"I Will Repay" by Emmuska Orczy - Sweded

France, 1783 

MESSENGER: Sorry but some guy named Déroulède killed your son.

DUC DE MARNY: What?  Juliette, my daughter, you must swear to kill him!

JULIETTE: Me? No offense, Father, but why don’t you do it yourself?

DUC DE MARNY: And get out of my deathbed? 

JULIETTE: Wait, if you were so sick why was my brother off dueling people for no good reason?

DUC DE MARNY: Fermez la bouche and take this oath to become a raging rampage of revenge!

JULIETTE: But I’m like eight years old!

DUC DE MARNY: Well I didn’t say you had to become one overnight! Give it about ten years or so, that way you can try wreaking vengeance in the middle of social upheaval that will threaten your life since you’re of noble blood.

JULIETTE: But I’d much rather be a sweet and pious nun than a raging rampage of revenge, father!

DUC DE MARNY: Nonsense! If you’re a nun then how are you going to be involved in the rest of the story ten years from now when I’m dead?

JULIETTE: Good point. 

Reviewing e e cummings' "The Enormous Room"

“Don’t be sad, my little son, everybody falls out of trees, 

they’re made for that by God,” 

~ The Enormous Room, e e cummings, pg. 102

Flitting about the online book world I came across a video by vlogbrothers, “18 Books You Probably Haven’t Read.”* Although I hadn’t read any of these books, I don’t feel too bad for not rushing out to read ALL of them since frankly Green goes through them so fast I couldn’t process whether I wanted to read them or not. The one exception which stood out was The Enormous Room, the autobiographical account of poet/author/playwright/artist e e cummings** and his time in a French prison in 1917.  

"The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells: A Review

A long time ago when I was just entering adolescence and had spare time to waste on doing nonsensical things, I was trying to construct a pyramid out of marbles. Marbles being round and therefore not exactly conducive to stacking like bricks, this was a laborious and time-intensive goal. Enter listening to audiobooks while I did these sorts of things. In fact, I’m not at all sure, so long after the fact, that these sorts of nonsensical enterprises weren’t created in order to be doing something while listening to audiobooks. Like the chicken and the egg, I’m not sure which came first.* 

It’s a strange thing how sometimes two sensory memories, the sight of marbles, for instance, can be connected to others, such as the sound of The Time Machine being played on cassette. But when I started composing this review, that’s exactly what happened.  Remembering my first experience with H.G. Wells made me think of what I was doing while listening to that audiobook for the first time over ten years ago.