Adrian Gray

Adrian’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (37)
currently-reading‎ (2)
read‎ (803)
abandoned‎ (11)
library-books‎ (427)
female-authors‎ (372)
crime‎ (200)
historical-fiction‎ (126)
recommend‎ (123)
american-fiction‎ (118)

non-fiction‎ (109)
golden-age‎ (71)
gothic‎ (38)
booker-novels‎ (37)
film-books‎ (29)
finn-s-books‎ (23)
sci-fi‎ (22)
books_about_books‎ (19)
black-history‎ (17)
graphic-novels‎ (16)

ocr-exam‎ (16)
short-stories‎ (14)
87-precinct‎ (8)
ya‎ (8)
environmental-theme‎ (7)
irish-fiction‎ (7)
anne-tyler-books‎ (5)
fantasy‎ (5)
working-class-life‎ (5)
cli-fi‎ (2)

granta-best-young-novelists‎ (2)
observer-best-young‎ (2)
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audio-books‎ (1)
classics‎ (1)
international-booker‎ (1)
play‎ (1)
poetry‎ (1)

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Adrian is Currently Reading

Adrian Gray is currently reading

The Perfect Crime: 22 Crime Stories from Diverse Cultures Around the World

by Vaseem Khan (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading, crime, short-stories

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Nov 26, 2025 12:48AM

Adrian Gray is currently reading

Careless People

by Sarah Churchwell (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading, books_about_books, female-authors, library-books, non-fiction, recommend

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Nov 26, 2025 12:42AM

“I came to understand that this truly was what it meant to go back to nature, that this was nature in its truest form. No forests and campfires, no rolling hills and reassuring rambles. Just rivers of shit and decay, a chamber in which we ate and shat and ate and shat and lived among the carcasses of all the things we didn't want and couldn't fully consume. The processes of the world were known to us. (p.235)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

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“You know what I think?’ said Zelma. ‘You got to start small, start symbolic, then grow it until it's huge.’
‘Meaning what’, I said
‘Meaning take back certain moments, enjoy certain moments starting with your body. Starting with how the only shit you can actually save her is at the weekend. I mean, Why? Why is that?’
‘In the morning I'm rushed. And when I get and then I get to work and I'm busy. And I feel like people notice when I'm away from my desk. I feel like either they think to themselves that I'm skiving, or that they just immediately know that I'm shitting.
‘Why shouldn't they know that you're shitting?’
‘I don't know.’
‘From now on, she said, I want you to prioritise your shitting. In your day now starting tomorrow nothing matters except shitting. Your sole purpose is to shit. I want you to get professional at shitting. And when you get good at it, celebrate it.’ (p.141)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

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“I began to feel as if we were merging with one another. The process was more than simply emotional. It was biological, systemic. Each of our bodies was a biosphere, slick with bacterial and insect life. Reteamed, and what we teamed with brought us closer not only to each other, but to the ecosystem we inhabited, fed off, and nourished. Bacteria bred in the ooze of our waste, our discarded food remains and puddled shit, then travelled onto us and between us, carried not only on the thickened air, but by the fleas and lice that hopped and crawled from one body to another. There was no difference, I began to think, between the puddles on the floor and the streaks of filth on my skin and the acne that erupted on Margot’s face. It was all just life, matter, the biome. We were leaking out into the world, and the pooled primordial essence of the world was soaking back into us in turn. (p.235)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

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“Margot felt self-conscious, timid. She had a fear running into people when she was unwashed. She seemed particularly worried about the people who worked on the estate, most of whom were men, most of whom, I tried to explain, were filthy in their own ways - smeared with grease and dust, or spattered with spray paint and oil. I tried pointing out to her the unfairness of this divide, the way some kinds of dirt were associated with honest, masculine labour, while others were associated with malaise or inertia. She understood this, warmed to it as an idea, but whenever the moment came to leave, she found it some excuse to stay. (p.198)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

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“I wanted to say to them: I don't even know what we're doing. There is no scheme. There's nothing we want or hope for. I felt as if everything was pressing in, as if my mind was a sludgy and toxic as the slurry that covered the floor, the walls, our skin. There is no difference anymore, I realised, between what we were taking in and what we were expelling, between what we were and what we might aspire to be, between what we consumed and expelled, and what we'd become. It was all shit. We were shit. Our world was shit. Everything was a single, flowing, un-dammed, undifferentiated river of filth, and within that river we were formless and liquid and horribly free, and all anyone wanted to do was to fashion new moulds into which we should pull the cooling and hardening putrescence of who we were, so they could force what was formless into a form that they could comfortably condemn.’ (p.290)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

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