Status Updates From A Boy's Own Story (The Edmu...

Nothing I did or said among the other boys came to me naturally. As a result, in every encounter, even the most glancing, I had to be a performer, for at all times I was aware I was impersonating a human being.

I didn’t want him to like men, just me, not even as a man but me as a discarnate ardor, pure willingness in his naïve, manly, exquisitely untested arms.

I’d decided to take the very futility I so often felt, the vacant hum, the sense of subsisting outside whatever was vibrant and to equate precisely this secular emptiness with the sacred void, to make of my shame a jewel, to call my poverty wealth.

It seemed to me then that beauty is the highest good, the one thing we all want to be or have or, failing that, destroy and that all the world’s virtues are nothing but the world’s spleen and deceit.

For I could thrive in the expressive, inhuman realm of nature or the expressive, human realm of books—both worlds so exalted, so guileless—but I felt imperiled by the hidden designs other people were drawing around me.

I carried the plots and atmosphere of fiction about with me and tried to cram random events into those ready molds. But no, truthfully, the relationship was more reciprocal, less rigorous—life sang art’s songs, but art also took the noise life gave and picked it out as a tune (the cocktail pianist obliging the humming drunk)

Mucha referencia a óperas y música clásica, me tiene ganado de momento

this book is so weird and i think i hate it

Agora o livro deu uma guinada boa.

Impressively honest and (because of that) lovable main character.

I get he's struggling with feeling like an outsider for being gay, but his obsession with being popular is so pedestrian that it's making me like him even less.

Updateando cada vez que leo porque me está costando un montón terminar este libro 😭

Not really liking this yet: reminds me a lot of The Boyhood of Cain, and I wasn't a fan of that one. But it's not long so I might stick it out, we'll see.

IDK, maybe the narrator wouldn't dislike bottoming so much if he stopped insisting you only need spit.

Interesting.

I will admit I am that basic bitch who has had this on my Kindle for at least ten years and is now reading it after he died

thats your dad...

thats a 12 year old boy buddy

no wonder honesty came to mean for my sister saying only the most damaging things against herself. if she began by admitting defeat, then something was possible: sincerity, perhaps, or at least the avoidance of appearing ludicrous.

when i grew up i would always be frank, loving and generous

The master of characterization.

a hypnotic reading experience

One of the best chapters that I have ever read

One of the best chapters that I have ever read

Entirely obsessed with this. White's writing is almost hypnotic. Some of the most beautiful scenes that I have ever read

White's prose is absolutely stunning and the perceptions of his narrator are truly marvelous and incredibly insightful

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Every sentence is so pretty

He’s so verbose in all the small details of his life. It reminds me of house on the bay and house on the ocean in that regard. I don’t think I have the bandwidth to read another book, by another old gay, going into immense detail about the smallest events in their past. This one is centered around childhood and set in the past which is unique but I feel that I will end up unfulfilled if I continue