David > Recent Status Updates

Poor Cleopatra(?), run down in the rain by a white limo, mashed multiple times, and left like road kill. And what about Shadow and Wednesday driving behind the scenes and losing a couple weeks of time in the process? Crazy things happen here. Plus Laura coming to Shadow and saying he may not be dead, but he's not living, either.

Shadow's working for Wednesday now, they're driving to Chicago then on to Madison and the House on the Rock (where they just arrived). There was an overnight stay at the home of some east European (slavic?) folks, and Shadow lost a checkers game that means the old guy gets a swing with his hammer at Shadow's head. But Shadow won the next game, so the guy has to team up with them. It's an odd story!

The trial has been going on and Soneji/Murphy seems to be a very calm and collected man. Now in a surprise Alex gets called to try to hypnotize him in the courtroom. That stretches belief, but we'll see how it goes...

In a truly sick act, Soneji takes hostages at a McDonald's, killing a couple people. Now afterward he seems to be acting as though he has no recollection, probably angling for an insanity defense or something -- remains to be seen. And there's the romance between Jezzy and Cross.

Past the background of Shadow's 3 years in prison, and the death of his wife and his brother just a couple days before he was to get out of jail (he gets out early). Mr. Wednesday has gotten him to accept a job offer, though he has no real idea what the work will be yet, and he's been grabbed by some other suspicious rival of Wednesday and threatened. And the weird scene with someone in LA with a prostitute.

Oh, they came so close to getting him at his daughter's birthday party. Now I suppose he'll hide deep again.

Listening in the car, just started today! I've heard and read a fair amount about the book, and as the author states in a foreword to this 10th anniversary edition it seems people either love it or hate it. Some who end up hating it said the first 50 pages they thought it was good, and of course that's about where I've been so far. My thought so far is it seems very promising.

Interesting background about the lives of some of these talented women, though I confess that some of the details run together - which one started college at 15? Was it the one that got married at 17 and pregnant the next year? Or was that the one that ended up staying at home for some years before probing the job market? Or the one that later picked up everything and moved close to her job? Just hard to keep track!

The five (Gatsby, Daisy, Nick, Tom, Jordan) have gone into town and end up in a room. A verbal fight ensues between Tom and Gatsby about who Daisy loves. Her certainty seems to fade as they talk. Tom sends Daisy and Gatsby off.
Later we find that Tom's lover has been killed, evidently by Gatsby's car, and we find out that Daisy was driving.

There are many what I'd call 'head shakers' in this book, like this one from chapter 19: "Polls show that something like half of American adults do not know that the Earth goes around the Sun and takes a year to do it." What?!? I get equally distressed about responses from American students who, when presented with examples of poor understanding compared to other countries, don't really see it as a problem.

He (the author) ends up getting back to the T1 site for a follow-up visit, as the Honduran president comes in to make a ceremonial removal of 2 artifacts. Then the story continues telling about the disease that he and other members of the team acquired, and how this may be one of the important aspects of this story - the spread of some of what we might consider 3rd-world diseases into modern society.

Oh the tropical diseases! And polio, measles et al that afflicted the natives 500 years prior.