"Sometimes Charlie felt like he was being cuckolded by his own mother."
— Eric Puchner: Dream State, p. 62
Brent Sleeper
- 8 Followers
- 4 Following
- 56 Posts
I am reading here until I can export my account to my local #SanFrancisco sfba.club Bookwyrm!
"Some people seemed to be relishing the pandemic, and she was one of them. Cora and Sam both recognized her instantly. [Cora] remembered something she’d forgotten, which was that their attraction existed in opposition to this woman and everything she stood for: self-righteousness, rigidity of spirit, the need to control."
— Erin Somers: The Ten Year Affair, pp. 129-131
I’m smashing together two excerpts that bookend a longer scene into a single quote, but they are a pairing that works—and that is perhaps, in fact, intentional. I love both the instantly recognizable characterization of this woman (“Broccoli Mom”) and the shared, secret story Cora and Sam have about her.
"He couldn’t move in time. For all that he was, he was bound to the seconds and minutes and hours just the same as anyone else."
— TJ Klune: Somewhere Beyond the Sea, p. 359
Emotive and powerful way to describe our inability to transcend the basic constraint of being human in the world: “bound to the seconds and minutes and hours.”
"The weight of her presence receded like the waves listening to the moon."
— TJ Klune: Somewhere Beyond the Sea, p. 345
The lyric beauty of this simile (“the waves listening to the moon”) belie the impersonality and inevitability of the tide.
"When we’re not laughing, we’re crying or running for our lives because monsters are trying to eat us. And they don’t even have to be real monsters. They could be the ones we make up in our heads."
— TJ Klune: Somewhere Beyond the Sea, p. 190
"There’s a limit to how much malice you can wring out of 256-row spreadsheet."
— Cory Doctorow: Picks and Shovels, p. 192
rated The Bezzle: 3 stars
The Bezzle - BookWyrm
***New York Times* bestseller Cory Doctorow’s *The Bezzle* is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California’s prisons are traded like stock shares.** The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost $25. Wait, what? When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he’s kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life. Martin has made his most dangerous mistake yet: trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and spoiled their fun. To them, money is a tool, a game, and a way to keep score, and they’ve found their newest mark—California’s Department of Corrections. Secure in the knowledge that they’re living behind far too many firewalls of shell companies and investors ever to be identified, they are interested not in the lives they ruin, but only in how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy. A seething rebuke of the privatized prison system that delves deeply into the arcane and baroque financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash, *The Bezzle* is a sizzling follow-up to *Red Team Blues*.
Brent Sleeper wants to read Elphie
Elphie - BookWyrm
**The riveting coming-of-age story of the prickly, green-skinned young girl who changes the world of Oz in the beloved *New York Times* bestseller *Wicked*.** Elphaba—the so-called Wicked Witch of the West—is seared into our collective memories as a feisty and uncompromising character. So it should come as little surprise that from her earliest days, young Elphie is an original. A firstborn child, Elphie stumbles into awareness of herself in the humid swamplands of Quadling Country, where her father is a renegade missionary. Shaped and molded by his fanaticism and by the whims of her high-strung society mother, Melena, Elphie watches with unflinching eye while largely keeping her own counsel. She suffers ordinary childhood jealousies over the births of her sister, saintly Nessarose, and her brother, junior felon Shell. Furthermore, she twitches with curiosity over her first apprehension of magic—but how is any young child to distinguish the unexplained from the uncanny? Haunted by a Monkey and taunted by Dwarf Bears, Elphie witnesses dubious attitudes toward the Animal populations of Oz, who live in the shadows of human settlements. She thrashes through her first bruising attempts at friendship, sensing a possible respite from her tricky circumstances. A shop clerk, a mission soloist, at once laced into family life and yearning to escape it, she begins to glean the possible benefits of education, however haphazardly she can cobble it together. Elphie is destined to be a witch; she bears the markings from childhood-most evidently in her green skin but more profoundly in her cunning and perhaps amoral behaviors. Or is she just misunderstood? This poignant sketch of young Elphaba adds depth and nuance to one of the most enduring characters in modern fiction.