The Stars and the Cookie Jar

I NEED TO FINISH MY BOOK.

IT WILL BE DONE.

THIS WEEKEND.

Thank you, that is all.

(The icon is no longer entirely appropriate, since sovay found me some fabulous potential cover art in the form of Susan Seddon Boulet's Sedna, which we realise is probably rights-protected up the wazoo. Sigh.)

I've just finished reading A Thread of Grace, by Mary Doria Russell.

I wish I could do that, verdammte.

It was an amazing read. I cried at two points, one I would not have expected, near the end. The characterization 'made' the book, and the writing was as remarkable for its not-telling as for what was revealed. I was stunned, in the old, more literal sense of stunned. And nobody makes perfect choices and nearly everybody dies -- good people and horrible people are consigned to all different directions by fate. There's no banner character that makes it through shiny and clean. Facts and memories are revealed little by little, people vanish, things are cryptic and frustrating.

I thought I was jaded and inured to modern Holocaust literature -- my own book included, if you wondered -- but this was just breathtaking. I would have got through it in a week, but I kept putting it down because I was horrified of what might happen next.