Luke > Recent Status Updates

Getting 'Dead Souls' vibes from this, which isn't a bad thing at all.

Man, first Anne Rice, now bell hooks. Rest in peace to both. I can feel the earth shift beneath me with them having gone one after the other.

Once again piling on a tad too many long ones because everything that looks good is 400+ pages, but at least it'll simply my reading calculations for the rest of the year.

And here we see Ackroyd attempting to argue that socioeconomic segregation into slums and ghettos is the natural result of glacial activity from thousands of years ago.

Took nearly 600 pages to mention enclosures, which explains anywhere between 50-80% of the material that precedes it. Of course, the tone doesn't convey the rapacious greed of the legal measure, but does its best to steamroll over it as a sad, yet inevitable necessity of, what. Progress? The same progress that would have us believe union strikes signal the end of the world, I suppose.

The number of times Ackroyd snidely blames the poor for their problems is rapidly increasing.

Wonder how Amazon's broken this site this time.

This is turning out to be a lot better than I expected it to be, but considering what a mess the status quo makes of autism even to this day, you can't blame me for being wary.

Ackroyd's "scholarship" has just now achieved the credibility of a fear mongering Facebook post.

Starting to wonder whether this is just a long-winded advertisment for "The History of White People."

So now porn bots are following random folks instead of merely liking their recent book status updates, in case anyone's wondering about their weirdly increasing follower count.

I don't think Painter unselfconsciously uses the word "fuck" often enough to know how to integrate it unto her writing in a manner that doesn't sound forced.

"There is more certainty of purchasing a pineapple here, every day in the year," John Timbs's Curiosities of London declares, "than in Jamaica and Calcutta, where pines are indigenous."

Looks a lot more innocuously impressive when you aren't familiar with imperialism, monoculture, and tariffs, doesn't it.

To discuss London without mentioning enclosure is rather dishonest, and if Ackroyd insists on doing so for the next nearly 500 pages, there's not much that I'm going to be able to give him credit for.

You say, "Enough," and then blind history drags you by the hair back to war.

It was preposterous, and immoral, but there were immoral laws out there, he knew.

I already know that this book is going to prove to be an absolute favorite of mine. Now I just need to finish it.

These questions are unimportant, Father, but our whole life is composed of unimportant questions that pile up on top of one another and stifle us.

I'll be finishing this, as I do anything I start reading on this site, but this is much more of a chain of Buzzfeed articles interspersed with Wikipedia quotes than a biography.

Neurotypicals really think that writing trauma is like doing basic arithmetic, don't they.

Didn't take long to come across Cromwell again, despite the fact that the last king chronologically mentioned was Henry III.

A man can become, in an instant, what he truly is and then forget.

You'd think that most recently finished work of mine would have burned out my begrudging Anglophilia for the rest of the year, and yet. So, as always, might as well strike while the iron is still hot.

I don't know who's been teaching 21st century writers that adequate characterization comes purely from mentioning what college a character graduated from and what brand of messenger bag they subscribe to, but they need to stop.

Love it when the GRAmazon hegemony tries to generate reccs and demonstrates that it has no idea what to do with any work that not only has less than 50 ratings, but also isn't white, male, or English.

History [...] extracts from our inner selves people we don't know, people whose presence we don't dare acknowledge.

Home stretch.

The work I have is actually called 'Bait' and contains the four stories "Dheebar," "Chhuri," "Shareer," and "Ghatak, so I'm hoping to have the patience to force the draconian GRAmazon book entry system to reflect that at some pont while I'm reading this.

Manliness, or what we call manliness, consists of flight, because inside all the bluster and bullying and big words, there's a refusal to face up to life.

Hard to tell what the worst thing I read today was: "stiflingly PC culture," or "So not impressed with the whole transgender thing." Either way, not touching either of these folks with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.