KJ > Recent Status Updates

Case in point: I just got to "You're beneath contempt, but believe me, boys - you'll rise" and started crying.

I didn't come to this entirely unaffected the first time around - I knew no spoilers, only that it was supposed to be A Pinnacle of the series. And I did love it. Approaching this reread, I thought, "it's probably just fine" ... But no, I'm a quarter of the way in, and knowing what's coming only makes it better. What a well composed book. I'm gonna go lie down in rumbly Ankh-Morporkh cart traffic now.

That awkward feeling when your First Ghost Crush turns out to be the same guy who seduced and murdered your mom, and you have to have a family meeting about your terrible taste in men.

Well, it did get... better? It got more compelling. I think the problem is that it is fueling all of the reader's engagement by relying on their fondness for characters established in the previous book. The new characters introduced are not interesting or sympathetic; the glimpses of preexisting characters are only there to remind you that this series had a heart before. I don't know.

Hmm. Hmmmm. I think that, if this were a standalone or the first in the series, I'd have marked it DNF by now. Action unclear, new characters uninteresting, compared to the blazing introductions of Gt9th. I keep going out of hope it will find its footing, and my heart... But I have a terrible fear I'll have to consider Gideon a single novel with no followup, like The Traitor Baru Cormorant.

it's here it's here it's here

Please be good, after a run of dull books daddy needs a win

Not super comfy with how many anecdotes end with the punchline of "And then I showed that I was Feisty and In Charge [of these people who are literally under my power and extremely vulnerable to abuse]!"

I would dearly like if the narrator would make fewer convoluted Harry Potter references. Every time it shoves me out of the actual account as I try to remember what DID happen the first time Floo Powder was used... and it just emphasizes how unseriously she seems to be taking her job.

Ooh, do not like this narrator's voice like, at all.

Oooof this seems like the kind of book I hate instinctively

Take a shot every time the narrative comes to a screeching halt so someone can recite an irrelevant Amanda Hamilton poem. Seriously, where was the editor, and why weren't they counting? This reads like the "songfics" of my teenage years.

I wonder if it's ever occurred to these authors that maybe someone can be deserving of help and human connection just because they need it, not because they are Unbearably Beautiful under their Uncouth Ways and Tousled Hair.

I genuinely don't recall why I had this one on hold - thought it was a mistake - but I'm delighted by that thing which is so seldom found, an interesting and lively narrative voice! And how much detail and drama the author is wringing out of dentistry. They find their subjects and their characters interesting in all their unglamorous detail, and it shows.

While I do love this book quite dearly, because I love caves (read: am terrified of caves), on this reread I can't help but notice a certain, shall we say, bias. Such as stating that two cavers in 1986 were "the first to see the cave," and, a mere two sentences later, describing their discovery of ritual artifacts and human bones from "Native Americans... whose descendants inhabited the region still."

I am rereading this for the first time in probably fifteen years. My memories of my dad reading it to me as a kiddo are coming back very strong and painful.

"I don't know if I'm the mood," I said, forgetting that Beagle's short stories always go for the throat.

I got two chapters in and I'm emotionally raw already.

I really like Reichl's language and descriptions, but not... sold on the plotting. This is like three books in one, simultaneously, and the effect is that each separate line feels like it's going on forever. It's about a woman learning to make friends and cook again after grief! No wait, it's a romance about restoring old houses! No wait, it's an epistolary mystery with a deeply contrived setup! Get on with it.

I didn't know if I was in the mood for a fairy tale retelling today, but it was the book I'd packed for lunch, so here I go. (Went.) Within ten minutes, my brain had relaxed entirely into the narration. Loving this.

Reading a lot of an author's works in a row tends to lay them uncomfortably bare. In this case, I feel for Wells. A lot of protagonists who cannot accept being loved, who react to too much attention paid up them by literally fleeing to avoid eye contact.

Hi yes I am immediately here for the local Wild Man Of The Woods being confusingly woo'd by his dapper new landlord

Reading "Lost Boy" put a bleh taste in my mouth, so I have to wash it out with a GOOD revisitation of the source material.

It's hard to stay "in" this book. The narrator's emotional reactions (or lack thereof) to her situation keep reminding me how thin this is, rather than digging in with its nails.

Goshdarn cagey blurbs! If you're wondering, the meat of this story is: wartime evacuations of other space stations overcrowd Earth's last intersteller bastion; everyone tries to stay alive while the situation (and life support, and politics, and alien relations) disintegrates around them.

It takes a lot of mental effort to "learn" a Cherryh book on first read, and hard to settle in. (If nothing else, it is intriguing to learn more about the setting behind Voyager in Night, which I love.) I'm finding my footing now, slowly - found a place to hang my heart up, if briefly - taking an enemy POW out to an incredibly awkward lunch to say "hey, I'm sorry we wiped your memories, even if you asked us to."

You can know perfectly well as soon as Mark's "butter bugs" gambit is introduced that it's going to be a DISASTER, and still every time, I'm caught off guard wheezing.

this time i read it with pen in hand