Susan > Recent Status Updates

“The poor woman was always making remarks suitable for printing on a calendar designed to prove that no day in the year was worth living.”

I love this book already… “tortoises circulated with honeycakes balanced on their backs… “

Monstrous! In a good way. Gorgeous images but very tiny typeface.

Charismatic megafauna, indeed!

“As he grew older, his life turned into an agreeable routine, with enough human contact to sustain and divert, but not disturb him.”

I am really enjoying this but another book for which I was waiting has come in…

“Isabella, in imitation of her forbear and namesake at the Siege of Grenada, resolved not to change her underwear until Ostend was retaken, thus giving her name to a shade of yellow.”

As in, you can’t make this stuff up.

more like a POLITICAL history of the Netherlands… zzz

A tremendous biography - so tremendous, in fact, that I have to temporarily put it down as it will not fit in my luggage.

Languidly turning the pages; as much as I am looking forward to the next book, taking my time with this one. Superb.

Yowza.

Yowza

“I’d put the top, of which I’d formerly been so proud, it was from Urban Outfitters, which felt like the epitome of grown-up fashion to me at the age of thirteen, back into my suitcase and didn’t wear it again for the rest of the summer.”

Read on for even more barely intelligible sentence structure!

“I’d never abandoned a book I’d started… “

Don’t tempt me.

Great story and great story telling with even more danger than the usual Doig.

“The sort of smile which might have hardened on the face of a dead baby.”

“ ...the only persons to be seen were serious Swiss taking their neutrality, like a dachshund, for a walk with them.”

“I concluded, perhaps rashly, that no great degree of intelligence was needed to rule a nation.”

“He thought that art was no more a vocation than innate cheerfulness or melancholy was a profession.”

“His wanderlust was his most faithful companion.”

My trip next month to the Netherlands has been canceled and I am too sad to finish reading at this time.

“At the same time that Rubens was festooning his history paintings with garlands of chubby pink infant sausage meat... “

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