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 📓
A short, focused Trollope; this one considered a sharp 'later' work. Highlights include a clear antagonist from the American south (a couple of losers from Louisiana fresh off being Colonels in the losing side of the Civil War), and an Englishman who for a while worked at Wash U in St. Louis(!)
a note about Dr. Wortle's School
A rambling, discursive hundred pages about the lecture itself as a format. Interesting, and like an in person lecture I am left with a few notable memories.
a note about Lecture
Ultimately I found that the end fizzled out, which is pretty typical for scifi. It posed a pretty good mystery but the resolution (SPOILER: it was a computer simulation all along) was disappointing.
a note about Children of Memory
Also there are pairs of talking ravens; one who observes facts and one who draws conclusions; together they work like a single brain but they deny they are conscious. Loved them.
a note about Children of Memory
The third in a scifi series, which I felt cool enough that for each book I wasn't sure I was going to read the next. But I enjoyed this one the best, even if it was ultimately unsatisfying. Partly that's because the outlandish complicated nature of the last two books was already understood (terraformers from earth accidentally created giant intelligent spiders who worshipped a scientist who uploaded her consciousness to the last surviving satellite before she died, then realized she wasn't a god but befriended her and then also helped raise humans to Humans, a higher-consciousness species. Who then met a planet where something similar happened with octopuses and also an all-devouring mold that can reconfigure itself to include consciousness/es.) When the book starts, we meet a NEW planet of desperate terraforming humans, but now our heroes are really the a multi-species community of spacefaring utopians (spiders, cephalopods, humans, AIs, molds) who have technical prowess indistinguishable from magic. So it's actually kind of fitting and nice that he bulk of this story takes place in a more fairy-tale-like world.
a note about Children of Memory
📖 Recent Quotes 📖
By dint of charging high prices and giving good food, - perhaps in part, also, by the quality of the education which he imparted, - his establishment had become popular and had outgrown the capacity of the parsonage. He had been enabled to purchase a field or two close abutting on the glebe' gardens, and had there built convenient premises. He now limited his number to thirty boys, for each of which he charged £200 a-year.* It was said of him by his friends that if he would only raise his price to £25o, he might double the number, and really make a fortune. In answer to this, he told his friends that he knew his own business best; - he declared that his charge was the only sum that was compatible both with regard to himself and honesty to his customers, and asserted that the labours he endured were already quite heavy enough. In fact, he recommended all those who gave him advice to mind their own business.
an excerpt from Dr. Wortle's School
And now, O kind-hearted reader, I feel myself constrained, in the telling of this little story, to depart altogether from those principles of story telling to which you probably have become accustomed, and to put the horse of my romance before the cart. There is a mystery respecting Mr and Mrs Peacocke which, according to all laws recognised in such matters, ought not to be elucidated till, let us say, the last chapter but two, so that your interest should be maintained almost to the end, - so near the end that there should be left only space for those little arrangements which are necessary for the well-being or perhaps for the evil-being, of our personages. It is my purpose to disclose the mystery at once, and to ask you to look for your interest - should you choose to go on with my chronicle, - simply in the conduct of my persons, during this disclosure, to others. You are to know it all before the Doctor or the Bishop, - before Mrs Wortle or the Hon Mrs Stantiloup, or Lady De Lawle. You are to know it all before the Peacockes become aware that it must necessarily be disclosed to any one. It may be that when I shall have once told the mystery there will no longer be any room for interest in the tale to you. That there are many such readers of novels I know. I doubt whether the greater number be not such. I am far from saying that the kind of interest of which I am speaking, - and of which I intend to deprive myself, - is not the most natural and the most eficacious. What would the Black Dwarf be if every one knew from the beginning that he was a rich man and a baronet? - or The Pirate, if all the truth abour Noma of the Fitful-head had been told in the first chapter? Therefors pur the book down if the revelation of some future secret be necessary for your enjoyment. Our mystery is going to be revealed in the next paragraph-in the next half-dozen words. [ SPOILERS ]
an excerpt from Dr. Wortle's School
The Doctor, instigated by the Bishop, had determined to ask some questions of Mr Peacocke as to his American life. The promise had been given at the Palace, and the Doctor, as he returned home, repented himself in that he had made it. His lordship was a gossip, as bad as an old woman, as bad as Mrs Stantiloup, and wanted to know things in which a man should feel no interest.
an excerpt from Dr. Wortle's School
[ A good footnote ]
Virgil, Aeneid, I, 199; the speaker Aeneas is comforting his sailors during a storm. The meaning is, 'God will put an end even to this.' an excerpt from Dr. Wortle's School
I say this, and yet I admit a nostalgic fondness for the thing that one must always say in a lecture, the phrase, "As we all know..." followed by a list of books and references that you know nothing about and after which you run out to find. Or, "As we will all remember ..." It is an arrogant presumption, but, at the same time, I have to say I love the share of knowledge it tries to dream: the lecture as a rite of passage into a readership or a community or, well, I hope not, a club? Perhaps this is where the lecture fails, but if it makes us want to run to a library, (ok, or to the Internet), or run from it, or toward something we didn't know enough to want to run toward or away from before we heard it, that may be all to the good; if it tempts us to move differently, maybe that is all good.
an excerpt from Lecture