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‘The oaks and wild-onions yielded to cornfields. The blight took the chestnut-groves that the ax spared. Only men graying at the temples remember the generous spreading trees, and the prickly burr with the sweet little nuts in the velvety pocket. But still, in half the counties from Massachusetts to Carolina, a Chestnut Hill stands as a monument to that brave upland tree.’

"Yet, profound changes and removals along the line split the spirit apart. Where is Vermont or Minnesota after you have packed up your things and taken your old wife to Florida--to live, to live, without the furnace and the snowplow? While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery."

These books aren't for me. I really want them to be, since so many people love them, but I'm partway through the third book and I'm just not feeling it. There are so many characters, and they all seem to have 2-3 different titles and names, and also, fighting and intrigue just don't hold my interest. I can see why people think these books are good; I can tell they're good; they're just not for me. for me.

Europe was a mess in the 17th century. A mess! This is a great book so far. Wedgwood starts the book with a broad overview of all the tensions in play in early 17th-century Europe, setting up the pieces for the conflict that is to come.

I'm liking this more than I expected to.

Stunning. So good.

Rescued from the dollar store. I'm trying to read some of my backlog of books to make space. It's not bad so far, although the American spy dressed as a nun seems to be a straight-up clone of The Great Gatsby's Jordan Baker.

I'll be donating this to a Little Free Library when I'm done, unless somebody speaks up for it.

"There's such a thing as being on God's side. Being right with the world. That's really the thing behind miracles. It's quite simple. You get in ... well, phase. That's the mechanical way of saying it. You ride the wave instead of bucking it."

"I remember 'adapt,'" says Toby. "It was another way of saying 'tough luck'. To people you weren't going to help out."

SO GOOD.

"Intellect, especially the sort of intellect a technocratic society favors, is, like all human abilities, far from uniformly distributed. Where there is a social competition which selects such serviceable intellect for reward, we quickly arrive at a meritocracy which winnows out the disadvantaged, the rebellious, the slow starters, the possessors of eccentric or unmarketable talents.”

"Intellect, especially the sort of intellect a technocratic society favors, is, like all human abilities, far from uniformly distributed. Where there is a social competition which selects such serviceable intellect for reward, we quickly arrive at a meritocracy which windows out the disadvantaged, the rebellious, the slow starters, the possessors of eccentric or unmarketable talents.”

"There are those who continue to hope that, in time, everything--politics, ethics, all--can be trapped in the quantitative net... if only its mesh might be made sufficiently fine."

"Police trace the receipt Peke was handed to a printing shop in Wheeling, West Virginia."

Really?? In my experience, when there's a theft, you file a report and police don't do shit.

I'm not sure whether I'll finish this book.

I love a good office novel. I'm not even sure if "office novel" is a genre, but this being the third good one that I've read (along with Transit of Venus and, And Then We Came to the End), I'm going to go ahead and declare it so. This is meringue of a book, delicate and sweet, yet flawlessly and meticulously constructed.

So glad this book came up in book club; last time I read this was in high school and I'm not sure if I ever would have re-read it again, otherwise. It's fantastic.

This book is not just about jellyfish; it's about ocean ecology from plankton to sea otters to whales. While it lays out in heartbreaking detail what humans have done to mess up the oceans, I find it oddly reassuring in a fatalistic way. The Bad Thing has already happened; the only thing left to do is to watch its fatal effects unfold.