Erik > Recent Status Updates

We’re about to ramp this reading up now that I’m back from D.C.

‘It’s French, Letty.’ Ramy rolled his eyes. ‘Latin’s flimsiest daughter. How hard could it be?’

I laughed

Getting better, things are actually happening but the pacing remains incongruous with the reviews emblazoned on the dust jacket.

I truly thing the only thing keeping this novel from being classified as YA are references to daguerreotypes and other odd 19th century facets of life.

I’m gonna claw my eyes out

Nothing is happening. Harry Potter meets the snail.

There is a lingering annoyance at the footnotes throughout the book. Preachy footnotes are detracting from the reader’s sympathy for the experienced racism towards the Cantonese main character. Giving historically retroactive political commentary along with each encounter detracts heavily from the setting. Stop qualifying each already convincing narrative critique of British society!

Good, with errors

“‘Please accept my apology, Miss Taggart, if I gave you the impression that I suspected the existence of a relationship which I would consider improbable for you and — from my knowledge of his inclinations — impossible for my husband.’ She turned and walked away, indifferently, leaving them together, as if in deliberate proof of her words.”

- The modern slop factories masquerading as books could never!

The inability of Ayn Rand to make an extramarital affair even slightly sexual in nature beyond discussions of industrial and economic power dynamics is quite hilarious

Trying to pick this back up.

“What became of you, Elizabeth, out there on the road with your son? … He closed his eyes. Thinking of a boy standing on the tarmac by the ghost plane, Air Gradia Flight 452, Arthur Leander’s beloved only son, reading [revelations] aloud to the dead.”

Those sins against your soul are more visible to the observer than you may think. Obscurations of your true nature are not a shiny suit but a clown costume, most visible, to other clowns.

Each chapter is filled with such wonderful and intelligent prose, always reaching back in time, clawing at the busts and achievements of history

“Who is he? An exile. Which must not be confused with, allowed to run into, all other words that people throw around: émigré, expatriate, refugee, immigrant, silence, cunning. Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena.”

Definitely the best book of the year so far… lol