Luke > Recent Status Updates

Reader's Favorite Horror Books: Unless you include a history of the Amazon takeover of Goodreads, you're missing the point.

This would be a better book if the narrator didn't feel the ever present need to defend Tagore. Leads to some very awkward moments where white boys complaining about not being able to hold picnics during memorial anniversaries is presented as evidence of the ultimate struggle (on the white boy's part, of course).

[T]he Nobel committee of 1913 had not the foggiest notion that in far-off Bengal Tagore was a polemical critic of religious, social and political orthodoxy, and by no means friendly to Government. If they had read his Bengali essays, they would not have given him the Nobel Prize. (Today, by contrast, his prose writings would more likely have secured him the prize than his translated poetry.)

Nearly 400 pages in and the narrator still sees fit to pop out with a "By the way, have I demonstrated how much I hate women?" for no godforsaken reason. Just in case you had forgotten.

God this main narrator dude is a dick.

I have to ask: how in character is it for someone who "went to Jewish classes three times a week" and whose father expects them to marry "a nice Jewish girl" to say 'Oh, Christ.'?

[P]ersonally I'm very pleased you were born.

Every time I get a surge of new followers it's like, ok. Which sector of the user populace got mass hacked by porn bots this time.

"Number alone is allowed, honored, protected, and recompensed. Since number does not think, since it is an...instrument...that never asks...whether it is made to serve the oppression of humankind or its deliverance,...the military leader of this era wanted no other emissary."

-Lamartine, 1834

Without waiting for me she removes her white shirt. Each button a piece of my own spine, undone.

The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.

I picked up this book largely in hope of some decent representation of viable polyamorous/non-nuclear households, and my efforts are starting to pay off.

There has never been an epoch that did not feel itself to be "modern" in the sense of eccentric, and did not believe itself to be standing directly before an abyss. The desperately clear consciousness of being in the middle of a crisis is something chronic in humanity.

I was having serious doubts about the translator's ability to provide objective commentary, and seeing the phrase "[a] fully initiated young African man" in a completely uncritical sense was the last nail in the coffin.

Benjamin sure does spend an awful lot of time playing the fool when it comes to sex work. It's really not that hard, bro.

So now GRAmazon is adding duplicate works to everyone's libraries after having broken their 'Find duplicate' button. Have to wonder how anyone is taking their force-feeding of stripping of user feedback/site functionality with the excuse of 'combatting bots' seriously after this.

Baudelaire confesses to having had, "in childhood, the good fortune—or the misfortune—of reading only books for adults."

(It would be interesting to study the bibliophile as the only type of collector who has not completely withdrawn [their] treasures from their functional context.)

Oh goodie. A whole heaping dose of neurotypical armchair diagnosing on top of the rest of the horseshit.

As life becomes more subject to administrative norms, people must learn to wait more. Games of chance possess the great charm of freeing people from having to wait.

This would be a much more interesting book if the author didn't feel the need to constantly make shit up (not to mention the shoehorned in micro specific digressions on early 2000s US politics).

Do I remember half of what I thought I knew when I first added this? No. Am I still going to attempt to read it? What else is living for?

I take it that GRAmazon has fucked the ability to sort books by number of ratings to hell for whatever reason at this moment in time.

Chances are good I read the first one at least two to two-and-a-half decades ago, so. Here goes nothing.

TL&DR version: Michelangelo plays the union breaker and gets his just deserts.

I wasn't too impressed with all the name dropping child genius rise to glory of the first chunk, but these "anatomy lessons" contextualized within the narrative as a whole are quite good.

Love it when the GRAmazon algorithm recommends me radfem trash, but honestly, that's on par with the hegemony.

Man do I love it when work has me acquire the books I want to read for the library holdings.

Why is that self proclaimed 'leftists' always turn out to be eugenicists with a 21st century hat. You might as well just call yourselves woke Nazis and save me a load of time.

Today we might say that we have all been offered an equal opportunity to perpetuate male dominance and racism.