Luke > Recent Status Updates

The nice thing about super short books is I can set up a longer tome that I've been looking forward to right alongside it, aka Women Writing in India, Volume 1 here I come *_______*

Those who were wiser could console themselves that they had fought for their country and for honor. What did he know of such things? He simply felt that he was hateful because he had killed and caused much injury.

Rūm is Rome, apparently. Things just got a lot more interesting.

'If your boasts are without foundation I have an impaling stick which can reduce you to a like condition.' Ahahahaha.

Ha.

.________.

No one knows culture clash like a girl who's just been sold.

I can't tell myself this is just an experience which I have to go through. I'm an Arab. I'm supposed to feel that I have some connection with the culture here, but I feel none at all. I'm completely detached from it. I'm getting older. I'm wasting my time.

Beginning of Volume IV: But when the eight-hundred-and-fifteenth night had come

The first time he asked how to say 'good morning' in English and American and found they were the same, he exclaimed in surprise, 'Praise the Lord! They're the same as each other inside and out!'

I've been on this site for five years now. Yeesh.

You ought to know that no one can worship the goddess of wisdom without some punishment.

Isn't there some Hitchcock film that involves birds? If there is, I believe this was one of the sources of it.

"She drew the virgin flesh of the boy towards her and with skilful fingers taught him how to find all the parts of the verb, to express the active in the passive, and make the two genders agree in number and case." That's certainly one way of putting it.

The author reads poetry during photography sessions :)

Those books that everyone on your friend list has added and barely anyone has actually read are intriguing, to say the least.

What is it with boys threatening to kill themselves in order to get what they want.

Some literary purveyors of the heart are subtle in the vein of Woolf and Evans and Shikibu. Others go, "To hell with subtlety! I've an otherwordly epic of a tale to tell!" Thus we have Lagerlöf, a fundamental different in art without the slightest diminishment in quality.

I do not subscribe to the Wodehousian view that all babies look like poached eggs.

is drunk reviewing still a thing

The Tale of Alā al-Dīn and the Wonderful Lamp! At last! I sure hope this makes up for the horrible rape culture of a tale that preceded it.

There are many answers, none of them right, but some of them most definitely wrong.

Stravinsky's 'Firebird Suite' is a great reading interlude for this.

When a boy's really pretty, it's just that he's really pretty. When a girl's really pretty, it's 'Glory be to Him Who Made her!' Alrighty then.

I could be reading an edition that doesn't require taping up as I go along, but where's the fun in that.

...just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.

Everyone needs to try tracking down A Woman's Trick so that they can laugh their ass off.

B&N's 'Essays' section: DFW, fairy tales, and supposedly Said's Orientalism. They'd save a lot of people time if they replaced that shiny marker up top with 'We Give Up'. Maybe that's why the section's so close to the bathrooms. At least I got Jamison's 'The Empathy Exams' and Smith's 'Artful' as worthy potentials out of it.

It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost.

'I fear that, if she goes out again, her beauty will bring about some deadly happening and my son will kill himself.' You can't even use this trope for a drinking game. Everyone would die so fast.

'If one celebrity would join your book club, who would you choose:'

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ruth Ozeki and Arundhati Roy are goddamn celebrities, okay? Okay. In light of that, all three please.

...just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, and then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on.