Jim > Recent Status Updates

Showing 691-720 of 3,917
Jim
Jim is on page 306 of 444 of Bosnian Chronicle: A Novel
The young man listened to him as he might have listened to the babble of water.... Old age! thought the young man. The worst of it was not that one suffered and died but that one grew old, for growing old was a malady for which there was no cure or hope; it was a long-dragged-out death.
Apr 27, 2022 08:56PM Add a comment
Bosnian Chronicle: A Novel

Jim
Jim is on page 227 of 444 of Bosnian Chronicle: A Novel
Isolated consuls are only too apt to see themselves abandoned by their governments and harassed by their opponents, and to regard themselves as men whom destiny has, so to speak, personally chosen to be the butt of her special malice.
Apr 26, 2022 09:14PM Add a comment
Bosnian Chronicle: A Novel

Jim
Jim is on page 153 of 444 of Bosnian Chronicle: A Novel
The "new" world did not exist as a separate, clear-cut, stable entity which a man could grasp and make his own; and likewise the "old" world of squalor and meanness that he had tried to escape by such prodigious effort was not nearly so easy or simple to shake off as he had shaken off his family; it accompanied a man, invisibly and fatefully through all his apparent changes and successes.
Apr 21, 2022 09:33PM Add a comment
Bosnian Chronicle: A Novel

Jim
Jim is on page 52 of 444 of Bosnian Chronicle: A Novel
For years to come the hard ringing name of Bonaparte was to echo through the valley of Travnik and, whether they liked it or not, the townspeople were often to mouth its gnarled, angular syllables; the name would long buzz in their ears and hover before their eyes. For the "Time of the Consuls" were at hand.
Apr 20, 2022 09:47PM Add a comment
Bosnian Chronicle: A Novel

Jim
Jim is on page 244 of 355 of New York in the 50s
Coach said that if you put a bean in a jar for every time you had sex during your first year of marriage, and you took a bean out of the jar for every time you had sex during the remaining years of your entire married life (and this presumed a lifelong marital union), you would never get all the beans out of the jar.
Apr 17, 2022 10:14PM Add a comment
New York in the 50s

Jim
Jim is on page 195 of 355 of New York in the 50s
Alcohol was [Jack Kerouac's] defense. He was phobic in crowds, shy and supersensitive. He was always open, taking in everything that happened. He felt his divine mission was to be like a recording angel and tell all that happened to him.
Apr 16, 2022 07:36PM Add a comment
New York in the 50s

Jim
Jim is on page 91 of 355 of New York in the 50s
The decade I lived in New York was the heart of the 1950s. I arrived at Columbia the year that Dwight D. Eisenhower exchanged his presidency of the university for that of the United States. One of my early assignments as a reporter for the Columbia Daily Spectator was to photograph him at a campaign picnic before the homecoming game, and I captured a view of his famous bald dome bending over a piece of fried chicken.
Apr 15, 2022 08:35PM Add a comment
New York in the 50s

Jim
Jim is 40% done with The White Devil
[L]et her lie
Some twenty months a dying; to cut off
Her nose and lips, pull out her rotten teeth;
Preserve her flesh like mummia, for trophies
Of my just anger! Hell to my affliction
Is mere snow-water.
Apr 13, 2022 09:36PM Add a comment
The White Devil

Jim
Jim is on page 113 of 166 of This is Not a Story and Other Stories (The ^AWorld's Classics)
Don't write letters; letters will be your undoing. Sooner or later chance will send one of your letters astray. It is in the nature of chance to contrive every possible circumstance, and it only needs time for it to bring about the fatal one.
Apr 12, 2022 09:12PM Add a comment
This is Not a Story and Other Stories (The ^AWorld's Classics)

Jim
Jim is on page 219 of 336 of The Way of the World
To turn your left cheek to the person who had struck the right was not the custom in Mahabad, where such behavior would only lead to a pitiful end. If Christ returned there the old folk would certainly perch in the trees to see him pass, then boredom would quickly surge back. Anyway he would meet the same end anywhere: crucifixion all over again, and fast.
Apr 10, 2022 08:13PM Add a comment
The Way of the World

Jim
Jim is on page 119 of 336 of The Way of the World
In the end, the bedrock of existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say or think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more.
Apr 09, 2022 08:34PM Add a comment
The Way of the World

Jim
Jim is on page 69 of 336 of The Way of the World
We followed in the steps of a filly that a peasant was taking to wash in the river. A high-stepping filly, with eyes like chestnuts beneath half-open lids and a faultless coat under which the muscles rippled with seductive majesty: she was the most womanly thing I had seen in Yugoslavia.
Apr 08, 2022 09:28PM Add a comment
The Way of the World

Jim
Jim is 58% done with Slouching Towards Bethlehem
The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled.
Apr 06, 2022 09:42PM Add a comment
Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Jim
Jim is 45% done with In Case of Emergency
If you're innocent, take any good lawyer. If you're guilty, get in touch with Maitre Gobillot.
Apr 04, 2022 09:26PM Add a comment
In Case of Emergency

Jim
Jim is on page 274 of 312 of The Wife and Other Stories (Tales of Chekhov #5)
They are readily carried away by the influence of the last new writers, even when they are not first-rate, but they take absolutely no interest in classics such as Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability to distinguish the great from the small betrays their ignorance of practical life more than anything.
Apr 03, 2022 07:37PM Add a comment
The Wife and Other Stories  (Tales of Chekhov #5)

Jim
Jim is on page 131 of 312 of The Wife and Other Stories (Tales of Chekhov #5)
The people surrounding me were uneducated, unintellectual, callous, for the most part dishonest, or if they were honest, they were unreasonable and unpractical....
Apr 01, 2022 08:52PM Add a comment
The Wife and Other Stories  (Tales of Chekhov #5)

Jim
Jim is 63% done with The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion
Paul Schrader once argued that detective noir concerns the disillusionment and moral uncertainty of postwar American culture, 'the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity and finally, psychic stability.'
Mar 29, 2022 09:28PM Add a comment
The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

Jim
Jim is 50% done with The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion
This is no longer a world aspiring to happily ever after. It is a world of transactions ever more complex, leading to mass movements of money and consolidations of power. And it requires a new kind of story-telling.
Mar 28, 2022 08:43PM Add a comment
The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

Jim
Jim is 44% done with The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion
Before Quintana was born, before she came to live with me, I assumed that I was mother material. It was only when I had to face the reality of actually having the perfect baby in my arms that I kind of felt not, not up to it.... I didn't have a clue to what was involved.
Mar 27, 2022 09:42PM Add a comment
The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

Jim
Jim is 36% done with The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion
Like [Norman] Mailer, Didion revered the novel's lyricism and interiority, but she, too, felt the genre's crisis: Story premises no longer held for her. Plot and character had gone spongy, soaked through with predictability.
Mar 26, 2022 10:29PM Add a comment
The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

Jim
Jim is 27% done with The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion
One way you can tell a true Westerner: she's the one who—when winters are too dry and too many days in a row are excessively beautiful—begins to worry about the snowpack in the Sierras.
Mar 25, 2022 09:48PM Add a comment
The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

Jim
Jim is 75% done with The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
I tell you that gold was only an afterthought with us. We came over hill and under hill, by wave and wind, for Revenge. Surely, O Smaug the unassessably wealthy, you must realize that your success has made you some bitter enemies?
Mar 22, 2022 09:02PM Add a comment
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

Jim
Jim is on page 383 of 427 of The Wrecker
My thought of the man I was pursuing had been greatly changed. I conceived of him, somewhere in front of me, upon his dangerous errand. I had called him a ferret; I conceived him now as a mad dog. Methought he would run, not walk; methought, as he ran, that he would bark and froth at the lips; methought, if the great wall of China were to rise across his path, he would attack it with his nails.
Mar 19, 2022 09:16PM Add a comment
The Wrecker

Jim
Jim is on page 258 of 427 of The Wrecker
The dull man is made, not by the nature, but by the degree of his immersion in a single business. And all the more if that be sedentary, uneventful, and ingloriously safe. More than one half of him will then remain unexercised and undeveloped; the rest will be distended and deformed by over-nutrition, over-cerebration, and the heat of rooms.
Mar 18, 2022 09:01PM Add a comment
The Wrecker

Jim
Jim is on page 134 of 427 of The Wrecker
I was to look at pictures thenceforward, not with the eye of an artist, but the dealer; and I saw the stream widen that divided me from all I loved.
Mar 17, 2022 09:27PM Add a comment
The Wrecker

Jim
Jim is on page 37 of 427 of The Wrecker
Mar 16, 2022 08:49PM Add a comment
The Wrecker

Jim
Jim is on page 142 of 273 of Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan
No one in Turkey mot prepared to wait will ever achieve anything, however able he is, he will only fray his own nerves, exhaust his energy quickly and pointlessly, lose his last friends and protectors -- and founder, with no benefit to himself or others.
Mar 14, 2022 09:13PM Add a comment
Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan

Jim
Jim is on page 37 of 273 of Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan
The procession, as they saw it now in the mind's eye, was truly impressive and intimidating, but somehow overdone. In front of it and behind i, to the right and left of it, stretched the deprivation of a poor harvest and a hungry spring, the bleakness of crooked, puddle-filled alleys, dilapidated eaves and long unpainted houses, the poorly dressed people and their anxious faces.
Mar 13, 2022 10:06PM Add a comment
Omer Pasha Latas: Marshal to the Sultan

Follow Jim's updates via RSS