Joan > Recent Status Updates

“You are Chinese, aren’t you Henry?”
“That’s fine. Be who you are…But I’m an American.”

Gosh, how I fought against family definition of Irish-American.

Did falling truly in love help Lesley become more sympathetic to people whose love crossed racial & gender boundaries?

a question of class bias?
p. 102 “The wives of Robert’s friends were quick to enlighten me that Ethel’s father, the chief of the fire brigade, was a person of no consequence” and by extension neither was Ethel.

Would a higher class woman have bern charged — some things never change

I wonder, in 1910, if a wife was told by her doctor that pregnancy would be bad for her, how would a loving husband view his responsibility to avoid impregnating her. Depo-provera, hormonal IUDs and birth control pills didn’t exist.

Description of the house in Lesley’s is great - changed my view of the writing completely.

Somerset Maugham was a master of creating a lush, foreboding atmosphere in his short-stories.
Eng seems to be trying to set up a similarly ominous feeling. It’s not working for me — instead of anticipating the revelation, I just want him to get on with it, already.

Hetta’s Midnite Haunting:
“It would kill Pollux. Just kill him. She couldn’t bear it if her father knew.”

“Your errors are one of the most precious parts of yourself.
Your errors contain something invaluable.
Your errors are something to cherish & learn from.
Sometimes your errors are the truth.”

Louise Erdrich as heard on PBS Books

“Once in a while I encounter that oblivion in the form of an unreal me. This unreal me is paralyzed by one bottomless thought: I didn’t choose this format.”

A slow meandering start “Chaos stalks our feeble efforts. One has ever to be on guard”

Oh dear, David Suchet’s version of Hercule Poirot is clogging my brain as debutant Franny strolls with Le Duc de Sauveterres

“”Life, she thought, is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake…”

“..why should we care so much for death, light upon us or around us whenever it may? Men die daily —or a bell tolls an hour but it is the death note of someone or other; and why hesitate to shorten the span of others, or take overanxious care to prolong our own? It is all a lottery.”

The despair of a soldier whose heir has died in battle.

It’s been fixed :-(
But the Walkie- Scorchie in London can melt cars & fry eggs

It’s been fixed :-(

iOS calendar Feb. 31, 1847 (:-)

As the people of Ukraine, Afghanistan, Palestine suffer, this story of WWII is heartwrenching.

So EXCITED! I won this in a G.R. give-away. I love Jason Reynolds’ poetry, if you haven’t read it, check out https://iamjasonreynolds.com/.

You could read a poem everyday and see the world in a different way.

Picked this up in at The Royal Oak pub in Bere Regis, a delightful village in Dorset England. If you visit stay at The Old Mill, it is very nice. I was visiting from theU.S.A.; we have family nearby.

Could be titled: “A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Woman”.

When was the last time you told a friend that you valued their friendship? We don’t really speak that way do we?
Though, we’d all like to know we are loved.
Janie & Phoebe just put their affection right out there,
Open and vulnerable.
Makes you think, doesn’t it?

When the going gets tough…
The tough pick up a good book.

Although the narration is well performed, the audio book isn’t working for me — a bit too many “I said”s and “She said”s. Reading a hardcopy will let me breeze past those little bits of detail.

Chapter 15 Gifty’s mom is one strong lady -2 jobs for disgracefully low pay, juggles the needs of 2 children and when her daughter gets sick the budget is blown by medical bills.

Still she doesn’t quit, she keeps on juggling. The next time one of my pampered neighbors tries to start a political argument to prove how tough they are I may scream — “just try living with real challenges tough guy”.

Chapter 14 — What problems do we solve by identifying them?
“Whenever I listened to his friends speak about issues like prison reform, climate change, the opioid epidemic, in the simultaneously intelligent and utterly vacuous way of people who think it’s important to weigh in, to have an opinion, … I would think What Is The Point of all this talk? What problems do we solve by identifying them? Endless circling…”

Chapter 14 — it amazes me in a country with an active “Right to Life” movement why don’t we have a safety net that insures that the children of hard-working parents get enough to eat, that ALL our precious children have access to enough food & decent shelter.

Are there little Gifties in my neighborhood and ought I do to ensure they have a chance to flourish?.

The main character, Gifty, is so well developed that I’d like to meet her, though she makes me feel a bit of a failure for wasting my potential.

Family dynamics are as mysterious as the workings of the brain — from the outside you never really know what is truly going on. Did the neighbors, teachers, fellow-church members really understand how the little-girl Gifty felt about her place in the world.

Just let me finish this chapter PLEEEEASE.
Remember your parents calling
“lights out now, no more reading, go to sleep!”
&
“No you may not read your book instead of eating dinner.”

This book istaking me back to those days; I don’t want to put it down!

Imagine that the way we think is no more than a passing fad.
What ways of thought have humans tossed aside in the last 1000 years; what tenets we hold today will be nonsensical in 1000 years?