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I think I’m in love with Barbara Pym? V funny if you’re tuned into her slyness about anthropologists and gender roles and white London suburbs.

I keep wanting to find quotes to show how hilarious this book is, but it's not so much zingers and just the embedded tone and observations about anthropologists and gender roles, so I guess you'll have to take my word on it

rounding the hump between years with some Pym as a grief cleanser

@mouse Is it incredible in the sense that it’s going to make me cry and think about loss or incredible in the sense that it will do those things and also maybe me give some sort of way to think about moving forward?

to be totally honest, I had never been able to get through The Odyssey before. I did listen to maybe half of Ian McKellan reading the Robert Fagles translation, and of course I knew the general gist of the stories in it. But this was the first translation that I found compelling. And, as with how I read Moby-Dick, I read this slowly over multiple months (and listened to some parts in the Clare Danes audiobook) and often got lost in the immediate moment while forgetting where in the multiply layered narratives I was. But it worked for me. Iliad next! or soon, at least.

I was not prepared for the grief and stress and loss in this! Sorry to say that her characterization in 1991 of how Americans would behave when confronted with health quarantines is exactly spot on.

@quaad ooooh I haven't read this one but have read the whole Palliser set and loved them so am now tempted!

started this because my library had it for immediate checkout and I've liked her other books, but genuinely was unprepared to spend my end of the year reading about pandemics and Christmas 😬

@shandyist I was just thinking about how great this movie is!

I don't know how to rate this because it feels like rating her, and I can't do that. I listened to the audiobook initially because the library waitlist had it before other versions, but preferred hearing it in her own voice--she snorts and laughs at herself sometimes, which is delightfully intimate. But the years about her childhood will break your heart, and her talking about her future and her son Shane's future will also break your heart. Don't necessarily stay for the latter part of the story, when she (as she admits) doesn't have the material to draw from because she was in such a state of trauma. z"l

You'll need to have a high tolerance for Catholic nuns and their deep love for god, and you need to be into the hard-boiled detective thing, but otherwise great. I'm curious how the next will be

come for the sex lessons, stay for the romance. or vice versa. fun and satisfying either way

yes!! Don't read if you have contingent academic anxieties or fear of plants, do read if you're into ancient Greek Sapphic things, vampires, and discovering relics.

brought back good memories of my bike riding days. she's either your bag or she's not, and I like her