Black Swan Green

by David Mitchell

Do not set foot in my office. That’s Dad’s rule.

Do other people think this is a good way to start the book? I think it is compelling, but does it capture the essence of what's to come? Should that even be the point? Does it foreshadow Jason breaking free from the "rules" and coming of age or something?

Games and sports aren’t about taking part or even about winning. Games and sports’re really about humiliating your enemies. Lee Biggs tried a poxy rugby tackle on me but I shook him free no sweat.

I hate games and sports in books. Do other people enjoy descriptions of these things?? I just find it takes too much effort to imagine them happening accurately..

I wound the stopped Omega up and set the time to a fraction after three. Unborn Twin murmured, Go to the lake.

wow that actually gave me chills (EDIT AFTER READING: ok I definitely thought this book was taking a dark turn and I was into it. but it didn't happen)

Then Mrs. de Roo got out her Metro Gnome. Metro Gnomes’re upside-down pendulums without the clock part. They tock rhythms. They’re small, which could be why they’re called gnomes. Music students normally use them but speech therapists do too.

lol i need to remember this

Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where’ve the yellow and the blue gone? Somehow this is to do with Moran’s dad. Somehow this is to do with everyone and everything. But too many things’d’ve gone wrong if I’d tried to say this to Moran.

"Somehow this is to do with everyone and everything." I really like this

Dad watches all this through the kitchen window. Dad isn’t laughing. He’s won. Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.

So here I was, tying cotton to Mr. Blake’s door knocker, cacking myself. The knocker was a roaring brass lion. Here be the fumbler who should be in bed, and here be the beast who bites off his head. Behind me, in the playground, Ross Wilcox was willing me to balls it up.

wth does any of this mean

You think I am French?” I nodded. “Belgian.

just like poirot! (SO emily)

“That music, when I came in. Was that your dad’s? It was beautiful. I didn’t know there was music like that.” “The sextet of Robert Frobisher. He was an amanuensis for my father, when my father was too old, too blind, too weak to hold a pen.”

is real? wait is this some cloud atlas easter egg or something https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2U-lL_qdTI

That’s when I saw a matt square on the scratched rink, right by my dodgem.

thank god for the kindle dictionary. a dodgem is a bumper car!

“But … I thought this place was … miles from anywhere.” “Here? Nah! Just between Pig Lane and the quarry. Where the Gypsies camp in the autumn. This whole wood’s only a few acres, y’know. Two or three footy pitches, tops. Hardly Amazonia. Hardly Sherwood Forest.”

oof so symbolic