Lisa Eckstein > Recent Status Updates

Hrm. The intel I received about the fate of the dog did not seem to be true, or is true only on a technicality.

Since so much of this is musings about writing, I should theoretically be in the target audience, but I was looking for a novel, not a disjointed collection of musings.

This showed up on several best-of-2018 lists, and it involves a dog (who apparently doesn't die!), so I was intrigued. So far I'm not finding it especially interesting, but it's a short book, so I'll persist and see if I can discern what the fuss is about.

Knowing what's coming makes this a suspenseful, distressing read.

"She would like to hold them back, to cling to them, scratch her nails in the stone floor. She would like to put them under glass, like two dancers, frozen and smiling, stuck to the pedestal of a musical box. She thinks that she could stare at them for hours without ever getting bored." Great, unsettling sentences as the tension is escalating.

This is fascinating -- primarily a nuanced portrait of two women, mother and nanny, in a situation that will somehow go horrifically wrong.

Done! (The rest of the book is the footnotes and references.) This was a slow read for me, and my enjoyment level varied, but overall I found it more interesting than not.

Well, that was inevitably tragic, but wow, what a story!

"Reason tells us that political deliberation would be most fruitful if it treated governance more like scientific experimentation and less like an extreme-sports competition."

I am so anxious about how things are going to turn out for these characters, but the source material doesn't bode well.

I like how we're getting each character's perspective in turn, building up the layers of the story.

Just getting started -- very intrigued to learn more about this family!

Finished with the largest middle section of the book, which I found overall interesting, educational, even enlightening (pun intended). Curious to see how I'm going to feel about the last section. (The book's main text only goes to 54% because of the many endnotes and references.)

While I'm still not wild about the pacing of this book, I'm definitely invested in the development of some of these relationships!

These characters are fun and all, but I'm ready for the story to get moving at this point...

Enjoying meeting the crew of the Wayfarer and getting immersed in this universe.

A variety of interesting concepts examined in the chapter on happiness. I appreciated this point: "A bit of anxiety is not a bad thing if it motivates people to support policies that would help solve major problems."

"Someone Else Besides You" spends a few days with a divorced man and his difficult father. This story's ending was much more satisfying than many in the collection.

The narrator of "Fatherland" has grown up in the shadow of a more impressive half-sister she's never met, who finally comes to visit.

In "The Americans", a man who dropped bombs on Vietnam during the war visits the country for the first time and can't understand why his daughter feels a connection to the place.

"I'd Love You To Want Me" was another story where I was really into the characters and sympathetic to their situation, but then disappointed by the ending. In this case, I was expecting an answer to a mystery raised by the story, and I suppose the point was that realistically. the character could never learn the answer, either.

I really enjoyed "The Transplant", which follows the unexpected turns in the life of a hapless protagonist.

In "The Other Man", a refugee from the war in Vietnam is taken in by a gay couple in San Francisco. Interesting scenario and characters, but I wished for a bit more from the story.

The family in "The War Years" finds that even though they've left Vietnam behind and the war has ended, the conflict still continues for some in their San Jose community.

"Black-Eyed Women" is a sad, powerful story of a ghostwriter who encounters the ghost of her brother and has to remember the difficult circumstances of his death.

Continues to be full of fascinating analysis and facts. For example, "As a result [of fire safety measures], fire departments are putting themselves out of business. About 96 percent of their calls are for cardiac arrests and other medical emergencies, and most of the remainder are for small fires. ... A typical firefighter will see just one burning building every other year."

"Life was nothing more than a long chain of coincidences."

"A Roman villa, he told her. 'A very well-preserved mosaic floor. It covers the hypocaust, Hypocaustum from the Ancient Greek -- hypo meaning "beneath" and caust "burnt." Which word do you think we get from that?'
'I have no idea," she said, caustically. Not that he noticed. Adverbs were too subtle a part of speech for him."

"We cannot be complacently optimistic about climate change, but we can be conditionally optimistic."

Really enjoying getting into the spy operations and the interpersonal dynamics of these characters.

Off to a good start, delivering the deliciously observant writing and intriguing historical detail I expect from Atkinson!

In the previous few chapters, especially the one on inequality, the book is gelling into what I hoped for: an excellent synthesis of data and studies about the state of the world.