ariel *ੈ✩‧₊˚ > Recent Status Updates

Oh no I’m confused and bored 😢😭 why is there no description given of Ben, I have no memery of what he looks like. I get that it’s a direct continuation of the dragon book, but girl, you gotta give us SOME kind of description!!

ONE OF MY MOST ANTICIPATED READS OF THE YEAR LETS FCKN GOOOOO

“This was to become a theme of our days there — her brief, pungent remarks on all that was already familiar to her: Turkish place-names, a cucumber salad consumed in an outdoor restaurant, the pointed arch of a window frame. This had a peculiar effect on me, too, a sort of doubling of my experience, so that I seemed to be seeing Istanbul and Romania at the same time.”

Absolutely devouring and loving this book

“Immediately I became aware of something very strange. A smell rose from is pages that was not merely the delicate scent of aging paper and cracked vel-lum. It was a reck of decay, a terrible, sickening odor, a smell of old meat or corrupted flesh.” Reading this right after Dracula, I appreciate the care and detail Kostova put in this to callback to the previous text

“It is a wild adventure we are on. Here, as we are rushing along through the darkness, with the cold from the river seeming to rise up and strike us; with all the mysterious voices of the night around us, it all comes home. We seem to be drifting into unknown places and unknown ways; into a whole world of dark and dreadful things.”

Seems appropriate to read this after reading Dracula!

Dr Seward is an annoying idiot. The only people I like in this book are Jonathan and Mina lol

“Take it, then, that the vampire, and the belief in his limitations and his cure, rest for the moment on the same base. For, let me tell you, he has known everywhere that men have been.”

Ch 29

This is so different/better than I thought it would be!

“The beautiful colour became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa's makes, and the lovely, blood-stained mouth grew to an open square, as in the passion masks of the Greeks and Japanese. If ever a face meant death—if looks could kill—we saw it at that moment.”
OH GIRL this is spooky!!!!

So sorry to say that Seward’s parts draaaggged for me. I was interested in Lucy and Van Helsing, but I truly couldn’t gaf about Seward (sorry bro lol). Mina’s journals are the ones I look forward to the most and I’m happy to return to her POV

This is so much creepier than I thought it’d be!!

“And I believe our sorrow was the more intense because nobody else seemed to share it. They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by the story. But we listened for the one who would say, “Poor little girl," or, "Poor baby," but there was only head-wagging where those words should have been. We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils.”

Forcing myself to finally read this in my anticipation of Egger’s Nosferatu release in a few weeks!!!

“Fareeda swallowed, studying the runner beneath her feet. Her eyes followed the fabric, its embroidered lines spinning in and out of each other, again and again. She felt as though her life was bound by the same pattern. She couldn't breathe.”

“…. That she had been burdened with duty ever since she was a child. That she had never really lived. She felt empty; she felt full. She needed people; she needed to be alone. She couldn't get the equation right. Who was to blame? She thought it was herself. She thought it was her mother, and her mother's mother, and the mothers of all their mothers, all the way back in time.”

This story is entrancing

“Every time Deya replayed this conversation in her head, she imagined her life was just another story, with plot and rising tension and conflict, all building to a happy resolution, one she just couldn't yet see.… It was much more bearable to pretend her life was fiction than to accept her reality for what it was: limited. In fiction, the possibilities of her life were endless. In fiction, she was in control.

“He hadn't known fire could look this way. He had never thought in his life that it could give as well as take. Even its smell was different.
How long he stood he did not know, but there was a foolish and yet delicious sense of knowing himself as an animal come from the forest, drawn by the fire.”

“In the morning he would not have needed sleep, for all the warm odors and sights of a complete country night would have half drowning rested and slept him while his eyes were wide and his mouth, self safe and when he thought to test it, was half a smile.”

“No, no, it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself.
Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say….”

“We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make the cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”

So far not a fan of Neil Gaiman’s Introduction in this edition 😅😅😅

“It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions. Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison….”

Idk how to feel about this one yet. It’s been on my physical TBR for probably 3 years though so I need to figure it out lol