Jan Priddy > Recent Status Updates

Still reading and feeling much better since reading the plot summary at Wikipedia, which left out MANY details.

I probably will not finish this novel. It won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards, and I figured out the major plot twists several hundred pages ago. I recognize the wonderful research and meticulous work to create twists and turns, but no. I refuse to read every word going on. When I accurately predicted it would take Eileen three pages to finally say six words, "I shoved it under your door" I went to Wikipedia.

Yes, 3 pages to get to "I slipped it under the door" And now explaining about Dunworthy over and over... "slippage" in real time, it will take months...

I don't know if I can stand it. A bit of information, a worry, and Eileen expresses it, twice, a third time, then Mike, then Polly twice more. Someone asks a simple question: Where's my book? Does she answer, no, she pushes and prods, the questions gets asked twice more, more repeated commentary. "I shoved it under the door two days ago." Simple right. Two pages later... and getting to the top of the hill?

Still reading and enjoying it, despite my carping!

He's in the last book. I should have noticed then, but read it the other way around.

"ishiwaka"? Seriously? Is the person supposed o be Japanese? It sounded so wrong, I looked it up. There is an Ishikawa, no Ishiwaka. It feels as if she'd rewritten Smith as Smiht, which autocorrect wants to fix.

I was impatient with Blackout because I figured out what was happening while the main characters were going around and around and getting nowhere. [Seriously, one more round of "Mike can't know five people died" and I was going to scream! Chapter endings are often a tease.] This one picks up from that seamlessly. Not sure if that's a good thing or bad thing. We'll see.

"The world has been different before and it will be different again. Maybe even better."

"Conclusion: An Incomplete Catalogue of Miraculous Births, or, Secrets of the Uterus Abscondita"

"I wrote it when I was pregnant and scared and thinking about all the other people struggling to bring new life into a dangerous world."

"“You’re the artist,” the woman went on, as though Remy might be the only one. She wondered how long this had been her designation. Oh, it’s just the Artist, people said, when they heard her fumbling through the night-time forest, echolocating and soaked to the skin, in search of the salmon’s secrets."

Maybe when she imagined him, it was all a sympa­thetic invention, like voices in the undergrowth, and the chatter of salal, and the slow conversations that trees have across the centuries."

"On the other side of the Pacific, Eidolon felt the universe open wide, pour into his tiny human brain. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe that was all her imagination, and Eidolon was knocked uncon­scious by sensations that were impossible to integrate or understand.

Beneath those regular animal conversations, she had sensed the rhythm of shelled crea­tures, the flick of barnacle cilia filtering microorganisms and marine snow from the rich green waters. The voice of a living ocean.

"Only in their absence, did she realize she’d been listening to the off-shore conversations of dolphins, the flick of chinooks’ tails against gravel upstream. The interplay of waves from a billion sources and moments up and down the inlet, the north Pacific, the whole of the world’s reverberating oceans.

“But seismoperception nearly killed me— — is a radio telescope even possible?”
He grunted, incredulous. “I want to hear the universe calling to me. I want to look back at heaven. How can you not? Electro­magnetic pulses from the very origin of the universe. Background radiation and exploding stars and light and the emanations of black holes. How can you not want to hear what the universe has to say?”

"You recre­ate inside what you perceive outside, just as you create a homunculus within your brain, the neurological model of your body. You can perceive — and process — sensation far beyond the grasp of our conscious mind.”

"Such Thoughts are Unproductive" is a full octave above 1984. I've never appreciated 1984 with wooden characters and sexism so taken for granted. Campbell's characters are fully 3 dimensional. [This is where I point out that a "one-dimensional" character would be a dot. Two dimensions allows for a flat drawing, three for sculpture. That should mean that three dimensional art is better/more important, but art isn't.

"flesh-coloured" is an unfortunate word choice on this page. Whose flesh?