Judith > Recent Status Updates

At first it seemed a way for the author to display his knowledge of art auctions and how experts evaluated artwork. It has become increasingly funny.

So much about whaling! I was hoping for more about Ahab.

p. 194: If you who own the things peole must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results; if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we".

Jane Mayer lays out the various threads of the "dark money" that has supported a number of libertarian or ultraconservative campaigns in the past thirty or forty years, especially the use of the Citizens United decision to hide millions of dollars in support. I am finding the book readable and interesting but deeply discouraging.

I won this in a Goodreads giveaway by the author. It arrived a few days ago, while I was out of town, and I started reading it yesterday. It's easy to read, simply and clearly written. Kari is fifteen when she helps an American pilot whose plane has gone down in Norway. With dreams of Hollywood and adventure, she helps lead him toward Sweden. She is not on good terms with her father and is not thinking of him.

I read that this book was about the author's interactions with a hawk helping her adjust to the grief of losing her father. And it is, but not the way I expected.

I thought she would be in the wild, observing hawks, perhaps observing a specific hawk. I did not think she would be training a young hawk, calling on her falconry skills.

My difficulty is with taking creatures from the wild. Whether bred or not.

At this point I'm no longer hoping for any kind of redemption for Bigger but still very interested in finding out how this all ends.

My stomach is not in knots quite as much now, but the tension in the book remains. I have another idea about where it will go now. Perhaps very different from what I initially expected.

Lordy! Talk about tension! Set in 1940, Bigger is a 20-year-old black man who lands a job in a home as a chauffeur. He's wary to begin with because of the way blacks are treated by whites, and when he is faced with this family's more progressive ways he is confused and frightened. He makes decisions we don't want him to make and my stomach is tied up in knots. I keep reminding myself that it's fiction!

"As corporate and government interests took tighter hold, ... ponds started to break down and fail. What followed was ruinous debt, environmental degradation, horrifying human rights abuses, and violence that left millions destitute."

"In the late 1970s, shrimp farmers turbocharged the ageo-old shrimp-farming process by adding to their ponds post-larval shrimp caught in the wild or raised in hatcheries. They supplemented natural feeds with nutrient slurries, chemicals, and antibiotics...While traditional shriimp farms yielded less than 450 pounds per acre, th enew factory-style outfits harvested as much as 89000 pounds per acre....

"We rail against exploitation of low-paid workers in Asia as we drive twenty minutes to the Big Box to save three bucks on tube socks and a dollar on underpants. We fume over the mistreatment of animals by agribusiness but freak out at an uptick in food prices. We lecture our kids on social responsibility and then buy them toys assembled by destitute child workers on some far flung foreign shore."

"We rails against exploitation of low-paid workers in Asia as we drive twenty minutes to the Big Box to save three bucks on tube socks and a dollar on underpants. We fume over the mistreatment of animals by agribusiness but freak out at an uptick in food prices. We lecture our kids on social responsibility and then buy them toys assembled by destitute child workers on some far flung foreign shore."

I was looking forward to reading this book. So far I am disappointed. The characters are stereotypes, the conversations trivial.

Quick to read, a story about a young woman who is with a senator when he drives them off a road into water. Reminiscent, of course, of the Kennedy scandal, but of course not an attempt to be that. Oates starts with a few words, then each chapter expands the story, filling in around the edges.

I'm enjoying this more than I expected to. I had heard excerpts on Book Radio and wasn't sure I wanted to read another book that uses a lot of dialect, but of course there is more to it than that.

An odd misspelling happens in here three times (so far, in my counting): Gibe. What she meant to use is "jibe". Because "gibe" is a word a spell check would not catch this error. The two, however, have different meanings.

Not impressed. A childhood that reads like every myth I can think of: the Native American rituals and wise women, childhood antics, blah blah blah. Also, hardly any dialogue. It's "told", not "shown", as mentioned in another review.

Tolstoy spent a long time on farming. Levin and his thoughts about how to improve Russian farming, how it is different from European farming because of the history of the workers. Clearly Tolstoy's way of inserting his own thinking.

Oh, and Anna's situation gets worse, so much worse. For a love story, there is actually very little love in it. But it isn't really a love story.

I added this to the "quotes" but was unable to explain it there: "Before, when I was ordered to consider him intelligent, I kept on trying to and I considered myself stupid for not seeing how intelligent he was; but the moment I said, "he's stupid," but said it in a whisper, everything became quite clear." - Princess Myagky, the 'enfant terrible' of Russian society, in Anna Karenina

Well-sketched characters and events. A good way to get into the world of the disenfranchised in the 1950s and 1960s.

The story is told in hiccups: an event is described, then the story jumps back and forth in time, telling what led up to that event. I find this a bit annoying in an audio book, but I am making sure I hear the date each time one is announced.

So far a lot of detail about life in the early 1900s for a wealthy family, with Ursula gently placed at the center of it.

Yikes! Not a bed of roses. From an interview I heard, with the author, I learned that most Silicon Valley startups have ugly beginnings but most cover it up. So this is probably more typical than not.

I have read a couple of Kate Shugak mysteries before and liked them well enough. I'm okay with this one so far, except that I am irritated by a couple of things:

Right at the start we learn that Kate's dog Mutt is not spayed. The dog is a husky-wolf mix. I assume people in Alaska figure there's always room for more dogs to put on sled and so on. I still think it's irresponsible.

Relentless. This fictionalized biography of a notorious landowner in Florida around the turn of the 20th century is just one awful thing after another. An occasional hint of goodness gets in from time to time but otherwise it is tough sledding.