Julie > Recent Status Updates

Mars is Heaven by Bradbury. Pretty good. A crew from earth lands on Mars and finds that it looks like a quaint town in Ohio. A solid 3.5 stars

Scanners Live in Vain. Long but kept my attention. Really cool. 5 stars

That only a mother by Merril. Creepy. I didn’t like it. 2 stars

First Contact by Leinster. A cool concept but very repetitious. The ending (last sentence) was juvenile. 2.5 stars

Arena by Fredric Brown. Finally one I really liked! Very engaging, action packed, and thought provoking. 5 stars

Huddling place by Simak
This one was moody. And sad. I liked it.
3.5 stars

Mimsy were the borograves by Padgett. This one was mildly interesting. I think it had potential, but I lost interest along the way. 2.5 stars

The Weapon Shop by van Vogt. 2 stars.
I thought it had potential, but it was another disappointment. Too long for what it was.

“I’d loved thinking of myself as having the capacity for mature love, which I’d experienced as self-erasure and processed as achievement.”

“I’d thought the marriage would improve, somehow, if I just improved myself. If I could sufficiently better myself, the fumes of my betterment would form a medicinal cloud that would surround and improve my husband.”

“So at his worst, my husband was an arrogant, insecure, workaholic, narcissistic bully with middlebrow taste, who maintained power over me by making major decisions without my input or consent. It could still be worse, I thought.”

“He sounded as if he’d do anything to save our marriage - anything but curtailing his arrogance or going to a single session of individual or marital therapy or apologizing for anything ever.”

“I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.”

“When I said that I enjoyed being able to travel for work again, John said he couldn’t believe I’d even have that thought. He said he wished he didn’t have to travel so much. He said he always missed us when he was gone.

I got maybe one trip a semester, while he went to Calgary twice a month. I wondered if he truly missed us or if just hated being alone.”

“At that moment I believed my husband didn’t value w, my work, or my life. At that moment, I wanted out of the marriage. At that moment, if we hadn’t had a kid, I’d have left.

The feeling wasn’t resolved; it just got set aside.”

“Sometimes I thought that if I weren’t writing and publishing and traveling so much, I wouldn’t be so frazzled, but then I remembered that those were the things that gave me energy. What sapped my energy was running the house and being a wife.”

“John didn’t just need to win the fight; he needed me to agree that it was my responsibility never to say anything that might make him feel as if he’d ever done anything wrong. Feeling that he’d done something wrong really threatened his sense of entitlement.”

“He didn’t realize that I didn’t have time to shit during the day. He still shitted like a bachelor, whenever and for however long he liked.”

“The cumulative amount of eye contact we made over two days might have been only ten seconds, but it felt like an entire alternate life.”

Nightfall by Asimov. Interesting premise but kinda thin. Didn’t care about any of the characters. More psychological than sci-fi. 2.5 stars

“It wasn’t happiness; it was the temporary cessation of pain. But I wouldn’t know that for another seven years.”

“I wanted neither a divorce nor a disdainful partner, so there I was, hoping for a third option.”

“I was a layer cake of abandonment and hurt and fury, iced with a smile.”
“I thought, If I had the energy I’d leave him, and then I folded up that little thought, wrapped it in gauze, and swallowed it.”

“By noon I’d showered, dressed, tidied the house of John’s shoes and clothes, put away laundry, swept to the floor, watered the garden, moved boxes to the garage, cooked breakfast, eaten, done the dishes, taken out the recycling, handled correspondence, and made the bed John had gotten up and taken a shit.”

“I decided to examine my rage, determine what I needed, and rely on John for no part of it. I imagined never needing to ask him for anything ever again.”

“And yet no married woman I knew was any better off, so I determined to carry on.”

“The reality I wanted didn’t include this event, so I stepped around it and continued on.”

“Agreeing to be someone’s wife should be done only if you can’t help yourself, I thought, but of course no one can help herself.”

“Tonight I learned why my mother always squealed and shrink away when my father tried to touch her: She was a fortress. And inside that fortress was rage, and in the center of that rage was the pain of the insult of being treated like a stupid maid.”