Stephanie Fachiol > Recent Status Updates

Close enough, welcome back, “Crime and Punishment”

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

I think remembering this is important to understanding part of this book… though admittedly there was much I did not understand at all. (Book is done, review to come)

I'm more confused than I've ever been, buuut the *even the fuligin cloak was foreshadowing*

Deep down, aren't we all Thecla? "She wants me to be better (than her), as every lover wants his lover to be better than he."

BOTNS is a retelling of The Book of Revelation. The Autarch is literally called, among his many titles, "Hyperion, the Bridegroom of Urth."

(I'm done with the book; I just need to let my thoughts settle because WHAT WAS THAT)

- anti-Communist vibes
- alliances like Russian nesting dolls
- breathtaking prose in the same chapter as Severian joking women have the advantage of being more comfortable riding horses
- Gene Wolfe helped engineer the Pringles chip

Tl;dr: BOTNS is based

Severian climbs a mountain and glimpses the cosmos:

“Time itself is a thing, so it seems to me, that stands solidly like a fence of iron palings with its endless row of years; and we flow past like Gyoll, on our way to a sea from which we shall return only as rain.
I knew then, on the arm of that giant figure, the ambition to conquer time…”

Do you ever do that thing where you read a paragraph three times not because you didn't understand it but because it's beautiful? There are times reading BOTNS that I genuinely have to reread because I have no idea what just happened--but just as often, if not more, I am simply in awe of the voice in which it's written. It's an almost physical sensation of dizzying poetry.

Pros: plot, giving in to my sunk cost fallacy
Cons: literally everything else

Look, I have a feeling that Donna Tartt is not exactly a New Age Hippie based on her philosophical conclusions in this novel, but she also is WAY too familiar with the 80s college drug scene

Wait a second, the guy's name is "Jonas" ('Yonah', i.e. Jonah) and he's a sailor...? There's something very significant about the Jonah story related to 3 days and 3 nights...

I have a theory but posting it would be a spoiler!

I don’t know what’s a more horrifying concept, Algae Man or the fact that Agia is relevant again

The winter break section is haunting and deserves more recognition

The persistent dreamlike haze over the story, especially in the lakehouse scenes, is phenomenal

Hobey ho let’s go

(Rereading a classic standalone to catch up on my hopeless-looking Goodreads challenge)

Hope Mirlees really does write like a female Hobbit

This is like a novel version of the vibes in the Shire at the opening of LOTR.

Between the 1600s and the 2020s, female physicians apparently still have the exact same dating strategy.

“Men define honor,” Blended said. “And no god can enforce it, no longer. Beyond that, spren like us are not mindless things. Our will is strong. Our perceptions mold our definitions of concepts such as honor and right and wrong.”

Adolin’s aghast response to this was mine. Alas and alack that the obvious weakness of Honorspren relativism is not extrapolated to other characters

Reading a book in which a major side plot is a scholar’s imposter syndrome was a bad idea in the middle of the Step 2 dedicated period. Also, Kaladin skipping the stages of therapeutic development to go straight to modern CBT hits different after having done a psych rotation… mixed feelings abound

Fine, I'll continue my Stormlight reread... (I gotta be honest, after "Oathbringer," I've been procrastinating--these are just too dang long and I don't have the patience I did in 2020)

Not only is this 'Narnia-with-horror-vibes,' but there's "Keys to the Kingdom" and "Fullmetal Alchemist" and "Neverending Story" logic here too. Let's see if it ends up gnostic like KttK or rejecting it like FMA and Neverending Story.

Imagine having the audacity to suggest Lewis took the idea of an Other World and popularized it “based on” some woman’s ideas (because the Inklings had no female members so they MUST have been sexist /s) WHILE WRITING A WORLD CLEARLY BASED ON NARNIA, WARDROBE AND ALL 😬 Mini rant over, it’s probably tongue in cheek like the rest of this book, but I’m still giving it a side-eye

"However loving and sympathetic we try to be, however sound our psychology, however frank and open our behavior, we cannot penetrate the incognito of the other man, for there are no direct relationships, not even between soul and soul. Christ stands between us, and we can only get into touch with our neighbors through Him."

Hear me out: this is why you can't change anyone's mind on anything

Are you a "Jason and Medea" guy or a "Dido and Aeneas" girl

If Pris Stratton, crying over peaches and the slow realization that techno-optimism was only ever an imaginative fiction she found comforting, didn't elicit SOME sympathy, did you even pass the Voight-Kampff test?

So this time around I decided to look up the meaning of the name 'Rachael,' and it means 'sheep or ewe'

Here I thought it was a reference to the wife of one of the Patriarchs (and it still might be)

No other interpretation has so effectively portrayed the Vivien-Delilah analogue, though it's a bit hampered by its unwillingness to commit to Merlin as an analogue for Samson (Tennyson insists Merlin didn't "really" love Vivien, probably worried about the age gap)

Broke: Tennyson is a misogynist

Woke: Tennyson is really into tsunderes

(Joking aside, Gareth and Geraints are nothing but green flags)

“Eve ate the fruit to become like God, even as she rebelled against Him. Her desire was not her own; she was imitating it. The fruit promised to enlighten her, to make her more herself, but by that new desire, she and Adam became less who they really were.” 🔥🔥🔥 This was what I wanted when I read Rene Girard’s seminal work—more application!