Luke > Recent Status Updates

Ok, now that the popularity of 'The Vegetarian' and 'The Sympathizer' is wearing down, who has both read at least one and is interested in actively pursuing further reading in the realms of Korean and/or Vietnamese(-American) literature? Anyone?

I struggled to understand this, that it was better he was dead.

Anyone still wondering where Trump came from is required to read up on the KKK nearly taking over the Democratic Party in 1924.

To patrons 'helping' out at the library by sticking yanked out books back in a horizonal position on top of a row: all you're doing is , along with being extremely lazy, favoring the aesthetic of a clean floor over the library's ability to actually function. In other words, stop.

The fact that Kenneth L. Roberts has a place in history certainly explains where Rush Limbaugh spawned from.

...I have always said, in passing judgements on others, that if you want to know the best and worst a person is capable of, try and imagine their greatest fear.

Mrs. Awad kept saying, If they build a subway, then we will know how many people died.

[Edward A.] Ross belonged to the mass of progressives like Roosevelt who termed the opponents of involuntary sterilization—such as social workers, immigrants, and African Americans—"sentimentalists."

All this talk of Plum in the Golden Vase is making it a priority for 2017. I only own the first volume, but that can be remedied.

This is prose that I can really sink my teeth into.

Factoring in average life expectancy for a human being and my current yearly reading rate, I need 3,619 more books on my to read list if I expect it to last until I croak. Time to get back into the business of reading reviews.

Innate qualities are needed to prove the justice—the naturalness and inalterability—of the status quo.

Love is not passion, perhaps. Not yearning either, but the experience of time, the part of life that accumulates over the months and years.

I need to read more books that have blurbs on the back from Tsitsi Dangarembga, Leila Aboulela, Veronique Tadjo, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, and Tade Ipadeola.

I can't take people who sniff at GIFs seriously if they give no overt credit to the owners of the images they use in their reviews.

Back east, in a decidedly bizarre event, a Know-Nothing mob assaulted a block of marble. The offending stone, taken from the Temple of Concord in Rome, was a gift from Pope Pius IX to be placed in the Washington Monument, still under construction. When the stone proved reisstant to destruction, the mob dumped it into the Potomac River.

The fact that it took me an hour and a half to do two things that I've spent months agonizing over doesn't mean those months of agonizing were a waste. It means I got enough experience points to level up.

Ironically, perhaps, the woman whose skull gave white people [the name of Caucasian] had been a sex slave in Moscow, like thousands of her compatriots in Russia and the Ottoman empire.

The equation of color with primitivism meant that experts often suppressed and removed color when they found it in the Greeks. Even now, the discovery of ancient Greek polychromy can still make news, for the allure of Winckelmann's hard, white, young bodies lives on.

I'd love to make a Listopia entry devoted to books written by disabled authors, but some shit tit is going to come along and add Me Before You and turn the whole thing into a eugenicist masturbation fest before the week is out.

If a woman had enough energy to sleep with another woman's husband, then she ought to have enough energy to contribute to the chores in his household. It was only fair.

This isn't the edition I'm actually reading. It figures that Goodreads wouldn't have the one that was actually published in Lagos.

Things That Cis Men Throw Hissy Fits Over Are My Siren Call, or Why I'm Seeing the New Ghostbusters Tonight

As late as the mid-seventeenth century, some three thousand Britons per year endured involuntary servitude in North Africa, even as the trade from Africa to the Western Hemisphere was gathering momentum...over more than a millenium, the vast story of Western slavery was primarily a white story. Geography, not race, ruled, and potential white slaves, like vulnerable aliens everywhere, were nearby for the taking.

The existence of people who try to force extremely complex works of literature into trite morality lessons and then blame the book because they don't like the results is hilariously baffling.

To most modern minds, footbinding is transparently obvious: we know what it does and what it looks like. Not so for Song, Yuan, and Ming scholars, who seem perplexed by the definitions and meanings of the mysterious practice. Their search for footbinding's origins alerts us to its complicated ontological status, to the difficulties of defining its essential traits.

Gotta keep up my streak of reading books whose last 100 pages are end notes.

I know I haven't posted many status updates, but this is how you write drama.

Requiring evidence that the drug being administered meets or exceeds the standard of medical care is de rigueur for Western trials, but university IRBs now employ an ethical sleight of hand to stipulate that the tested drug must meet or exceed the standard of care in the country where the study is being evaluated. In impoverished, medically underserved sub-Saharan African countries, that standard of care...

That feeling when work has you page a book one of your GR friends has recently reviewed.

I seeeeeee youuuuuuu.