Luke > Recent Status Updates

My page count is going to be a mess cause I'm actually reading only Titus Adronicus and deriving that from the Complete Works, but damnitall, until I get down to the business of reading said CW in its entirety, individual reviews for individual works it is.

[C]orrect English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

It turns out that, rhetorically speaking, yelling "IMMORTAL SOULS DON'T HAVE GENDERS NUMBNUTS" at people is actually quite effective.

For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same; yet the fanciful female character, so prettily drawn by poets and novelists, demanding the sacrifice of truth and sincerity, virtue becomes a relative idea, having no other foundation than utility, and of that utility men pretend arbitrarily to judge, shaping it to their own convenience.

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood.

I can't believe I'm excited about reading this. Must be getting old.

You don't know subtle until Munif hits you with what 500+ plus pages have been building towards ten pages before it ends. Knowing there's a sequel to this doesn't help the post-French-Revolution-style aftershock.

A call for votes for the oddest bed partners: Wollstonecraft (fic & nonfic) & Titus Adronicus; Austen's Juvenilia & Sense & Sensibility & Romeo & Juliet; Sense & Sensibility & Hamlet & Northanger Abbey; Pride & Prejudice & Macbeth; Mansfield Park & Othello; Mansfield Park & King Lear & Emma; Persuasion & Coriolanus.

Cross comparisons for Canterbury Tales & Middlemarch available upon request.

I have to wonder when was the last time a member of the English government made decisions out of fear of necromancy.

After this quarter ends I'm either going to be super fit or in jail cause I threw my Complete Works of Shakespeare at someone who mocked me for panting my way into class.

[...]Her eyes
have the innocence of a creamy blue sky before a dizzying flock
of birds congregate to destroy an entire town.[...]

-'What Would Hitchcock Do?'

And now, the second school book of the new year. Also a good one.

First school book of the new year. 'Tis a good one to start with.

[...]Reminds me of my father wanting to send me to Lebanon

to betroth me to a good Druze boy. But my aunt had a loveless arranged
marriage, Grandma was married off at 12, Mother at 15. And since I already

had a boyfriend and Auntie had become a lover of romance novels, she
coached me to say eat shit in Arabic, which sent the Druze boy running.

[...]

-'An Orgasm Is a Terrible Thing to Waste'

This upcoming quarter of mine's going to be a solid block of Middlemarch, Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's tragedies, and aspiring Austen completionism, with requisite personal YoRWoC2016 reading, of course. Feel free to tag along.

Why did no one ever tell me about Edward II and his shenanigans before. He makes Henry VIII look as exciting as Antiques Road Show.

She knew that I had no idea how close I was, would always be, to the edge, how easily boys like me were erased in absurd, impractical ways.

My first book for 2016 - The Year of Reading Women of Color :)

Much anti-feminist criticism of feminist writing can best be answered with, "Yeah? And where were you at the time, twinkletoes? Writing your ten-thousandth essay on King Lear?"

We have been trained to regard certain kinds of art (especially the violent, the arcane, and the assaultive) as "experimental." But there's all the difference in the world between studying oxidation and producing loud noises with gunpowder.

False Categorizing: She is not really she [an artist] and it is not really it [serious, of the right genre, aesthetically sound, important, etc.] so how could "she" have written "it"?

That feeling when your personal library saves you around $150-$250 in school books.

Ever since reading Lear, kings dividing their lands give me the heebie jeebies.

I understand self-publishing more now after reading about literary agents extorting manuscripts and money via rape.

2015 in Books

#Read: 115
#Absolute Faves: 7 (6%)
#Translations: 42 (36%)
#by Women of Color: 35 (30%)
#by White Men: 13 (11%)
#Rereads: 7 (6%)
#Oldest Fifth of To-Reads: 14 (12%)
#Nonfiction: 24 (20%)
#pre-1950: 34 (29%)
#pre-1800: 10 (9%)

It's unusual to get a more serviceable author bio out of IMDb than Wikipedia, but I'll take what I can get.

He went back to Baldwin, who posed the great paradox that would haunt him to the end: Who among us would integrate into a burning house?

Why did no one mention the Hobbit style map of Old Baltimore that's at the beginning of this.

I remember thinking: "If Shoko Asahara has supernatural powers, why can't he use them to weed out the spies?"

Here's an idea, Goodreads Staff. A list search function that's a bit more accurate and a lot less time consuming than 70+ webpages of ctrl-F. Wouldn't it be nice if I didn't have to send the website response into an infinite loop every time I try (and fail) to rid a particularly longwinded lists of duplicates?