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 📓
Now at the end of Book 2. Is it just going to be all these different traveling parties bumping into each other for the rest of the book? It feels like they're all at the same party, but they're covering a huge expanse of unpopulated west. Like four states so far?
a note about Lonesome Dove
OK, midway through Part 2 now, 3-400 pages in. It's obviously GOOD. But it's still about Cowboys and Indians. But I'm not bored!
Some misc Part 1 thoughts:
- there is a lot of prostitution and rape here, much more than I anticipated.
- there is apparently only one woman in this book and at least five characters have paid to have sex with her
- we're going to make a lot of carrot jokes, I can tell.
- I learned the word 'remuda'
Some misc Part 2 thoughts:
- the moccasin attack! Shocking, I didn't see this coming. After 300 pages of casual murder and rape, this accident felt violent.
- I met Po Campo and immediately love this guy. I hope he's around to stay.
- The July Johnson storyline isn't grabbing me yet
- Roscoe's foundling? This feels like a whole lot of western tropes all at once.
a note about Lonesome Dove
My book club is reading this, and thus far I'm split. I love a good giant novel (look at Trollope!) and so an epic social tale that takes 800+ pages doesn't bother me one bit. On the other hand, Westerns and cowboys in general always have me rolling my eyes. We'll see.
a note about Lonesome Dove
This is a 'magic kids at boarding school' book, except the kids are snarky teenagers and they don't understand their magic. But the school does, and it's keeping them from finding out their Special Purpose. And their deal is: they're the children of the Titans, the primordial forces that the greek gods overthrew to give the world order. But maybe all the gods are real? And they all have a vested interest in keeping these kids from learning Who They Really Are and What They Can Really Do. I read a recommendation on this that said "it's not good but it's interesting", but I found it neither.
a note about Orphans of Chaos
A sweet, realistic book about young boys playing and growing up in the shadow of London's air raids. They're too young to appreciate the real danger, but love the thrill and excitement. I love a Susan Cooper book, and this is the most grounded of any of hers I've read.
a note about Dawn of Fear
📖 Recent Quotes 📖
"Son, this is a sad thing," Augustus said. "Loss of life always is. But the life is lost for good. Don't you go attempting vengeance. You've got more urgent business. If I ever run into Blue Duck I'll kill him. But if I don't, somebody else will. He's big and mean, but sooner or later he'll meet somebody bigger and meaner. Or a snake will bite him or a horse will fall on him, or he'll get hung, or one of his renegades will shoot him in the back. Or he'll just get old and die."
He went over and tightened the girth on his saddle.
"Don't be trying to give back pain for pain," he said. "You can't get even measures in business like this. You best go find your wife."an excerpt from Lonesome Dove
"That's right," Augustus said. "There's an art to biscuit making, and I learned it."
"My wife was good at it too," Po Campo remarked. "I liked her biscuits. She never burned them on the bottom."
"Where's she live, Mexico?" Augustus asked, curious as to where the short old man had come from.
"No, she lives in hell, where I sent her," Po Campo said quietly, startling everyone within hearing. "Her behavior was terrible, but she made good biscuits."an excerpt from Lonesome Dove
Restaurants, even air-cooled perforce in the midst of hot sand, like Palm Springs, or as far from the sea as Oskaloosa in lowa, can serve oysters without fear these days. Tycoons with inlets in Maryland have their highfalutin molluscs flown for supper that night to a penthouse in Fort Worth, or to a simple log-cabin Away from It All in the Michigan woods, and know that Space and Time and even the development of putrescent bacteria stand still for dollars. Bindlestiffs on a rare bender in Los Angeles (Ell-ay, you say) gulp down three swollen "on the half's" with a rot gut whiskey chaser in any of a dozen joints on Main Street, and are more than moderately sure that if they die that night, it won't be from the oysters.
an excerpt from Consider the Oyster
Those few of us who actually live to eat are less repulsive than boring, and at this date I honestly know of only two such lost souls, gross puffy creatures, both of them, who are exhibited like any other monstrous curiosity by their well-fed but still balanced acquaintances.
On the other hand, I cannot count the good people I know who, to my mind, would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers. There are too many of us, otherwise in proper focus, who feel an impatience for the demands of our bodies, and who try throughout our whole lives, none too successfully, to deafen ourselves to the voices of our various hungers. Some stuff the wax of religious solace in our ears. Others practice a Spartan if somewhat pretentious disinterest in the pleasures of the flesh, or pretend that if we do not admit our sensual delight in a ripe nectarine we are not guilty. .. of even that tiny lust!an excerpt from How to Cook a Wolf
Perhaps it is an old wives' tale; perhaps it is a part of our appetites more easily explained by The Golden Bough than by a cook or doctor: whatever the reason, a roasted pigeon is and long has been the most heartening dish to set before a man bowed down with grief or loneliness. In the same way it can reassure a timid lover, or comfort a woman weak from childbirth.
It is not easy to find pigeons, these days. Most of the ones you know about in the city are working for the government.an excerpt from How to Cook a Wolf