Zoë Marriott > Recent Status Updates

Why do my supervisors keep doing this to me? Everytime I read one of their recommendations it makes me want to entirely reth

Of course this is beautifully written and compelling - it's Hilary Mantel - but the painstakingly related sufferings of poor little 'Llary' are really rough to struggle through. I keep trying to read this at bedtime and then I can't sleep. May have a bit of a hiatus...

Nina Riva, you are a good girl, a very good girl - but if you don't start standing up for yourself soon I WILL BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN BEFORE YOUR AUTHOR DOES. My God.

I'm surprised this wasn't called 'Crib', honestly - but then I suppose the author already did that with 'You Should have Known'. But it does feel like a wasted opportunity.

Reading this again, I'm struck by how terriby *catty* Harriet Vane is. Descriptions of her fellow graduates:

"...face like the back of a cab... tightly corseted peroxide of sixty...plain...curious little creature dressed in unbecoming pink...tall, haggard, tragedy queen... bony..."

To paraphrase, she never looks at another woman except to find fault!

"Darkness and so forth" ha ha ha ha I love it.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha *gasp* I need this to be a film starring Army Adams and Ana de Armas.

The most unrealistic thing about this whole book, it strikes me, is not the outlandish, exaggerated academics, or two sets of hidden letters suddenly coming to light after 100 years and revealing a whole new history, or even any of the romance. It's that everyone in this who writes anything, from Blanche Glover to Ellen Ash to this Kercoz cousin are somehow all fantastically talented & fascinating writers.

Yay, they've run away together from all these appalling rotters! Oh, the relief.

Ooooh, finally a glimpse of Ragnarok - and by this point I am quite desperate to read Ask to Embla. Come on woman, you know exactly what you've done. Dish these love poems up, I MUST KNOOOOW.

I'm completely carried away by the ambition of this. The way the author, with complete confidence, throws 60 pages of dense, Victorian, literary correspondence at you, drops potted, detailed biographies of side characters on you, offers a felt of references literary/religious/philosophical/scientific, some of them real, some of them imaginary, with an attitude of 'DEAL WITH IT, KIDDO'. And you *do*.

Can already tell that I'm going to be in love with this, and am attempting to ration it to make it last longer. I adore how Maud comes into the story as this deeply odd, coldly seething, unknowable near-antagonist who has so clearly got her own complex history and in no way presents as 'Potential Love Interest for Roland'.

I wish I hadn't read Circe before starting this. Or maybe what I really wish is that Jennifer Saint hadn't read Circe before writing this?

Madeline Miller is a goddess.

I'm making v slow progress on this for 2 reasons: 1 is CampNaNoWriMo, the 2nd is that I am so bored of the heroine's past life version, who is passive, one-dimensional and irrationally obsessed with a married man, old enough to be her father, who seduced & abandoned her when she was 16. Present-day Helen is of some interest, but she passes out & has a past-life vision every 3pgs.

Unsure what page since I'm reading on the Kobo reader, which stubbornly and annoyingly does not provide pagination - but I'm about four sections in, and this is already breaking my frigging heart.

I hate the Other so, so much. The slick, contemptuous smugness of him, his dismissiveness and lack of even the faintest hint of compassion... I want to put it all in a blender and press 'Juice'. I don't even know exactly what he's done yet, or how bad it is, but I hate him. I really hope he dies in a poetically fitting and awful way.

Too Good. Just too good. I ought to ration this to make it last, but I have no self-control so I will probably finish it today...

Never yet have I been so glad to see a fatal avalanche occur. They can all die in the snow as far as I'm concerned (not Erin or Danny, obvs). Kill those materialistic capitalist drone yuppy hipsters, snow! KILL.

This... is not how police investigations work. At all. And this is also not how actual human beings speak, think or act! I take back that 'YA novel' observation from before - this just reads like a First draft.

I may have been misled by the cover here. I imagined something very lush, very lyrical, very Gothic and dark. But so far this is really straightforward - it feels like reading a pretty basic YA novel, but with a couple of older narrators and added references to abortificants. Something's missing for me...

Gosh, Emma Darwin's writing is a bit of all right.

I am struggling a little. There's nothing specifically wrong with this, and I can see why so many people find it charming, but there's so much 'first draftitis' in the writing that it feels quite clunky to get wade through and the homespun platitudes... they never end. Ever.

You know, I never used to understand why ppl were creeped out by the age difference in Twilight, since Edward seemed to have about the maturity of a normal teen boy - frozen forever and all that. But now that he's *with* Bella in this book, his voice is so obviously that of a grown man, it IS starting to squick me out. Bella's falling over herself (literally) a clumsy, awkward teen and Edward is... drooling. Ick.

Am I the only one who gets a weird feeling that Edward's first crush was actually Carlisle? I've never met anyone who 'admired' their 'dad' this much, or would would spend this much time thinking about their dad while meadow-snuggling with their beloved.

Edward says of his bare chest/arms: "(...)this was nothing. Just pale skin. Well, extremely pale skin, bent in a slightly inhuman way over the angularity of my inhuman musculature." Um. Ew?