P. Kirby > Recent Status Updates

Another Tor free ebook of the month that's been sitting on my Kindle, taking up 1s and 0s and needing to move on....

Someone described this as "sweet, slow burn romance," and I was all CLICK! BUY!

Hmmm. Green card wedding.

I'm surprised how much I'm enjoying this. Because it's basically an immigrant story; except the immigrants are from another dimension, which handily avoids any complaints about cultural appropriation or authenticity.

Darroti is a whiny git.

"Lisa, are there any Mendicants her who aren't crooks?"
"Sure. Sure there are sweetie. Most poor people aren't crooks, whatever rich people think. It's the rich people who are more likely to be crooks, with all that money they don't need.

TRUTH.

"His faith is monstrous," Erolorit had said once, when he thought Zamatryna had fallen asleep on the couch. "His god handed his own son, who is also himself, to the executioners. This is a god of murder and suicide, and furthermore this god has too many souls inside, like a seed or a flower crammed with too many dead."

I had to let him have that hope, lest he cast us out of this new, precarious home, as he had told us that his god cast unrepentant sinners into the outer darkness, where there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. And yet he called his god a god of love.

Stan Buttle's god would have turned my sorrows into nonsense. And Stan Buttle's heaven seemed a bleak, cold place, for as he told it, the spirits of the dead were plucked forever from the world, rather than remaining in fruit and flowers, in leaves and lizards. And I needed to believe that my dead were in sight... I needed to believe that they were growing and learning and alive.

...I was delighted for Zamatryna-Harani when she fit in, when she went to her high school prom...accompanied by a young man who--to the horror of the older relatives--had made a great show of giving her mutilated foliage.
Heh. I'm not a fan of cut flowers myself. Apparently I come from another dimension where plant gonads are a bizarro gift.

Argh! Hit wrong button, and stoopid GRs put this in my Read listing. Still reading...and, I like it! It's far removed from fast-paced, but the protagonist's voice is holding my rodent-like attention span.

Argh! Hit wrong button, and stoopid GRs put this in my Read listing. Still reading...and, I like it! It's far removed from fast paced, but the protagonist's voice is holding my rodent-like attention span.

I like this

Uh-oh. Getting bored with Un Lun Dun, and wandering off to something else.

As with all things Mieville, the setting is fantastic, but the characterization rather bland. The shift from one protagonist to another is rather odd.

Attack of the Manky Insect.

*Giggle* Great chapter title, or possibly a band name.

"There's a lot of animals very good at that sort of misinformation. There are no cats in UnLondon, for example, because they're not magic or mysterious at all, they're idiots."

Heh.

They passed squat tower blocks, arches of brick and stone, the hotchpotch slopes of roofs. There were stranger things, too. skyscraper-high chests of drawers in polished wood, spires like melting candles, houses like enormous hats and bats.

The imagery in this is great! Disney should turn this into a film, rather than creepy Lion King remakes.

I had described my mother's voice to Teddy as resembling the shriek of a thousand bagpipes melting in Satan's taint.

I am somewhat entertain to see Bella, a little fat and a whole lot tall, smack the bejesus out of Caelin first thing.

Heh. Smart kid.

"You know," I say over our mother's shoulder, "the PT Cruiser is reported to fall out of alignment faster than any other car on the market. It's really poorly proportioned.

The PT Cruiser is a piece of shit.

I need to remind her of the world we are both from, where a man will hit a woman in public just as easily as he'll open the door for her. And if that woman is dressed like a man down here, he could do worse, and get a pass for it.

tRump's constituency in a nutshell.

"This place,"she said, "is a bucket of sand crabs. One tries to climb out, the others'll reach up and pull him back down. Climb out of here. Don't you dare come back."

I was from the town, like everyone else, but I could never shake the suspicion that I was merely a spectator. I haunted the yearbooks of the past yet failed to show up for my own senior portrait.

The ability of anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of something violent to grasp the details that remind them of their humiliation--smells, colors, sounds--and blur these details so that they become foreign, someone else's property. It is a cultivated skill, requiring time, experience, unspeakable mental real estate.

It was a love that did not occur to us physically,. It had a body in a way children handle each other when they do not yet know intimacy--closeness without electrical current. In the summers, his arms and legs tanned, the hairs turning to red gold. He smelled like sand, and sweat. Once, when we were pretending to be cats, I licked his face. Only later did I remember to be embarrassed.

My kid life was a more of less constant state of humiliation, the feeling that my skin didn't quite fit me right and that everyone could see it.

...it would be nice if we were defined, ultimately, by the people and places we loved. Good things. But at the end of the day, there's the reality that we're not. Does the good stuff really have the weight that the weird stuff does? What makes the deeper imprint--all the ridges and gathers--on who we are? Do we have a choice?

"Funny thing," Mel said. "The prettier the face, the fewer the details. Fewer lines, less sketch time. Not as complex as an old lady. Or a dude. Any dude."

True. In comics, pretty [young] women are reduced to a a simple geometry of a few features.