Greg S > Recent Status Updates

I don’t get it. - “…she thinks of her body as somehow the mother of her brain… The way other people’s mothers are.”

oh, it’s vocal fry: “…in her twenties, maybe—but her voice bore a gravelly authority…”

I don’t know what the author means except name-dropping Sleepy Hollow.: “…looking something like the way Tracy had always pictured Ichabod Crane.”

Frequency of words or phrases. “Thin”: 25; “Her body”: 19; “pretty”:18; “beautiful”: 24; “ugly”: 01; “smart”: 07; “bright”: 16; “intelligent”: 03; “clever”: 01; “shrewd”: 02, “brain”: 05, “face”: 144; “love”: 14; “kiss”: 02; “sex”: 03; “heart”: 02; “legs”: 05; “generous”: 03; “caring”: 02; “kind”: 05

Author uses the word “pretty” 18 times in the book. 7 or 38% times in the first 10% of the book. No wonder it’s been annoying me.

Memory, all alone in the moonlight
I can dream of the old days
Life was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again

As a child of parents who threw dinner parties, I have no sympathy for their 14 years of dinner party absence. Sounds wonderful to me.

'Tis true, sir, love can still inspire
The blood to pound, the heart leap higher!
What more (what more)
Can man require, than love, sir?
More than love, sir!
What, sir?
Women!
Ah, yes, women
Pretty women!

Also, what reasonable kid—or human, for that matter—would complains about a new puppy?

Ah, yes, the stepmother adjusting her own bra must be indicative of something sinister!

Is it misogyny to have another missing girl story when researchers have found that 57% of missing children are female, while 43% are male. I couldn’t find data on missing nonbinary kids.

No irony when Louise whines about Annabel worrying about herself instead of Louise.

Faulty pontification as some kind of wisdom.

Tolkien also enjoyed having mundaine things appear magical. — “…some slow old-fashioned dance ... in and out, in and out. Why, they were only figures on a piece of tapestry flapping in the wind!”

I appreciate the small setting and the overwhelming shadow of the nebulous “Fairy Land” beyond the hills that dominates the town.

Cambridge notes that Hope Mirrlees had friends in the temperance movement, which isn’t surprising for the era she lived in.

Interesting that this book and the harm of “faery fruit” came out at the height of Prohibition in America and the height of the Temperance movement in the UK.

Random sacrificing of young maidens

What a long journey to finding a box with all the evidence!

Faery faire taken by Gaiman decades later.

So many trials!

I can only think of two actual happenings, while the rest of the book is descriptions of the past.

I had no idea this was going to be a law trial story.

This trial is pre-Rashomon

Secret panel into tunnel like a boarding school adventure.

Most frequent phrase: “seemed to be” (14 counts out of 5117 sentences)

6th most common word: “like” (268 occurrences)

“It was then that things began to happen…”

Clearly, Gaiman stole from this for Stardust and Susanna Clarke stole for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Or maybe it all comes from ancient folklore, like King Arthur’s return.

First four chapters are just exposition and description about the town.