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This book doesn't use quotation marks or any equivalent, which mostly works, a dreamy/introspective effect, but I keep misreading what's happening when it switches narrators with no indication. I asked if I could record her, said Sigrid while relating her past encounter with Damaris - wait, no, just kidding, half a paragraph later I realize that was really Jake in the present asking to record Sigrid.

When the Dracula Daily guy announced this book for another epistolary readalong, from the description I couldn't really see why he picked this one but I was up for finding out. A month in, I still don't see it.

"Mrs. Linton sat down by the fire, flushed and gloomy. The spirit which served her was growing intractable: she could neither lay nor control it. He stood on the hearth with folded arms, brooding on his evil thoughts," followed by another of Catherine's fits with "the muscles of her neck and arms standing out preternaturally" - fascinated by the way Nelly describes them like something out of a witch trial.

"About the middle of the night, I was wakened from my first nap" - ooh, biphasic sleep referenced.

Marius agrees to regular visits between Cosette and Valjean, proceeds to make these visits as uncomfortable as possible in a passive aggressive attempt to try to get Valjean to stop visiting without having to actually come out and say that, and then this line: "Let us say, however, that the reader would do wrong were he to blame Marius." Okay. I'm gonna though.

The final chapter was beautiful, five stars for the last chapter. The rest is... probably necessary to set up that last chapter.

A used bookstore just opened up downtown! It's been years since the old one closed! I was excited! ...I'm reading this book now because their fantasy section was pretty much just this and the ASOIAF series. To be fair this is a small town, but. Now missing this small town's very good former used bookstore intensely.

The bit about Eponine trying to lead Marius to his death, "She died with the tragic joy of jealous hearts who drag the beloved being into their own death, and who say: 'No one shall have him!'" - IMMEDIATELY followed with the chapter where Valjean discovers Cosette's in love with Marius and plunges into despair about it, mirroring Eponine, when ultimately he'll save Marius from the death she tried to lead him to. !!!

The final chapter is on plants in space, and from it I've learned very little about plants in space, a bit more about how humans react to the absence of plants, and a lot about the author's personal experience of zero gravity. The whole book's been like that. This pop science book really really wanted to be a botanist's memoir. The memoir parts were fun to read though!

This is pop science, it's mostly trivia not in-depth explanations and that's fine, it's 200 pages and half of that is photos, but I still feel like taking a red pen to this like it's an essay. You have not proved your point!! You just tossed out a cool claim and fully did not provide any evidence for it!! You can't just say the modular construction of the Crystal Palace was based on plants and not explain how!!

It would be real easy to read the part Odysseus narrates as a cannibalism story. Odysseus, famous liar, says his crew was eaten (by the Cyclops). They were eaten (by giants). They were eaten (by Scylla). He looked at his crew and saw them as pigs. They were trapped starving on an island with animals they knew they must not eat. They were punished by the gods for killing and eating something forbidden, says Odysseus.

The golden fleece is red, "like to a cloud that blushes red (ἐρεύθεται) with the fiery beams of the rising sun." In Thalaba the Destroyer (written in English around 1800), gold hair means red hair, with footnotes that make it clear the poet thinks that's the usual meaning of gold hair. Prose Edda, gold is red. Starting to suspect the current gold = yellow is an outlier.

Repeatedly quotes a Tigrinya proverb as "ኵሉ ይሓልፍ ፍቕሪ ትቕጽል—kullu yihalif, fiqri yiterif—everything passes, love remains," except I'm looking at the Tigrinya trying to figure out how the alphabet works and realized that last word is not yiterif. Wordplay? Proverb's yiterif, ይተርፍ, "remains," has been changed to ትቕጽል, per google pronounced tǝq̲ǝṣǝl and translated as "continues." This story is one continuous paragraph.

The Death Bride, a story about an ominous supernatural stranger who appears at Camilla's masquerade and refuses to unmask when everyone else has, "You alone keep on your mask" - was the King in Yellow referencing this story??? I'm grasping at straws, I can find no record of Robert Chambers having read Fantasmagoriana or Tales of the Dead and the extra guest is a common trope, but Camilla's not a super common name!

The first story's a comedy! You think of Mary Shelley & co reading these ghost stories and getting the inspiration to write their own - and it turns out it starts with a fun adventure involving a ghost barber who shaves people's eyebrows off. Adjusting my mental image of the Villa Diodati a bit here.

I'm just now realizing they've been using the Julian calendar this whole time! Lovelace starts dating his letters using both calendars, Belford keeps on using only the Julian, and then the final letter is dated only in Gregorian, Samuel Richardson is screwing with me specifically. Anyway this readalong is going to end a week+ earlier than I thought.

Reading the titular story, with the daughter who nobly and patiently bears a previously loving father's attempts to force her to marry someone she doesn't want, the maid placed with her to spy and intercept her letters, her fear of a father's curse... Mary Shelley for sure was a Clarissa fan, right? *googles* She was, read it multiple times in multiple languages, I knew I wasn't just seeing things. It's everywhere.

No letter today, but meanwhile reading the Haunting of Hill House there was a Clarissa mention (and the professor threatening to read Pamela aloud as an insomnia cure) - I never noticed just how many other books reference Richardson before I started reading this.

Today Clarissa's final letters to her family and friends are sent out, and since they're all along similar lines only some of them are included and the rest are just summaries with short excerpts, makes complete sense - but the letter to Anna Howe, of all people?? Only a summary for Clarissa's final letter to Anna Howe??

Clarissa mentioned! Fun coincidence. Quote from Denis Diderot about a friend's reaction: "At this point he seized the notebooks, withdrew into a corner and read. First I saw tears running down his face, he interrupted himself, he sobbed; suddenly he got up, he wandered aimlessly, he cried out as though he were devastated, he reproached the Harlowe family in the most bitter way."

Reading on the corresponding days, it really stood out when a date was set for Clarissa's marriage to Solmes, that pressure of this dreaded event getting closer and closer every day. This past week leading up to the date Lovelace set for their marriage has felt awfully familiar! Confining her, forbidding her letter-writing - the same ways he'd used to pressure her to flee with him, now used against himself, bravo.

Bold of Lovelace to act like it's absurd of Clarissa to suspect he set a fire to get at her - "To suppose I should have recourse to such a poor contrivance"! - when he's talking to people who JUST saw him disguise himself to sneak into her rooms! Also he misattributes Dryden's "Oppose not rage" quote to Shakespeare, and that same mistake is all over internet quote sites - I wonder if that mix-up started here.

Letter XL and Lovelace is now claiming he doesn't care for tragedies (at least not on stage), which is a fascinating thing to say after he's spent this whole story quoting from tragedies. Can't take this guy at his word even about his own tastes.

A secondhand copy without the DVD, I'm reading it mostly for the previous owner's EXTENSIVE handwritten notes in the margins. Thank you Amanda!

Delighted to discover this goes through October day by day, one day per chapter, so I'm reading only a chapter a day as a countdown to Halloween. Five stars for everything so far, ideal Halloween mood-setting.

(spoilers) "I don't suppose you were a singer, not with a voice like yours."

That was alarming enough on its own, but then, some chapters later:

"Damn medic pulled out a body without a decent voice. ... I still can't shake the slight, and definitely irrational, suspicion that the tech medic chose that particular body just to annoy me."

...Well, this is deeply upsetting.