Luke > Recent Status Updates

It was he, Makhaya, the individual, who was seeking his own life because he was fearful of the living death a man could be born into.

Well, I've established a few things: namely, Marcella, or whoever the author modeled her on, is definitely not straight.

I took a book of J. J. Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloise, but after a few pages I was disgusted. As for Émile [Rousseau's book on education], I read it in honor of the Surprising One and found a few good ideas, but many useless dissertations.

Good to see GRAmazon's blocking system is working better than ever: aka, not at all. Just can't value user privacy over that corporate dollar, can they. I'll be surprised if this site is still free to use in the next five years. It's either that, or more ads than are on a download site for illegal content.

Grateful for the list of principle characters at the beginning, cause these Russian names be a' Russianing.

Surely, she reasoned, it was far better to have a country of promiscuous women than a country of dead women?

As libraries 'open' back up, anyone of you who isn't a librarian better be grateful and on your best behavior. We're risking our lives to provide you a service, and library management often has little concern for our welfare. You say that you love libraries: prove it.

The comparisons to both Woolf and Nin are not proving credible, but then again, when do they ever. It would have been more honest to stick to the biographical context, especially concerning the author not yet being in her twenties, and leave it at that.

Unfortunately, I am not rich enough to buy a husband. I'll buy one only when I've lost the hope of being bought myself. A husband is a luxury animal.

Must we part with every ray of sunlight in order to assure the solidity of our walls of ice?

If a patient sat vacantly in an empty room with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, this new symptom would be recorded on his medical chart. But this brief, solitary drama at least had the effect of considerably mellowing my anxious state of mind[.]

I see kernels of Han Kang's 'Human Acts' in Moo-Sook Hahn's "Among the Marching Columns".

It'd be so easy for this to be queer coded to hell and back, especially given the historical context, but, unfortunately, I imagine that's only conscientiously done in the fanfiction.

You're so sure you're right it doesn't matter to you whether people talk to you at all. I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice.

"That the scientists who have discovered the rotation of the earth and the planets, their positions, and the truth about the sun have no religious beliefs surprises me. It seems to me that because they know more about the mysteries of the world, they should have the greatest faith."

Intelligent words from a fourteen-year-old.

The sky had turned to grasshoppers—it seemed that simple. The other day it had turned to hailstones, now it was grasshoppers. All he could do was try to endure it—you couldn't shoot grasshoppers.

Was I really the last page of his life, where he could not write his own existence?

Certain scenes would be scarier if I weren't looking into the indigenous nations as they are mentioned, but I suppose that's the strength of a work of popular fiction that doesn't include contextualizing notes of some kind.

What do we know of the manner of the laws and customs of the white people? They might buy our bodies for dissection, and we would touch the goose quill to confirm it, without knowing what we are doing.

I'm currently reading at least two works that are laying the indigenous stereotyping/sentimentalizing/bigotry/etc on thick, so this is a necessary counteractive.

The fact that 'what's up?' existed in its current form way back when is still jarring to me, but a character crying 'Whatever's up?' tickles me immensely.

Every so often, I truly become aware of all the books I have yet to read, and I get excited all over again.

When we campaign for the reform of women, we mean other people's wives and sisters, not our own!

If the young priest's life hadn't been cut short, what then? He would have become a respectable parish priest, or perhaps reached a higher rank. And perhaps, from the seat of his power, whatever it was, he would have sent one or another of his subordinates to his death.

Looking to finish this off today so as to leave my weekend open for more varied pursuits (as if I didn't have three other works going already, but if I were logical about these kinds of things, I wouldn't've started TK to begin with).

Still don't know why the foreword is at the end. Were they trying to avoid giving out spoilers? This work covers a period of more than a century: any character that stuck around long enough for the reader to become emotionally invested in is dead.

If I never see the word 'eclectic' associated with someone's personal list of books, it'll be too soon.

(I'm sure the word pops up in my earlier reviews, but what else are your early twenties good for.)

The intro mentions three blockbuster sensation novels: Collins' 'The Woman in White', Wood's 'East Lynne', and Braddon's 'Lady Audley's Secret', all published within three years of each other. Are the disparities in rating counts on this site as disgusting as I imagine them to be?

*runs the numbers*

Collins' work has more than five times the number of ratings as the other two works combined. How pathetic.

The world's affairs rush on, an endless stream;
A sky-told fate, infinite in reach, dooms all.
The kingdoms three are now the stuff of dream,
For men to ponder, past all praise or blame.

End of Volume IV; only some end material to go.

This is drawing together very nicely: precisely taut, like a well thrown lasso, or a Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon with far less flabby machismo.