Lovely article about kids reading There There in the classroom - and Tommy Orange visiting.
A Bronx Teacher Asked. Tommy Orange Answered. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/books/tommy-orange-there-there-wandering-star...
Lovely article about kids reading There There in the classroom - and Tommy Orange visiting.
A Bronx Teacher Asked. Tommy Orange Answered. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/books/tommy-orange-there-there-wandering-star...
To use an insult is to cite the past. It only has meaning because it has been used by so many earlier speakers: a dizzying word that rises from the depths of time immemorial, as one of Genet's verses puts it.
Yet, for those at whom it is aimed, it also represents a projection into the future: the dreadful presentiment that such words, and the violence they carry, will accompany you for the rest of your days.
Or there was the time when, after I had made mention of Simone de Beauvoir, this same ultra-Catholic professor, an extremely powerful presence in the philosophy department, interrupted me and curtly interjected: "You seem to be unaware that Mademoiselle de Beauvoir treated her own mother disrespectfully.".... "Mademoiselle"! I laughed for months each time I thought of this way of referring to her.
Warning: this book may make you exceptionally angry.
Credit to the author for continuing to stick with the campaign in the face of years of government denials (and worse).
This book is terribly serious, and I am reading it getting angry at the UK government(s).
However, the author does like her tabloid-speak. She meets David Owen in his "immaculate" town house. An infected woman has a "heart of gold". Another victim is a "high-flying graduate" It's a bit jarring.??♀️
...the harrowing tombstone and iceberg TV adverts voiced by the actor John Hurt. The campaign was undoubtedly effective....
'I have heard it said that the advert was so scary it put a whole generation off having sex,' Fowler [former health secretary] told me. 'Well, I don't think there is any evidence that it actually did! What I do know is that I get letters from time to time from people who say thank you - that it saved their life...'
Her book collection is astounding. It covers two of the living room walls from floor to ceiling, running across the top of two doorways, and is organised entirely by colour.
----
How does anyone find anything when they do this with a big book collection? 🤯
Then there was the stench from the camps, which waxed and waned in changing winds, and made any pleasant thing seem false. At first Julia believed it came from unwashed criminals, thinking it only natural their smells were worse than other people's. Then one day Mrs Marcy wrinkled her nose and said, "They could bury them a little bit deeper,' and the scales fell from her eyes.
[Prof John] Cash also questioned whether the aspiration for the UK to become self-sufficient by producing enough home-grown factor concentrates was achievable on current spending plans. His intervention would prove prophetic. But, once again, he was ignored by the powers that be.
The intransigence of the UK Government is difficult to understand. Perversely, commercial imports were more expensive than UK products...😡🤬😤😱🤯
Dual narrative centred on a Chinese man and the daughter of an American single mum living (struggling) in Shanghai. A coming of age story, but for parents too. The jumps over decades so you get a sense of the rapid change families lived through.
Do I want it to be shortlisted? I didn't "love" it, but think it would be a worthy "shortlistee" (I just made that word up, I think!).
#WomensPrize24 #Longlist
... people who grow up surrounded by chaos and fear are more likely to..... suffer cancer, heart disease, and auto-immune disorders. Maybe you think of course they're more likely to be unhealthy if they're more depressed and they're drinking more? Well no. Because these scientists have shown that when you stress out young mice, they go on to have screwed up minds and bodies, and that certainly isn't because they spend too much time in the pub.
I have never been happier or felt more at home than in this grubby underground world full of people like me, and I experience genuine and instant love for the girl who takes my entrance money and stamps my hand, the girl who checks my coat and bag, the girls who keep my plastic cups filled, girls who touch their fingertips to dripping ceiling as they dance, the girls in the endless queue for the horrible toilets...The girls, the girls, the girls.
"Do you see me becoming a wife and a mother?" she said.
"The pale heavens' arrangements are obeyed as they come," he replied.
She squinted at him, then sighed. "Sometimes I think Chinese proverbs were only invented to obfuscate."
"The Chinese invented the alienation effect. You know you're putting on a show, but you still get lost in it. Sometimes too lost. Like the actor who plays the Yu Concubine in this movie and ended up dead."
"In the movie," Alva said.
The man stared at her blankly. "No, girl. In real life. You haven't heard what happened to Leslie Cheung?"
A man called Lu Fang stole Alva's mother in Grand Ballroom B of Shanghaï's Imperial Hotel.
#OpeningLine
#WomensPrize
“I tried out for fifth grade chorus...I‘d always heard that anyone could be in chorus in elementary school. If you didn‘t have a great voice, they‘d just stick you in the back.... But you‘ll never guess what happened.” He smiled, his eyes crinkling in the nicest way.
“You didn‘t make it.”
“Is your school‘s chorus that cutthroat?”
“Not really,” he said. “All the competition is in going out for hall patrol. It‘s a campus of narcs.”
Have I retained any memories from these years? ....it is of my father coming home dead drunk... He is standing at one end of the room and taking every bottle he could lay his hands on-oil, milk, wine- -and throwing them one by one against opposite wall, where they shatter. My brother and I are crying, huddled up against our mother, who is simply repeating, in a voice crying of both anger and despair, at least watch out for the kids?"
Reading via my library's ebook collection in "borrowbox" The "double click to view whole table" each time there is a playscript section is not enhancing my reading experience. The paperback comes out on the 14th - I might just hang on for that.
As we turned past a building with a burnt façade, the word 'territory' rang around in my head. It comes with the territory. That's not my territory. Occupied territory. Enemy territory. Unknown territory. What exactly happened on this road to cause this mess? And where were the people standing when whatever it was had happened?
He was held up three days at Columbus because the ferry cable had broken, and so he watched from under a verandah roof....
They spoke of little things, things that mattered. The death of a baby from fever, that Jameson's mare had come home herself after being sto- len, that a man had come who read aloud from newspapers gathered from the entire world over, including stories of polar explorers and sinking ships in the Atlantic Ocean...
Deckled edges. 😀
Two months passed. It was well into autumn. The air was crisp and cool, and the leaves of the Japanese maples had turned the brilliant crimson of a geisha's painted lips. On the grounds of Tokyo University Medical School, in the neighborhood of the pond made famous by Natsume Soseki's novel Sanshiro, a tall, remarkably good-looking youth was loitering about gazing at the scenery.
For half a year I've been writing my story. And everything in it seems unimportant, ragged, substandard. The narrative melts into the running streams of memory. The rhythm is off. Poems and essays have made their way into the book. The book falls to pieces and it appears to be neither elegant nor comprehensible; it in no way resembles the books people are supposed to read and love.
‐------
I went to return this book and then changed my mind.🙃
"Really, it is. But tell me, who is the murderer?"
"I can't talk about that right now." Tsunetaro sounded nervous, as if someone might be listening in.
"Why is that? Oh, I see, now that you mention it, this really isn't the sort of thing you can discuss on the telephone. Where are you now, at Peony? I'll come to meet you right away."
-----
What will happen now? ?
Sometimes my book ambitions are not very realistic. These are due back to the library after lots of renewals, but I still haven't read them. I blame mood reading.
I loved this book. The reflections on identity and the on-going effects for all descendents were powerful and memorable.
@mcctrish @GatheringBooks @tpixie @kspenmoll @Gleefulreader @LeahBergen @TheBookDream @DrexEdit @Sapphire @TheKidUpstairs @Aimeesue @Deblovestoread @Adventures-of-a-French-Reader @Tamra @auraisntwilder @Chelsea.Poole @squirrelbrain @Cathythoughts @BarbaraBB @CSeydel @Sparklemn @JuniperWilde @julieclair @AllDebooks
In a Dorothea Tanning painting she saw in a show three years before in Paris, a bare-chested woman stands before a row of doors that stand ajar. The title was Birthday. She thinks this painting represents her life and that she is inside it, as she was once inside Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre, and later Nausea. With every book she reads, To the Lighthouse, Rezvani's Les Années-lumière, she wonders if she could write her life that way too.
Such a great (grim) read. The author recounts her experiences as a journalist as a government-sanctioned "drug war" in thr Phillipines led to executions of thousands of people by the police and paid killers.
Hoping all the #WomensPrize NF list I pick up will be as compelling.
Political signage is not rare in the Philippines. Graduation congratulations and Christmas greetings on tarpaulin banners are holiday standbys. Plastic tents—the sort borrowed for wakes, feeding programs, and mass weddings—are routinely printed with the faces of current officials. There are sidewalks in my city tiled with the mayor‘s initials. This, however, was the first time any of us had seen government compassion advertised on a coffin lid.
Suspect it doesn't say:
Leave when he's good and ready?
This was a funny, quick read from a webcomic.
I think my favourite bad date was the OJ hobby one (surely this must have been exaggerated. Right? )
The same happened when his father had died. After the funeral Kai saw him everywhere – at tram stops, on the way into and out of shops - but in the end it was always a stranger, someone walking ahead of him, someone he had never seen before...
A friend shared this from Erik Karl Anderson's YT predictions for the Women's Prize for Fiction - what do you think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY8WmbkutX8
#WomensPrize
#Fiction
Long sentence alert ⚠️
Which makes us sometimes envy a certain sort of tranquillity: the tranquillity of loving couples who were wise enough not to have (or who wisely resigned themselves to not having) a child who can always be a source of bad news or disappointments...
A doctorate - that's really something.
Putting on an act of humility, I told him that the
matter entailed no more than spending three years delving into the life of an obscure English poet.
I was furious - I won't disguise the fact from you - when the man laughed unashamedly and said We have no need of poetry here.
Valur grabbed the telephone directory and started running through the A's for Arnfrídur .. . first in Reykjavík, then systematically around the country, by postcode.
After trawling through for some time, he established to his satisfaction that there were only two women called Arnfridur Leifsdóttir currently living in Iceland.
‐-----
Rather startling reminder of how small Iceland is!
A Reuters investigation concluded that “data on the total number of drug users, the number of users needing treatment, the types of drugs being consumed and the prevalence of drug-related crime is exaggerated, flawed or non-existent.” ....
“I don‘t see it as a problem,” Wilkins Villanueva, PDEA‘s Metro Manila regional director, told Reuters. The president “just exaggerates it so we will know that the problem is very big.”
I felt connected to the smell of old books....I would flip open the books and smell them whenever I could, while Granny nagged me, asking what the point of smelling musty books was
Books took me to places I could never go otherwise. They shared the confessions of people I'd never met and lives I'd never witnessed. The emotions I could never feel, and the events I hadn't experienced could all be found in those volumes.
Mom said she would buy a small espresso machine. Books and the aroma of coffee. They were the perfect combination, at least in Mom's opinion.
"Coffee machine, my ass," Granny snorted. She had a flair for getting on Mom's nerves with only a few words. Mom was furious that her elegant taste was being mocked. Granny didn't bat an eyelid as she said in a low voice, "Just get some smut in here."
...seven days before the elections. It ended with a warning: “If Rodrigo Duterte wins,” we wrote, “his dictatorship will not be thrust upon us.... Duterte‘s contempt for human rights, due process, and equal protection is legitimized by the applause at the end of every speech. We write this as a warning. The streets will run red if Rodrigo Duterte keeps his promise. Take him at his word—and know you could be next.”
Many details in the Nights suggest that the tales as we have them are as much a product of Ottoman-era Cairo and Damascus as of Sassanid Persia or Abbasid Baghdad. Thus in "The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,' when a woman buys a lavish array of supplies for a feast, these include Turkish quinces, Hebron peaches, Damascus lilies, Aleppo raisins, and pastry from Cairo, Turkey, and the Balkans...
No one involved covers his face...
I believed in democracy much the same way I believed in short sentences and small words.
'Oh yes,' said a middle-aged male clerk with a fastidious air. 'I remember him. Positively garish. Orange stripes round the hat, and a tie to match. I noticed him because the outfit was not refined, or first-class in any way, and yet he bought a Pullman ticket. Which is not the usual combination. He was very pleased with himself.
What do you want him for, crimes against fashion?'
Deal on UK price of kindle issue.
#WomensPrizeNF
#KindleDealUK
@squirrelbrain