📖 Recent Quotes 📖

• But some days, as she pounded away at the mahogany upright in the living room or punished the garage door with her forehands and backhands, Kate found herself feeling restless. Impatient. What was the point? She was young enough that all she had to do was kid things, but she was also getting old enough that she wanted to do more than play games and pretend. She felt ready for something more exciting. More real. Something that actually mattered.
  
  But there wasn't anything. Just toys and games and tennis and piano. Life always seemed so interesting in books, but then when you had to actually live it nothing all that interesting ever seemed to happen. And unlike in books, you couldn't skip ahead past the boring parts.

  an excerpt from The Silver Arrow, written by Lev Grossman in 2020

• It is commonly thought that children must have what are commonly called "children's epidemics," "current contagions," &c., in other words, that they are born to have measles, hooping-cough, perhaps even scarlet fever, just as they are born to cut their teeth, if they live.
  
  Now, do tell us, why must a child have measles?
  
  Oh because, you say, we cannot keep it from infection—other children have measles—and it must take them—and it is safer that it should.
  
  But why must other children have measles? And if they have, why must yours have them too?

  an excerpt from Notes on Nursing, written by Florence Nightingale in 1859

• [a footnote here arguing against a proto-germ theory, I think?]
  Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases, as we do now, as separate entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs? instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and a clean condition, and just as much under our own control; or rather as the reactions of kindly nature, against the conditions in which we have placed ourselves.
  
  I was brought up, both by scientific men and ignorant women, distinctly to believe that small-pox, for instance, was a thing of which there was once a first specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in a perpetual chain of descent, just as much as that there was a first dog, (or a first pair of dogs), and that small-pox would not begin itself any more than a new dog would begin without there having been a parent dog.
  
  Since then I have seen with my eyes and smelt with my nose small-pox growing up in first specimens, either in close rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have been "caught," but must have begun.

  an excerpt from Notes on Nursing, written by Florence Nightingale in 1859

📓 Recent Notes 📓

• This is really sweet: a straight ahead little magic fantasy, with a wry but not annoying narrator. Our heroine is great, I loved the surprising story beats. It's maybe not going to get up there with the Narnia books but I've already recommended it to several people. And it's got the slight wistfulness that Grossman has in all his books, which I think is... healthy? correct.

  an note about The Silver Arrow, written by Lev Grossman in 2020

• OK, I love Lev Grossman's books for adults. Then a few weeks ago I was surprised to see him credited as a writer on a Netflix movie (and in a cameo too!), so I googled him.... and he's got some early-reader chapter books??? Instant library request.

  an note about The Silver Arrow, written by Lev Grossman in 2020

• A really interesting manifesto about nursing, focusing on it as not a profession but a THING people do; and absolutely emphasizing fresh air, clean rooms, quiet rest. It's really interesting to see her emphasize this despite not having (I think?) access to the germ theory of disease - and in fact rejecting it in its early forms. Or at least that's how I'm understanding it here!

  an note about Notes on Nursing, written by Florence Nightingale in 1859

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