Alicia > Recent Status Updates

"And it came to him then that it should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect: This was true for Jim & Helen & for Margaret & himself, as well. " Page 195
My goodeness, I have not been on Goodreads all year & here I am with Elizabeth Strout getting to the truth of ALL things.......

"Sometimes, like now, Olive has a sense of just how desperately hard
every person in the world was working to get what they needed.
For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life
increasingly became.
People thought love would do it & maybe it did......" Page 211

Olive my goodeness!

" They think they're finished with loneliness too.
This thought causes Olive to nod her head slowly as she lies on the bed. She knows that loneliness can kill people--in different ways can actually make you die. " Page 68

Oh Olive...

My Sunday Read!

" Influenza is a VIRAL disease. When it kills, it usually does so in one of two ways; either quickly & directly with a violent viral pneumonia so damaging that it has been compared to burning the lungs; or more slowly& indirectly by stripping the body of defenses, allowing bacteria to invade the lungs & cause a more common & slower killing bacterial pneumonia."
Page 35
When History Repeats & We Do Not Learn......

My book arrived today & tonight I have begin the read.
I heard an interview with Kate Moore over the weekend & I was just enthralled !!!
Diving In Now !!!

My book arrived in the mail (Finally!!),
I began to read it on Saturday night & spent all day yesterday ~ lost in it.
Sheri Fink's writing is just stellar & you really feel that you are there with the nurses, patients & MD's at Memorial Hospital. Oh My Gosh... Hurricane Katrina.

~~!!!! Harper Lee ~~ !!!!!

Not only has she revisited and/or mentioned, some of my branches, but the topics within each chapter weave a thread about how wonderful LA is & how we forget that. Each chapter begins w/a list of books & the topics she will visit. So...I have added 2 books to my "MUST READ!!".
Cadillac Desert The American West & it's Disappearing Water & Water To Angels William Mullholland His Monumental Aqueduct & the Rise of LA.

I CANNOT put this book down.
I know this tale inside out but Ms. Pasternak is determined to clearly define who Wallis Simpson truly was & to ensure that the prejudice & the near misogyny that sullied her name is cleared.
And rightly so~Indeed~today divorced royal's are the norm.
Wallis as her own woman always knew who she was in relation to the Duke of Windsor & remained strong & clear.
Oh ..this story

" As I write this, there are only a dozen counties & one metro area in America where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent.
You'd have to make at least $16.35 an hour-more than twice the federal minimum wage-to rent such an apartment without spending more than the recommended 30% of income on housing." Page 7
Holy Cow .......This read is stunning!

"~I read a lot it's comforting.
You're never alone if you live surrounded by books.
They lift my spirit. The main thing is to be uplifted...." Page 13

Oh This Book! We all know the tale but Ms. Williams looks at this historical record from the point of view of 2018
" Elizabeth was scandalised & also conscious of her position: if an anointed queen could be abducted, raped, imprisoned & then deposed & no one protested, then what of the right of any queen to be on the throne? She naturally feared that her enemies might be emboldened to treat her similiarly." Pg 219

"But she was also betrayed by the body of a queen, a body which, to those around her, made her vulnerable to being exploited, seized.
If she was a woman & they could take her body, then they could, it followed, take her power.
She attempted to push back, control her own life & realm.
She tried to rule & hers was one of the hardest fights in royal history."
Pg 6 ~
Oh this book is really goode !!

"Life was fragile & fleeting & one had to be cautious, sure, but I would risk death if it means I could sleep all day & become a new person" Page 26
I am fascinated by Ottessa because of the interviews & I knew i had to READ this book....
I also ordered & received " Eileen " & I wonder ought I have read that one first?? I threw caution to the wind & have fallen into My Year of ..........

"How coincidental is this?
(He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.)

"Parks, on winter afternoons. The drizzle scatters dead leaves.
The icy gravel sticks to the children's knees. On benches , on narrows paths, you see those people the world doesn't want anymore.
They flee cramped apartments, sad living rooms, armchairs sunk with
the imprint of boredom & inertia. " Page 107
"Chanton Douce " ~~

"More & more now, I remember things. Images, my life, the sky. Sometimes I remember the life I used to live & it feels impossibly far away. It's always there, a part of me, in the back of my mind, but it doesn't seem real. Whether life is more real than death, I don't know. "
Page 1

"It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.." Page 18
This quote from this book, via goodreads, a week or two ago
& I had to find it & have it & read it & so today ~~
it has arrived.............

"Louis F. Burns, an Osage historian, wrote that after oil was discovered, the tribe had been " set adrift in a strange world," adding
"there was nothing familiar to clutch & stay afloat in the world of white man's wealth". Page 26 .....
when the book you are reading mentions another villain from another book on your bookshelf...
That is to say..... Dr. H.H. Holmes is mentioned!! Yikes..
#LostInMyNewBook

"From her mother she would learn the power of perseversnce. From her father, Judge would learn that the decision to free oneself trumped everything, no matter who was left behind."

McCandless's signature had been penned at the bottom of the SOS note, & the photos, when developed, included many self-portraits. But because he had been carrying no identification, the authorities didn't know who he was, where he was from, or why he was there............ page 14

"Sanity is a valuable possession... I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes..."
page 109

"All tribes tell the same story. They are surrounded on all sides, the game is destroyed or driven away, they are left to starve & there remains but one thing for them to do -fight while they can. Our treatment of the Indian is an outrage" Page 7

" George & Willie Muse were just 9 & 6 years old, but they worked
a shift known by sharecroppers as "can see to can't see"~ daylight to dark.
Can to Can't for short "
pg 4
Today a woman that makes jewelry at the County Fair,
replied to my question about how late she would be there with
" Yes Maam, I'll be here every day can to can't " .
I gasped as I had never heard that phrase until this book.

" I finally understood war for the first time in Maglaj. I saw a beautiful woman without any clothes lying at the entrance to the town in the middle of the sniper's path. ...The people would scream at her to get up, try to drag her, finally beg her to move. But she stayed........She was safer in madness than in reality." Page 30......

"But she always came back to this: She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional ........ " Page 233

'Why "a year ago"? What happened a year ago?
Your words are sibylline ~ Page 14
Because of Rebecca Miller ~I fell down this Rabbit Hole of four books & this is the first of the four... ....