Bjorn > Recent Status Updates

Two chapters in and we've already offered our services to the local British governor to root out rebellious natives, and renamed one of the non-rebellious natives "Dusky" since he's biracial and we can't be bothered to pronounce his name.

Yeah, this is going about as well as expected.

My father, who was happy to sit in his solitude, whereas many people are never able to do so and can only stand, awkwardly, in the telephone box of their solitude, knocking on the window and shouting 'excuse me' in a strangled angry voice.

"I'll have you know the blood of pharaohs runs in my veins!"
"Would you like it to stay there?"

The man was clearly mad, but at the heart of his madness was a dreadful cold sanity, a core of pure interstellar ice in the center of the furnace. She’d thought him weak under a thin shell of strength, but it went a lot further than that. Somewhere deep inside his mind, somewhere beyond the event horizon of rationality, the sheer pressure of insanity had hammered his madness into something harder than diamond.

"Få ting er mer irriterende enn fnisende sfinxer."

"...attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the newspaper aloud. Of that group I was one. A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr. Wopsle was imbrued in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest."

In which Dickens invents the True Crime podcast.

In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find…

"Danger has stared me in the back of the head, oh, hundreds of times!"

Jesus, Clavell didn't leave a single scrap of fact about 16th century Japan on the cutting-room floor for this novel.

»Stånder upp! Stånder upp! Solberga prästgård står i brand!»

...Men då de noga genomsökte hela stugan, funno de henne, där hon hade stuckit sig undan mellan den stora ugnen och väggen. Hon hade hållit sig gömd där under striden och var alldeles oskadad, men hon var så förbi av skrämsel, att hon varken kunde tala eller svara.

...Detta är ju Aliens. Fan vad jag älskar Selma.

"The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree."

Oh, it's going to be THAT kind of novel.

"Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person."

"In short, he was the sort of man who could use the word 'personnel' and mean it."

OK, now we're talking.

Stephen Hawking on the anthropic principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg1a5...

...OK, this book took a turn.

It was hard, Richard thought, for people to accept that an event could be utterly devoid of goodness. No one wanted to admit that cruelty really existed. Which is why the letters that came to Starve Acre from second cousins and old school-friends insisted that the experience of Ewan’s death would send the Willoughbys out into the rest of their lives with the sort of inner strength that was only ever forged in grief.

"The bottom (fart) line is this: I don't want to become someone who will blightly carry on when a king's name is as close to 'cunt' as Cnut's is. If I get to the point where that amusement is lost on me, the fact that a big important serious king is very very nearly called King Cunt, King Cunt the Great, or the Great Big Cunt, then I think a very important part of me will have died."

That whole lawn sculpture scene still gets me. I swear it's where Doctor Who got the whole Weeping Angels shtick, but here it comes with character development too.

Danny is a VERY erudite 5-year-old. Sometimes. "The clouds were pregnant with rain, waiting to burst... what's the word for a bad dream?"

They found diamonds on the moon, and gold on a random asteroid. I can't wait to see what our intrepid colonizers heroes find on Mars. Opium?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

[Peps] puffade på sin pipa, en gång, två gånger, och sa: Jag skulle till och med vilja påstå att människan inte har någon själ. Människor har själ, men själen finns inte i oss, den finns mellan oss.
Många har genom tiderna försökt förklara vad själen är, men för mig var detta en av de allra vackraste definitionerna. Själen är den rytm som fyller tomrummet mellan allt levande.

Tre böcker som inte finns på GR:
"En verklig plats", Sven Westerlund (2022) ****
"Tio tusen år i Botkyrka", Erik Sundström (1985) ***
"Botkyrka kyrka", Robert Bennett (1975) ***

Is Marmee's maiden name Flanders?

OK, so that's a solid 100 pages of very cromulent exposition before we actually get into the action...

"Det är helt naturligt att den unga generationen lever med en starkare känsla av undergångshot än de som nått över de trettio (...) 'Hur vill du att världen ska se ut om femtio år?' 'Förutsatt att det finns en värld då' (...) Vilka är de egentligen, ungdomarna i den nya generationen? är en fråga som ofta ställs, och man är frestad att svara: De som hör tickandet."
- 1970.

The US cover is so ugly it HAS to play into the plot somehow.

So far basically a Fillyjonk upgrade. Which is not a bad thing.