Luke > Recent Status Updates

Sir Clement is conscious he has acted dishonorably, yet the same unbridled vehemence which urged him to gratify a blameable curiosity, will sooner prompt him to risk his life, than confess his misconduct.

Glendower. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur. Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

"You are a Coleto before you are a priest, and therefore you're accustomed to despising the Indians," Don Alfonso continued. "In a Christian, this is a lack of charity. And in a politician—because you are one whether or not we want to acknowledge it—it is a miscalculation."

People on this website need to learn that the fact that I have fifty-fifty times as many books as I do GR friends means something.

I thought it would be hard getting back into Shakespeare saddle with a history play, a type that I haven't traversed in reading, but between my memories of the Hollow Crown Henriad adaptation of this play's tetrology and Three Kingdoms slinging forty to fifty Henriad cycles in a single work at me, this is actually going okay.

A hundred pages to go for the tale, a tad less than three hundred to go for the work. The foreword's at the end for whatever reason, the afterword alone is more than a hundred pages, and there's several other contextual bits and bobs to contend with.

This scene confirms that Lord Orville is nothing but a himbo, if a well-bred one.

Well. Mrs. Selwyn is obviously my favorite.

I'm fairly certain I'm going to rate this pretty highly overall, but quarantine has me gnawing my legs off in the pursuit of variety and holy bajeezus I cannot wait for this to be done already.

My friend's risking his life in order to pay bills by doing warehouse work for Amazon because of the company's 'good business practices' while people on this site simultaneously order books using Prime and shame essential workers for not social distancing. I get that Goodreads is owned by Amazon, but could these people be more entitled?

When Lispector sucks, she really really sucks, but when she's writing the contents of your brain half a century before you were born, you wonder how you ever did without her.

A similar breed of book to that of Independent People and The Greenlanders.

If you think about this book a bit too much (aka, view some of Evelina's trials through the lens of rape culture), it becomes rather terrifying in its comic exaggerations. At least I have a very rainy day drumming away at my roof to soothe me while I read.

And so the last of the Red Cliff's quartet falls.

I wonder what percentage of Ferrante readers can name one single other Italian woman writer.

I've discovered the wonders of the indie book store conglomerate (an anachronism if there ever was one) known as Book Shop, so I've made a list for when the book buying urge is too much, which you can see here. Feel free to ask questions and make recommendations.

At first I was getting weirded out by all the recent follows and likes, but then I remembered the pandemic.

There's always a moment of trepidation with an author such as Lispector, who requires a great deal of time and energy and hasn't, in my experience, always been worth it, but thus far, this is going wonderfully.

For a strange superstition has survived among most that editors or publishers are discriminating readers. Which is absurd. They carry their wares about in a suitcase, like salesmen for horse-medicine or cough-drops or something worse. Not good tough roistering salesmen with their own lingo, but an affected figure aped out of some London drawing-room.

I've had quite the varied time with Lispector, so we'll see how this one, her first composed work and my fifth read work, goes.

This is going much better than expected, which is extremely comforting when considering how poorly Edgeworth's 'Belinda' turned out.

It's all fun and games to read histories about pandemics these days, but if you really want something informative, Klein's The Shock Doctrine is happening right before our eyes.

Goldman's mention of Smedley is making me look forward to this year's planned read of Smedley's autobiographical 'Daughter of Earth' even more.

Starting V. 4, the beginning of the end (it's not April yet, but the point of the breaks is to give me time to prepare myself, and lord am I ready to finish this thing).

In [Lenin's] early writings I would find that he had for years advocated and defended such methods of attack against his political opponents, methods to "cause them to be loathed and hated as the vilest of creatures." He had used such tactics when his victims could defend themselves; why should he now not add insult to injury when he had the whole of Russia as his forum?

Time to get away from both the nonfiction and the 21st century for a time.

More richly textured evocations of food, animals, landscapes, and foreign lands and less heterosexual nonsensicals plz.

It's becoming more and more clear where Stalin came from, and the regime change from Lenin and Trotsky to him was hardly a huge one.

So Millett did know about leather culture. Again, probably not a topic I wish to know her thoughts about: I have a feeling she'd cherry-pick queer theory so much to avoid getting into the power relation cultures that inform huge swathes of the community that'd it'd be useless to me.

I was wondering, with all this talk about Miller, whether Millett was ever going to mention Nin. Only a footnote, unfortunately, but considering how uneasy Millett would probably be about Nin's writing and lifestyle (and how much she would inevitably conflate the two), I doubt I'd get much from such commentary. Ah well. At least it makes me look forward to my yearly Nin diary volume reading even more.