Luke > Recent Status Updates

A disabled villain. How original. The sooner temporarily able people get over themselves, the better.

I'll never understand the point of the existence of people who view books only as decoration.

Tons of people who regularly use this website are, either today or tomorrow, choosing to feed a hoarding dragon while indie bookstores struggle to make ends meet and libraries get their funding cut and non-mainstream authors are frantically coordinating online for their next paycheck. I know that this place has been GRAmazon rather than Goodreads for a long time, but it all still makes me sick.

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

Apparently, for some folks, hearing intimations that someone they know isn't a virgin hurts worse then getting stabbed with a dagger in the chest.

We realized that if we had asked her at the beginning why she was afraid, she might have told us.

This Coming Out Day, a reminder to everyone following me that I'm queer; if you don't fully embrace that, you shouldn't be here.

I've been silently enjoying this for the most part, but I must now take especial vocal delight in the not insignificant number of women writers, most, if not all, desperately underread today, that this text mentions, especially the ones I've already found and loved on my own, such as Mary Augusta (aka Mrs. Humphry) Ward.

Not going to lie, pretty sick of white people winning the Nobel Prize for Lit, but I suppose that's my fault for expecting anything better.

It says a lot about 2020 that I completely forgot about the Nobel Prize for Literature until the day before it's due to be awarded.

How many lackluster longlist/shortlist/whateverlist reading results is it going to take before people start wondering if, maybe, they should instead think for themselves.

So. Trump got COVID, ey?

I'm having a blast with this, and then they throw in an easy to follow, delicious sounding recipe at me. Love it.

I see these people include me in their wave of (formerly) popular reviewers that they chose to follow in one fell swoop, and it's like...y'all realize one of these is not like the others, right?

People will be all, this person's read everything! And then the person's top 100 books will be 96% white, 92% Anglo, 80% white boy, and 10% white children's books.

Rum sort of job, isn't it? All dust. Not like the other war: that was all mud. Makes one wonder what the next one will be. Ashes, I expect...

Nothing's more inanely presumptuous than someone who made their annotations in pen and then didn't even bother to keep the copy.

Just a problem of geography, he thought, with the confidence of someone who had never yet tried to free himself of family.

I saw this twist coming about 50-75 pages back, so I'm glad the author finally committed to the fact that assuming everyone is a cishet is bad faith at best and violent otherwise.

Christ this is giving me intense flashbacks to the kind of living/reading I used to do and in terms of good or bad it all could go either way at this point.

I can't edit posts without them threatening to disappear, I can't ask for help because the help group is gone, I can't report the issue because the separate login system for the help tickets is broken: GRAmazon is really showing its stripes today.

I just got out of the chokehold that is reading multiple 500+ page long works at once, and here I am doing it again. When will I learn.

No one believes the Bible literally. Ask the man who tells you he does, "Shall we start dismantling the penitentiary?"

"I got him back to the subject of redneck sex." Uhhh, Naipaul? You doing ok there?

As if one's grief is a fallen house, and one has to pick one's way over the rubble to the ground on the other side...

Naipaul speaks of Du Bois as a settled fifty-something academic would speak of an author whom they had had a hard time with in their high school English class: criticism of inconsequentials; a valuing of coincidences and chance details over intentionally developed themes; and a barely there, yet deeply-rooted, insecurity that, despite repeated proclamations of disinterest, repeatedly returns to the author.

I'm basically resigned to having a higher than usual average page count per work read this year, but still, why are so many of the works I'm interested in right now in the 500+ range?

Old Mrs. Gibbs wanted to know, at lunch, if I had seen the cells where the new slaves had been "acclimated." (I hadn't heard the word before; later I was to understand that the word was in general use in the South.)

The soul will fly home of its own accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.

I'm not reading this for the noblest of reasons, but who cares?