Jan Priddy > Recent Status Updates

Shouldn't be Rite Aid. Pay 'n Save.

I am reminded why my first impulse while I was reading Lincoln in the Bardo was to urge people to read this novel instead. Read this novel instead.

If anything, better!

I loved this book the first time I read it, but I failed to write a review. So it's time for a reread!

Aren't I done with this yet? Several good stories in the second half of the collection.

It's not and easy-quick read, but the bigger challenge is that I keep this book in another place and I always bring another novel along when I go there.

"Too many women mistake a man's hostility for wit and his silence for depth" (194). I desperately want to rewrite that line, but it's still a good one.

There might have been a chance I'd read this far in the series from a copy bvporrowed from my mom. But no. I would have remembered "bellhumans" and "girl stewardperson". The replacement for the more obvious "bellhop" and "flight attendant" or even simply "steward" seem snarky, I fear I am reading a mystery by an anti-feminist republican trying to be clever? The use of "girl" to describe a grown woman? Sad and dated.

Who-a thunk it? Seventh and eighth century Islamic poetry about drunkenness and debauchery! Did not go down well.

I have read a few pages and set it aside for now. When I am feeling quarrelsome...

Sara Dant is a charming and compelling speaker. I enjoyed meeting her. Unfortunately, she used the history of horses in America to introduce her book, and her history is wrong. This book appears to be—from her talk—a white-person apology, suggesting the buffalo and Native horses were already destroying the ecology of the west. There never was an Eden here. I don't disagree, but I will be disagreeing with her reasons.

"The color of a scalpel" is how she sees the AI Beast. But that's not a particularly useful comparison. Shiny steel. A scalpel is no particular color beyond shiny steel. The author wanted that word, "scalpel", I get that, but perhaps another way? The author of this story focuses on world-building. It's an interesting future, but the penultimate battle... ended sad and strong though I do not buy the overall premise.

Some excellent stories and some stories that are boring or juvenile—literally so.

I am actually somewhat further along, but I keep leaving the book in Portland.

I went off about the use of "snuck" by a Scot in my last read, but there's 140 years difference between that 1873 usage and finding it here in Ireland. So I will live with it. ["Snuck" is recently-acceptable late nineteenth century American slang.)

2015 copy with 452 pages + "a selection" from The Trespasser etc..

Another use of "snuck", which likely didn't existed in 1873 as a new American slang term, but certainly not in Scotland. And Dr. B "screws" the top on a bottle of writing ink... but no, the bottle would have had a cork. What sort of lid did she imagine ink would have that screws on? No plastic. No celluloid yet. A screw-on glass lid would have been far too expensive for ink, and not watertight without cork. Cork.

Did the storybenefit from the back-and-forth chronology? I have my doubts.

Brilliant last lines and echo right back through each story!

Surprising, every one. Rebecca Turkewitz knows how to defy expectations, twist a story around the reader until they can't help looking.

Quibble: an educated character uses the word "snuck" which is now a regular word, but not so long ago—I am 70 years old so "very long ago" might be more accurate—that was considered inappropriate slang for past tense of "sneak." Use "sneaked". Acceptable in Victorian England? I doubt it. I've caught a couple of minor usage issues that suggest Miro is American (is) and much younger than me (also more than likely).