Eve Castle > Recent Status Updates

Trying to finish by tomorrow since it’s part of a book challenge. I’m not completely sold on this novel yet. It’s a good meditation on financial situations in the 20th century and specifically life in New York. The portrayals of life and husband and wife relationships of those times is interesting. Historical references to parents’ lives. I’m entering the third of four stories. How will it tie together?

I can’t recommend as an audiobook. Many references to graphs and images I can’t stop to review on a walk or while driving. I’m tempted to abandon because of some chapters that make me think of a snake oil salesman but some parts are worthwhile.

My daughter-in-law recommended it to me - she did say it was kind of hokey in places. It sounds a bit like a sales pitch so far. I’m interested in the parts regarding meditation practice. Will see . . .

Extraordinary story. I’m thoroughly impressed how the author immediately captivated my attention and I’m definitely already emotionally attached to our young heroine.

Wonderful haiku examples.

Totally enjoyable storytelling and truly enlightening. Setting is India’s harsh circumstances before and during 1975 as the country shifted to a dictatorship - all told in a matter-of-fact voice.

“In many poems Issa pushes his connection to nonhuman animals a step further, addressing them as if they are his peers who perfectly understand Japanese.

O snail
how do you make your living?
autumn rain

evening lark―
which pine island’s
good for sleeping?

hey reed thrush
which way to ancient
Naniwa?

heron on a post―
how is your year
ending?”

Author David G. Lanoue has an impressive searchable online archive of the translated works of Kobayashi Issa’s many #haiku.

Find it at this internet address:
https://haikuguy.com/issa/

I’m looking forward to reading this resource!

I follow poet John Chmura on Blue Sky where he shares his poetry. I’ve always found his work compelling and brilliant. He shares much of his poetry as video readings. This collection covers poems he wrote April 2026 while the world is literally burning, politically speaking.

My favorite poems so far are titled Shrink to Fit, American Twilight, and Armchair Paralysis.

Wow, wow, wow. Most authors so fare truly understand Stephen King’s voice & his technique of developing strong quirky characters. Flawed strong characters. Evil normal characters.

I sincerely wanted these vignettes to keep going. What happens next! I demand to know!

I imagine King himself fell over in awe. I’m sure he got a thrill from the stories birthed from The Stand & chosen authors’ amazing imaginations

“Mike sidestepped his way down the furrow pulling dark soil over hunks of potato with a long-handled hoe. With each contact with the warm earth, he felt a sharp pain from fresh blisters earned since early that morning.”

Vivid detail in this story about Japanese American citizen Mike Murata. I’m in Mike’s coming of age part of the story.

“The world was closing in on itself, pulling all its color and moisture deep into its belly in preparation for the coming winter. Hayden couldn’t see that now, but he could hear it in the quiet inhalations and exhalations of brittle leaves and drying stalks and the whispering sheaves of decorative grasses. What looked like death was only a refusal to surrender. Adaptation, metamorphosis. Transfiguration.” 😍

Grief is a strong emotion. . . author’s poetic style meets it directly.

“His rose was gone. What purpose had the dew after the petals fell? Hayden wished the sun could sear him into oblivion, too.”

Of course. What else could I read after finishing The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin?

27 hours on audio, 34 short stories by great authors (including Gabino Iglesias, Tananarive Due, Paul Tremblay, and S. A. Cosby) and all stories connected to Stephen King’s novel The Stand.

Yay! I hope.

garden therapy

“There was something reassuring in the rhythms of the body following the course of the sun. Hayden’s eyes adjusted effortlessly to the growing light as he worked, cutting down the exhausted summer growth of the perennial flowers, raking away the debris, heaping a deep bed of insulating mulch to grant the sleeping bulbs beneath the earth refuge from the coming incursions of winter.”

Gorgeous writing . . .

“Grief was a wild rhododendron forest. Tangled, impassable, choking all light from any other sprout attempting to grow. An uninvited, foreign invader claiming every inch of ground as its own.”