Luke > Recent Status Updates

Amazon has been running Goodreads into the ground for nearly a decade and folks get into a tizzy about a fake book. Way to let the company know that they don't need to take any sort of user criticism seriously.

This is a 2023 read that I brought with me for when things get slow during my family visit for New Years, so I'm in no rush.

Not sure if I'm ever going to get used to seeing books on my GR dash that I'm responsible for having added to my real life public library's collection as part of my duties as tech services librarian.

What is it with the English? Did ever a nation hate liberty more?

This would be a far more interesting story if the men were allowed to fuck each other, but alas.

"Your moral education's over. [...] Now you're going to learn a thing or two about war."

GRAmazon begging me to vote in their yearly clown show when my most recently published read is from 2020. Cringe behavior.

I'm sorry, but no one traverses life from the age of fourteen to that of thirty-six with the exact same writing style.

Always the French.

I don't know why Amazon continues putting on the grand mal farce that is the choice awards. Just slap the top hundred purchased books of the year on the header and leave the rest of us alone.

The only thing more pathetic than a weeb is a fifty-three-year-old weeb. Unfortunately, I doubt the narrative realizes this.

Have started to look forward to the upside-down sections: I get to practice reading upside-down, and average words per page count tends to go down the drain.

As Gore Vidal observes, "With historians like ours, who needs Göebbels?"

In Beckett's play, as everyone knows, Godot never arrives. In the Native version, Europeans never leave.

These days nothing deserves our faith less than the slick and expensive.

'Tis the time of year to learn a thing or two about this Turtle Island upon which I currently reside (although any time of year is prime time for such, to tell it plain).

And now Peoples Park in Berkeley, CA, US is educational industrial complex housing. One of the more obvious signs of this country going down the disaster capitalism tubes.

Certainly seems like the kind of book that'd show up on a 'Bopks to Read While drunk' list, so. Two steps ahead in thatregard.

He wasn't transsexual. He just wanted dresses.
It was a vague plan.

Thus far, the classic horror trope where the White Guy finds out that he is not in fact the apex predator. Or, to be more precise, the apex impregnator.

Another attempt to read according to the current seasonal theme. Hope this is less disappointing than prior seasonal reads have been.

There was a widespread assumption that white workers' sense of racial superiority was a manifestation of "false consciousness" that could be eradicated by common struggle. But white supremacy as a form of nationalism was backed by the largest imperial economy and military in human history, no small cause for "pride." And even though the forces openly advocating white supremacy were marginal, their message was...

I so rarely read something genre during the time of year it's most suited for, so I guess I should take advantage of this.

The biography's couching of its eighty-year-old subject refusing to process the aftermath of being raped as 'stiff upper lip' is rather despicable, to put it mildly.

"So there are some quite reputable Catholics, Jews, and Protestants who think that I might in some sense of the word be worth saving. The Muslim faction has been quieter."

No shit, Sherlock.

Lol, figures I'd have to trawl through the tripe of Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me again.

I'd be very surprised indeed if Gellhorn hadn't been aspec.

I could do without the US nationalism rankly seething throughout the author's wording choices. Where does she think the Nazis got their ideas about racial segregation from?

Not every day a character claims to really like Kristóf's 'The Notebook'. Wonder what that's going to build up to.

A crash course in "Western" cultural paradigms, with the assumption that one is always taken off guard (but mildly enough to never elicit committed protest) by sex-negativity, bigotry, and capitalism.