Rob Baker > Recent Status Updates

During Covid, I stopped going to the gym, but found a great home- exercise routine online on a website set up by this author. Been following him ever since (and still using the home-exercise routine :)

In his newsletter, he's been telling enhustiastic stories about the approach of the publication date, so I wanted to read it!

So far, lots of helpful ideas about failure and success, told with a fun sense of humor.

Lots of beautiful writing in this grim, bloody novel:

"...and his big idea is to open his stupid eyes, which he doesn and he sees a raft of rain arrows fired from sagittarii of holy archers, a soggy debauch of dead roads and buildings and humans, and a foothill of brick that fell so close it covered Bagger in a pale dust that the rain is turning to grime" (156).

"...and though the angel is carried like Hestia's flame, night falls anyway" (119).

Had to look up the allusion to "Hestia's flame":

"The eternal, sacred fire of the Greek goddess of the hearth and home. Representing warmth, community unity, and purity, it was kept perpetually burning in the public hearth of ancient cities and taken by colonists to light the fires of new settlements" (per Google search)

"...except now slaughter seems pointless to Bagger...and isn't it possible the angel was shot down while serving a summons to the human race, subpoenaed to defend the crimes they mistook as valor" (100).

“and Bagger dares a glance at the others, even amid the death, rumbles and offal stink, perhaps because of it, they have the translucent look of Bishop Bagger’s rapt congregation, because stories are hope, stories have all sorts of fantastical twists, underdog victories, and heavenly inventions, all things soldiers yearn for,” (47).

“…the war would never end, like the carnage won’t ever end, it’s a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can’t ever be stopped…”

"Invariably, i f any member of the family had a problem, Larry knew the best way to solve it; if anyone boasted of an achievement, Larry could never see what the fuss was about--the thing was perfectly easy to do providing one used one's brain. It was due to this attitude of pomposity that he set the villa on fire" (218).

"Outside, the warm wind would shoulder the shutters, making them creak, and the raindrops would chase each other down the window-pane like transparent tadpoles" (96).

"Mother spent a lot of her spare time choosing places to be buried in, but they were generally situated in the most remote areas, and one had visions of the funeral cortège dropping exhausted by the wayside long before it had reached the grave" (99).

"Gradually the magic of the island setteld over us as gently and clingingly as pollen. Each day had a tranquiility, a timelessness, about it, so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us, glossy and colourful like a child's transfer and with the same tinge of unreality" (46).

I have a library copy that is about 4" x 6" with a built-in cloth bookmark...and 372 pages instead of 273...

"...all of us were standing there, like a storage room full of puppets..." (295).

"She gave me a look of approval. That was the way women operated in my community: if you wanted to be a wealthy Christian woman and maintain good standing, you needed to publicly disavow your luxuries in order to maintain possession of them" (80).