Jan Priddy > Recent Status Updates

Gorgeous poetry, especially for translation.

Words are defined, but I could wish for a glossary because I've lost track and some words I probably should know but don't. Also, a more extensive index, please.

through "two affinities"

I have read "one solidification"

My copy actually ends on page 193, so I used proportion to enter progress. My immediate response at the end? Books are tinder; the new(?) garden will always reveal them. Otherwise, an incredible story.

I wondered when drying food would occur to them. Reading about Native peoples but doesn't stop to consider they would not have been canning food? Yes, I believe it. They are young, and their mother was afraid to eat wild food. I canned salal yesterday, but my mother had never eaten a single berry when she was a girl!

The Complete Book of Home Canning was on my shelf at one time. I canned tomatoes and sauces and peaches, pears, and plums. I only make marmalade and jam these days. The life of the characters in this story is familiar to me—we never lived so far away, but I had students who were home-schooled till high school, when they decided they needed a Math teacher, and who chose to graduate from a brick & mortar school.

Father arguing against the use of encyclopedia info because "it sucks the blood" out of facts; my dad called it an inferior source, go to primary sources, On page 13, as the world comes undone: "we couldn't help but feel a peculiar sort of delight that something beyond us" had control. I used to feel that way about storms, but now my mortality is ever-present and I do not need to be reminded I am small.

I recall decades ago when there was concern the US government was torturing prisoners, a former military agent testified about waterboarding, which his training had caused him to experience. He said with that torture—he said it absolutely was torture—he could make a person say anything he wanted, that the tortured would say anything to make it stop. Thus it was not only cruel but produced absolutely nothing reliable.

I will buy his recent one. New. Hardcover.

I've gone back twice to: "This isn't a story about war. It's about ruin."

All war stories are about ruin...

Immediately compelling.

It is an extraordinary imagining, a fantasy world that might use a few familiar terms (like "familiar"] but otherwise follows a completely original set of rules.