aja > Recent Status Updates

i think it'd like this more if it were a horror novel but i am enjoying this much more than i anticipated. fascinated by how the page formatting impacts the way the narration is received; i'll talk about that more in depth in my final review. i will say though that i have copied several pages over into my media journal because i thought they were so beautiful or interesting, so. that's a good sign i think

let's see what all this fuss is about

"there is a level below all humanity where those cursed with being human always find themselves"

we are doing some EXTREMELY fun stuff with this

delighted so far by how offputting this is. not the writing itself - that is gorgeous - but in the creatures & the weirdness we've invented here. love the filthlings in their small monstrosity. love the gland of mercy (feels a bit like act i of 'hurled headlong flaming'). LOVE the oracle, which feeds off the marrow of bones steeped in sin-confession and sings horrors to itself when exposed to new pieces of the world

fun & weird so far!

obsessed w this chapter ending: "i felt something deep down in me, something dark like jazz when it reminds you that death is waiting. 'death,' the saxophone rasps. but, really, i didn't care."

"i could tell that he didn't have the fear or contempt that most white people showed when they dealt with me. ... mr. todd carter was so rich that he didn't even consider me in human terms. he could tell me anything. i could have been a prized dog that he knelt to and hugged when he felt low. it was the worst kind of racism. the fact that he didn't even recognize our difference" OOF

enjoying this so far!

i'll post an updated review of this in the morning but i've already stayed up later than i should have in my determination to finish this before bed tonight lol

i am really enjoying this process but my god it takes so much longer to read a book when you're annotating & taking notes as you go

picking this back up again today for book club this weekend-- not gonna bother adjusting the &age but just know i am attempting to start from the beginning again bc it's been like 9 months since i last read this & i have no fucking clue what's going on

sickos dot jpeg

this is gonna be an in-between book-- she has a series of youtube videos designed as companion pieces to this book that featured one on analyzing tarot through critical theory that i enjoyed so much it genuinely changed the way i read tarot, and so i thought it only made sense to check this book out

part of why i wanted to pick this up is bc i've been neglecting my talks-about-media journal and i wanted to read something i'd WANT to journal about. let me tell you, i have Thoughts about this series lmao. i've filled up 7 pages already and i'm less than 20% through this book. anyway i love this series very much. reading through it with a more critical eye has proven very fun for me

been thinking a lot about this series again recently so i am rereading! for uh. the third time in the past five years lmao. don't worry about it

why do these characters from the high dark fantasy series our protag grew up reading keep saying "no worries"

i actually genuinely did not see that surprise reveal coming and suddenly i am like. 100x more invested in this lol. much more like the kind of dynamic i would have expected out of one of their romances. i do feel like for all the talk of how brutal and horrific this world is we've softened it a bit more than i would have expected from reading kate daniels? like the torture sequence barely happened before it ended

none of these people talk like they're in a fantasy novel, including the characters who are actually from a fantasy novel, but otherwise i am having fun

i feel like the andrews have a voice much better fitting for urban fantasy than this hybrid of high fantasy & isekai so i'm not 100% sure how i feel about this yet, but the kate daniels series means so much to me i will absolutely be sticking this one out unless something particularly egregious happens

i realize i am reading this very slowly but that is only because for some reason my brain is determined to only read it at work. i am having a GREAT time. just genuine endless delight

why did they do that with the title of this edition.............................. anyway i am picking this up because leave it (un)read had an entire blog post about georgette heyer's regency romances & it sounded NUTS so i figured it would be a fun early foray into romance novels. really enjoyed this opening chapter, we open with our romance hero killing a man & the quickly move on to lots of fun sharp gossip

hmmmmmmmm. undecided how i feel about this so far, but then, we are only two stories in. i liked the second better than the first

another very mixed bag here-- a couple were fine, one i thought was interesting but disliked in execution, and then 'to follow the waves,' which i really, really liked. please stop telling me what your story's moral is, el-mohtar, and just TELL ME YOUR STORY. this is always when you are at your best

highlight of this so far for me is very easily "and their lips rang with the sun," which runs closest to what i love about a good fairytale and also doesn't feel like someone's hitting me in the head with a mallet that reads "this is the moral of this story." "the lonely sea in the sky" had some rly fun & interesting concepts but i was somewhat less impressed w the the delivery. also for once i enjoyed a poem

liked the short story featured at the end of 'the river has roots' enough that i decided when this came out i would check it out so we shall see how this goes. undecided whether this first one is too heavy handed-- that is often the way of fairytales, after all?

love love love the sense of impending and inevitable doom in this section, a kind of sword of damocles of cosmic scope. we cannot stop it, we cannot change it. things happen this was because there is no other way for things to be. aiat.

i was half dreading and half hoping i'd still like this, and well. what can i say. i'm a sucker for this kind of strange melange of genres: science fiction, fantasy, horror, the blend of pulpy westerns and arthurian grandeur with a multiverse our characters are painfully aware of, the dream-like state of it all. it would be even better if stephen king knew how to be even VAGUELY normal about women

haven't read this in ages and i couldn't figure out anything else i was in the mood to read so. curious to see how this goes for me now lol