Luke > Recent Status Updates

Freedom is higher than love. At least today. Perhaps one day the two will be one.

I take my library building choices for granted for the most part, but when I see one of my books in the 'rare and antiquarian' section going for fifty bucks when I probably got mine, first edition dust jacketed hardcover and all, for two to three dollars at a library sale? Feels good.

I thought being extremely smart would take care of it. But I see that I have been found out.

This section in which the Smedley stand-in character seriously engages with Indian intellectuals reminds me of my own upbringing. I wonder what other narratives are out there that frankly discuss the presence of Indian folks in the US around the WWI era and mayhaps even earlier, instead of pretending they just randomly spawned in various regions along the coasts in the 80s/90s.

Karin and Knut heard my story and laughed at my unhappiness; school did not necessarily teach one anything, they held—often it perverted and destroyed intelligence. But their words carried no meaning to me...their feet were planted firmly on sound knowledge, and from the heights they could afford to be critical.

"Deserve" is the word which the possessors use as a weapon against those they dispossess.

Thus far, this is the most un-Woolfean Woolf I've come across to date. However, there are some inklings of things drawing together, so here's hoping there's a great deal more of that before the end.

We alone, and not our technologies, are responsible for our losses, and we alone are to blame when we deliberately choose oblivion over reflection.

These stories are doing their best to be inexorably yet unobtrusively (white) "American", and as a result, for the most part, they're painfully boring.

This trend of self-proclaimed liberals and other "good" people pathologizing Trump's mental state, throwing out 'sociopath' and 'psychopath' when people with antisocial personality disorder are just trying to live their lives in the face of overwhelming social stigma, rather than just calling him plain old evil shows me that nothing's changed since 1938.

Multiple works by the same author in a single year? I never. Of course, if it were to happen, it would have to be Woolf.

The creator of WITMonth is currently coordinating an international WIT book exchange between interested readers, which I'm hoping to participate in. You can check out the details and sign up for it here: https://twitter.com/Read_WIT/status/1...

[N]o library is what it is set up to be, and a library's fate is often decided not by those who created it for its merits but by those who wish to destroy it for its supposed faults.

It's been quite a ride, but after half a month of reading sizable chunks of this every day, I'll be glad to free up my reading schedule with comparative briefer bits of novelty.

The rest of the church was filled with men and women to whom the war had made different gifts, giving to this a death, to another new life, to this one money. There were many people in Danesacre whom the war had fed full with money. Perhaps they came here to thank someone for it.

Women in Translation (WIT) Month will soon be upon us! Got any plans for it? You can check out mine and those of others at the 100 Best WIT Group here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.

There is a moment when the gull, turning, to sweep sideways and downward to the surface of the water, makes a movement of such perfection that it can scarcely be watched without tears.

I've made a habit of creating a list of all the TBR books I currently own on this particular day of the year for a few years now. If anyone's curious and/or in need of something mindlessly fulfilling to do, here's 2020's: https://www.listchallenges.com/korric...

The next 100 pages contain 'Mask of the Red Death', 'Pit and the Pendulum', the sequel to 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' 'Tell-Tale Heart', 'Lenore', 'Gold-Bug', and 'Black Cat', all published in that order within a two year span. Quite the feat, that.

For the first time in a long while, I'm aiding and abetting the jailbreak of a good chunk of my white boy books from their long relegation in storage. We'll see how this goes.

Here lies the short story 'Ligeia' and its contained poem 'The Conqueror Worm', both put out in 1838 when Poe was 29. Slowly but surely we approach the author's golden age.

English people won't pay out good money to read uncomfortable truths.

There're seafaring zombie horror games out there already, but a quality, sprawling, substantially nonlinear yet ultimately storydriven one that involved traversing one or more absolutely massive ships with the added business of murderous fauna (and possibly flora)? That's the one that this section of 'The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket' has me craving.

Considering how much fatphobic propaganda swamps the medical industry, all this stuff that Gawande's putting out without citations is rather aggravating.

Welp, I guess it's book within a book time.

A bad Treaty doesn't settle anything—except the causes of the next war.

All this talk about behavioral problems and mental illnesses and personality disorders. So many of these doctors are just acting like a typical domestic abuser, and so many of the excuses sound like the ones used to deflect criticisms of old white men.

The year had been a year of terror, and of feelings more intense than terror for which there is no name upon the earth. For many prodigies and signs had taken place, and far and wide, over sea and land, the black wings of the Pestilence were spread abroad.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what this so sharply reminds me of, but I'm liking it very much nonetheless.