Bookmarker is a personal project by @dellsystem to help with retaining reading material. Source on GitHub.

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Martin exits I-89 before he needs to and progresses town by town. He keeps pulling over to eyeball a fiery spruce or an outcropping of mica, admire quaint inns with ivy wreathed around their VACANCY signs and crumbling breweries offering hard apple cider tastings. He’s eager to reach Tunbridge, but knows anticipation is the greatest pleasure. He stops to buy a mason jar of corn whiskey from a sweet old man on a porch, thinking how happy he’ll be once he reaches Lola and Dot’s barn. Then, realizing his spirits are at that peak where they’re in danger of toppling over into confusion or sadness, he drinks two beers in a gloomy pub. The people here are not part of the world of ivied inns and apple cider tastings; they’re leathery and anonymous, faces raised mutely to the TV, and Martin feels comfortable among them: alone and unseen.

i'm sorry but i hate this. so annoying

—p.14 Wool (14) missing author 3 months, 1 week ago

[...] Dot, for her part, had been cowed by Martin’s longstanding friendship with Lola, whose moods she was still trying to interpret. During their brief early breakup, Lola had sat for hours on Martin’s fire escape in the hideous frilly nightgown inherited from her hated mother, smoking like a junkie in recovery, enumerating all of Dot’s microscopic flaws: she was insecure about her grammar, she under-tipped, she made fun of the acting in Lola’s beloved Ozu films. Martin defended Dot: “She’s the only person you’ve ever dated who gets up before noon and goes to a job every day. Plus, those lips, that ass.”

UGH

—p.16 Wool (14) missing author 3 months, 1 week ago

“She was riding in Marge Hasselbeck’s truck,” Lola says. She pauses for a moment to stare at Dot’s back. “Did you meet her at Ginger’s birthday? Lives about a mile down the road. Our closest neighbor. And her son looks, I swear, the spitting image of Julyana: all otherworldly and translucent. Unfortunately, he’s a real moron. This little boy, I mean.” (Julyana was a drag queen, videographer, and fire eater Martin and Lola had been vaguely friends with a million years ago.) [...]

????

—p.19 Wool (14) missing author 3 months, 1 week ago

Tell your family. Use the word temporary. [...] Your grandfather will tell you that nannying is for foreigners and retards.

ok i chuckled

—p.80 How To Be A Nanny (78) missing author 3 months, 1 week ago

[...] Cryptic notes in the margins of a grocery list: Consider a change. Remember to leave. The words "don't forget" crossed out. Affirmations tucked in a drawer in the bathroom with the old pregnancy tests and Vaseline: You are worthwhile. It makes you blush to find them but she's not trying to hide them either. [...]

—p.88 How To Be A Nanny (78) missing author 3 months, 1 week ago

[...] That turn really did take place between Strong Motion and The Corrections. There was plenty of domestic stuff in the first two books, but the idea that the [domestic] dramas could carry the main weight of the story was a liberating discovery. I did not have to resort to elaborate superstructures.

—p.104 Different People, Different Families (99) missing author 3 months, 1 week ago

The money helped. She signed a lease on an apartment in Harlem with two friends and once there, spent the summer applying for internships and entry-level jobs. She bought some cute interview clothes, shoes made of supple leather that molded to her feet. She procured a summer internship with a literary agent, an elderly woman who rolled her own cigarettes, ate sardines, and hated all of her clients, and then in the fall, landed an entry-level assistant publicist job at one of the most esteemed publishing houses in the country. The assistants from the various departments went once a week to happy-hour tapas at a bar in Union Square and Elisa would spend too much money on sangria and whatever slider or oyster everyone else ordered. And at night, she would sit on her bed, on the sheets she bought at a discount store, tiny lightning bolts across them, and she would feel overwhelmed with it, that she had so easily, so simply gotten the life that she wanted.

damn i was prepared to hate this but i do like the ending.

—p.124 Radical Empathy (118) missing author 3 months, 1 week ago

He knew nothing, Ben, but he couldn't help it. He had known no heartache, had excelled in school, gone straight to medical school. He knew work and reward, work and reward, nothing complicated, nothing tragic. A piece of her floated away from him that night, or had been floating for a while, but she said yes, as she always knew she would, if he asked.

—p.129 Radical Empathy (118) missing author 3 months, 1 week ago

[...] They were young, still in their early twenties. They had decades to figure it out. She wanted to edit books. To have an office with floor to ceiling bookcases, a vase of fresh flowers near a wall of thank-you notes from famous authors. She wanted conversations at restaurants that made her blood course faster, that gave her brain the spins. She wanted to be at the edge of things, to feel the feeling a book gave to you when it did something new and lively, when it bent the conversation away from itself, away from its expected course, and made new air. Was it a kind of mother-instinct to want this? Maybe, and maybe it would be enough for her. This future pulled at her. She wanted to use her mind. Her mind was a restless things. It had a clock of its own. [...]

i find the writing a bit cloying in a way i can't fully articulate but this is still moving nonetheless

—p.130 Radical Empathy (118) missing author 3 months, 1 week ago

They were going through what they had privately acknowledged to friends and family as a rough patch. They had been together for four years, married for two, living in the apartment for one, and driving each other crazy for eight straight months.

—p.169 Parents of North American Children (167) missing author 3 months, 1 week ago