Ex Libris Kirkland is my entirely self-centered way to keep track of what I read, what I enjoy, and what I want to remember.
📓 Recent Notes 📓
The new Corey universe started off with a big depressing alien invasion; I'm not sure I would have stuck with it except that I'm more tolerant of genre stuff in audiobooks than I am on paper. But here's a novella in that same universe, also available in my libby app just at the start of lawn mowing season. Perfect.
a note about Livesuit
Each is loosely themed with a book, but at a pretty surface level. Book 1 is Paradise Lost, and Emma falls from grace to become poor (sort of). Book 2 is Jane Eyre, we meet a brooding handsome man (and also a woman who lives in an attic). Book 3 is Julius Caesar, and involves the downfall of a tyrant (but confusingly just when we are starting to empathize with the bastard). I don't know if this continues through the series, but I think it's a kind-of-fun structure.
a note about The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion
By book 3 I realized: it’s not just a TV show. It’s Gilmore Girls. The mom and daughter are collapsed into a single young woman, who is literary and more clever than everyone around them, except she’s actually kind of stupid about what other people are thinking and feeling. She collects handsome eligible men who become obsessed with her, without her trying to or ever pursuing anyone romantically. She’s poor, but she has a rich relative who provides her nice clothes and excuses to always be involved in rich-person society (and it constantly critical about our heroine’s nonconformance). She lives in a quirky, offbeat community that supplies funny neighborhood characters and charming B-plots.
a note about The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion
By book 2 I realized: this is structured like a TV show. That explains the lack of plot; we’re just enjoying episodes here. That's fine!
a note about The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion
A sweet, short novella? in faux victorian style. The first book has ... no plot. There are interesting characters, settings, and events… but is there a PLOT? A central conflict? Not really. Yes, there is some conflict, but the book doesn’t spend its time on it. Stuff happens.
a note about The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion
📖 Recent Quotes 📖
More people gave me invitations. I did not think they would have given me invitations if I had been talking about my feelings instead of dressing with éclat and playing bridge with flair and playing the piano when a party was off to a dull start. So perhaps there were people who would like to hear about feelings, but I did not think they were people I would want to know.
an excerpt from The English Understand Wool
"Oh, dern," Pea Eye said, feeling so sorrowful that he wanted to die himself.
No one had to ask him what he was derning about.an excerpt from Lonesome Dove
"Son, this is a sad thing," Augustus said. "Loss of life always is. But the life is lost for good. Don't you go attempting vengeance. You've got more urgent business. If I ever run into Blue Duck I'll kill him. But if I don't, somebody else will. He's big and mean, but sooner or later he'll meet somebody bigger and meaner. Or a snake will bite him or a horse will fall on him, or he'll get hung, or one of his renegades will shoot him in the back. Or he'll just get old and die."
He went over and tightened the girth on his saddle.
"Don't be trying to give back pain for pain," he said. "You can't get even measures in business like this. You best go find your wife."an excerpt from Lonesome Dove
"That's right," Augustus said. "There's an art to biscuit making, and I learned it."
"My wife was good at it too," Po Campo remarked. "I liked her biscuits. She never burned them on the bottom."
"Where's she live, Mexico?" Augustus asked, curious as to where the short old man had come from.
"No, she lives in hell, where I sent her," Po Campo said quietly, startling everyone within hearing. "Her behavior was terrible, but she made good biscuits."an excerpt from Lonesome Dove
Restaurants, even air-cooled perforce in the midst of hot sand, like Palm Springs, or as far from the sea as Oskaloosa in lowa, can serve oysters without fear these days. Tycoons with inlets in Maryland have their highfalutin molluscs flown for supper that night to a penthouse in Fort Worth, or to a simple log-cabin Away from It All in the Michigan woods, and know that Space and Time and even the development of putrescent bacteria stand still for dollars. Bindlestiffs on a rare bender in Los Angeles (Ell-ay, you say) gulp down three swollen "on the half's" with a rot gut whiskey chaser in any of a dozen joints on Main Street, and are more than moderately sure that if they die that night, it won't be from the oysters.
an excerpt from Consider the Oyster