Sean O > Recent Status Updates

Time to tackle this beast.

Opens with Szilard, Rutherford, and Bohr. Good move.

It’s weird how things really shit the bed right at
60% (time for the final plot development/resolution.) I generally don’t like my plots that programmed.

Tbh, I kinda prefer KSR’s earth-based stories more. Space sci-fi isnt his strength.

“Captain Aylmer having won his spurs easily, had taken no care in buckling them, and now found, to his surprise, that he was like to lose them. He had told himself that he would only be too glad to shuffle his feet free of their bondage; but now that they were going from him, he began to find that they were very necessary for the road that he was to travel.”

Pro tip: when everyone constantly asserts that a woman is “most excellent,” she is not. She’s really the worst.

This book teaches you that (a) don’t marry people if you haven’t met their family and (b) people change after rich people who could leave them money die.

Only one subplot: woman marries abusive drunk, leaves abusive drunk, changes name, marries someone else. First husband dies of drink. Random person attempts to expose said woman.

I’m hoping that Trollope will take the “bigamy is not that big a deal” route.

Clara is really pigheaded.

I do wish that the women in trollope’s novels had reasons for their proposal anxiety. The ones who dither around just to complicate the plot are always the heroines (Ayala, Clara Amedroz) and the ones who make clear decisions are always the problems and have sad ends (Julia Brabazon, Laura Standish.)

Typical “hard to get started” Trollope. He really needs about four chapters to get all the pieces in play.

Back into it after a lapse. This is a pretty good story, but it’s no Vanity Fair.

The story is interesting, but fuck this author.

The gentleman in question is very close to my age, and it boggles my mind how long he “dropped out.”

Ok. So every two chapters are a short story. And the third one is also quite sad, but the overall effect is… sameness? I still quite like the story, but I kinda wish something would happen.

Two more chapters, and the damn book made me tear up again. Mrs. Gaskell, you’re currently between Jane Austen and George Eliot.

The first two chapters of Cranford might be the finest Victorian short story I’ve ever read.

A subplot in “Monuments Men”, Rose Valland gets full treatment here.

He read a great deal: Jane Eyre, Trollope, Candide, Wuthering Heights, 1984, Phineas Finn, C. S. Forester.

Churchill reads more Trollope than most people I know.