Jan Priddy > Recent Status Updates

The Bobbies case was a key turning point, but the profiling of that one seems obvious to me. Despite the Behavioral Science Unit central to this story, I am disappointed not to find any discussion of how Behaviorism altered the discipline of psychology to focus on countable and measurable behaviors. Burgess discounts the "instinct" the FBI relied upon earlier. [note: I've read a couple chapters out of order.]

This could have been a much shorter book designed purely to advance the author's thesis. Instead it is a book for people who want to read about serial killers, which is not the same thing at all.

still reading Molly's intro

"Squirrels plant thousands of trees every year

just from forgetting where they left
their acorns. If we aimed to be just half as good
as one of the earth's mistakes,
we could turn so much around."
p. 39

"There are enough tears between us to put a redwood tree out of a nettle seed. or to water the garden beneath us for a century" (108).

It is suggested that the foal's dam may have died and the foal born so small and frail because of Ramadan. However, there are specific dietary exceptions for those who are elderly, pregnant, or ill. Life is always the prime concern. [Most people actually gain weight during Ramadan. There is feasting every night, after all.]

Among my all-time favorite reads as a child, I found a used copy in fair condition, a 1st printing, I think, because it doesn't even have the award sticker. I will begin reading it today. note: Henry frequently offended me even as a child. All her protagonists—other than the horses, and even then—are boys. I loved Misty but was furious when the MC's little sister was sent into the house to help her mother.

"Elegy" for her trans father... "Two Spirits... it is said that if one's fate is determined by power, one must follow its directive, and can no more go against it than one can go against gravity." Three sisters... "grateful, grieving—each reverent in her own way."

On the page numbered 21, "Laura: One"

Even though she is married, the girl in this poem is 14 and the suggestion of a romantic relationship with the author is offensive. I have known Janice was unfaithful for more than 25 years, but this is new.

... The problem of good and evil cannot be completely resolved in human history."—Reinhold Niebuhr, BEYOND TRAGEDY

It might, however be negotiable. We might become a species more interested in cooperation [good] than conflict [evil] as a necessary survival strategy. We might cease insisting that evil is necessary.

"[Utopian theory] imagines that perfect innocency, a new childhood, lies at the end of the social process. It thinks itself capable of creating a society in which all tensions are resolved and the final root of human anarchy is eliminated. If the were really possible its new society would not be the beginning of history as it fondly imagines, but its end. ...

James Wood, The New Yorker "In “The Wall,” Haushofer’s narrator, alone with her animals, establishes a kind of separatist commune deep in the woods, creating a new life so fulfilling and engrossing that it is not clear she would wish to rejoin the old, ordinary, damaged society, even if she could..." But no, I disagree. The MC is not fulfilled. She reaches a point of patient acceptance, more Zen, and often lost.

translation: "Toward morning the moments of daylight increased..." wtf

Foolish to think raspberries were only sugar; foolish to go on and on about scything hay, but not a word about bundling it up for drying and carrying and storage. Apparently most of her hay dries in one day? Unlikely. She burns cordwood the same season she cuts it and without ever mentioning splitting the logs? And aspirin is toxic to cats.

The MC consistently ascribes thoughts and motivations to animals, which are ridiculous sometimes. Sentimental and silly. Though it's believable that she would do this, I find it annoying.

Issues for me concerning this novel. The translation isn't great—"stove door" is an inglenook, "diary" is sometimes a diary but otherwise something that includes fairytales, and "stroking" never becomes petting the dog. The MC is philosophic but ignorant of nutrition and over concerned for the wrong things—why so worried about meat but not about salt? And because I researched for a novel about women left alone...

I am struggling with this. It's a combination of bad translation and my own research while writing a novel where most all animals in the world have died, leaving only insects, arachnids, & eleven women (actually 12 women, but only 11 speak). She never makes cheese or yogurt or any sort of fermented food? She salts meat but doesn't worry about running out of salt? The work of dressing a deer or gathering cut hay?

spruce "tips" not "tops" are edible—the new growth.