Luke > Recent Status Updates

'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.

People who call men 'noted feminists' in order to gain credibility: no. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Literary awards that run out of funding make me sad, especially if their focus lies outside the Euro/Neo-Euro gaze.

I'm surprised there aren't more reviews decrying this as wishy washy liberal trash, or whatever else is said when the real world hits certain people in the face and sets their upper lips a' wibbling.

'Readers also enjoyed 'Alien VS. Predator''

O-kay, Goodreads. O-kay.

Just saw a 'Discover the 'lost' novel by Ayn Rand' GR ad float by. Apparently someone's not familiar with the concept of staring into the void. Or wearing the One Ring. Or EVIL. EVILLLLLLLL.

'In truth, his manners are too exquisite for his intention to have the least harm in it; but when a thing is written by Destiny, the saying must be fulfilled. And it is the destiny of this beautiful youth which made him become passionately amorous of your beauty.' In other words, Nice Guys are riddled throughout all manner of centuries, religions, and cultural practices.

...it occurred to me that I was probably the only person in the history of the world who has ever recalled Shōnagon in a strip joint in Texas. I liked that.

People Who Look Pleased with Themselves

I was at the top of that list.

"The popularity and heart-warming poignancy of “To Kill a Mockingbird” buries the very real activism and resistance of black citizens in Alabama and throughout the South right at the time that Lee wrote her story. Its publication made invisible the very people it claimed to care about."

-Colin Dayan

Eyyy. GR finally rolled out a 'Lists I Created' page. Now I can look at all my pretty pretties in one place.

Uh, GR? That work you have as authored by a white boy? Guess again.

Ayse Bircan's so cool. I need to track down more works by/about her, as well as works concerned with black Turkish people in general.

Shout out to John Green: if you think the discomfort of girls is valid only when sexual assault is proven to be involved, what the actual fuck are you feeding the young female portion of your audience. Or, more importantly, what the actual fuck are you feeding the male portion.

'The fear of exposure, the fear that one's deepest emotions and innermost thoughts will be dismissed as mere nonsense, felt by so many young girls keeping diaries, holding and hiding speech, seems to me now one of the barriers that women have always needed and still need to destroy so that we are no longer pushed into secrecy or silence.'

-bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist — Thinking Black

Hegi's prose is as lovely as I remember it being.

For way too many authors without proper profiles on this site it's like "Oh my fucking god Goodreads just how far up your ass is your head anyway."

'I do not know what has happened to God. He is fastidious. He fled at the moment that I smoothed the wet black hair before wrapping it up. I do not think he will come back.'

-Zoë Wicomb, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

Thanks for the pop-ups, GR. Thanks a lot.

I pity the people who follow/friend me because I happen to be on some of those top/best/popular lists, I really do.

Librarying, librarying, librarying away. Casa de las Américas Prize, anyone?

People, he sees at once, are no better than books to her, ideas to be stolen, repositories of whatever she can glean to feed her rapacious bird-of-prey mind.

I need more super long books by women in my life. My number of applicable to-reads is rapidly diminishing :(

Buh. Needs more editing, less commas, more semi-colons, less lists, more room to breath goddamn. This sort of style only works if fully embodied by the third person perspective body and soul and that, unfortunately, is not yet the case.

'As for that blessing of Allāh, her most desirable bum, it was so vast that the merchant had not been able to find a veil great enough to cover it.' Judging by the frequency with which this sort of description crops up, I estimate the total of such takes up ten pages of the entire compendium of tales, at least.

One of my subscribed fanfics just updated with a nearly novel length word count of a chapter. If anyone wants the secret to my reading rate, this is it.

If anyone hears somebody blathering on about how much they just adore mixed race couples/babies/people, slap them for me if you'd be so kind.

Imagine what the world would be like if all these white women attempting to write feminist texts in the second millenia CE donated to the writers in all those demographics who haven't dominated the scene since 'The Book of the City of Ladies'. White feminism is white supremacism, ladies, and you're better off lifting up than speaking over.

When the feminist historians of the twenty-first century attempt to recapitulate the third wave, will they ignore the momentous contributions of Afro-American women, who have been leaders and activists in movements often confined to women of color, but whose accomplishments have invariably advanced the cause of white women as well?