Michelle Bizzell > Recent Status Updates

I've lost the ability to be immersed in fairy tale adjacent worlds like this I think. The characters and the romance are not drawing me in and I am short on time to listen to 7+ more hours of magical places being described

Lots of interesting facts, but I don't have the attention for this right now

Many thoughts about the first installment of this famous book. Despite the length, I am still looking forward to the rest to see the fall play out.

I am definitely learning a lot about 1940's Harlem and the treatment of TB. The author has included detailed biographies of several nurses who we are following. But the up close and personal medical procedures are pretty gory.

The ghost thing is not working for me. There might be something here about grief and letting go, but I am not open to it right now.

These ladies have serious main character syndrome but I am here for the drama.

+1 for a Tchaikovsky reference. Not totally sure I'm fully in the story here, but I'm enjoying this as a piece of history.

I was excited to return to this series, but I think in the interim I have lost the enthusiasm I had for YA fantasy. It's fine, but I'm just not pulled into he world and my attention keeps wandering.

Taking a break because this detailed account of how the evangelical right became a thing is hard to read.

I am inspired by Jane Jacobs' no-holds-barred attack on the status quo in the introduction and can only hope to one day achieve that level of eloquent savagery. That being said, the world has changed a lot since this was published in the 60's and the observations in the text after the introduction are less relevant now. This is a testament to the impact this book had, but make it feel dated. I may come back.

A cool setup, but I just can't get into YA right now and I'm going to give myself a break to come back to this when I'm in the mood.

Being an astronaut is cool. But being an astronaut doesn't make you cool in the sense that I now want to buy you a beer and listen to your stories. If all of your punchlines fall flat and you seem kind of douchey having a cool job doesn't fix that. I picked this book up as one of the library's blind dates with a book, but I don't think things are going to work out. Maybe I just don't like astronauts.

The volume of Herman Melville quotes is getting to be a bit much. Did anyone else write about Sperm Whales? The information is interesting but I need a break from Moby Dick.

I'm intrigued but this world is brutal. I ended up checking trigger warnings here, so if you are considering this you may want to as well. https://triggerwarningdatabase.com/20...

My disappoinment that I do not care about anything in this book, not the characters, the setting, or the plot, is acute. I wanted a fantasy about the sister of Mozart to be something I loved but I can't be bothered to finish.

Wakanda doesn't have suburbs - Kendra Pierre-Louis
This is not what I got from watching the Black Panther movie and now I'm disappointed in myself. Excellent essay.

Getting a good overview of the author's Coyote America, which I read a few years ago in the coyote chapter.

The detective stoies were interesting to see such early examples but not as compelling as Poe's other works. I picked this up for the Masque of the Red Death and that was the best of the collection. Some of the others I ended up skipping.

Having read Green Metropolis and a few other books addressing urban planning, this was glancing over a lot of topics that I was already familiar with and not going into much depth.  

There are still 12 hours left in this audiobook for a plot to appear or everyone to die. At this point, either would work if it will end.

David Owen does not mince words to express how much he feels cars are destroying the world/society. 🚗

I've listened to this book for 13 hours so far and only one character has made a decision based on actual motivations like they feel an emotion and they want something specific to change in their life for a reason. And that was a side character trying to escape being trafficked.
What I'm learning is that life on the cow trail is just a lot of people who end up just going along with life. They're kinda funny though.

Reading this for a work book club, but already I can tell the author and I are not on the same page about writing style. Luckily it is short.

The beginning was focused on the history of the events in the 90's and early 2000's that helped to shape the twenty first century, which was interesting. Especially since the book was written in 2004, with all of the starry-eyed optimism that people presumably had before the 2008 housing market crash. But the author spends too long making the same recommendations without being knowledgeable on the relevant subjects

The beginning was focused on the history of the events in the 90's and early 2000's that helped to shape the twenty first century, which was interesting. Especially since the book was written in 2004, with all of the starry-eyed optimism that people presumably had before the 2008 housing market crash.

'The opposite of poverty is justice.' Every part of this is unflinching and hard.

The section about life and well-being is brutally straight forward. Do not expect philosophy from a psychologist with a Nobel Prize in Economics.

The lives of these mathematicians from the past are much juicer than I anticipated.