Rylan Shewmaker > Recent Status Updates

“Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul… their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness. My imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.”

“A promise is a direction taken… If no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused.”

Um excuse me??

“Your habit of understanding everyone as a person, as an individual, won’t work here. You’ve got to understand the powers behind the individuals.”

Anarchist in an “archist” world

This narrator is a lil crazy…

EU R&I funding mentioned

“One explanation of Guenever, for what it is worth, is that she was what they used to call a ‘real’ person. She was not the kind who can be fitted away safely under some label or other, as ‘loyal’ or ‘disloyal’ or ‘self-sacrificing’ or
‘jealous.’ Sometimes she was loyal and sometimes she was disloyal. She behaved like herself… It is difficult to write about a real person.”

Arthurian legend x the author as a conscientious objector…

“Passive resistance,” said Arthur with intense interest. “It is a new weapon. But it seems difficult to use.”

“Elaine recognized Lancelot in two heartbeats. The first beat was a rising one which faltered at the top. The second one caught up with it, picked its momentum from the crest of the wave, and both came down together like a rearing horse that falls.”

Lovely!!

Ugh somehow the fight scenes always happen when I’m trying to fall asleep

My Libby rental returned and I ran out of listening hours on Spotify so I used an audible credit to listen to the rest of the book but I accidentally bought a version with a different narrator than I’ve had for the previous 2 books and 60% of this book😭😭 and she’s pronouncing everything totally differently. someone put me out of my misery

“—for few people can hate so bitterly and so self-righteously as the members of a ruling caste which is being dispossessed.” True of many things, but I thought of Brussels car drivers…

Done with the Queen of Air and Darkness, a much darker book than the first. Poor unicorn.

This book is so disturbing ack

The sword has been removed from the stone and the Wart is now King Arthur… I will miss the lovely and sweet first book.

“…he stood still solemnly, and took off his leather hat. He did this every spring religiously, when the wild geese left him, and every autumn, when he saw the first returning gaggle.”

“He had loved his arrow’s movement, its burning ambition in the sunlight.”

Decided I wasn’t reading enough books simultaneously.

Libby automatic return🥲🥲 tragic

Oof kuang loves a toxic mentor relationship

Ran out of listening hours on Spotify and still waiting for my hold at my library on Libby🥲🥲

Not this rando Perrin guy now leading Egwain (idk how to spell any of their names). Patriarchy shows up. These male fantasy/SF authors are giving me some sort of second feminist awakening

First women in the whole book has just shown up, 80% in

This is so fun

“You rely invariable on authority or on the past, and never on yourselves.”

“No, I did not promise to go. I only smirked, and bowed, and said the word ‘happy.’”

What is this Odium’s champion nonsense

Weird as hell but getting more bearable!!

Okay but like why and how has Kaladin suddenly acquired a degree in psychology between this book and the previous…

I kinda hate the description of “zooming in” on a map in this book. It feels like such a weird anachronistic word

Anna Karenina mentioned!!

“I was in the slipstream of his status as a firebrand.”

“Erase family names, erase nations — I was taught such things by the desert.”

“…continuing with the song her mother had taught her, that she practiced on any surface. A kitchen table, a wall while she walked upstairs, her own bed before she fell asleep. They had no piano.”