Sasha > Recent Status Updates

I admit I have been having trouble following this person's exploration of what capitalism means, because said person owns a house, just bought a house in fact, refuses to not talk about how owning a house was part of why she started confronting the concept of capitalism in earnest. Anyway, I live in a third-world country.

One of the last books I salvaged from a Booksale in the pre-plague. I started in earnest about two months ago, but then digressed—WK brought up Sontag and Barthes (of course), reminding me of their books I’d put on the back burner and must retrieve. Then I strayed some more, caught in Kate Zambreno’s funny riff on Sontag, which itself led to another rabbit hole within her bibliography and of adjacent writers.

I am, apparently, starting my eleventh Siri Hustvedt book.

It's been ten years since I first read this, and my original copy has been in someone else's shelves for a while now. I've felt the need to reacquaint.

I am bored out of my wits, and have not stumbled onto a line that has made me gasp. Every time my mind glances against the thought that I need to pick up this book again and continue reading it, a thick and syrupy dread fills me.

Reuniting with an enduring love.

Sick and grumpy and a little over 200 pages into the self-congratulatorily impermeable THE VORRH—featuring white asshats in a reimagined Africa and women who exist to be fucked / butchered into tools. Srsly: Every woman we've encountered has been: subservient or sexual or "savage" or sexual or a robot or a bow; permutations of! Yay, you.

You are not, book, "the best book in the world." What you are is blindly, willfully optimistic. Here's a cookie.

Who was I even kidding.

Took a chance that the book everyone loved two years ago would help me get through this day. There is an obscene amount of sunshine in this book.

GODDAMMIT STEPHEN KING

Good lateral reading-begets-reading from the Bryson. A man's stranded in Mars, and I'm totally freaking out but laughing at the same time and totally freaking out still. Good times, so far.

I'm liking the kind of reader that Bryson has turned me into: Someone who reaches for this book first thing in the morning, to continue the section on quantum mechanics; someone who takes this book to bed, reluctantly falling asleep right after the chapter on how active volcanoes can wipe us off the face of the planet yay yay yay oh god.

Why do not have a running list, yet, of scientists who've had extraordinarily bad luck or are ridiculously kooky or both? (Also: The geography and the chemistry sections are giving me a downer, after all the wonder of the larger Universe.)

Reading science books published prior to Pluto's demotion: Always a welcome, twinge-y reminder of the ever-evolving nature of, well, science.

Bill Bryson writes, "...the universe bends, in a way we can't adequately imagine," and my eyes are getting squintier and squintier and squintier. I fucking love Science.

Liking this one so far, even if I'd thought (by the first fifty pages) that I'd either just slog through mindlessly, or toss it away entirely. Sure, can't remember first two books of the series, but I'm in this one for now. What a relief.

I know I said I'd stop reading Julia Quinn, because she's gotten so fluffy it's like inhaling fumes from cotton candy. But. I need some low-level-commitment reading for tonight. So. Myeh.

Some absurd Sunday reading. And for JANE EYRE reasons, too, of course.

This obstinate obstinate obstinate, impossible book.

What? It's Christmas Eve.

I bought this when it first came out, started it then, but never really moved forward. But now, it seems, I'm the ideal Sasha to read this. And I'm crazy about it. [Um. Needs more Batman, though, as with all things.]

This happens a lot with King: The book grows into something that matters, and you're compelled to keep reading. But precisely because it matters to you now, and because Steve likes making Constant Reader suffer, the rest of the book (with shit going down) will have to drag you kicking and screaming.

Whut, Charlie Manx shout-out, and in the fittingest, most creeptastic way. (I'm all twisty with love for the Kings.)

Just about halfway through the book I was very skittish about reading. But I'm convinced it's what I need to read now. — — Here's a short note on what led me to it in the first place: http://silverfysh.wordpress.com/2013/...

Of course I am reading this because its hero has been described as a Georgian-era Batman.

Sadly, strangely fitting that the last time I was with this book, I was struck by this breathleas sentence that ended with, "I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead."