Allison > Recent Status Updates

this book is messed up :(

this is either a 5⭐️ or 3⭐️ but I can’t decide so it gets a 5 for now.

very lovely book, and for some reason I’m happy with where I’m at. DNF for now, I might come back to it in the future

damn my angel of the pool of bethesda poem just got shown up (oliveira’s balancing between the modern and past speaker is >>>>)

everything abt this book is so indulgent. I think what makes the lover the most Christ-like is his sense of excess

woahh ok wow

I should’ve known what was coming as soon as Lilith showed up

maybe? hot take, these books are a lot better when written by someone who actually knows philosophy. It’s good to be aware that there are literal centuries of thought on these topics, that can’t just be dismissed (cough cough Nick Chater)

I so nearly cried at 241 and 256; please read this book

I’m collecting all the ways the title and author has been botched:

For _Take This Man_: Take This Horse, Don’t Call Me a Horse, A Horse Called Brando, and Call Me By Your Horse.

For Brando Skyhorse: Brando Skywalker and Sky-brand-man.

It’s been a bit since I’ve read a prose piece that makes me want to write—this does it for me. I think it’s how Monson knows when to linger in a moment, when to leave it, when to let it blend and fade into something else.

Like: “The thing that saves him—that saves Dutch, and by extension us…” (p. 207) where he goes on about shared identity, leaving that first clause for some paragraphs later.

Calvino, at it again. I have some minor qualms with the voice and all, but the images are too beautiful. The idea of Moon-milk is mildly disturbing (in a positive way still), but there's something lovely about the visual of scooping it from between the scales of the Moon, its surface like the belly of a fish.

(First off- props to whoever designed this book bc I'm obsessed.)

But all the images and the narrative remain so clear throughout—I didn't realize how much I'd already read.

"Susan claims my name is muscle,
Bone, calls me tissue
And sinew, fills in my blank
With the absence of her boys,

"But I am water, pebble,
Silt and gravity,
Evidence under her nail." (37)

poems, etc., inclusive, "are not drafts / toward a future form, but / furious versions / of the here and now...."

"he sets candles / out the color of teeth."

The balance of the writing style makes it confusing whether or not some elements are literal or not, and I really like not knowing. I think there's a good chance we'll get to know, but I'm still hoping it won't smooth out the wrinkles

Just taking the time to put this here:

I was going to write "thanks for ripping my heart out VanderMeer" but he always has a way of refusing the tragic to be fully tragic and the fortunate to be fully fortunate

I've returned to reiterate how much I love Wick.

I also just love how carefully VanderMeer displays relationships as extending beyond the space of two people, that Borne still infiltrates the language/voice of the rest of the book.

This just possibly jumped up to my favorites list. I don't know how to process what just happened

Listen I really want the best for Wick, but that's coming at the cost of Borne...

The dynamic between Rachel and Wick is strikingly similar to the biologist and her husband. Except VanderMeer is tackling this idea of "dystopian" in a more familiarly unfamiliar way...

It's probably best I wait before deciding how I feel about the style- there's still quite a bit to go, and it may actually just be a plot thing

I love this book—it’s is just as interesting as I remember. Especially in all the word play, like in characters like the Duchess and the Mock Turtle, who find a type of authority through this in Wonderland they couldn’t in our world. The book feels like a kind of experiment of the failure of set structures (language, arithmetic, the subjects in school, law), especially to a growing child