Brady Meyer > Recent Status Updates

Time for a seasonal re-read.

"Can a conscious person really have any respect for himself?"

"I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness, a genuine full-blown illness."

"Love draws our original nature back together - he tries to reintegrate us and heal the split in our nature... Each of us has been cut in half, and so we are human tallies, constantly searching for our counterparts."

Time to learn about love. Between this and Heated Rivalry on TV, I think I'm covered for same-sex fun-times for a while.

It is time to start book 2, and Grandfather Herodotus has a lot to say about the Nile, Egyptian urination practices, and puppets with 18 inch moveable phalluses.

"A Gentle Creature" - I spent almost every moment of this thrill ride wondering "WTF is this narrator doing!?". Thrilling, depressing, and a disturbing look into ego, power dynamics, and main character syndrome. 5 out of 5, no notes, better/wilder than some Stephen King short stories.

Episode 2, Nestor, complete!

"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

"White Nights" - A passionate but lonely man falls in love with a young woman in just four days, and learns a tough lesson in tempering our expectations and learning to live in the moment, to not hide within our impossible dreams. Maybe in our modern world filled with the false delusions of social media, this is still a very important work.

Part 1 of the Epilogue is complete, which means today we said goodbye to all the characters we've spent the last 349 days with :(

Time for the 12 days of Christmas, I mean, 12 days of Tolstoy talking about history and historians in Part 2 of the Epilogue!

Paradiso, Cantos 8 - 14.

Volume 2 done! Such fun!

If you had told me a year ago that the funniest book I'd read in 2025 would be this book with a graveyard on the cover, I probably would not have believed it.

For the few lucky people on here who read my Goodreads updates, I will be helping lead a year-long read of Ulysses on Reddit (r/ayearofulysses) that will begin in January 2026. Time to get ahead of the game!

Episode 1, Telemachus = done

"White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide."

Volume 1 done!

"And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me."

Paradiso, Cantos 1-8 done. Denser than peanut butter.

Audiobook 're-read'. The opening chapter of this feels like pure comfort food.

"In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice... Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice."

"My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip."

Hoffmann's Nutcracker is a strange tale. I'm glad Tchaikovsky's team had the good sense the remove the entire Krakatuk Nut story line, as well as the seven hundred slaves in the kingdom of sweets...

Volume 4 is completely wrapped up, leaving us just two brief epilogues to enjoy for December. The journey is almost done!

Playing my first ever round of Nutcracker ballets this coming weekend, so let's study up!

"I came back from those holiest waters new,
remade, reborn, like a sun-wakened tree
that spreads new foliage to the Spring dew
in sweetest freshness, healed of Winter's scars;
perfect, pure, and ready for the Stars."

The climb up Purgatory is complete, time to climb higher to Paradise!