ThatBookish_deviant > Recent Status Updates

Sevro has Mickey ‘The Carver’ replace his eyes with Darrow’s old red eyes to “bring them closer together” & it’s the most weirdly endearing, homoerotic act in the Red Rising saga. Ephraim & Trigg’s marriage ain’t got nothing on The Goblin & Reaper’s Howler bromance!
“I told him it was odd,” Ragnar says.
“Do you want the eyes back?” Sevro asks, suddenly worried. “I can give them back.”

“A savage’s miscellany of psychopaths and hooligans, my pack is a scatter mash of rejects.” -Darrow

“They are all at it, constantly, gluey with fucking; dripping with fucking. This is a Paradise of Penises; a Cockaigne of Cunts. Marriage is a political arrangement, quite separate from love, and not to enter into extramarital affairs a little gauche.” -On the court of Louis XIV at Versailles.

First time reading Hill and I kept musing over how similar his writing style is to Stephen King. Halfway through the book I Google pics of him and I’m like, wow he really looks like a young Stephen King. Days later I browse his Goodreads reviews and clearly I’m slow at putting two and two together! 😂

Reread! Because when you’re sick, grumpy, and new books aren’t hitting right, you go back to your favorites for inspiration.

Is this cover not a blatant (poor) imitation of The Borough Press’s October 2024 release, Of the Flesh?

“There was nothing so pitiful, so utterly helpless as old women—if they were ugly enough or poor enough; nobody in such need of succour.”

“When women laugh and donkeys bray, that there’s the devil having his say. When the devil wanted to learn, to women he will turn.”

“We never talked about the nights, because he was ashamed of the nights. I learned to seek out the tickles. I learned to position myself in such a way that his coming and going rubbed me where it set me aflame. I could scarcely manage to abide the pleasure in silence. To grind my teeth together hard when the wolf-fart puffball exploded inside me.” A Catalan to English translation issue? Doubtful. Sola is bizarre.

“It done emptied me out like a dunderhead, all that heeheeheehee and hahahaha, and my noggin went clong-clong.” 😂 Say what?

“She conceived me. I took shape like an infant, not in her body, but in her heart, growing from her imagination until I was bold enough to climb out of the page and into your mind. Now Mary is the ghost whose bones have turned to dust and it is I who live on.”

“Her terror was transformed into a burning itch of malevolence.”
Ohh, this one’s fun. There’s plague, vampires, demons AND phosphorescent magical mushrooms!🧛🏻‍♀️

This content warning is legit.
“Contains wartime violence, religious abuse, depictions of complex trauma, suicidal ideation, self-harm, human experimentation, medical torture, eugenics, cannibalism, sexual assault, rape, and allusions to necrophilia.”
So much doom & gloom.

“Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.”p.32

Kingfisher’s diving right in with a main character snorting adder venom in the first few pages. It’s particularly apropos having just finished reading Little Eve, it left me with adders on the brain!

“What a huge excavation is going on down here inside me. Level after level. The pain keeps on flooding out of the darkness. The sides clamp tighter and tighter. Can’t smell, can’t see, can’t speak. I’m being pulled apart like a cracker. Vomit one end, shit the other. It’s abject, violent, unstoppable.”
On childberth)

“His moods filled the room even when he wasn’t in it.”

“She was one of those good-looking women who can be so carefree about their natural splendor that you only want to kick them in the forehead.” p.14

“The sea is a vast canvas, and we are the artists, painting our stories upon its waves.”

“There is something indecent about how obviously she wears her grief, and Maren is worried that whenever they touch it will leach into her skin.”

“Often you fall in love not with someone, but with yourself in love. Or with what being in love implies, the positive side effects. You want to be in love, so you are.”

“Horror at the unthinkable forces that war had unleashed united both victors and vanquished.”

Well this is much darker than expected but it’s also really, really good!

“You did it because you wanted to. No one can make you do evil. You had evil inside you, and you indulged it. Men will always indulge it.”

“I killed him because he was a priest, because it is priests and pardoners and their kind who destroy the young and the beautiful, the innocent and the helpless. They use His name to torment those they should care for. They make them ashamed of what is beautiful. They make them despise their nature and their own bodies.”

Paused on page 214, after The Sword In The Stone.

“She did not change; things changed around her.” Okay, Narigorm is creepy as fuck. I thought I was reading a plague book but maybe it’s another creepy, feral kid book.

So Julia was kind of a rapist, despot-asshole, eh? Love that Griff can now embrace his “peculiar proclivities” and finds a real partner in Delo.

“This grief, I think, it’s like a dirty house I abandoned that even years later I know how to crawl through blind.”

“It’s strange, after years taking refuge in silence, to suddenly feel trapped by it.”

“He was a casserole of douche energy.”