aja > Recent Status Updates

arrived at the library just in time for me to start reading on christmas eve lmao. excited for this one!

loving the narrative voice so far. really strong opening chapter with some genuinely gorgeous bits of prose interwoven here!

..................now hang on a second. is this pulling a witcher season 1 on me

just finished part ii so this feels like a good spot to update: have decided i am def having fun with this! it's just so unapologetically weird & gross, with all the weird hallucinogenic perfumes & insect toxins & venoms & the ensuing body horror. fascinated by the worldbuilding here, and all the subtle little plot points as they are revealed to us in bits & pieces. i am intrigued to see how this plays out

i swear i am actually reading this lol, just slowly & without updating. can't decide how i feel about this so far: there's smth about the decadent absurdity of this world & its casual uncaring cruelty i'm not sure i like. but then we get things like this: "he feels upside-down under the chandeliers and arching skylights, too used to his light radiating from below, reflected in silver water" & i'm like, oh. okay

back to our dresden files reread! no marcone in this one but should still be fun

this fucking rules so far holy shit

this has been sitting on my shelf for like three weeks now bc i took so long to finish the monk but i'm excited for it!!!!

girl do you even like women. like do you respect them as people. jesus christ.

i'm sure i've seen more sexless depictions of lust than we got in their little sojourn through the court of desire here but i'd be hard pressed to think of them. embarrassingly awkward, like an alien had googled "weird fetishes and kinks," all overlaid with a smug sense of superiority that our MC was Better Than That. all our degrees & the best we can come up with for names are "bone-things" & "barge-type thing."

insipidly dull so far, & a deeply uninteresting interpretation of hell for all that she is clearly trying to be clever & creative with it (i have simply read too much classic weird fiction with all its hells of terrible splendor to find endless plains of sand & dust & some very lazy attempts at non-euclidean geography at all interesting), & interspersed with endless asides of academia & linguistic etymology? for why

lmao. five pages in & we are talking about bringing lembas bread with us into hell as though it is a food that actually exists & not fantasy elven bread invented by tolkien for lord of the rings. this paragraph is also just soooooo: "to be honest she had never gotten around to trying proust, but cambridge had made her the kind of person who wanted to have read proust, and she figured hell was a good place to start"

this book is NUTS

been very bad about updating this lol but i am having fun! haven't rly gotten into the horror of it yet. the opening few sections were so light in tone i found myself very taken aback; if i hadn't known better i would have thought this a comedy. matilda is insane, btw, i'm obsessed w her

still working my way thru the introduction of this so far but have gotten a very fun anecdote about how popular it was to adapt this story into plays, and one particularly egregious censored version that made the entire crowd "hiss" with outrage so loudly an actress leaving the stage accidentally knocked the wooden head off a baby doll off as she was fleeing thru the door

firstly i would like to say forgive me father, for i have not locked in. however i have also just finished part 1 of this, which feels like a good time to update before i get busy at work, and i've been having a good time basically since the beginning but things are getting GOOD.

rly enjoying this so far! a bit clunky in prose at points, but the sense of place & atmosphere and the slow build of dread is SO good.

i have five more books to read before the month ends time to lock in

there is nothing quite like eating your lunch while you read about ppl engaging unwittingly in cannibalism lmao. anyway we're starting to get into the meat of things now & they are at least fun enough to keep me going despite my many qualms

i am going to be blunt here: the majority of this feels like a fanfic writer who has done the bare minimum of research for their medieval siege AU. if this were fanfic, & not published literature, i would say that they're doing a fine enough job; prbly i'd give it a chance. we keep getting glimmers of things that could be GOOD & then out of nowhere we get sentences like "that's her signal to get the fuck out of here"

hm.

forgot to update this yesterday lmao, woops! obsessed the visuals of this so far

some of the most insane sentences i think i have ever seen put to the written word here. i do wish i had a better memory of what happened in the last segment we read but that was like 10 months ago lmao. alack

busy day at work so i didn't get as far as i would have liked but i'm enjoying this so far!

BRING BACK WEIRD AS FUCK VAMPIRES HOLY SHIT, i love these disgusting plant tentacle parasite vampires so much. the plot threads are finally starting to come together here

shout out to 80s horror fiction for being such 80s horror fiction: we have just read a flashback to our antagonist as a teenager staying for a time with his foster father's sister & her two teenage daughters & witnessing them having an orgy with a satyr, & then as an adult confess to the millennia old vampire trapped in its mausoleum that he is an adult virgin & been laughed at & mocked for it. god bless (genuinely)

definitely a bit of a slow start in favor of building atmosphere, but some books really call for a more deliberate pacing to let you sit with them. enjoying both the early glimpses of keogh's ability to commune with ghosts & dragosani's early interactions with the vampire (whose name we've not yet gotten). this is a kind of vampire i haven't seen in quite some time; i'm stoked to see just what horrors he wreaks

having fun with this so far! feels very prototypically 80s horror, at least to my inexperienced eye (i'm more familiar w 80s horror films than w its books), w a post-cold war red scare secret paranormal organization operating from within the KGB, & its english counterpart. love the horror of the necromancy in this so far, with dragosani literally carving it out of corpses. curious to see how keogh's arc progresses

none of my october spooky reads from the library have come in yet so we will be starting instead with this! bc i have it on my shelves lol