Thoraiya > Recent Status Updates

"The iPhone was taking an eternity to charge on the slow-use electricity supplier's low-voltage pay-as-you-use card paid by pension money [...] and he prayed for the federal government's golden-hair guardian angel, the saint Mother Holy Minister in charge of all Aboriginal children to hover above him in this moment of great peril, and to prevent him from being caught by marauding black people." - p323

THE WHEEL OF TIME TURNS!

Huzzah for Dunk and Egg!

(Reread) I hate Dragonfly, because why did it take so long to put a woman on Roke, and why does she have to be ridiculously OP just to get a foot in the door? (a metaphor for Ursula?) - but how can I hate it, the emotions run true, the language is glorious (ridiculously OP, in fact), the story moves in gentle but irresistible waves forward - I love Dragonfly with all my heart.

"While the golden emperor moths stirred from countryside to countryside in the mangroves where the phenomenon of old culture was rising, Tommyhawk was beside himself with a paranoid fear of the growing darkness, and itching now to run down the beach, race out into the shallow sea, to really drown that Aboriginal Sovereignty himself." -p176

"The seagulls [...] as far as the eye could see in the star-brightened night, the spectacle of soft body feathers tossing in the brightness of the fiery rippling winds, fanning the overheating of these powerful storytellers whispering, whistling, growling and squawking in the circling, circling of all life quaking after the sedan crash-landed in a loud thud that woke up the dead." - p152

...new life into the planet, and the atmospheric rivers bringing the rain, and sail through the dusty rivers of stars in the Milky Way galaxy continuing its infinite journey out into the universe, and he would follow the magnetic rivers forming the stars just to keep fishing, ahoy one, two, three, the fish to feed his country. Dance claimed that foreign fishing men visit her all the time with gifts of butterflies"p9

"The old man was still wet from the ocean spray that had rolled into the cemetery, following him from the sea. He looked around, and said he was going back to the sea to catch fish, where he must keep following the rivers of old winds, the birth of new winds, and he would follow the aerial rivers of butterflies to see where they go, and he must chase the great rivers of ocean currents eternally breathing new life...

This book is making me want to go to Kathmandu and Angkor Wat. Kathmanwat. Angkordu.

A fifty year old female protagonist in a monsoonal jungle. This is so up my alley :)

"Tommyhawk! Get here. Planet yelled several times to the tubby little brown-skinned boy with golden curls, the eight-year-old youngest son who ignored anyone who did not address him as a Jedi, or ninja, but he did not look Jedi-like, nor like a ninja, but just a fat boy, a law unto himself, who was following his more superior brother - the song of the country, lightness itself - gliding up the street." -p68

"He carried his country-hardened, long thin frame stiffly, and he often walked as though his body was more than it appeared. He was the solid rock-hard weight of country that was also equally lightness, but he had lost this feature of homeland." - p38

I just love the figurative illustrations and could quote them all day. "It was like expecting a Kmart-bought frisbee to fly all the passengers in Praiseworthy as though it were some majestic bird spirit, as though it were the largest and strongest plane on earth carrying hypersonic vehicles to space while everyone cried with happiness at such a feat, when it was not like that at all."

"They sent a common brown butterfly on a journey down south, to flutter four thousand kilometres to the lonely Australian capital Canberra, as their final embassy on the matter. Then they waited, and waited some more, only to see the broken tattered butterfly return the next autumn on a slow breeze with its singed wings. The story went around that the government shot the butterfly with a blowtorch." - p9

"'People have their own absorption spectra, Prentice,' said Diana '[...] If you could take a sort of life-spectrum for everybody, of all the things they believed in and took an interest in and became involved in - all that sort of stuff - then they'd look like stellar spectra; a smooth band of colour, from violet to red, with black lines where the things that meant something to those people had been absorbed.'"

"God, what did any of it matter in the end? You lived; you died. You were as indistinguishable from a distance as one of these blades of grass, and who was to say more important?" RIP Ian. You contemplated more deeply and turned a phrase better than any blade of grass.

"[...] even the vacuum, seethes with creation and annihilation all the time [...]" Yeah. I often think about that, too.

Custard and Thousand Island dressing pudding? NO.

"Up she stood on the bulwarks and held by a stay, the wind blowing in her petticoats, which made the enterprise more dangerous, and gave us rather more of a view of her stockings than would be thought genteel in cities." - p399 tee hee

"Syne, upon a suddenty, and wi' the ae dreidfu' skelloch, Tod sprang up frae his hinderlands and fell forrit on the wab, a bluidy corp[...] grandfaither's siller tester in the puddock's heart of him." - p335 Phew! I think maybe a siller tester is a silver bullet. Pew pew!

Translate* from Scots: "There he sat, a muckle fat, white hash of a man, like creish, wi' a kind of a holy smile that gart me scunner. The hand of him aye cawed the shuttle, but his een was steeked. " - p330
*Robert Louis Stephenson was adamant that no footnotes be provided. Possibly steeked eens are closed eyes.

"But that's the strange thing about you folk of the college learning: ye're ignorant, and ye cannae see't. Wae's me for my Greek and Hebrew; but, man, I ken that I dinnae ken them - that's the differ of it. No, here's you. Ye lie on your wame a bittie in the bield of this wood, and ye tell me that ye've cuist off these Frasers and Macgregors. Why? *Because I couldnae see them* says you. Ye blockhead" - p301 hahaha

"There can nothing pass in the streets of a city without some following of idle folk and children." (Bro, still true 130yrs later)

"There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman fits in a man's mind, and stays there, and he could never tell you why; it just seems it was the thing he wanted." - p218 (But only p4 of CATRIONA)

[...] his eyes were unusually light and had a kind of dancing madness in them, that was both engaging and alarming; and when he took off his great-coat, he laid a pair of fine, silver-mounted pistols on the table" - p50

If you can ignore the sexism and racism this is a good swashbuckle!

"a tiger's birthing fluids" - it's because I'm loving this book that I'm allowed to be nitpicky. Aida no way can get slimy "to the shoulder" assisting a Tasmanian tiger birth. They're marsupials. They're spitting out lil pink jellybeans. Ahem. Carry on :)

This reader is starting to crave dialogue like the protagonist craves bitter greens!