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"Even if there was no room inside me for anything but the pain, I had to lie to myself that it was otherwise; and in the narrow space of that lie, make myself useful."

This hits home. Really hard.

"What I want is considerably more difficult to arrange. I want truth. And I want to stop being alone. I want others to see it, too."

The existential empathy of this book... Precise, clear - just few enough words - to render real life in all its aching love and horror. <3

The exactness of the description and sympath-- no, passion in the portrayal is to die for in this book.

O damn... "Your true error is is more basic than either of these. You are assuming the existence of problems, and humans, and rocks."

O! It's an illustrated book... I got the audio book first (read by a presumed clan 'mate), after searching online for something Goblin Fruit. Skimming the description, realizing the breadth of the work, I got the ebook - for reading before/between listens - and then came here to market. And only then did I see... Behold! The work has an illustrator! How delightfully interstitial I shall feel, reading this on and on a

"Through the pain, at the very edge of my senses, I heard again the holy song. I thought I had left it behind... I thought I had fled the voice of my god, but... The Hidden God waited for me to sing."

Reading this tale reminds me of reading when I was a child: the books that became touchstones. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea; Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series; Tolkien's The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. There is something old, almost forgotten, yet alive: terrible, beautiful, haunting. Dark depths bright with pain and love.

But I am an adult now, and The Four Profound Weaves is timeless.

*shivers*

"To weave from death, you had to listen to the dead, to know them, deeply. To attend to what had been silenced, to care enough to help the dead speak again through every thread that made up the great work."

It surprises me how much this tale reminds me of Le Guin's Earthsea books - without resembling them at all.

Change. Wanderlust. Hope. Death.

Would you expect a story that begins with an old worn, cantankerous elder to be gripping? To find yourself hooked, in the first 10 minutes of reading, to what hinges on that elder's choices?

This is such a story.

Yes!

Firing this up again, partly ahead of Jade War coming out, mostly to follow this behind-the-scenes read-along by Lee! https://curiousfictions.com/posts/235...

I cannot get over wonderfully Goss handles Gothic tropes - poking fun at them in one paragraph, then drawing out their true horrific reality in the next. Fantastic book & series!

Good gods... This series just keeps on delivering - from the wit, to the bad-assery, to the heart-warming. (I've just gotten to where Quirk is verbally keel-hauling the [REDACTED], and egad is it GLORIOUS!

"War doesn't determine who's right. War determines who remains."

This is one of the most compelling books I've read in the last few years. I can barely put it down.

And Emily Woo Zeller's narration for the audiobook is spot on.

This is so delightful. The interaction between the characters is the heart of the story (and the asides on how one should or should not write the story are fantastic).

Damn, but this is good. The most economical and impactful use of language I've read in a while. It's a novella that feels like a novel, but reads with the intensity of a short story.

"This is being some good shit."

"The quick, sudden terror of exploding bombs is not the same as the neverending, bonesucking fear of discovery and capture. It never goes away. There isn't ever any relief, never the possibility of an all clear siren. You always feel a little bit sick inside, knowing the worst might happen at any moment."

Haven't fallen into a comic / manga so much as this since Nausicaä...