Excellent Women 93%

page 210

"On vacation to Montana so slowed down. If there was a male equivalent for the word misogynist, Pym would get the label. All the men are obtuse, dense, and not up to the quality of the excellent women."

Our heroine, for example, sits down with Everard Bone. He tells her that she is a sensible woman. She asks him: What kind of woman would you want to marry? He replies: "Oh, a sensible woman." But Mildred is not on his radar. How boorish! How insensitive! How unlikely! What intelligent young man, sitting with a single woman, would make such a comment?

Comments

Puppy, Story by George Saunders

PUPPY Dysfunctional family has puppy that they need to get rid of. Mom places ad; family is coming over. Description of family. Mom: husband changed from long-haired attractive to stooped old man. Husband: talks constantly of living on a farm and doing what needs to be done, though he never lived on a farm. Conversations together: Sell and move to Arizona, get hooked on phonics for kids, buying a car wash. . . wonderful randomness. Straight-laced suburbanite comes to look at puppy. Seems like she will buy it, even though she is repelled by house. (Dog turds on carpet, filthy.) She is proud of how accepting she is until she looks out window and sees white trash's son tied by harness to a tree. Reader knows he is a menace to himself, darting across I-90, for example. Suburban mother beats hasty retreat, leaving dog to be (probably) drowned by dad who does what has to be done. Suburbanite remembers her own pathetic ch...

Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler

Bryant & May--Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery, Book 1 Lots that I liked. Crime novel that is also historical fiction. Fowler gives insight into London during the blitz. Danger from street cars, some looting during blackout, stiff upper lip British still going to theaters, etc. Fowler also takes reader backstage into the workings of a theater. I learned a lot about the physical complexity of a major theater--production is a tremendous production. I liked both the main characters. Bryant, the eccentric loner who thinks out of the box. May, the more traditional "bright" guy, who is able to appreciate Bryant and help by keeping him in the real world, a little. Plot revolves around murders committed while cast rehearses and then performs Offenbach's scandalous version of Orpheus and Eurydice. The murders are on the gruesome-detail side given the general British coolness of the rest of the text. Spoiler coming. The denouement wa...

Napoleon, mainly Egyptian campaign.

Napoleon genuinely enjoyed being with his soldiers. He was modern in that he used praise to motivate. "Severe to officers, kindly to men" was his mantra. Tremendous memory--story of asking a minor minister how his two children were doing . . . he had met the minister once, ten years earlier. . . Admiration for Andrea Doria even though his star had fallen . . . Josephine "psychotic extravagence." Bona fide intellectual . . . the attack on Egypt included scientists, geologists, poets. It resulted in a 20 volume scholarly work on all things Egypt "Denon's Description l'Egypte (last remaining handwritten copy burned in the the Arab Spring uprising in December of 2011, along with 192,000 other books in a Cairo library) . . . In Malta, Napoleon immediately reformed the government, freed political prisoners, installed street lights, postal service, hospitals . . . generally well received by intellectuals as a liberator, hated by religious conservatives and...

Carl Deuker -- Books, Movies, TV

Search This Blog