HRose/Abalieno’s Reviews > Miss MacIntosh, My Darling > Status Update

"just when she was about to change beyond all future recognition."

Quite an understated way of describing death...

I'm trying to get exactly at 50% for the end of the year.

'She had always seemed to give her attention to those who were not there. For she had walked in circles and semicircles, describing various elegant patterns in her most casual movements, measuring the distance from a blue brocade divan to a gilt and ivory chair as if this distance were a complicated problem in infinity or in eternity, as if, when she walked from room to room, she walked between two stars >"

"Cousin Hannah, who had urged her independence of man, that she should arise, take horse, make war, join her troops, fly her skirt upon some lonely mountain top as that great flag which would be seen by all the nations of the world and would strike pity and fear in all men’s hearts."

Almost precisely 400 pages in two months. I mostly stick to 8 pages a day, but someday gets skipped. Be done by March, if I keep up.

"that all the people who were more than three miles tall should be put out of the house, as she would say, for fear they should bump their heads into Mr. Chandelier with his candle lights like dim stars in some dim, glassy heaven."

"whether he would stare at that wild, precipitous abyss which would stare at him."

"for in this mortal chaos where we now were caught, this constant fluctuation of distorted mirror images and principle of nothing but error repeating error like a mad, sad dream, no man knew where or who he was, and no man knew what he might become"

Now it feels like reading The Elephant Man.

Sometimes I think it's a joke on me, personally. An impossible object. That all existence is one giant prank.

There has been a plot twist through the last few chapters. It's very simple. So simple that I don't know anymore what I'm reading.

"That this was the garden of the blind could surely in no way have influenced my own clarity of vision in that amorphous, wet, clammy night of clouds and whirling fogs—even though, I have wondered ever since, what is the influence of place?"

A good chunk of the book done.

"The P’s were crowding upon her—Pandora’s bottomless box, pyramids, peninsulas, pebbles, prologues, pterodactyls. The P’s were crowding upon her—planets, Pythian games, polygons, Prussians, petunias, pseudopsias which are the delusions of sight, pseudosmias which are the delusions of smell, and there was no other guest expected through all that empty house."

Chapter 10 (next)

"She sat upright, the stuffed bird bobbing on her flower-laden hat, mechanical as consciousness, always in agreement with the dual-minded wearer of the hat"

This is now an exercise in concentration. I read 8 pages a day, but some days I have to skip. It seems doable. The book is like inside-out, everything that goes inside characters is exploded outwardly. A dreamlike reality, loosely connected with elsewhere.

"taking all the roads that went nowhere"

102 pages and chapter 5 done.