ariel *ੈ✩‧₊˚ > Recent Status Updates

*spoilers* Athena stealing June’s scary experience and publishing it as her own idea is fucked lol. I don’t like ANYONE in this book but tbh that’s prob the point lol

tbh this is maing me want to delete twitter (not like i use it very often anyways lol)

Kind of feel bad for the FMC

Starting to think that authors pay more money on pretty cover artists than editors lol

Idk how to feel about this book lol…..why is it written like every other YA book from 2010 but with sex😅😅 am I supposed to like any of the characters?

Pls save me from this reading slump lol 🙏🙏🙏🙏

Oh wait were in 1988? 😭 why isn’t that listed anywhere lol

I shook my head. "There'll be wars."
"Yes. There'll be wars. Fought for the same reason most wars in ancient times were fought for: food. They'd use religion or glory or whatever as an excuse, but it was always about food. Farmlands and people to work that land.”

“‘Intelligence evolves to gives us an advantage over the other animals on our planet. But evolution is lazy. Once a problem is solved, the trait stops evolving. So you and me, we're both just intelligent enough to be smarter than our planet's other animals.’”

“If this happened when Earth was in the Stone Age, we would have just died. And if it happened a thousand years from now, we'd probably work out how to deal with Astrophage without breaking a sweat. There is a fairly narrow band of technological advancement that would cause a species to send a ship to Tau Ceti to look for an-swers. Eridians and humans both fall into that band.”

I appreciate all the science explanations but it’s boring lol

“‘According to this international treaty, I am personally immune from prosecution for any crime anywhere on Earth…. I also have a preemptive pardon from the president of the United States for any and all crimes I’m accused of within US jurisdictions” okay GORL for so for real rn 😭 I can suspend my disbelief for a lot of things but this is so cringey lmao

Note to self: I like the first discovery of alien spaceships and the alien cylinder—has anyone else read alien/first contact books? What do you think? I think of Interstellar (alien are us from the future), Contact, and Arrival. Any books to recommend ? Maybe more serious than this one lol not a fan of the humor

Annoying that he wouldn’t even plan for the drop in gravity? Like my guy you had 5 days to prepare.

38 - “All life needs is a chemical reaction that results in copies of the original catalyst. You don’t need water !”
50 - “Believe it or not, light has momentum. It exerts a force. If you were out in space and you turned on a flashlight, you'd get a teeny, tiny amount of thrust from it."

Finally on KU, babyyy

Really enjoying this book, and will prob read the rest in the series, but MY GOD do they need an editor. It’s so boring to read multiple paragraphs of internal monologues and scenes that should be quick transitions. I don’t need to read multiple pages each time someone goes outside to walk the dog or go to the hardware store. Esp when Nothing. Happens.

“‘Because knowledge is like...love,’ she answered, a soft smile curling her mouth as she settled on that particular word. ‘It should be freely given. It shouldn't be a selfish thing.’”

"My book even gets chosen for a national book club run by a pretty white Republican woman who is mostly famous for being the daughter of a prominent Republican politician" aka Read with Jenna lmaoooo

Ngl, getting annoyed at how much Vandy is assuming Pen and Luk’s relationship ship.

"It's not like I sat down and hatched up some evil plant to profit off my dead friend's work. No, seriously--it felt *natural*, like this was my calling, like it was divinely ordained."

Finally getting back to this book

This books makes me want to visit Turkey and Bulgaria baaaad lol 2026 vacation goal?!

“There is something vastly mysterious for me about the shift one sees, along that route, from the Islamic world to the Christian…. It is a gradation of towns, of architecture, of gradually receding minarets blended with the advancing church domes, of the very look of forest and riverbank, so that little by little you begin to believe you can read in nature itself the saturation of history.

“It's not morally wrong. It doesn't hurt anyone. There are no victims here, but maybe it's messed up? At the very least it's so fucking
-I don't even know, heteronormative of me. Gender conforming.
Regressive. Stereotypical. Banal. I hate it.
I love it.”

“It is fact that we historians are interested in what is partly a reflection of ourselves, perhaps a part of ourselves we would rather not examine except through the medium of scholarship; it is also true that as we steep ourselves in our interests, they become more and more a part of us.”

The writing in this book is so lovely

There’s very little to indicate that we know why Stoneheart isn’t open with his heart, and I’m frustrated to think we won’t get a proper answer lol. Could be authorial intent (and I sure hope so 😭) but I need a background, an I herbal monologue, SOMETHING! I do not remember anything from the previous book about them, and I wish more info was given

Barnaby being so stiff/awkward is interesting. He keeps Maisie at arms length and comes across as an ass a lot of the time, which works tbh

I feel like the writing is very stilted? Usually Riley’s prose is pretty good but in this, it’s a bit lacking?