Yoana > Recent Status Updates

I wonder how many others are starting this today

Books very rarely depress me but I find myself reluctant to pick it up again for sheer misery. I feel depressed for the main characters and angry at them at the same time

Sonny was a controlling cheating asshole but also loved her. I like how she doesn't downplay or play up any of her loved ones' complications and nuances

What an absolute delight!

Sontag didn't like Diane Arbus. I find her analysis of Arbus's photographs rather self-unaware - what she sees as ugliness and "other" might be her own subjective interpretation IMO

Thia woman's decisions make no sense. She's a thorough idiot and this also makes no sense because she's supposed to be a scientist

What's with this husband and his slippers? Is that what the author calls character trait, asking his wife to bring him his slippers?

The writing is frankly juvenile, how this won the Booker boggles the mind.

The writing style is borderline unreadable for me

Let the misogyny begin. I understand that as an American, Franzen's whole life revolves around the injustices he sustained in high school at the hands of the popular girls, but I promise him, women aren't motivated purely by social status, and when we want to have sex, it's not a huge cosmic mystery, and when men can't tear themselves away from a woman's "pit" (!), it's not the woman' fault. how tedious can you be

This is very very readable, to my mild surprise. Not terribly pretentious

It's early pages but honestly, I've had my lifetime's fill of stories about assholey but brilliant men. The brilliance is rarely as dazzling than the author imagines and it never justifies the assholery

Ok, there's some insane suspense around the 65% mark. I stayed up late because I couldn't not know what was going to happen and when it all came to a head, I actually clapped my hands over my mouth. Credit where credit is due, much as I hate to give it

The misogyny running through every book continues, and it's curious how you can trace it getting more conservative with each one. Here, we have people not having children as a shorthand for unsympathetic characters and her pet trope, unmotherly women (that goes all the way back to HP). The nuclear family and monogamy are elevated to the only reasonable and normal states of being and anything else as an aberration

I think JKR is using this cult as an analogy for trans "ideology"; it becomes pretty clear when she explicitly says they use suicide as a boogeyman to keep people imprisoned in the church. There's also the over-the-top church doctrine of condemning familial relationships as materialistic possession - a clear dig at trans people's decision to seek acceptance in their communities because they can't find it at home

I really do not care at which ring characters pick up the phone.

An nnoying plot hole - Robin needs a way to keep time in a place with no calendars, clocks, or news, so she starts hiding a pebble in her bra every day and hiding it under the mattress in the evening - a pebble for each day. But she has a journal assigned to her and a pencil, and she's expected to write in it every day. Isn't that the obvious way? They've solved it for her

It's frustrating trying to buy the allure of the cult when it's all starvation, exhaustion, fear, and animosity. Why would anyone stay past the trial week? Shouldn't the reader be able to understand, feel why characters are drawn to it?

Neither the cult leader's charisma nor the cult's inflience are depicted convincingly. In fact I'd say we're told about them but they're not shown. If the cult is so powerful, I should feel drawn to it during the scenes in the temple. They should excite and pack a punch, instead the philosophy, methods, and speeches are generic and feel serevly underresearched

So far, the book is mostly lengthy exposition, including a long prologue that reads like a business brief.

By page 2 of the main body Robin is juxtaposed to yet another harlot so we are reminded how perfect she is. Robin's character has lost all of its complexity in the first book. Even though she had strong "not like other girls" vibes even then, she also had some layers, some believable flaws, fears, etc.

So far:

Prose even clunkier than I remember. Please, please let editors do their job! Recaps of information long established in previous books in every second paragraph, awkwardly tacked on as clauses in long-ass sentences. And even aside from that there's a lot of superfluous information, like no subtext is allowed to exist - everything is painstakingly elucidated in case the reader is a complete idiot.

Love this so much I'm going to cry

Ако идеята е тези писма да описват идеалната или истинската любовз резултатът е неубедителен - не усетих искреност, нито убеждение, нито авторът да има какво да каже. Нито съдържанието, нито стилът блестят с нещо. Звучи като упражнение по писане, което е трябвало да си остане в тетрадката. Оформлението е прекрасно обаче.

Well I jus got completely spoiled by somebody's username (which was the killer's name AND online persona) and I've got to say this sucks big time. The book may be bloated, rambly, badly written at times, with zero subtext and an inept romance storyline; the author's politics may be ignorant and harmful, but it's still a murder mystery and it's the only kind of book where a spoiler basically takes all the fun out.

As in Lethal White, here too JKR sin't quite brave enough to call working-class leftists useless and lazy so she contrives to depict them as hapless victims of malicious middle-class champagne commies who take advantage of their struggles. Which is no less insulting but she doesn't seem to understand that. The resut is that almost all working-class people in her novels are curiously apolitical

The victim seems to be a stand-in for JKR herself. Her troubles with the HP fandom too started when she sued a fan-created offshoot (a HP encyclopaedia) for copyright infringement - like Ledwell's with her fandom after she dissed a fan-created game based on her comic.

The deploration of online mobs would have sounded more genuine if JKR's own tweets hadn't been used to start real ones against trans people and activists on Twitter

JKR is doing her old schtick of reducing her opponents' arguments to absurdity (or picking only the most overtly ridiculous outliers) and going, well, look how extreme and irrational they are. How brave, to expose them in her book sold in the millions when they don't have anything even remotely resembling a similar platform to respond

I saw complaints that ppl don't want to read tweets or online interaction simulations in a novel but I'm loving this. I'm enjoying it much more than any of the previous ones so far. I'm a sucker for cyberdetecting - it's an environment that naturally lends itself to mystery and consequently there's so much more guesswork involved

As usual, intensely readable. But I don't understand why Robin needs to be pitted against a different woman in each instalment, so she can shine in comparison. It's so offputting, and it doesn't work in her favour at all.