Naia > Recent Status Updates

"I am half inclined to think, Fanny, that you do not quite know your own feelings."

Ah, if I had a nickel...

"Nothing is more painful to the human mind, than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows, and deprives the soul both of hope and fear."

Just re-read "Street Walker," and it's officially my favorite short story of 2020 so far.

Whew. This collection could have just as easily been titled 'Difficult Men'

"And we might, in our lives, have many thresholds, many houses to walk out from and view the stars, or to turn and go back to for warmth and company. But the real one--the actual house not of beams and nails but of existence itself--is all of earth, with no door, no address separate from oceans or stars, or from pleasure or wretchedness either, or hope, or weakness, or greed."

Wow, really loving this more than I expected to. Really interesting, very suspenseful.

Just shy of reaching my reading goal, but it matters not-- I've read some of the best books of my life (so far) this year. Have a happy and healthy new year, my fellow goodreaders!

For every page I turn it seems two are added to the back. Loving this though, so it's all good.

Stating the obvious here, but H.H. is a real creep.

I don't even mind that the previous library patron must have read this in the middle of sandstorm. I'm so excited to read this book!

Just finished part 2 and still compelled to go on, but, wow...This is a challenge. The heavy Jamaican dialect, the stream of consciousness prose, the graphic language and violence, the constant changes in voice--not for the faint of heart.

This is intense.

"She prized the frank, the open-hearted, the eager character beyond all others. Warmth and enthusiasm did captivate her still. She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped."

A lot of typos in this book. I've just met a character wearing hiking books on her feet.

What imaginative stories!

"In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters"

"The act of eating food straight from its source, raw, unprocessed, still warm from the sun or briny from the ocean, is possibly the best eating experience there is."

Love the idea of Multiple Discoveries. So fascinating.

"Hover" by Nell Freudenberger. I LOVED this story.

So many slappable people in one book!

This is so good. Incredible, really, but it hurts. And even though I just reached the section entitled 'The Happy Years,' I might have to put it down for a day or two.

"Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities."

Whenever I put this book down and then pick it up later, I'm transported immediately to Alexandria, Mississippi; I'm on an adventure with Harriet and Hely, or nodding my head along with Ida Rhew about the trouble with kids these days, or barefoot, stuck in a dream-like existence with Allison. I love being submerged inside of a story like this. It's just glorious.