Tim Combes > Recent Status Updates

The bat ears being knives is badass

Not vibing with this one so far. I like the series too much to DNF but if this whole thing is gonna be Shallan and Kaladin being annoying insecure bitches then this is gonna be a slog

Going from Ferrante to Sanderson is a stark contrast. For all of his plotting and world building and magic systems, his prose leaves much to be desired.

“That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelessness is what most frightened Lila in the course of her life.”

“My life forces me to imagine what [Lila’s] would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck. And her life continuously appears in mine, in the words that I’ve uttered, in which there’s often an echo of hers, in a particular gesture that is an adaptation of a gesture of hers”

I cannot describe why these books are so good but they must be because I’m incredibly invested in

“He felt a sharp envy toward the person he had been in those moments—why had time continued to unspool, why had his heart kept beating, stupidly and stubbornly, until now?”

“In the cold, white light Jakob clearly sees the tears running down Boris’s face. He realizes Boris will never forgive him for seeing him like this. At this moment their friendship is over.”

“the so-called War to End All Wars. . . Bagger understands with horror, is really the War to Begin All Wars, countries carved into furious parcels and technology matured to a stage of perpetual regeneration”

“We have to stop trying to make our children fit into the world they find themselves in, and start creating a world that fits them. Nature created such a world.”

Takes about 50 pages to get used to the tone and the prose (one run on sentence, every paragraph starting with “and”) but damn now I’m hooked

"Bagger, of course, inserts explicit content, Tarzan revised to be a randy sodomite and Lady Greystoke a nudist cannibal, to which Arno only nods along, suggesting there’s no atrocity Bagger can concoct the Great War hasn’t reduced to believability,"

"Bagger’s guts thicken like they do anytime he sees Arno, the kid’s fourteen, lied about his age to some Nebraska National Guardsfuck trying to make quota, and ever since has been a tick sucked to the 172nd’s underbelly, devoid of skills but too damn small for the Germans to hit,"

So far this feels like a more sardonic Catch-22, which I don't hate.

"Zac Brettler’s teenage years coincided with a period of history during which the texture of human existence subtly changed. . . Any momentary impulse he had, as expressed by his index finger on a touchscreen, could give rise to a kind of digital undertow, pulling him deeper into his own preoccupations. His interests—in supercars, rich people, luxury real estate—were compounded by the algorithm."

It's either coincidence or a very good writerly intuition on Radden Keefe's part that the very moment I thought to myself "how did he even hear about this story?" he answers that very question.

“London is the capital of pristine facades, often painted in wedding-cake shades of cream or ivory; the city’s dominant aesthetic is a literal whitewash.”

“'He called Dave Sharma a ‘Paki,’ even though he’s Indian, not Pakistani, and he called me a fat cunt,' Baker said, before adding, in a studiously neutral tone, 'He ended up getting attacked by a machete.'"

“Riverwalk’s interior was fitted out in the antiseptic fashion of today’s superrich, with gleaming surfaces, velvet sofas, and generic accent sculptures. Real wealth, this aesthetic seemed to imply, meant living full-time in the featureless splendor of a corporate hotel.”

Keefe’s prose oozes with barely concealed contempt for the rich.

If there's one thing Keefe does especially well it's find the threads that bind the personal and the political, deftly weaving between the micro and the macro. His books always feel personal and grand simultaneously.

"But if political instability can be great when you’re trying to make a fortune, it’s less attractive when you’re trying to hold on to one. So having acquired their riches in the hurly-burly of the former Soviet Union, the oligarchs started looking for safe havens abroad where law and order prevailed and they could securely park their money—and, if necessary, themselves."

"In fact, there is a statistical correlation between the value of a property and the likelihood that it will be occupied: the higher the price, the greater the chance it is empty. . . in fashionable neighborhoods after sundown, the windows of the multimillion-dollar dwellings were all dark. The press gave a nickname to these vacant palaces: ghost mansions."

"He told me that not many people were ordering hand-painted signs anymore, that they were all going neon, but if he had one sign he could put on the world he would say that he was Gloria’s father."

"I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty."

"That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it’s hard to think you’ll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it’s just so comfortable you don’t want to have to develop your own."

I've seen the documentary Man on Wire and I don't recall if they mentioned that Nixon resigned the next day but that's a pretty crazy historical confluence

The switch between the first two narrators was a tough transition and I almost gave up. Glad I didn't.

"She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs—she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry."