David Stanley > Recent Status Updates

I started this on a whim. I was celebrating finding a library in rural northern MI that helped me finally get a card.

Like a list of all the friends that were at That event, this work focuses on writers who have inspired the writers being interviewed.

I find myself shamed to be familiar with so few, and inspired to catch up. I started with audio & lived it so much I returned for the HC.

Intense scene at the police station. Very concerned about the handling of these children.

I started this one as a challenge with my daughter, and I am loving it. The prose are smooth & unforced. The age old struggle of youthful idealism, meet conservatism & familial duty.

A little tricky to get into, due to an unusual narrative. The semi-detached mater-of -fact seems to draw the readers imagination and sympathy in a way that 1st person narrator melodrama could not. A great quote: "after three weeks, he held her. Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the Nan's gentleness, his thereness.

3/4 into this work. I have heard much of the controversy of this work upon release. Also I have read that it is a response to social oppression. So, of course, I was interested. I have been surprised to find it a very personal composition, focused on a character longing for genuine romantic passion & the desire, to pursue her inclination toward art.

This is the dense understated sort of book that makes good use of a fine tipped pen, & leaves me happy to have a paperback which I liberally annotate.

A bit more than half way into this book, and what a quest it has been. After the great experience I had with Tale of Two Cities, it seemed the natural choice. At times the book is frightful piece of suspense, at others a sublime panoramic of the human condition, at long spells it is a mire of minutia. 1500 pages when will I get my life back? But wait, why am I writing this? I am dying to get back to the story.

What a book! I am only half way in, but have long since resolved that this one will need a second read. The plot draws me on, and the prose intoxicate me, even as I realize I am just lancing the surface.

Not for the first time I wonder how I could have been let free, even of my high school years, without such a work under my cap.
I will have to make a run to the store, for a fresh highlighter & fine tip pen.