Bob Lopez > Recent Status Updates

Flowing fine nothing too outstanding or offensive, but a logical...inconsistency. After Evie moves in to the boot, she is plagued, daily, by visitors looking for a shoe cobbler. In fact, while she is being sorta-scolded by her would-be boyfriend about the financial suffering of the locals and how they can't afford food, they are interrupted by another person who needs shoe repair. Just didn't jive for me.

"The Swamp" A story that matches my previous Can Xue reading experiences. Surreal and confusing about searching for a swamp (literal/fig.?) beneath a building.

"Sin" Dad leaves daughter a locked box without a key. What's in the box? Where's the key?

"Other Side of the Partition" Another surreal, unconventional story--takes place in a community kitchen with a mysterious, secret kitchen with shadow children.

"I Live in Slums" Titular story told the perspective of a rat, follows "Rat" as he bounces from home to home, is met quite often with violence or other rodents. Weird but straightforward.

"Our Human Neighbors" Told through the eyes of a magpie as it tries to survive in a human world.

"The Old Cicada" Literally through the eyes of an old cicada as it lives its life and, we think briefly, encounters death.

While I’m not like the book very much mostly because I find the main character insufferable, the worst part of this so far is when she opens the fridge door and jars of peanut butter in there.

Enjoyable first story, about a reporter reflecting on two interviews she conducted, one with a serene artist just back from a meditation retreat in India, the other with a political activist just released after 20 years in prison. I found the writing quite soothing and it flowed very well from subject to subject, including reflection on her younger days as a student, her activists friends and their exploits.

"Relief from these humors" has got to be the best euphemism for a make-shift massage parlor. It's like the client list for the lady doctor. "...some of the nuns require such expression of the humors more than others. Some as often as once every two days!"

"If such things are medicinal, they are no sin."

"He hated her hopelessly for refusing to deserve this."

“They wanted each other in the way of flesh knitting itself together over a wound.” Damn!

“Paul’s tongue was too clumsy for wit.” Phew what a line!

I'm about 60-65% of the way through on audio and Jude just brought up her aunt to her mother...but didn't say WHY she brought her up. JFC, just tell her you saw someone that coulda been her...what is the harm in that?? Needless.

Begins with the car accident that leaves Marina orphaned—her father died instantly, her mother died at the hospital after falling into a coma. M spends some time in a hospital then is shipped to an orphanage. Book then trades perspectives between Marinas POV and a collective voice of the rest of the orphaned girls.

Looks like we have a time jump back to when Wilhelm and Berta were together, raising two children, Little Berta and Rudolf. There were some hints at Berta's mental state, a sort of meloncholic state she was drifting into watching Rudolf fall asleep. She snapped herself out of it but it's alluding to perhaps why she's institutionalized later.

Looks like we have a time jump back to when Wilhelm and Berta were together, raising two children, Little Berta and Rudolf. There were some hints at Berta's mental state, a sort of meloncholic state she was drifting into watching Rudolf fall asleep. She snapped herself out of it but it's alluding to perhaps why she's institutionalized later.

The last 20 pages have been mostly a lead up to Wilhelm’s visit. It is revealed that Wilhelm and Berta had kids together? Twins?

2nd read as I realized I couldn't remember anything about it. We have 2 couples?, Wilhelmine/Wilhelm, Berta/Rudolf. Rudolf apparently does not return from the war. In 1947, Wilhelm proposes to Wilhemine but gives Berta a necklace. Wilhelm is a Chauffeur. He and Wilhelmine get married in 1960, 1963, they intend to visit Berta who is in a home? They call it a fortress, and in Berta's section, Ward 66 is mentioned.

A lot of disillusion and myth about her father being dispelled here by the narrator--or rather she is telling us how and when those myths were destroyed: her mother's confession, a secret brother, and her belief, early on, that he was in search of Nirvana but was in reality just a frail man like all the rest.

About halfway through and for much of it, it's felt like a Hallmark Channel movie, no more so than this line "Your ex-boyfriend is dating your sitter?" The book isn't as cheesy as it sounds, it's...trying to say some things about race and race relations, but at its core, it's a little movie-of-the-week-ish.

You have to have faith in someone before they earn it. Otherwise it’s not faith, right?

"I'm constantly imagining that she'll fall, or get burned, or be run over. Or that she'll drown, right now, in this guitar-shaped pool in Memphis, Tennessee, her face, in my mind, all blue and swollen. A friend of mine calls this "the rescue distance"--the constant equation operating in a parent's mind, where time and distance are factored in to calculate whether it would be possible to save a child from danger.

That was a good, spooky little book!

"...I've always loved her with the light of the morning she taught me to write my name."

“Cynicism requires rhetoric. Sitting in the sun doesn’t.”

Maybe he’ll apply to a library?? A life as a librarian?? Homie, you gotta go to library school and get a masters degree...you don’t just decide on a whim to become a librarian. Took me right outta the book for a min there.

"'Sir,' Jesse says solemnly. 'I have come to kill American Song.'" Yeesh. You sure you aren't here to kill the American Novel? Because, boy! You're getting close...

The narrator just said "I felt sorry for all of us. Like we were all little children pretending to be adults." That encapsulates my feelings for this book entirely. This book is a chore.