Katy St. Clair > Recent Status Updates

Bouncing back and forth from audio to print version but this was totally the book I was in the mood for. Love the characters and setting and, ta da, the locked room mystery.

This book unfolds wonderfully and is moving but also darkly funny. I believe it is about the different faces we show people of ourself that are still really the true person we are, just expressed differently.

I have to be a masochist to read this book while my own country is swiftly heading in this direction. Those in power in this novel have declared a national emergency so they can suspend the constitution, round people up... in this case, protesting unionists, and put them in holding camps. The fact that the book has prophet in its title and came out before the second Trump election is just painful

In just the first chapter it's evident he has a profound understanding of the themes in Huckleberry Finn. My English degree is really paying off here man

Laugh out loud in parts but I feel sadness when I read how hard he had to hide his gayness, not just for him but he kept quiet mostly for his band; to find out this macho metal band was led by a "puffter" would ruin things for everyone. Funny though is that once he could come out, everyone assumed the leather and studs stuff was his fetish. Nope. "I'm vanilla," he writes!

I'm a sucker for any musician's autobio, but make them closeted gay and at the forefront of heavy metal, and Katy bar the door. One thing that perplexes me so far is that he just sort of joins Judas Priest and starts referring to them as heavy metal... I expected a bit more about being obsessed with heavy, or taking Sabbath further, or anything other than being into Zeppelin. We shall see.

Three chapters in and still no mention of the Reich, yet fascinating. It was as if amid all the ruin and rubble, German's relished the reset opportunity, like when you have a hard breakup and are sad yet relief and even hope percolate in slowly.

I always appreciate Heller's love for animals and nature, and the animals really are a central character in this one. The fact that the "detective" here is a Yellowstone ranger keeps the plot moving nicely, though still not as good as The River... but better than The Guide.

Finally, a book I can5 put down. It's been awhile.

"Sappy, coincidence ridden glory" was said by a reviewer and I concur. This is what I had hoped to get from A Man Called Ove but didn't.

"Sappy, coincidence ridden glory" was said by a reviewer and I concur. Totally what I was hoping for.

Hm... don't think King is on top of his game here but I'll keep going. It's certainly odd.

If Heronymous Bosch wrote a novel. I adore it so far.

So far no one is who I would describe as a "baddie," but perhaps they are to come. It's a fascinating melding of queer theory and world history; indeed, the cultural economy of "sodomy" has existed for centuries, separating the givers and the takers as masculine and feminine, and we know which was considered the worst. In that sense this is also a feminist book. It's not all theory though, it's fun reading,

What drove Kellyanne wasn't a love for Trump but a burning hatred of Clinton... a hatred that burns like a thousand Jersey tanning beds. Her blind spot, cognitive dissonance or whatever you want to call her Loyalty to Trump came from how tightly she was tethered to his success. A rejection of him was a rejection of her, since she coached and molded him into the candidate he became.

It hasn't gone as Coen Brothers as I'd hoped but I'm only halfway done. I am predicting another plot twist so I'm curious if I am right. The budding romance is making me uncomfortable for admittedly prudish reasons.

A perfect King book so far.

Dinosaurs get all the hoopla but they are only one of five known mass extinctions on our planet. People who study this stuff know that when it's our turn, nothing will remain of our civilizations for whatever intelligent being might go poking around after the million or so years it will take the planet to get to that new epoch. Even steel will have disintegrated. So yeah, homo erectus, you ain't all that.

A sign of a good book is when you don't want anything baD to happen to the protagonist. So that's happening for me. But it's lagging at times now. 100 more pages though and I want to see how it ends.

The West of the 1880s had "temples" set up for Chinese immigrants, much like the missions in California. You could travel from each to each and know you would be among other Chinese people. They were basically log cabins but I wonder if any still stand. The protagonist is in Idaho and feeling very out of place, which I'm sure hasn't changed much for Asian people in that state to this day.

"Swallow is the mystery. Bone-white and silent—not quiet, but silent—she has no history and no future that she speaks of. She has the most customers of us all, and perhaps her silence is why. There is something about her that can be rewritten over and over again."

The protagonist is of Chinese descent, a remnant of immigrants basically enslaved to build the railroads. It's fitting then that he uses a sharpened railroad spike for some up close and personal revenge killing.

Carmac McCarthy meets The Wizard of Oz. You think it's a basic- but good- revenge Western but then the author splashes in magic realism.

COVID created a problem for fentanyl production because it's ingredients were mostly created in a giant lab in Wuhan.