J.D. Sutter > Recent Status Updates

"The voice that spoke to him in dreams
spoke also in the flowing streams,
for sometimes Heaven shines and gleams
even in things that pass."

Beautiful!

“Even the air-conditioning ... could not completely undo the baking heat. It was well over a hundred degrees outside. Every sign of life seemed to have been burned out of the landscape. Even the tumbleweed lay motionless against the saguaros. It was too hot to tumble … It was a dry heat—so the Arizonans liked to say. Dry like a blowtorch or the bowels of hell, he thought.”

Yep. That's southern Arizona all right!

Boy, I'm really struggling with this one. I don't like any of the characters, Turin least of all.

Gotta say that I'm not loving the "biblical" prose style. Lots of telling and little showing. "And then," "It came to pass," and "So it was," sort of language is not the most interesting way to unfold the narrative. I know that this was not completed by J.R.R. and was finished by Christopher, so perhaps that's why, but this doesn't even feel like the same author of LOTR or The Hobbit.

“...he is brave, indeed, who fears but does what must be done despite it.”

"...first define the problem, for a problem clearly defined is already half solved..."

"For the mind must be prepared for knowledge as one prepares a field for planting, and a discovery made too soon is no better than a discovery not made at all.”

“My ignorance was enormous. Beside it my knowledge was nothing. My hunger for learning, not so much to improve my lot as to understand my world, had led me to study and to thought. Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think.”

“I seek to be seeking, as I learn to be learning. Each book is an adventure as is each day’s horizon.”

“The best of all things is to learn. Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever.”

"Honor can be a troublesome thing, but if one has it one does not lightly yield it."

“I know the weather is bitter cold,” she said, “and this is a hard time for the poor, and for the wild creatures, but do you not think it is beautiful? Not with the soft beauty of the budding spring or the lavish beauty of summer. But with something magnificent and enduring. I love to see the trees, stripped to their bones, standing so defiant against the winter winds.”

"It has always been in my observation of human nature, that a man who has any good reason to believe in himself never flourishes himself before the faces of other people in order that they may believe in him."

"There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose."

"...I resign myself to coffee; which I seem, on looking back, to have taken by the gallon at about this period of my existence."

I feel you, David. I, too, love me a good cup, er, bucket o' joe.

Check out these Christmas novella recommendations! I'm also giving away a free audiobook!
https://www.jdsutter.me/ccm17