Jessica > Recent Status Updates

Apologies if I've flooded anyone's feed with me rating revisions, I was just going through the books I read all year and changing some ratings based on how I feel about them now that time has passed. It's entirely possible I'll regret this and change them back to my initial gut reactions!

Now that she's finished her paleontology PhD she's been promoted to director of ocean life, and she works long hours. She's putting together a huge exhibit of the five-hundred-million-year-long evolution of the octopus, which Nick has suggested she name "Squid Marks".

"It is what it is," [her father] says. "But my temperature is 80 degrees, which seems low. "

"Indeed," I say. I make a mental note to replace his thermometer, which is doubtless from the 1960s and the mercury all leaked out into somebody's butthole decades ago. Probably my own! That might explain a lot, actually.

"I hear that it doesn't sound so bad," he admits, and I say, because I know how it feels to hurt your own feelings, "Sometimes things just feel bad anyways."

"--its own blood supply."

"Mom, oh my god. Please stop, " Willa says. She's laughing. "I was just spacing out. But are you trying to say cis man? You don't actually know that's what he is. But feel free to cut his penis and check."

"I fucking might," I say, and she laughs.

"And of course it's a fucking man."

Willa opens her eyes, narrows them at me.

"Sorry, sorry, " I say. I'm trying not to be stuck a gender essentialist. "I just mean someone with a penis," I clarify. No, no, no. "An anatomically attached penis," I add, apologetically. "The kind that would bleed if you cut it." What is wrong with me? "I mean, you wouldn't cut it? But it, you know,--" (cont'd)

"The first biopsy I ever did was under my girlfriend's jaw and it scarred terribly."

"...I'm not sure that's a story for sharing with your patients, just FYI. I mean disfiguring your girlfriend and all."

"My ex-girlfriend," he says. "Did I already say that?"

"You didn't," I say. "But maybe it was implied."

"The past is only ever populated by strangers, Guy had told her once, referencing some pompous corpse or another."

"I think making meaning is an alchemy we don't give ourselves enough credit for."

Oof. I'm going up give this one more time because I was feeling nostalgic for YA paranormal romance, and this fits the bill from the sound of it. But the writing has me cringing and I'm not sure how much of it I should put myself through, fam. If the plot grabs me soon maybe I'll persevere.

"All he wanted was some sign from them that they acknowledged him. That they saw him for what he knew himself to be: a man, a strong man, in the prime of health...Not someone to be ignored."

"They were angry. Perhaps not only about the sisters or the murdered man's fate. They were angry about the weather and their failing crops and shallow wells, alongside all sorts of ordinary things, like the fact that their wives no longer loved them or that they would someday die."

"Angus spoke for all of us when he said, 'Huh?'"

"'Most of your muscles have to have your bones to anchor them and push against. Imagine...oh... trying to punch someone with your tongue...'

There was a pause while we gave this particularly vivid mental image the credit it deserved. I opened my mouth to mention a young lady of my acquaintance in Paris, but caught a glimpse of Denton's expression and closed it again."

"'That is horrifying and I want to go home,' I said, although I pronounced it, 'Ah, I see.'"

Is this a British author writing a story with an American first person POV? Not that she can't do that, it's fine, I'm just noticing our American main character is using a lot of Britishisms.

"It sounds so gentle, for something to touch your heart. But anything that reaches your heart does so through flesh and muscle and bone, through every defence your body can put up to protect it."

"She was so beautiful. It should have been meaningless--it should always be meaningless, I suppose, and knowing what she was should have made it more meaningless still. But of course it wasn't. Beauty has its own meaning: it speaks to us in ways we can't articulate."

"I hate you," I said, and I meant it with every atom of my dying body.

"I know," Shadow said. "Get up."

"'Three coffees, two with milk, please,' said Francis to the fat woman behind the counter."

Well that was a random bit of body-shaming thrown in for no apparent reason.

"Your torment wants a witness in me."

"Good Lord, it is a surfeit of memory that drives people to drink, I think so sometimes. Mother must have remembered such terrible, terrible things."

"...let me assure you that no outward sign of death means anything to me as much as love and that we lived, you and I, once, all of us, alive, and I would not be anywhere now but with you here in this slow and damp and safe corruption."

Dang, Anne Rice!

And I am once again reminded how much I loathe Thomas Edison.

This book came out over a year ago and I only just recently learned of it? I feel let down by all the bookish content creators I follow!

"Five isn't a lot when it's grains of rice, but a great deal when it's bites of hemlock or forty-foot monsters."

"The only exception was an armoire that looked large enough to sleep three, provided they were all good friends."