J > Recent Status Updates

Well. This is a book that I am reading. The banality of evil, indeed.

I get it, but I don’t LIKE it…

Bro, I am so tired.

Cheer up, emo kid!

i picked this one up on a whim because i’m tryin to be thematically appropriate and ~read spooky~ this october and i got to about 15% and went “this feels like YA” and then i googled the author and found out he got semi-cancelled by booktwt or whatever despite being one of those same sorts of booktwt people who calls out women for fetishizing gay men and somehow none of that surprised me at all.

I was told this was a fascinating, fourth-wall-breaking, action-packed, make-you-piss-your-pants-and-cry level of fantastic but, one: it's repetitive as hell (which I presume is kind of the whole deal with LitRPGs--leveling and whatnot--so, whatever), and two: the entire translation was apparently done by something half a step above Google translate, meaning it reads... poorly. I can't do this for 4000 more pages.

Far less enamored of this now than I was when I was in high school. It's not *bad*, but 16-year-old me had a much lower barrier of entry for 5-star ratings than I currently do.

Oof, I can already tell this one is too "twee, chronically-online white millenial who hasn't lived in the Midwest for decades" to be of any interest to me. Maybe the Jodi Picoult blurb or the author's entire previous bibliography being YA novels with the kind of cover I actively avoid should have been big red warning flags.

Ms. Russell, what happened???

Credit where it is due: I can see why people can read like 500 of these a year. This is extremely easy to listen to at like 3x speed while at work doing mindless tasks since there’s pretty much no complexity in its prose.

Sometimes you gotta try something outside of your wheelhouse because, y’know, tastes change and pretension is overrated, but… no, I still can’t vibe with romantasy.

I didn’t like Conrad when I read him in high school and I fear I don’t like him any better seventeen years later.

Something, something, I know this is a classic but I don’t caaaaaaare about any of this.

Good Old Neon, Mister Squishy, and The Soul is Not a Smithy were all superb. But now sitting here in a mild Covid-fog, I’m attempting to get through the titular story and wondering why I’m doing this to myself. It’s like they front-loaded all the good stories at the start in hopes that the reader’s completionist streak would kick in and compel them to power through the rest.