Reading Cat > Recent Status Updates

I really am starting to love this book. At first I thought it was a clever genderswap of my favorite Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, updated for the modern age, but it's really doing something unique and powerful here. I can't wait to see how this ends--like Rae, I hope it ends well for all my favorite charactes!

I didn't grow up in Texas so I can't vouch for every detail but he definitely captures the feel of growing up in a small podunk town.

At this point there are still so many questions--where is Tolly writing this from? Why does he need to stay away from her?

A slog to read because of the author's privilege and narcissism. Still hoping to find some gold in all this. Dude is a white male political left guy who has leisure enough and money enough to go to Harvard Divinity School--a lot of what he says is blindly toward THAT audience and no other.

One of my old metaphysical stores does a book rec a month and though I don't even live in that state anymore, these recs allow me to feel part of the community. This was their November rec.

This is a slog. I agree with the basic premise that monastic style meditation is perhaps not suited for householders, and as a second wave feminist, I'm even not averse to the idea that the female experience might require a different style of meditation, but she keeps losing me. Maybe it's 2021 and I'm just not okay with the idea of rigid sexual dichotomies, maybe it's how she leans into woman = emotional mess.

A fast read, but so well-versed in the Sutras and in Indian mythology that it is hard to not want to fly through, but to take time to let it sink in.

I really can't wait to flail in full about how much I really love this book. I'm upset that it's been out for 10 years and I've never heard of it? Shame on me! Big takeaways so far is how he finds value in studies of all kinds of people, because he says that 'analogy breeds empathy'. If we can see a mechanism affecting us, we can 'get' how it could affect others and then...we're willing to solve!

DNF. I can't. Everyone is super rapey, Jamie is a virgin, of course, lol despite how improbable that would be, and the protagonist has no personality. Author seems to only occasionally remember that her main character was a nurse in WWII, and of course everyone wants to have sex with her (cough cough mary sue) and...yuck. The sex scenes are pure cringe. I've read better fanfiction. You should too.

I wonder how much she relates with Corte, in his disquisition about the writing he did being now hopelessly out of fashion. A lot of Nemirovsky's style seems reminiscent of the 19th Century British tradition--it reads very much like Dickens or Hardy in how it presents character and voice. OF course I'm a British literature major so that's my jam.

Yeah, I can't drag myself through this. I've given it halfway and I still don't care about any of the characters and both of the female leads are too similar in their Feisty Historical Fiction Feminist poses. Life's too short to read bad books. Sadly, this just keeps confirming my thesis that steampunk is such a great idea...and so terribly executed.