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I keep thinking "poor little rich girl". I find all the adults in her life a bit despicable, including her stepfather, but mostly I want to smack her mother.

Loving this. Sometimes James is overwhelming, but this is an easy, flowing read and I am very involved with the fate of Miss Maisie.

Loosely autobiographical memoir, interspersed with other stories that inform his situation. He survived Auschwitz. He has an engaging writing style. I would like to read his memoir of his experiences in the camp, If This is a Man.

Because for everyone you meet there is a last moment, there will be a last moment when your hand slips from theirs, and everything ripples outwards from that, the last firmness of a hand in yours that every moment after becomes a little less firm until you look down at your own hand and try to imagine just what it felt like before their hand slipped away. And you cannot. You cannot feel them.

He'd look at Mary and his heart would float. That was the kind of love it was, the kind that radiates, that begins in the eyes of another but soon has got into everything, the kind that makes the world seem better, everything become just that bit more marvelous. Maybe it was because he'd been at sea so long; maybe it was because he was realizing how lost he had been ...; maybe it was because he was feeling rescued.

I love the way, for Ruth, this is a story of herself that started three generations back; and the stories of her father and grandfather are just another piece of the story of her.

Faith is the most peculiar thing. It's Number One in human mysteries. Because how do you do it? Where do you learn it? For the Believers it doesn't matter how outlandish or unlikely the thing you believe in, if you believe it, there's no arguing.

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

We're a race of elsewhere people. That's what makes us the best saints and the best poets and the best musicians and the world's worst bankers...It's in the eyes. The idea of the better home. Some of us have it worse than others. My father had it running in the rivers of him.

Has that very Irish flavor that I seem to find irresistible.

It is quite interesting that the Cherokee who elected to leave for Arkansas begin to take, by force, the land of the Osage. I don't think they understood "do unto others" in exactly the way it was meant. Domino effect as one people rapidly attempts to displace another.

I find the manner in which Sequoyah constructs a system of written language combining sounds of the Cherokee language fascinating. I don't think I ever thought about a written language being created from scratch since the Egyptians invented hieroglyphics.

How can the Indians be called savage and the Whites civilized, when the Whites strip the bodies of skin so that they can make belts and pouches. On the other hand, the Indian women tie the white captives to a pole by a long vine and chase them around the pole burning them in degrees until they die. There is surely enough barbarity to go around.

Stream of consciousness is not my favorite genre. This one is quite easy to follow, however, as Joana tends to think complete thoughts vs. fragments. There is also a vestige of a plot.

(pauses at the school and watches the young men leaving; remembering his own graduation.) "It was his own life he was coming down, eagerly jumping down into--Well, here he was, passing those very steps, and whose life was he living? Mabel's? Old Fortune's? And to what end?"

End of Part II: Nona
And so we meet the woman he should have married. What a sad situation. This book is about choices and the consequences of them. Sometimes we also pay the price for choices other people make.

End of Part 1: We meet the Perch duo--mother and son. Very endearing relationship. I love the story about him patting her hand and her falling back to sleep. So sweet and natural. This section ends with the sentence "Nona returned into his life."

We do not yet know who Nona even is, but I cannot help hoping she brings some joy, love and laughter with her.

The attack on Fort Mims and killing and scalping of 500 people was done by the Creeks, but all the Indians suffered the consequences of this. Perception is everything, and for white settlers, I imagine an Indian is an Indian.

It is heartbreaking to read, but I am interested in the POV being from inside the Indian nations. The internal conflicts are never heard of in history lessons, only as it affects whites.

This is so very sad because we all know the ending of the story. How confusing and unimaginable this must have been for these people. Of course, there are despicable men on both sides, but the greed of the Indian leaders who sell the land so cheaply makes me want to cry. I feel for those, like Ridge, who recognize the value and can do little.

Poor Mark Sabre, he has married exactly the wrong woman. On the outside she looks perfect, she does just what her class requires, but she is as cold and barren as an Arctic iceberg.

"she was the complete and perfect snob in the most refined meaning of the word. She was much liked, and she like many."

I have seldom come across a better description of this kind of person, and I dislike her intensely.

Jorge Luis Borges - The Garden of Forking Paths - Interview Questions
Even the questions and answers shot right over my head.
He does consider reading as real an experience as visiting London. "Many people are apt to think of real life on the one side...then you have on the other side imaginary life and fancy that means the arts. I don't think that distinction holds water. I think that everything is a part of life."

"As they saw the situation, this land had never been owned before by anybody. The Indians had owned it in common but never owned it in the sense of knowing it or having boundaries possessing it personally."

How good we humans are at making everything fit our preferred scenario. No guilt if you are not taking something that belonged to someone else. They don't even have to feel they are the ones starting the war.

James Baldwin - Sonny's Blues - Race and the African-American Writer.

"I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly."

"One writes out of one thing only-one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give."

Margaret Atwood - Happy Endings - On the Canadian Identity
The short story seems very dated to me, but the essay is terrific.

Format = short biography, story, essay on either the story or the telling of a story by the author.

1. Achebe - Dead Men's Path - Modern Africa as the Crossroads of Culture. "I believe two things were in my favor-that curiosity, and the little distance imposed between me and it by the accident of my birth."
2. Sherwood Anderson - Hands - Words not Plot give form to a short story. Like color to a painter.

I have been taking this rather slowly, reading the Psalms that are given as examples along with Lewis' thoughts. What an interesting mind he had! He so often looks at them through the lens of a great writer, and sees nuances I have either missed or looked at completely differently.

Finally got my turn at the library and very excited to start this one. Fingers crossed!

This is one of the most marvelous books I have ever read. I have marked something in almost every paragraph of every section. It is evident from his writing that A.W. Tozer maintained a personal and very intimate relationship with God. I cannot help thinking of King David and the Psalms. This book is the same kind of love letter to the Lord.

"He blew a smoke ring which feathered up, ghostly in the frail light that showed through the gap in the window curtains. "Don't you trust me, then?" "No" "Fair Enough"...He reached a lazy arm and pulled me to him. "You can, as a matter of fact. I thought I'd just given you the best of reasons why you should." "Or why I shouldn't."