Mythlee > Recent Status Updates

"Years of teaching had left him with that firm and didactic tone of someone used to being heard, but not certain of being listened to."

"Tomás never told me you had so much cheek."
"That's because what little I have, I've reserved entirely for you."

p. 76: "...the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly feeling all the wiser the more it forgot."

"Perhaps that unexpected and feverish outbreak of imagination was just a side effect of the growth spurt I'd been waiting for, an event that all the women in the building said would turn me into a man, if not of stature, at least of a certain height."

"I thought of something Wendell had said to me after I'd listed my own regrettable missteps that I took great pleasure in punishing myself for: 'How long do you think the sentence for this crime should be? A year? Five? Ten?' Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we've genuinely attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?"

much in here that moves me to sympathy, or laughter - but I also just want to share this wonderful phrase: the concept of eating lunch "al desco"

"I mean, who do I think I am, Elizabeth Gilbert at the beginning of Eat, Pray, Love when she's crying on the bathroom floor as she thinks about leaving the husband who loves her? Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project who has the loving, handsome husband, the healthy daughters, and more money than most people will ever see but still has that niggling feeling of something missing?"

"Pay attention to your emotions, we'd been instructed, but it was far more convenient to close them off as we scalped our cadaver and sawed open his skull like a cantaloupe. ('It's another Black & Decker day,' our professor said when he greeted us on the second morning of that unit. A week later, we'd do a 'gentle dissection' of the ear--meaning chisels and hammers, but no saws.)"

"Pay attention to your emotions, we'd been instructed, but it was far more convenient to close them off as we scalped our cadaver and sawed open his skull like a cantaloupe. ('It's another Black & Decker day,' our professor said when he greeted us on the second morning of that unit. A week later, we'd do a 'gentle dissection' of the ear--meaning chisels and hammers, but no saws.)"

If nothing else, we can count on CSL to know what "begging the question" means.
Mr Dimble: “I don’t mean, of course, that anything can be a real neutral. [...] But there might be things neutral in relation to us.”
Mme Dimble: “You mean eldils-angels?”
Mr Dimble: “Well, the word angel rather begs the question. Even the Oyeresu aren’t exactly angels in the same sense as our guardian angels are."

I think I've read 7 of the 29 stories at this point. My absolute favorite so far is "A Series of Steaks" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, a true delight and quite funny. I've also particularly liked Mary Robinette Kowal's "The Worshipful Society of Glovers" (improverished apprentice desperate to help his epileptic sister) and Maureen McHugh's "Sidewalks" (speech pathologist finds LA woman's gibberish is OE)

"Clanking steel golems staggered drunkenly down alleys. Golems did not require water as such, but they loved coffee, and without water, coffee was hard to find."

Jack Aubrey, as Commodore, cherishes his inward glow about their chances of success, "a glow that he believed to be his most private secret, although in fact it was evident to everyone aboard from Stephen Maturin to the adenoidal third-class boy who closed the muster-book."

Didn't