Darryl Liu > Recent Status Updates

I feel like I haven't studied up enough on pop culture and Beyoncé to appreciate these fully, but boy do they make you feel sultry reading them on translink

I miss when the guy was scared and pathetic, because now he's just annoying

Natasha Pulley's doing it again, going "hey all these unsavory realities of history?? Yeah I'm going to write about them with a british sort of goodnatured glee and witty, pretty prose, and you're going to be okay with it because oh look boys are kissing now"

Okaayyyy I get it now, the booktok girlies who partake in the possessive love interest are onto something 💁‍♀️

I can now use the word Kafkaesque with even more pretentiousness

This bug has awful work-life balance

I loved this book so much I wanted to eat it

This one is the same experience I had reading The Library at Mount Char, where I thought, surely I've reached the climax of this book, only to find more book ahead of me. This has happened like 10 times

holy shit holy shit not even a quarter way through and this is contender for favourite book of 2025 also as I'm writing this in my dad's fourth floor apartment in Taiwan, a very small earthquake happened LMAO

Ah the call me by your name formula of spending a page describing the act of cumming in the most beautiful prose

I am cozy fiction hater. I live to spew vitriol. I need my dark edge fix right now or else baby will get CRANKY!!

Ok granted I've only read one other cozy-fiction book, but so far both have had this saccharine chipper undertone that feels to me like the reading equivalent of Splenda. Also things just sort of happen on the logic of "this would be nice".

Wait actually I kind of love the afterword from the author

Whoa that ended 50 pages earlier than I thought

3rd person present tense POV is weird, this feels like you're reading the star wars intro crawl before the movie except it's the self-narrative of a white hipster woman

Niche interest to murder pipeline is relatable. I felt this way during my tumblr years.

"They threatened to fan the dying ember of the past into a full hemorrhoidal flame again"

Hemorrhoidal?????? I'm taking this as permission to describe everything as hemorrhoidal from now on

I forgot how freaking long this is 🫡

this protag is so endearing, they just want to be pretty and will risk their life for the 10 dollars someone owes them from a bet

My internal image of this robot shifts between alphonse elric from full metal alchemist and a refrigerator

This is a utopia because the monk is allowed to be horny

"Good god, get a grip girl" - Latrice Royale

Yassss let queer people be awful

This reads like one of those tiktoks where the plot of a horror movie is narrated by an AI voice

lmao nevermind, book good, that ending takes nerve

So far enjoying this one less than the author's other two books. Was pretty excited at first with the multi-POV just to see what the author might do with it, but I feel like it's actually following a similar formula as her other mystery/romance, but just... not as good? The mystery in this one feels more contrived to me and the romance tensionless, maybe because we're seeing more of the pieces.

I'm only 30ish pages in and already a reveal that made me gasp embarassingly loud, man I freaking love this author

A third romanceable man has entered the chat