Pica > Recent Status Updates

I’ve picked this books up, hoping to inspire myself to a more minimalist existence, which I hope will cause me to value and appreciate the things I keep more.

"The story was too fascinating to be derailed by fact." I wish Eco were still around and commenting on where we are today. He missed out on some prime lunacy.

2 pages in, I have already encountered a sentence containing 2 words I have never seen before: euhemerism and fideistic.

The more I think about it, the more I feel that Lewis did actually want to focus his novel on the female characters, and only made mild-mannered Doremus the protagonist because if you didn’t have a white male everyman protagonist in the 1930s your novel wouldn’t sell. All the most compelling characters are women.

This book continues to be a good but intense and anxious read. I keep finding myself wishing that it was from the point of view of Lorinda, the sharp-tongued widow with the fire of revolution in her heart, or Sissy, Doremus’s idealistic but practical 18yo daughter.

About halfway through this book, s**t got real. Fascism cranked up to 11!

This book is so unsettling. Almost prophetic.

I'm reading this on Project Gutenberg. 3 chapters in. For a novel published in 1935, an uncomfortable amount of it is still relevant.

I've decided I'm giving up on this. The relentless antisemitism was just too much for me.

I want to enjoy this, and there are parts of it that are entertaining, but the relentless antisemitism against two of the only really sympathetic characters is exhausting. Kind of thinking I don't need to read anymore "classics" by straight white men ever again.

"But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempts to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

This is the first time I've read this book since I first read it in 2000. I'm enjoying it a lot, especially seeing how Eco sets up the pieces of the mystery. I'm even enjoying the intense mediaeval philosophical/religious debate parts.

Yes, I am re-reading this already. I know it's only been a month, but I wasn't thinking in terms of writing fanfic the first time, or paying attention to the right things.

This book is utterly ridiculous. I just about died laughing in three different places so far. It reminds me of so many old school fanfic tropes. But the Scorbus shipping is so strong!