Joining team "green is a hippo, blue is a (weird) cow!" However I did have to squint confusedly at the blue one for quite a while before I got there...

The Bird of the River (Kage Baker, standalone); whatever the nearest Mary Stewart is that I haven't reread in a while; A Little Princess (I know it has problems but I imprinted on it); The Dark is Rising or The Grey King; to mix it up with nonfiction, Ruth Goodman's The Domestic Revolution

perhaps even more!!!

(oh my GOD)

Made this soup last night and it was a hit: localkitchenblog.com/2012/09/25/1... (Added extra thyme and sage; used veggie broth so I also added umami seasoning and stirred in some blue cheese at the end, but I only like squash when it's super umami so ymmv. Chicken broth would address this anyway.)

Oh, marvelous! That looks like a great time even without the research angle, but an amazing find with it!

Just a genuine lifelong hero to me. May we all live even half as well.

And unlike many childhood role models, she was the real deal. Even up until right before her death she was a tireless advocate for conservation and animals and science, gracious and eloquent and compassionate and humble, constantly using her platform for good, always quietly but firmly herself.

I read In The Shadow Of Man over and over as a nature-loving kid. She was a genuine inspiration. I thought until well into college that I was going to be a scientist, and she wasn't the reason, but she was a major role model. She did the kind of work kid me dreamed of.

I am so here for every single one of these updates (but I KNOW to the autocorrected capitalization; it drives me up a wall)

Yeah, I can come up with a bunch of theories but they'd all be like, "well, I can see how a guy who felt like and experienced this could have become Nick" and not "this is my clear idea of Nick and who he is"

Yes exactly!!

I remember discussing with you right after my reread, and it's fascinating because to me, the landscapes felt way more real than any of the people in them! Fairy tale either way but from different angles.

Like, my read would be the "Nick has trauma he's refusing to even look at and it's shaping all of this" reading, but that's in part because I think it's more interesting; I don't necessarily feel bound by authorial intent but it's interesting to me that I don't know what the authorial intent is.

And/or Doylistically if Fitzgerald put in the WWI background because it was illogical for Nick not to have one but wasn't really interested in exploring that, or if that's part of what he's talking about with the unreliability. I don't know! I can't tell! And I don't know that much about Fitzgerald

And yet because Nick is so very unreliable, and because of how it's written, I TRULY AND SINCERELY cannot tell if Nick has WWI trauma he's never looking at even indirectly, or if Nick is one of those people who managed to somehow skate through without deep trauma (some did! idk how!!) & move on

But it IS omnipresent. Nick getting demobbed, Nick and Gatsby having met in Europe, the occasional mentions of other veterans, the whole situation with Gatsby and Daisy breaking up in the first place, the economic impacts... it's all woven through.