rebecca_solnit epitome of incomprehensibility She's speaking on the radio, partly about a book she wrote called Orwell's Roses, with roots that reach out to many different topics. I'm not concentrated enough to take in everything she's saying, but I'm curious to read the book. She also has a soothing voice. 220601 ... raze i need to read more of her books. "the faraway nearby" took me a long time to get through a little less than ten years ago. not because of how long it was, but because i didn't want it to be over. it begins and ends as something of a memoir, digging into her mother's alzheimer's disease and her own mortality. between those two personal poles, it fans out in other directions and becomes a book about impermanence, about leprosy and the strange arc of che guevara's life, about fairytales, about fruit preserves, and about stories, how we tell them, how and why their meanings shift, what feeds them, and what they feed to those who are alive to take them in. the chapters are arranged as mirrors of themselves, with an additional chapter snaking through the bottom of each page like a news ticker — an afterword that's everywhere. there's an appraisal of mary shelley's "frankenstein" that's one of the most insightful reviews of anything i've read anywhere, ever. there's also this: "listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. the usual i we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others' stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. there are other ways of telling." 220602 what's it to you? who go blather from