Charity > Recent Status Updates

I'm getting irritated about some inaccuracies with the setting. One, turtle dove is two words and the doves that live in Southern California are mourning doves (turtle doves don't live in North America). Two, it's spring but there are Santa Ana winds, which happen in autumn. A main character raised in the desert should know better...unless Lalami's point is that she's an outsider even though she grew up there?

So far not thrilled with this. Wondering how many more pages to give it.

I didn't expect to move to the front of the library holds for this one for a couple of months, but I walked into the library one day and there it was on the "Express Reads" cart! Fourteen days, no renewals...I'm on it!

And one more quote that I like, also from this page (199):

"If you can blow whole places out of existence, you can blow whole places into it. I don't see why not."

This gave me major deja vu, to the point that I started trying to find the quote in other books and stories I've read recently:

"'Every thing and place had been found and marked on some map; so what wasn't marked on any map couldn't be there at all...That was what set me off hating civilization.'
'Well, cheer up,' he said; 'there isn't much of it left.'"

This delights me:

"The only point about that region is that it has no point and that it goes on and on. I think there are floods there sometimes, there would be nothing to stop them; a forest fire would be what is needed really, but that would not be possible as there are no trees. It would have looked better, really, just left as primeval marsh, but someone once said, 'Let there be bungalows'."

I really dislike this book, and I was planning on quitting it. Then I read a review that complained about the cliched ending, and now I want to finish the book if only to have more to dislike. After that, I think I'll scrub my TBR of all books set in NYC.

Brooks quotes George Eliot's Adam Bede: "[I]t is these people---amongst whom your life is passed---that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movement of goodness you should be able to admire---for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience." (184) I think I need to read Adam Bede.

From pp. 100-101: When other people are in trauma, "the sensitive person grants the sufferer the dignity of her own process. She lets the sufferer define the meaning of what is going on. She just sits simply through the nights of pain and darkness, being practical, human, simple, and direct."

p 169: "It's really easy to persuade someone to be hateful...You can train any animal into any behavior on cue if it's a natural behavior to begin with. Racism, sexism, speciesism---all are natural human behaviors. They can be triggered any time by any unscrupulous yahoo with a pulpit. A child could do it."

I double-checked the copyright date when I read that.

"To my mind, the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself."

Ugh. This book is just dragging along. The only thing that keeps me reading (or listening, rather, since it's an audiobook) is that I don't think Theo's a reliable narrator at all, and I'm curious what Tartt's going to do with that unreliability.

Done with Call of the Wild. Listened to it with my kids. I hope that wasn't a mistake because we're going to listen to White Fang together, too.

Ugh. I'm still so angry about the ending of A God in Ruins, I'm not sure I can put up with this one much longer. The damned cat scene. Are you kidding me?

The thought that keeps coming to mind as I slog through this novel is that if you have an interesting story but your narrator isn't a compelling storyteller, you might want to change narrators. If this story doesn't move forward soon, I'm going to have to ditch this one, which pains me because John Irving used to be one of my favorite authors.

Trying this one again. Why am I so resistant to this book?

I might have to put this one down. It's got some great insights, but they're buried in so very many words.

I'd forgotten about the appearance of Charity Burbage at the beginning of this book. Listening to Jim Dale speak my first name in this context is a rather strange experience.

If I think too hard about the contents of this book, I might just have to have a panic attack.