Emmalita > Recent Status Updates

I'm putting this aside for now because I'm struggling with processing this story as an audiobook.

Did I stay up too late reading this? Yes I did. Adorable. And I cried. 3 times.

Holy smokes this is so good. Neon Yang’s mind is amazing.

Even though I can’t eat most of the recipes in this book, this still might be my favorite cookbook this year. Seeni sambol, pol sambol, cardamom fried chicken! I keep trying to sniff the book. Now I need to find fresh curry leaves and fresh pandan leaves.

I haven’t left the introduction and this is already a fantastic book.

I like Juliet Tilney and Jonathon Darcy very much. I might even read Northanger Abbey after this.

I’m barely into this and already I love it. I can hear her voice as I read her words.

“Can’t we just go and sit in the audience and mock people dressed in clothes from another century? You know . . . like normal shifters do?”
“Most times I’d say yes, but I need to do this. And if I survive, you’ll be really proud of me.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Have me cremated and tell my family I left town. They don’t deserve anything better than that.”

“Meaning you give it away.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but yes.”
“To the worthy poor,” she guessed.
“I don’t much care if they’re worthy,” Rob said. “None of my business.”

“She knew there was more to her than that, that she was more than the sum of those roles, but she couldn’t put a name to any of those other parts, so it was hard to believe that they counted for much.“

“ I don’t want to be a bother.”

“Ha! You long to be a bother. You would not, however, succeed in this instance.”

And now he was looking at her as if she were a cake, if cakes were also religious icons, and she was possessed of a mortifying certainty that she was looking at him in precisely the same deranged manner.

I love Marian so much.

“You have been busy,” he murmured, thinking of what a waste it was that in all the thousands of love poems written across the ages, nobody had ever thought to catalogue their beloved’s proficiency in crime.

This is the quote that should be used to sell this book.

She spoke both parts of that sentence with an equal degree of brisk authority, as if everything from Rob’s amusements to the horse’s welfare fell under the shelter of her command.

I read the Afterword first, and I just want to say, I do not want to read a dark brooding symphony book. Very happy to have this light pop song of a book in my hands.

I’m dnf’ing this one. It isn’t bad, it’s just not working for me.

I'm really enjoying this. I'm interested to see how two very guarded people are going to let down their walls enough to make this fake dating real. I love that instinct does not equal ability or skill.

Right off the bat, I am not ok with co-opting the language of the LGBTQ community. There may be similarities for some people in telling a community that they are an atheist and telling a community they are LGBTQ+. However, it's not the same and it's erasure of a marginalized community. Straight white people sure do like to be oppressed.

Noah is such an anxiety disaster baby and I love him.

And suddenly I am looking forward to Viggo’s book.

I'm doing that thing where I've stopped reading because I don't want it to be over

When the full diversity of people is represented in stories, it expands people’s sense of possibility. It’s incredible how direct a line there is from representation in fiction to empowerment in the real world.

You don’t have to think of yourself as an activist—but anyone who imagines a different reality is helping everyone else to see our power to act, and to make changes. Imagination is always a form of resistance to domination and oppression, and we’ve all been saved by other people’s stories one time or another.

“In fact, Kit, arriving at the bakery as soon as they unlocked their doors, had picked out the cake that seemed the most unnecessarily complicated.”

Rarely have I read a sentence I related to more.

“But whatever fate awaits you, you’ll need to meet it wearing something other than rags and sackcloth.”

“In any event,” Percy went on, “what I had thought were principles were merely manners, and they’re utterly insufficient for my present circumstances.”

A thing happened that I was absolutely not expecting and I have no one to yell with about it.

“Don’t be honest. Or you’ll be alone a lot.”
“We’re tigers. We’re supposed to be solitary.”
“You know, all you cats say that, but the cats I’ve met lately . . . you’re always hanging around somebody.“