Reading a biography of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's third wife, and growing a little tired of the pains the biographer is taking to assure me that poor doomed Jane was not a great beauty. She was fine! Stop picking on her, she's going to be dead in a hundred pages or so anyway.
even if you spend your whole life believing yourself to be deeply in touch with the ebb and flow, the cycle, the ecosystem as it actually is, you will still have trouble picturing an untouched world. You will still struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around.
-- Becky Chambers, _A Prayer for the Wild-Built_
A little girl takes her father’s hand and the two of them wander away as her brother begs them to bring him an ice cream cone. Today that sort of beginning feels ominous: what’s going to happen?
https://sophronisba.com/2022/11/26/reading-alice-munro-walker-brothers-cowboy/
Reading a biography of Alice Prin (better known as Kiki) and I am already exhausted by her boyfriend: "Man Ray subscribed to the idea that a romantic relationship was a kind of war, and the winner was whoever revealed less of himself to the other."
This reminds me that as much as I love reading about 1920s Paris, I would have lasted about five minutes in a conversation with the ilk of Man Ray and Ernest Hemingway before I lost all patience with their macho nonsense.
If you ask six different monks the question of which godly domain robot consciousness belongs to, you’ll get seven different answers.
-- Becky Chambers, _A Psalm for the Wild-Built_
The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
-- Barbara Kingsolver, _Demon Copperhead_
It's that most wonderful time of the year -- we have the longlist for the Tournament of Books.
"It was said, or so he had been told: Fatima, beloved daughter of the Prophet, had not felt the heat of the fire as she stirred a pot of simmering halva with her hand. She didn't feel the burning sugar climbing her arm, darkening to the color of her skin, such was her grief."
-- Aamina Ahmad, _The Return of Faraz Ali_
Reading The Family Roe (which is excellent) and I cannot get over how sad the life of Norma McCorvey ("Jane Roe") was -- she was used by pro-choice feminists and she was used by Operation Rescue and I'm not sure she knew herself how she felt about abortion rights by the end.
"Two decades and change into her beef, Carlotta Mercedes braced herself for audition number five with the New York State Board of Parole."
-- James Hannaham, _Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta_
The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense
-- Ian McEwan, _Lessons_
First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they've always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let's just say out of it.
-- Barbara Kingsolver, _Demon Copperhead_
Really sad news. I loved the Julie/Julia Project back in the day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/dining/julie-powell-dead.html
Yay for Trust! Not my very favorite novel of the year (that would be Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait) but it's definitely top five.
https://lithub.com/here-are-the-winners-of-the-2022-kirkus-prize/
You guys, Elizabeth Finch (Julian Barnes's latest) is so good. It's short and I thought I would just breeze through it but I'm reading very slowly because there's just so much there.
New Sebastian Barry coming in March!
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/652719/old-gods-time-by-sebastian-barry/
Sophronisba
Joined Oct 2022