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“They’re humans with a godly view and that’s the blessing and also the curse.”

on a sentence level it’s quite good, but on a plot/structure level it’s driving me nuts. and i think i figured out why: it’s written more like a movie or miniseries than like a novel, with the way it uses flashbacks.

I am a thing called alive.

UNK?

so far i haven’t like anything quite so much as the first story, but (apart from the novella-length one) i’ve enjoyed all of them

mostly enjoying this but man. my least favorite story of the bunch was also by far the longest and i had to drag myself through it. hoping i can get along at a faster clip now

i’ve always heard about how timely and hard and important and relevant the topic of this book is but NO ONE prepared me for how gorgeous the writing is. ms atwood is in here writing P R O S E and we should all be taking notes

on the one hand i’m envious of people who read this for school but on the other hand—i think if i’d had to discuss this book with a single boy who went to my high school there would have been murders

Last week they shot a woman, right about here.
[…] Doing their job, said Cora. Keeping us safe.
Nothing safer than dead, said Rita, angrily. She was minding her own business. No call to shoot her.
It was an accident, said Cora.
No such thing, said Rita. Everything is meant.

“Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade,—all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design.”

impossible to read a book like this and not think of the early pandemic lockdown. can’t tell if i do or don’t wish i had run across this in 2020 instead of now

“if i cannot inspire love, i will cause fear”

he just wants to he LOVED!!!

“What these incidents really make clear, my dear fellow, is that the laws evolved by one particular species, for the convenience of that species, are, by their nature, concerned only with the capacities of that species—against a species with different capacities they simply become inapplicable.”

the sheer audacity. i’m having a ball. if you’re going to commit to reality-bending as a part of the universe, you gotta commit, and boy howdy does this book do so

this book just made my jaw drop

delighted to start this and realize that the main character absolutely sucks