Oakleigh > Recent Status Updates

Brilliant. Love it so so much!!!

Is this the best book I've ever read?? The THRILL of it is immense. Brilliant! Brilliant!

He's cupping Sadie's firm breast through her propped cotton and sexy nylon right now... 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️ Life is too short for me to read this nonsense.

I'm now multiple pages deep into the 'Of Mice and Men' play scenes. King, what are we doing here? King, for goodness sake, move on.

It was exactly this page where I stopped reading on my last attempt a few years ago... My distress is so palpable it makes it hard to focus on the words. I know everyone is going to read this and hate Briony (indeed, McEwan does little to sway us) but she is just a child. Just a child. My chest constricts with a nauseating frustration towards her. But she is still just a child.

Briony and her mother appear to be having a "most unlikeable"-off. Briony, being a child, is forgiven for this. Emily not so much. Though, to be fair, I suppose she's just a product of her time?

That's it. The final straw. With god as my witness I vow to go back in time to this fictional world and put an end to William myself. I feel ill. Whoever said that reading it enjoyable? My heart is breaking.

I'd say that William's violence against women is gratuitous but I unfortunately have no doubt that Follett is, in fact, light handed with it. Evil, evil, boy.

Everyone wants to talk about trauma until traumatised individuals do traumatised things... My stomach turns to read this. I am more judgemental than I thought I was.

The deceptively cute book cover had me thinking this would be a new-agey feel-good love-thyself book. Nope.

Such overpowering grief, I had to stop reading just to look around and remind myself it's fiction. This reminder does little to ease the pain though and my heart breaks all the same. Blod, although in this particular instance fictive, represents a hundred thousand real women.

Does someone need to be real for me to grieve for them? I think perhaps not.

This section is titled "The Happy Years" and everything is starting to improve. Oh boy, I sure hope the remaining 1/3 of the book is just happy stuff

Physically shaking, nauseous and angry and scared. I don't know if I can read another word without being sick. Awful, awful, awful. I'm flying to New York to fist fight Caleb and if I don't win, I'm going down swinging.

"...(he always suspected the two of them of conducting an extracurricular friendship from which he was excluded)..."

Every sentence, every parenthesesed aside, of this book is structurally and emotively perfect. I promise you, Yanagihara will go down in the history books as one of the English-language literature giants.

"...how although they'd of course been warned that their lives would be misery for years, how they had all, to a one, assumed they'd be the exception (and now all, to a one, secretly thought they still would be)."

Looks like I'm developing a habit of rereading this series every 5 years or so. I have a vague memory that 'Shift' was my all-time favourite childhood book, but I failed to review the series, so I am going to have to read it all again to discover why lol.

'Stalin and Molotov jumped at the chance to add another terrible weapon in their arsenal for use against political opponents, decreeing that children of twelve could now be executed.'

This is such a poorly (over) written try-hard pretence at hard-talking edginess that, for the sake of old Trent's reputation, it better have been ghost written by a wattpad tween. Green eyes, no name, dreams of Picasso - you may as well call her Y/N and throw her hair up in a messy bun.

I'm??? In love??? With Thomas Cromwell???

Very unexpected take away.

"The death toll of the 'absurd' famine... was between four to five, and as high as, ten million dead, a tragedy unequalled in human history except by the Nazi and Maoist terrors. The peasants had always been the Bolshevik Enemy. Lenin himself had said: 'The peasants must do a bit of starving.'"

Reading this feels so close to the English history I've been studying, I cry as if for a real history of the real people of our British past. Only the beginning of the series, and already I'm overwhelmed with grief and fear... Life is suffering; for kings and peasants and all the wretches in between, suffering always. I hope the afterlife is easy and all our ancestors are softly sleeping.

"It is wise therefore not to begin to write until you are quite certain what you want to say." // something I learn more and more each paper I draft

"The peasant labour teams, like the labour armies, were fantastically inefficient. It took fifty conscripts one whole day, on average, to cut down and chop up a single tree."

In early 1918 Lenin himself had backed a plan to organise a special closed restaurant for the Bolsheviks in Petrograd... Since then the principle had been gradually extended so that, by the end of the civil war, it was also deemed that party members needed higher salaries and special rations, subsidised housing in apartments and hotels, access to exclusive shops and hospitals, private dachas, chauffeured cars... etc.

...the principle urged by Lenin - that it was better to arrest one hundred innocent people than to run the risk of letting one enemy of the regime go free - ensured that wholesale and indiscriminate arrests became a general part of the system.

Quotes that make you say hmmmm:

Trotsky had once said: "We must put an end once and for all to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life."

'Comrades!', a bad-tempered Trotsky warned an army conference in 1919, 'although we have not been brought down by Denikin or Kolchak, we may yet be brought down by overcoats or boots.' In fact, if anything, the Red Army was brought down - quite literally - by illness and disease. More soldiers died from disease than from fighting in the civil war. // Wow. It just gets worse and worse for the people of Russia...

"Although these public employees held diverse political views, virtually all were agreed that the Bolshevik regime was illegal and had to be opposed... The refusal of the State Bank and the Treasury to honour the new governments cash demands was the most serious threat of all... the Bolsheviks finally seized control of the bank and forced the employees, at the point of a gun, to open the vaults."

"[Edward IV] indulged in the theatrical and spectacular aspect of kingship. In the first year of his reign the keeper of the great wardrobe spent a little over £4,784 on clothes and furs for the king's person, an extraordinary sum when the average annual wage of a labourer was approximately £6."

// Something something, rich man, camel, eye of a needle? It's so immoral and indecent you kind of have to laugh...

"And Stoner came to realise that she was, as she had said, almost happy with her despair; she would live her days out quietly, drinking a little more, year by year, numbing herself against the nothingness her life had become. He was glad she had that, at least; he was grateful that she could drink." // He acts like there's nothing to be done when everything could have been done all along. I hate this type of person.

"Stoner looked upon the transformation [of his daughters depression] with a sadness that belied that indifferent face he presented to the world. He did not allow himself the easy luxury of guilt; given his own nature and the circumstances of his life with Edith, there was nothing that he could have done."
// Every time I think I may be capable of forgiving his flaccid passivity, he pulls some rubbish like this UGH!