Jan Priddy > Recent Status Updates

So very smart and she assumes the reader will pay attention.

The chapter about the Modoc... so powerful!

I am somewhere past this page number, but another dense read.

I do find the text font is small, the ideas expansive, and that is my excuse for slow reading.

This is elegant and insightful history—Solnit is approaching history from another direction, and I am genuinely impressed.

I've had this book since 2003, and though I have since become a Solnit fan, I had not found my way in. I am a Muybridge fan going back decades, and horse for longer. The bet about Occident, a trotting horse, fascinates. I have written to many online sources who want that bet to be about a galloping horse. The horse people I knew did not believe all four feet are off the ground at once in a trot. He proved it in 1872.

One issue, perhaps, is the repeated sympathy for the convicted child molester.

I had forgotten how genuinely wonderful her writing is!

All locations are so familiar!

I knew I wanted to read this even before it won the Le Guin Prize.

Someone asked me if my novel All the Daughters Sing is a worst-case scenario since only a dozen people survive a catastrophic extinction. No, I said. The worst case scenario is what will actually happen. This novel might be a best-case of that worst-case. I love the writing/that it's set in places I know/the struggle to save books!

Lily trying to get into writing scripts. Visits an editor. The earliest editors in Hollywood were women. That would have been changing by the time Lily was there, because men figured out how important the editing was and began pushing women out. Still, many great editors have been women. It was a famous woman, Verna Fields, who edited Jaws, for example, and Spielberg credits the tension of the film to her cuts.

My dad was raised in LA, still in school in the mid-1930s. We were watching a Western on TV when a horse went down and my dad told me how that was done. He revealed considerable disgust. Horses were injured or died from trip wires designed to make a dramatic show for the camera. By contrast, he told me about a circus trainer who was so in tune with his big cats that he could not perform. He made it look too easy.

I am struck by the wisdom of this story. How we remember, what we remember and the way we piece that into our life story—a quilt of patched together scenes, arranged in ways that make sense to ourselves but not necessarily "true" or complete or in any sort of order that fits into a pattern anyone else would devise.

Bud's story begins, it seems to me, about 100 years ago and 30 years before I was born. That seems so long, but I am reminded that my grandmother rode in a covered wagon from Texas nearly 150 years ago. The world changes from our making. Our beachfront property was like the Frazer's second home, no water or electricity, miles from town. An outhouse. My mother and her sister cleaned the kerosine chimneys on Tuesdays.

"America wielded her huge power in the world with a brash confidence that reminded him of a toddler who has got hold of a hammer" (173).

I laughed so hard.

A relief to read something easy after several challenging reads.

Made it to the Bs once I stopped trying to read all the "See XXX" as I went along. Still funny and so accurate about fantasy chché that I doubt I'll last to the end.

Funny and odd, very odd at times. I'm certain it's funnier and stranger in Icelandic.

still funny... a far more personal and lighter version of the story I found in The Greenlanders