Andrew Mcc > Recent Status Updates

Incorrect update before

What’s going on? What are we doing?

Her copy of Eat, Pray, Love has been read so many times the cover has fallen off.

That’s it—that’s what’s been bothering me. Instead of reading EPL and seeing Elizabeth Gilbert as a self-unaware narcissist ruining the lives of people around her, the author of this book read EPL and said “I wanna do this too.” So she leaves her fiance to travel the world in the same vein. I should DNF this.

With her writing so openly about cheating on her fiancé with multiple men—a fiancé she admits is a great guy who treats her well and loves her—one has to wonder what his friends told him when this memoir came out. “Hey bro don’t read your ex’s book” just doesn’t seem to cover it.

Bought copy at the sigmund Freud museum in his old office/apartment. Reading at cafe central, where Freud frequented, along with Tito, Trotsky, Herzl, and many others. Have been planning this sequence for decades. I feel like Charlotte in Lost in Translation: why don’t I feel anything?

Why is it a common trope of travel memoirs that one must leave the decent, loving boyfriend behind in order to travel the world? Why are so many travel memoirs inverse romance novels? I want to support your travel bug but not at the expense of cheating on a decent guy who loves the narrator.

Why is every travel memoir an inverse romance novel. I don’t care about the man you left behind or how sad you were to break his heart. I’ll read his memoir later.

Train listen

Bb is so traumatized

Eh.

The transition from blitz+invasion to postwar observations has slowed the narrative considerably. Biographies don’t follow narrative arcs. I am bored.

Miller is present for the liberation of Dachau and thinks, at first, that it and Buchenwald are staged propaganda stunts faked by the USA. A remarkable detail

Just casually trucking along enjoying the history of photography and then there’s a passage on life in the blitz in London that just guts me because, well, it’s the quotidian hassle of life in Kyiv right now also. Will quote passage later.

Can I finish this bad boy this weekend while also managing to get my homework done?

The problem with introducing a new POV character for the last 2 books is that I’m only invested in the story insofar as he’s interacting with characters from the first 7 books. Now we’re off on a solo adventure and I’m losing interest.

God what an experience reading something like this. The finale of a series that was foundational for me in like 2002… but which I never got to finish until now. Characters I haven’t interacted with in 20+ years. Wow. Should have re-read some of the prior books in preparation but probably not necessary.

On the advice of some internet people I am doing one episode a week alongside a reading guide. I did Telemachus and Nestor the last two weeks and excited to jump into Proteus tonight.

Finding it incredibly valuable to read side by side with Ulysses. Very chuffed when I check a footnote to realize I already knew its significance.

Couldn’t read Ulysses without this book.

Okay he’s cooking.

Here’s a gripe about novels like this. Where they’re experts I can’t tell the difference. But ablative absolute is like, Latin II level stuff. And yeah more complicated ablatives come along later, but absolutes are pretty easy to identify even at higher levels. All these characters have been studying and reading Latin IV-V+ level texts for years. Tacitus may be a problem but it’s absolutely not his absolutes

Well that’s certainly a turning point.

Still don’t really like the main character which makes it a slog, but the secondary characters are all compelling enough.

Other barflies have stopped making fun of me for not making progress on the book.

Huh.

Getting into it slowly. New characters helped. Every bartender or barista or waitress here is so damn excited about it. I may buy a Ukrainian copy and give it away to my favorite host.

Bartender here is a big RF KUANG fan so she’s obsessed with me now and quizzing me on every booktok book I should read

It was the only bearable thing to buy on the English language bookshelf here so I’m gonna give it a third attempt.