Lisa Eckstein > Recent Status Updates

"From afar, the hills of her childhood look washed clean. She's lived her share of rainy seasons, but she lived them down in the muck. Where thin soil became soup, each day waterlogged by the suck-tide of living. From afar she can't see how dangerous the West is, how dirty. From afar the wet hills shine smooth and bright as ingots-- riches upon riches stacked to the Western horizon."

"The movie ends with the head wizard winking and blowing a kiss as she makes the theater pitch black. Droplets from the ceiling landed on my head and exposed skin. I felt hundreds of legs crawling on me. I sat in darkness and applauded. The lights came on and my skin was covered in pink and purple dust. The crawling came from the scorpions let loose as a consolation prize for watching the movie."

Absorbed by the characters and their journey, but this is definitely not a story for the squeamish!

Such a varied, dreamy, poetic collection. A couple more stories have featured time travel, and those are some of my favorites.

Fascinating start, beautifully written: "Stand long enough under open sky in these parts, and a curious thing happens. At first the clouds meander, aimless. Then they start to turn, swirling toward you at their center. Stand long enough and it isn't the hills that shrink—it's you that grows. Like you could step over and reach the distant blue mountains, if you so chose. Like you were a giant and all this your land."

"Ear to the Ground" goes from childhood innocence to shocking violence, with an interlude of opening pecans and discovering impossible contents. After that comes a series of paragraph-length works that felt like tiny memoirs. From "Enojada": "If somebody asks me where I'm from or corners me to guess my ethnicity, I remember their faces and think about punching their throats when I'm taking a bath to relax."

I can't remember where I heard about this collection of brief stories. I was drawn in by the second, "Lupe and Her Time Machine," a beautiful, dreamy story of a grandmother who builds and decorates a machine in her garage. Maybe it lets her time travel, maybe she's simply remembering, but that's not particularly important to the story.

Pessimistic view of far future human progress, at least when it comes to hotel rooms: "Why have a bed that could easily accommodate four medium to large humans when you only had one hook for towels in the bath facility? Were the humans supposed to share the towel?”

Moving on to the 4th installment, which picks up right after book 3 with more Murderbot goodness: "(Possibly I was overthinking this. I do that; it's the anxiety that comes with being a part-organic murderbot. The upside was paranoid attention to detail. The downside was also paranoid attention to detail.)"

"Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present so many moral dilemmas. (Yes, that was sarcasm)." So happy to be hanging out with Murderbot again!

"'I never much cared for prophecies and destinies myself. I prefer a clean slate in life, a woman's fate up to herself, not the sayings of old men and dusty scrolls. Besides, prophecies always have a way of going wrong, don't they? They promise you a savior, but that savior ends up eating babies or kicking puppies or something, and the poor gull who's the prophecied one always ends up dead.'"

"It wasn't like I didn't know what was happening, or that I wanted us to be over, but it just felt like gravity—like I was slowly sinking into something that would eventually happen anyway and I didn't know how to stop it or turn it around or what."

Started the middle section, with another character narrating, and I hope he's going to let us get closer than the first character does.

Well-plotted, with events that keep chugging along, but there's sometimes odd pacing in when the shifts between storylines happen.

Lots of great character details and moments already. This is definitely going to be a complex story.

Getting invested in the characters and what's going to happen to them.

The middle of the book has a lot of talking and waiting that probably could have been trimmed, though I largely still enjoyed it. Curious to see how the rest is going to play out.

It took me a while to get a handle on the different plotlines and characters, but now that it's clearer what to focus on, I am enjoying the story.

After an intriguing, disturbing first chapter, we've jumped forward in time and met a drunken, lusty sea captain who seems like she's going to be fun. Can't wait to see where we go next!

Enjoying this, and have no clue what to expect in the remaining half, so I'm excited!

Nerve-wracking at points, funny at others, and all-around exciting!

Excited to learn about the aliens and intrigued by the hints that this story might get linguistic!

Great start to what looks like it's going to be a story about alien first contact, a Wikileaks-like site, and the fallout these have on a family.

An interesting mix of topics tied together by the connections Serpell makes to faces. The three essays I've read so far are about Joseph Merrick ("the Elephant Man"); The Bondswoman's Narrative, a novel by Hannah Crafts, who escaped from slavery; and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

I bought this collection of research-based, philosophical essays about faces because I so admired Serpell's novel. This is a very different sort of writing, less to my taste, but interesting to read.

"Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to the movies or paying your taxes or fucking your wife or worrying about the mortgage."

Augh, I am loving this book, but I'm so anxious!

The writing is so good, and the situation is so tense!

Heck of an opening: "Well, the sun was shining. They felt that boded well—people turn any old thing into an omen. It was all just to say no clouds were to be seen. The sun where the sun always was. The sun persistent and indifferent."

Things are finally happening now, but I'm still not sure how it all fits together.