Suzanne > Recent Status Updates

The mc is still so very murdery

The mc is pretty murdery for someone who’s supposed to be an ethical, observant advisor.

I’m here for the travelogue blended with biographical bits about Humboldt and Bolivar.

The book surely has aged, even though it was published less than 15 years ago — terms like “Indians,” “oriental-looking,” and “authoress” are jarring.

This is pretty awful. It’s narrated by the concept of Love, and has about as much life in it as the derivative Barbie “stories” my kid would invent at age 6 and then coerce us into filming with her.

Christmas gift from my husband and daughter

Under a full moon, Fox introduces his kits: “I stepped away from the door, and four round and fluid kits rolled past me. Fox moved off to the side, leaving me surrounded by little leaping foxes. Close enough to touch, they were tumbling around me like acrobats while my hands sprung up in surprise.”

A delightful scene.

“Murders of ravenous clouds were gathering at both ends of my valley” — she clearly loves wordplay

“No doubt the same deer that had regurgitated the sticky leaves that morning had returned to eat and spit up more leaves. The deer would eat from the same plant tomorrow, and the next day, and every day until autumn. And every day after spitting the leaves out, they would turn their long jaws this way and that and look at each other in astonishment, as if to ask, Who knew they tasted so bad?”

“One thing a private person cannot afford is secrets. People will leave you alone if they know you’re not hiding anything.”

When he built the first lighthouses in Scotland, Robert Louis Stevenson’s great-grandfather, fought “the prejudices of those whom the lights were supposed to save, people who often showed “inertia, hostility, superstition and disbelief.” People thought the lights wouldn’t work, or weren’t necessary, or went against the will of God.

I see a parallel with current vaccination efforts.

“Like methodical ants wearing team jerseys made from dust, her family and I paced their field.”

I’m hoping she’s getting all the awkward similes out of her system early, and that I’m not going to regret this impulse purchase.

I think I’ll quickly get tired of her snarking about everyone, but I paused to marvel at the nastiness of comparing Bloomsbury women to “a tunicate, possessing, to quote the scientific description of this elementary from of life, a preference for dwelling amidst mud. A stomach and a mouth, but neither nerves nor a heart.”

My dad’s work is mentioned in this book! Plus there are gorgeous pics throughout. I have high hopes!

“The argument should perhaps be that if it is ineffable, the best thing to do is not to effing try to say it.”

Yay! A surprise new Penric & Desdemona story from Lois McMaster Bujold! I’ll read anything she wants to write.

“[O]n a finite planet, the only way to achieve perpetual growth is to take more from elsewhere. What felt like a miracle of the modern age was just stealing.”

“When was the last time Donald Trump, or for that matter Greenpeace, tweeted something designed to make you pause in calm reflection? Today’s persuaders don’t want you to stop and think. They want you to hurry up and feel.
“Don’t be rushed.”

“The more detail people [are] presented with — graphs, research methods, commentary... the easier they [find] it to disbelieve unwelcome evidence.” And the more education people have, the more they are likely to fall prey to this “motivated reasoning” where any detail only reinforces their pet theory.

“I had learned that silence was the best policy when encountering strangers, especially drunken ones, as the most common reaction to meeting a foreigner was demands of communal vodka ingestion to facilitate a lengthy exploration of cultural differences. I’d done my time and was not volunteering for more.”

So far, it’s fascinating, and the guy is great with description:

Fish owls seem too big and too silly to be real owls, more like “someone had hastily glued fistfuls of feathers to a yearling bear, then propped the dazed bear on a tree.”

A logger named Mikhail wore his flannel shirt “unbuttoned low to give the yeti of hair on his chest a taste of freedom.”

I thought of Lewis-Stempel observing young rabbits in his field “playing the chase games beloved of many mammalian young” this afternoon as I watched a pair of fawns chase each other back and forth across our back yard.

“There is now an International Dawn Chorus Day, which was founded courtesy of the Urban Wildlife Trust in Birmingham. This is international in the way that the American football World Series is global. It’s a British thing.”

That the World Series is for American baseball, not football, is a charming, perhaps accidental reinforcement of his point.

“There is now an International Dawn Chorus Day, which was founded courtesy of the Urban Wildlife Trust in Birmingham. This is international in the way that the American football World Series is global. It’s a British thing.”

That the World Series is for American baseball, not football, is a charming, perhaps accidental reinforcement of his point.

“If one does not have wild dreams of achievement, there is no spur even to get the dishes washed. One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.”

Successfully suspended disbelief at the hyper-detailed “memories” of conversations from when she was 5yo, only to crash against her story of enviously watching classmates with Capri Suns and string cheese in 1975, well before either were available in the US. I hate not being able to ignore it.