Luke > Recent Status Updates

It'd be hilarious how scared certain types of folks are of properly consensual BDSM if that fear hadn't been working itself out in dehumanizing legalities for some time now.

Beginning of Volume III - Honeycomb

Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.

Well, now I know that simply changing around an edition for various read works will spam my feed with review posts, but in a sneaky way that targets only the app and leaves the desktop seemingly untouched. So, y'all won't have to deal with that anymore. I don't need pity review likes.

We all die already judged immediately, book and author, made classics or corpses in a day, and meanwhile they recommend us to posterity and complain about the present.

What's the use of feeling like that if it doesn't stay? It doesn't change anything. Next time I'll make it stay. It might whisk me right away. There's something in me that can't be touched or altered. Me. If it comes again. If it's stronger every time...Perhaps it goes on getting stronger till you die.

"There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy." Leaving aside the grotesque solipsism and pure untruth of this statement, this was said by an author who, like many of his kind, probably had everything he wrote copyedited by whatever woman he had at his side at the moment.

I've seen fervent discussion about 'The Great Gatsby' entering the public domain, but where are the raptures over 'Mrs. Dalloway' or 'The Trial'? Hmmmm?

Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them.

You know shit's getting real when a work has two introductions.

Getting more than a few porn bot followers these days. Y'all should be watching your follower lists accordingly.

Beginning of Volume II - Backwater

[Compared to the Vietnam War, t]he Korean War was understood differently—as part of the just struggle of the Free World against the Soviet Union and China—and, given that characterization, photographs of the cruelty of unlimited American firepower would have been irrelevant.

Wanted to get this digital update out of the way before I go exercise and get some desperately needed endorphins in my brain, and honestly, looking at the state of my country today, I desperately need some evidence of critical thinking in my life.

I don't know if the author is actually trying to render eugenics in all its "benign" forms as nasty, inhumane, and evil as possible (aka, as it actually is) via word choice and association of events, but he's doing a pretty good job of it.

Wide, wide world, but as narrow as the coins in your hand.

So we have an asexual 'sociopathic' woman set up as the ultimate villain. My lord are allosexual, neurotypical men full of themselves sometimes.

If you make a list of books along the lines of 'Greatest Works Ever' and it's more than 30% white boy, I'm going to have a hard time believing that you know how to read better than you know how to copy-paste.

Reviewers Review Books By Non-White People Without Mentioning A Single White Person Challenge™

The introduction to this edition kept coming back to comparisons between this work and 'The Grapes of Wrath.' However, if you don't acknowledge how, this time around, Steinbeck didn't have Sanora Babb-esque material lying around to, subconsciously or otherwise, pilfer from, such work is little more than an exercise in obfuscating futility.

Ōe sure does like his edgy figures of speech, doesn't he.

I don't know why GRAmazon is restricting pre-load counts of books in one's library to ten per page. If I wanted to look at so few books at a time, I'd go on Facebook.

Can I just say how delighted I am to have some Djuna Barnes reading planned for this year? Because it's really worth mentioning.

This'll be the first time that I'm reading this author for reasons other than a school assignment. We'll see how it goes.

Thinking, feeling, rivulets of memory, English, German, a deep appreciation for music: so far, so good.

2020 Stats

# Read: 109
# of Pages: 38078
Longest: 2339 pp.
Shortest: 62 pp.
# by WoC: 28
# by White Men: 14
# of Faves: 1
# of 5 Stars: 6
# of 1 Stars: 6
# Translated: 36
# of Original Languages: 15
# Nonfiction: 28
# from Oldest 20% of TBR: 36
# pre-1800s: 5
# pre-1900s: 19
# pre-1950: 39
# of Poetry: 7
# of Authors Revisited: 30
# Avg Rating < 3.7: 24
# Avg Rating > 4.2: 19

Other stats available upon request.

Do most people on this site seriously not know any other 'Classics of Africa' other than 'Things Fall Apart' and (barely) 'Cry, the Beloved Country'? Give me a break.

It's weird to only be able to read one book at a time. At least I won't have to do it for very much longer.

Someone on Twitter mentioned the cool idea of devoting January 2021 to Japanese literature. Challenge reads for me come first, but I will for sure be slipping in Ōe's 'A Personal Matter.' Starting either 'The Tale of the Heike' or Mishima's 'The Sea of Fertility' is also possible, but with Richardson's 'Pilgrimage' already an early 2021 commitment, I don't want to overburden myself.

Anyone else interested?

Unless I get a sudden burst of reading desire, this is the last work I'll be starting in 2020. Sad, but necessary.