Ricky > Recent Status Updates

I'm assuming the author of this book is a woman, but I guess you can't know for sure but it's probably the case. I've been trying to figure out where the author is from. There was something I saw in one of the websites that made me wonder if she was from Asia, but it's hard to know because it's possible that multiple people could be using the same pseudonym in different places. Anyway, I just got to a point where she

Kind of sweet but very monotonous. There's a major life event that happens that is intermittently a source of pathos but mostly it all feels very flat. I'm torn between thinking that it's important for culture to have stories of good parents and things going well, but when most things are pretty idealized, it makes things feel flat

I never thought I would find myself in a situation where I am reading a gay romance novel because I watched an AI generated mini drama on tiktok which the comments told me was plagiarizing said novel, but here I am.

This book is like reading the Tao of Pooh, or maybe one of those illustrated little books like the one about the horse and the mole that got turned into that insufferable oscar-winning animated short film, where the characters speak in platitudes and every scene is meant to illustrate a really cheesy life lesson or make some kind of remark about how sweet everything is, but also how heteronormative these boys are...

Ever since reading Fruit Fly, I just keep thinking of Mallory writing all of these stories. I actually really appreciate when they make the characters gay in these MM romances. The flip side though is that when they are actually supposed to be gay, it comes across more clearly how hard it is to write about other people. It cracks me up to imagine a group of gay men sitting around talking like the ones in this book.

The thing that really surprises me about this book is that this author is fully a decade older than I am and somehow this book feels so anachronistic that I thought it would have been written by someone a decade younger than I am. It's really confusing to me. But I suppose the idea is that he's repackaging the past in a way that feels palatable to young people today? It feels really strange sometimes.

This seems like a cute book but I think I hate one of the main characters. Like we keep hearing about Ben and his ex-boyfriend and I'm perpetually on the side of the ex-boyfriend. Ben has problems and I hope it's not a problem for this book if I can't stand him right now.

The intriguing thing about reading this book is I find the details pretty boring for the most part but sometimes the grand sweep of it is captivating.

Alternating this with War and Peace probably isn't the smartest idea because this book is pretty badly written, but I checked it out from the library because of social media and I always feel obligated to try to read everything I check out from the library.

So far I'm engaged in the stuff that's happening back in Russia but frequently struggling to focus on the war scenes.

Given that this subject matter is already potentially alienating, suffusing the text with sarcasm and defensiveness is not a good move. It's not extreme, but it is annoying. This might be exacerbated by the performance of the audiobook narrator. It's really one of my biggest turn offs with books. It just makes you look so immature and unprofessional. It makes you sound like a rando on the internet.

When the sky falls, use it as a blanket.