Seth > Recent Status Updates

book is actively changing my life.

Provides an incredible means of reframing an internal drive for better. The bits about procrastination were especially freeing. I need to get a print copy so I can highlight a book for the first time in my life.

1 million bonus points to the author for actually being able to write non-fiction with empathy, expertise and some really good prose. Seriously she’s a really good writer.

s’ good m’ Lord

Incredible. Makes an entirely different understanding of world, space, time and the sacred legible. Most encounters I’ve had with similar texts are filtered through a latent christianity, skeptic materialism, or a weird mix of both. Profound and humbling.

Sheesh this is good. Raw psychological novel about wealth, women’s bodies, weak ass liberal guilt, via a lazy ass trust fund kid getting into a love triangle even wealthier trust fund kids. You love to hate them, then see your own extraordinarily vain thoughts on the page.

I need to finally admit I don’t care much for memoir, but it is an extravagant pleasure to find someone so equally harassed and bewildered by those sorts of folk who don’t seem to have eyes when they are outside. You didn’t see the butterfly? You didn’t spot the mushroom? It is not us, the observers of nature, who are weird in this scenario! Rhythm of the walk be damned.

This book is great lmao. Just the right amount of weird and funny.

Hilarious. Reminds me of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, but less heavy (so far) and a little more levity.

It’s pulp and it’s cool as shit

So intrigue is cool and all and its a little tiny bit queer. I dunno missing something for me. Like everything is pretty surface level and theres not a ton of internality. Or my brain has calloused over and its actually really good and subtle but i dont think so

well the plots getting good but i’m way more of a vibes reader. too much plot and intrigue not enough vibes

Ehhh. I kind of hate when a book starts a million threads and every chapter is a cliffhanger. Dragons are cool as hell though so i’m going to give jt some more time. But I’m just so conscious that every chapter isn’t going to get very much further.

The vibes are kinda dim too. I dunno. Blah.

Not at all my usual bag, but it’s a lot of fun so far.

I don’t know how someone who has experienced so much hell can write with so much love for everything. This book is actively making me less of a hardass cynical bitch.

gorgeous. i need the softness of this one in our increasingly unmerciful times. longing, love, family, death, struggle….Abduraqib is wringing it all out through his own love of basketball and growing up in Columbus, OH during Lebron’s rise to fame.

Ehhhhhh. Beautifully set. Incredible nature writing. The island and landscape are gorgeous. Some great interior psychology. Shinji is compelling.

But I can see the edges of each piece and it’s kind of clunky. Hatsue is barely believable. Most of the women, in fact. Just here to weep and be sad.

McBride can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned. With her prose she lushly dishes image after image, sensation after sensation, while revealing her narrator's inner psychological workings. Turning the reader's gaze toward the anxious mundane in every situation, she universalizes her story. I could gush forever. Easily my favorite author right now.

So good. Great imagery, atmosphere and tone. Loving it so far.

If you want to blow up the tunnel vision you might feel reading the NT or grant yourself a better understanding of the NT happening in a real world, with history, politics, and just as much chaos as today, this will do it. Cant say enough good about it so far.

You should read Baldwin. You just absolutely HAVE to. Little has changed since Baldwin first named the pitfalls so apparent in books like Uncle Tom's Cabin. We still publish the Green Books, the Helps, and the Driving Miss Daisies in attempts to sanctify ourselves. I can't say more because the first chapter is so beautifully rich. Just read it.

Vexing.

I have no understanding of Buddhism, which doesn't help me here. I have trouble following Buddhist logic and find myself baffled more often than not.

Even so baffled, violence, beauty and a wildly detached eroticism make compelling subjects as related by a scorned individual desperate for harmony.

And who isn't desperate for harmony?

Far more ponderous than "...Sailor who Fell from Grace...", TOTGP follows a young boy entering Buddhist priesthood. Mishima's again wondering about internal/external beauty, insistent that children are not childish and are capable of projecting adulthood, death and disappointing reality. More interesting here is boy's stutter, asking how we might translate out inner life to others as well as we experience it.

Putting this on "currently reading" so I can get my ass off the couch, upstairs and outside to get it out of the car.

Hope it's worth it. Goodreads scores look a little high for it to be any good.

An actress manages wrapping for gifts she didn't buy. A boy spies into his mother's bedroom through a hole in the wal. The mother grieves and runs luxury boutique. A sailor can't voice his Romantic internal monologues and instead quotes pop songs. Children dissect a kitten with scissors. Sensuous prose pries/slashes/penetrates all matter of surfaces, wondering what's underneath and how it matters and controls us.

In answering "what is literature, after all?", Eagleton covers literature's changing definitions (and its changers) from 1700's England onward. In short, "literature" is a set of agreed upon calues, and agreed upon values are always a product of a community. Examining that community can help us understand why we read what we read in the first place.

Maybe I'll actually finish a book?

Also reading this again, and it's great the second time.

Labor & love in an American chain restaurant, on it's last service day before Corporate shuts it down on a whim.