steady roar into the depths of the woods and thrashed the gray waters of the pond. It sent rivulets into the bolt-hole of the groundhog, the den of the fox, the burrow of the field hare."

Beautiful book. All the feels. Laughing and crying.

"I loved those dogs so much, and it came back to me in spades each day."

"A great friend of mine says that a pet dying is almost more devastating, because humans come and go... But a pet is totally ours. They stay."

"...for they know us like no one else does, and they forgive us better than humans. Their histories are deceptively complex."

This one had me both laughing and crying within the first few pages!

"One of the more useful parts of dog ownership is that they get you out of bed every day, even when you don’t really feel like it. If you’re sick, they get you moving. If you’re down, they get you up. They’re the best personal trainers in the world."

"Can we break a trait? Can we inherit characteristics like being late? Or on my side crying without good reason? Did we have ancestors who went around being late and weeping?"

Absolutely loved this book. Beautiful and heartbreaking,

"It is even more difficult to leave the graveyard, than it was to enter it. So many graves to walk past, so many sad and angry ghosts tugging at her skirts, touching her with their cold fingers, pulling at her, naggingly, piteously, saying, Don’t go, wait for us, don’t leave us here."

“You never had a clue about anything till it happened and you learned the truth about yourself.”

Absolutely loving this beautiful book!

"She keeps bees here, in hemp-woven skeps, which hum with industrious and absorbed life; there are rows of herbs, flowers, plants, stems that wind up supporting twigs. Agnes’s witch garden, her stepmother calls it, with a roll of her eyes."

"Compared with the upstart juveniles of, say, the Alps or Everest, the Blue Ridge mountains were worn to a nub. In these elders was some divine wisdom he might have picked out like a walnut from its shell if he had more time."