Emily > Recent Status Updates

Through all the shrines [at Stratford-upon-Avon] surge English and American tourists, either people who have read too much Shakespeare at the expense of good, healthy detective stories or people who have never read him at all and hope to get the same results by bumping their heads on low beams.

Enjoying this quite a bit so far.

"I'm as good as Day," Janet protested irritably.
"No." Sidney made flat response. "You aren't."

Poor Janet!

Yay! The first three books barely advanced the timeline four months, but this one skips ahead and Janie's actually going to high school on the mainland!

"There are days when a small kindness, even from someone you dislike, can sting you almost to tears. It is disconcerting that people will not be all of one piece, that hard people will suddenly be tender, and gentle people hurt you. It breaks into that novelist's tale that you are making of your own life and theirs, and makes you ashamed."

This is a refreshing change of pace for me. I lost track of the body count about 100 pages ago.

omigosh this is so good.

I'm going to set this aside and maybe pick it up again after reading the Boel Westin biography. I've been feeling myself a bit at sea here, and think I'll enjoy the letters a lot more with more context and understanding of all the people and events in Tove Jansson's life.

Beverly Cleary will turn 104 on April 12th! A good time to pluck this one from the to read pile.

Bracing myself for the Fruitlands chapter. I'll be glad when LMA is old enough to have some agency.

I had made a guess at my page number in the earlier update, and it turned out I was much further along than I'd thought, and then, when I saw how much of the end of the book was taken up by footnotes, I thought I might as well press on and finish.

I'm going leave this unfinished. The parts about Rose as an adult, I'm finding just too depressing.

I have seven hours of listening left of this audio book, and I don't know if I can keep going. I dread returning to it. Just one horrible thing after another. It's affecting my mood. But so many people seem to love it. Maybe I'd be better off reading it, rather than have the audio version stretch out the experience?

Dirty British Coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack
Butting through the channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rail, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

from John Masefield, "Cargoes"

"i thank You God for most this amazing
day for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes"

e.e cummings

It was possibly a mistake to gulp down the first three books of this series without even knowing if the fourth one will be published in English.

I thought I was pretty much done with first person narrators navigating high-school life, but this book made me miss my subway stop twice today.

1 CD down, 16 to go.

Reading this aloud. Wasn't enjoying the first few chapters (have never, ever, enjoyed reading about the Dursleys); things always get so much better when we're firmly ensconced at Hogwarts.

If Nick Hornby read nothing but the phone book, he could fill a volume with funny, discursive, essays about it. Hey, does that say page 105 of 135? Oh dear, not much left.

"But the words went out of her head at the last minute, and all she actually said was, 'I've got her.'"