Bonnie > Recent Status Updates

"You would think the benefit of being stuck on a ranch in the middle of nowhere would be a little bit of peace and quiet, but no. A child is a child is a child. In every world, in every possible scenario, they are programmed to drain you.
Unfortunately for Mary, I'm not in the mood to be drained today."

Approaching the end, and instead of having an idea of how it will track and predictions on how it might end, I have no idea what will happen... That's kind of interesting itself.

I sure wonder about the author, what her life has been like. Are any of the observations from her own experiences, or are they invented from things she reads / talks to people /thinks about? (Rural life, religious upbringing, college etc)

"Nearly every comment he made to another man was accompanied by a hearty clap on the shoulder."

heh

I think I am going to like this. Protagonist is snarky, and doing something that most of us can see is bad in multiple ways.
Seems to be satire.

"When we met -- "
"No, " I say. "No more about the past. We're building the future now."

What if the narrator gets rid of the future tense too, as well as the past tense
😳

Mokshi.
Mokshi, Mokshi, Mokshi.
Why didn't the Mokshi kill her like it killed your sisters?
...assault the Mokshi, into the Mokshi, on the Mokshi, take the Mokshi, open the Mokshi, sabotage the Mokshi.

(McGuffin, McGuffin, McGuffin.)

Like Moscow in The Cherry Orchard.


Without telescopes, photography, books, libraries, do they even know if a Mokshi exists?

"I hold the arm in my hands, but it's attached to a woman who will crush me with it as surely as Anat would. While it was unattached, I had a chance. Now... Without the arm, I will never be able to get inside the Mokshi."

I understand these sentences, but w/o understanding the world or story, I couldn't have predicted them. They conjure up no suspense or emotions.
Words appear in the mist, replaced by more words.

Not another book all in present tense, please

"But what if there’s another room?"

Sigh, I'm not going to like this.
I would do better if it just accepted it is fantastical, like Doctor Who or dark magic with Spells of Forgetting.

“Any side effects of these pills?” Mahlo asks

“Nausea, and dramatically increased risk of pancreatic cancer,” Quinn says. “And very bad dreams.”

In the course of conversation they discovered some mutual friends which had the immediate effect of making them more friendly and less stiff. They discussed old Tommy Somebody and Jerry Someone Else.

"Why had they believed that, having been smashed and broken, torn to rags, the world would somehow end up better than before? It was never true of people, was it? Never true that, once abused, once hurt, they became better people. They became more defensive, more concentrated on preserving what little they could of themselves. More insular, more determined never to let anyone hurt them again..."

"...And the names of things changed, and the languages one needed to know, and the books the teachers taught from at school, and the ideas of what was supposed to have belonged to whom in the past. All that changed.
But beyond all of that, there was just life, simple life. Parents and children, friendships and arguments, and people writing books, and people making films in which people fell in love..."

Because there would be a future. All of this had to end eventually. And once it did, one way or another, change would come. A new world would build itself back up again. And it was impossible to think of that world as not containing her mother and her father.
Worlds didn’t end—not for good: they were destroyed in part, and then whoever was left after the destruction built the destroyed parts back up again...

The words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, formed a structure. A scaffolding. A wall. An architecture. They had shape. They gave shape. They showed her the lines and edges of things, defined them one from the other, gave them their places. Not a wall. A picture. A map of the world was being drawn, in which everything was brought into relation with everything else, and could be made sense of.

The more the letters spoke to her, the further from her mind the madness seemed. The words, in writing like flame, had the power to organize thoughts. The writing held things together, linked different parts of her mind.

Learning to read while hiding out in the forest. Start with the letters. Kezia isn't an adult, but not a four-year-old either. Maybe 13.

"But when she finally fell asleep, the letters returned, assembling themselves into words, then sentences, imprinting themselves in the colors of fire. Speaking. Bringing understanding with them."

Life and lessons during World War II.

"It was as simple as that. You forgot a thing, and it was saved. You remembered it, and it burned with everything else. Or you forgot a thing, and it was destroyed. Or you remembered it, and it was saved. There was no logic, no knowing."

I like the writing, light and contemporary. The dialog feels very natural. I only started today and I'm about 2/3 through.

"She wanted to say something friendly and welcoming—the woman was surely the wife or daughter of the black family the Welcome Wagon lady had mentioned—but she didn’t want to be white-liberal patronizing. Would she say something if the woman weren’t black? Yes, in a situation like this she—“

"sitting cross-legged on the grass outside, her face trayed on a sun reflector"

{Chortling} a sun reflector! I know it's the 70s but when was this written exactly?
1972. Wow.
Reminds me of watching The Exorcist at an anniversary showing some years back. A doctor was smoking IN THE HOSPITAL while talking to the possessed girl's parents, and moviegoers in the theater started laughing.

...the New Projects Committee, to which he had been appointed...
They talked about the Christmas-Toys project and the Preserve-the-Landscape project...
The men talked about new projects again.

This is weird to think and somehow sexist, in multiple directions? But it seems odd, now, to have men-only discussing these topics. It seems like something women (or nonbinar) would mostly run, or not much would happen?

Sounds like society in After Atlas

"Where to go now? The answer seems to be ‘nowhere that we can realistically hope for’.

The assault that has been gaining momentum, of ecopolitical protest groups, implies a profoundly damaging psychological withdrawal from delimited boundaries. It would terminate Stage One w/o ushering in Stage Two. The result could only be apathy and decay on a planet-wide scale"

"A memory nagged at him—something he’d read years ago, that the initiate to the Orphic Rites in ancient Greece had to learn by heart for recitation after death. ‘I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven. Give me to drink of…’
Of what? The waters of forgetfulness—or the waters of memory? One of the two; but he couldn’t remember which it had been. Yet the distinction was critical."

Dotheboy's Hall, from Nicholas Nickelby. Now I get the reference. Makes me happy when things connect.

"What sort of grim Dotheboys Hall would Dorothy’s logic world have turned into, but for the warmth and kindliness of Lionel Rosson?"

a conversation about speech processing, information in the brain>>

“...a permanent form isn’t practical for every single word—we only need remember the basic meaning. So you’ve got one level of information—that’s the actual words we use, on the surface of the mind. The other permanent level, deep down, contains highly abstract concepts—idea associations linked together network-style..."

Very descriptive, can see this

"Africa. Those hot still evenings when the open louvres brought no air into their flat and the beer came warm from the overloaded icebox. The brightly-lit university buildings there on the hill, and the yellow glow of the city a dozen miles away by the sea, with the sticky darkness in between syncopated by the mutter of drums."

"What damage have I done you? What have I said?
I don’t grudge you anything,
not if the next man up and gives you plenty.
This doorsill is big enough for the both of us —
you’ve got no call to grudge me what’s not yours.
You’re another vagrant, just like me, I’d say,
and it lies with the gods to make us rich or poor."

"Stupid because this duty was yet another crime. Stupid because white can’t also be black, duty and crime cannot be one and the same. Otherwise there is no black or white at all, and color is wholly dependent on the foundational logical premise."

Handheld calculator in the 1920s, nice

In front of me, on the half-breadth plan, in the sketch, I saw my hand holding the calculator, the logarithmic dial pointing to 15.

"Fifteen tons [of rocket fuel]. But it’d be better to take... yes: let’s do 100..." I said that because I knew that tomorrow...

Watching this scene from outside of myself, I noticed the hand holding the calculator had started to tremble

"He could see us. I pictured what He saw: the concentric circles of the tribunes dappled in little blue dots, like the rings of a spiderweb speckled in microscopic suns (our gleaming badges). The wise, white Spider would now alight in the center, clad in the white robes of the Benefactor, having wisely bound us all hand and foot in His beneficent snares of happiness."