Oakleigh > Recent Status Updates

"I insist the world must know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine..."

Go to hell H.H. Even now he's still only describing her in the physical. He doesn't even hate her personality, he refuses to acknowledge that it even exists...

"He was the only man she had ever been crazy about."
"In her washed-out grey eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the fullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood."

"The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets—not crime's prowling ground."

So desperate (every page) to prove he's not a monster.

"...try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling."

Creepy, horrible, disingenuous, predator...

She was on the whole an obedient little girl and I kissed her in the neck when we got back into the car.
'Dont do that,' she said looking at me with unfeigned suprise. 'Dont drool on me. You dirty man.'

"...the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behaviour, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them."

"The child knew nothing. I had done nothing to her."
"...and I humble hunchback abusing myself in the dark."

Interesting passage about how his thoughts and fantasies aren't impacting her true experience. I suppose he has a point that, at this stage at least, what she doesn't know... doesn't hurt her???

"...Humbert the Hound, the sad-eyed degenerate cur clasping the boot that would presently kick him away."

"I began creeping up to her—"crippling" up to her, as pantomimists say. My arms and legs were convex surfaces between which—rather than upon which—I slowly progressed by some neutral means of locomotion: Humbert the Wounded Spider. I must have taken hours to reach her: I seemed to see her through the wrong end of a telescope, and towards her taut little rear I moved like some paralytic, on soft distorted limbs..."

"Aging ape eyes"
"...the little Herr Doktor who was to cure me of all my aches."
"... my knees were like the reflections of knees in rippling water..."

Altogether a heady description of first meeting.

"Aging ape eyes"

Lent my 2nd copy to a new friend and they came to much deeper conclusions than I ever had. I have been inspired to reread it with the new lens they have shown me... Excited to see what I think now!

I read this 5 years ago and failed to leave a review ugh. If my terrible memory serves me though, I seem to dimly recall thinking his argument is perfectly rational as long as you accept "morally good = increased human flourishing". It drove my moral absolutist friends up the wall that I (stuck in the weak trough of indecisive moral relativism) wouldn't allow him that axiom lol. Excited to see if I've changed my mind

I saw this coming from so early in the book and yet I'm so angry that it's happening. Why is Auel writing this? Why does she create this world in this way?
Over my dead body will this become in any shape or form a love story. The only acceptable ending to this book will be a loose stone and Broud's limp body.

No :((3. The line I had really hoped this book would not cross. Is nothing sacred? Can I not simply read a nice book about a girl having fun?

As a vegetarian animal conservationist whose worst nightmare would be killing an animal, I'm not sure how I'm meant to be interpreting this protracted animal slaying plotline... I feel sickened and put-out by it. Are we meant to be celebrating?? Between this and the horrific misogyny, this is far from a pleasant read...

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)."