ash > Recent Status Updates

crystal and i went to our local library and participated in a read out to protest a shitty book bill in our legislature and we took banned books to read, so this was my selection - i'm reading the copy i bought at barnes & noble in mid-1999 (along with the arthur nersesian's the fuck-up which i'd seen in interstitials on mtv -- mtv books! those were the days!

every time i think i like this it pulls a romance Thing i hate like, ohhh she's in his shirt and it's SO BIG she's just TEENY TINY he could put her in his pocket and save her to fuck later if she can even take it bc she's soooooo small or, for whatever fucking reason, needing to use the main characters' full names??? what the fuck IS that

i don't want to quit this yet bc 20% isn't really much at all for a story like this and i WAS p excited, but all the awkward interpersonal interactions are sooooooooooo boringggggggggg and i know this is probably an issue of translation/cultural difference, but i simply cannot take very many more pages of literal children being surprised and/or aghast at the forms of address they're using with each other

whyyyyyyyyy did a bunch of contemporary fiction writers decide to stop correctly punctuating dialogue, HOW are quotation marks the aesthetic hill you're willing to die on

this is, idk, fine i guess, but i don't understand who it's FOR

the giant time jump in this is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO lazy and also so badly rendered i'm really not actually sure how much time has passed??? are these not what dates would be useful for???? or numbers???

first of all, this man is a prick. second of all, he's BRITISH, but that doesn't become clear until page 14 or so. third of all, i am the audience for this book precisely because i already know musical taste isn't intrinsic and have always been desperately curious to know where it comes from and yet i am punished by the godforsaken tone of this. jesus christ.

this has already made me cry a bunch?? what am i going through

the way i legit WAILED and immediately changed apps when i glanced down and saw this one is 350 pages long,,, martha we had such a nice thing going why would you do this to me i thought we were FRIENDS

oh i want to love this so bad, but it reads like it was written by someone raised on overlong, meandering westerns with a Diversity Representation checklist pulled up next to their word processing program and a post-it that says, CHARACTER INTRO: NAME, JOB, FUN FACT, and the repetition alone is making me want to die

this is so close to being so good and so fun but WHY does it switch pov so often and so randomly and also WHYYYYY must het romances insist on the bit where the perfectly normal but boring woman SimPLy canNOTTTTT beLIEve that A Man FIndS hEr ATTracTiVE nO!! it CANNOT poSSIBLY BEEEEEE!!!!!!! is the most boring fucking shit in the world and i'd rather die

i want to love this so bad but one of the things i have the hardest time tolerating in any fiction is when someone is desperate for forgiveness when they didn't do anything wrong, it's maybe the only thing in the world that gives me genuine secondhand embarrassment AND makes me think less of the character, i HATE it ugh

i hate when i can't tell if the narrating character is stupid or if the writer is

both of the leads in this are insufferable and the narrative is so boring and verbose i want to die why does the universe allow such suffering

oh the first chapter of this already kicked my asssssss

i associate this book SO heavily with my grandfather and i remember picking it up and skimming it, reading chunks whenever i was hanging around their house and being like, mildly interested? and i've read lots about it between then and now and the wiki, etc, but it is crazy to me that it was so hugely popular, dense and dull and repetitive and 500+ pages of it!!

i think! perhaps! oseman! should stick! with graphic novels!

i am always trying to expand my taste by force and i was like, so many people have loved this! surely you can too! and i am trying! but it is so, so hard to take seriously :\

this tipped into a hate read 100 pages ago, and whilst i support refusing to engage with woody allen's product and lecturing whomever might be in earshot about it, saying it's, "gross wish fulfillment where he gets to monologue about how weird and awkward he is while young blond girls fall in love with him for literally no reason at all," in the middle of THIS book? i can't tell if sussman's oblivious or hilarious

i have GOT to start reading blurbs more thoroughly, the entertainment writing is bad enough but then i have to relive it in pov with an embarrassing narrator??

every time i try to read something self-helpy i have to reckon with the fact that most of these people have more time to emotionally masturbate and write about it than most people have to just not be at work trying to survive and somehow it's even more egregiously offensive while this one tries to tell us we're mis-spending what little time we do have

this book is trying SO HARD to pretend it's saying something while absolutely middle-of-the-road don't-rock-the-boat two-sides-to-every-story-ing it, it's frankly embarrassing

i like this a lot but why are teenagers in ya books always terrible liars, i would say in my experience 1 in 10 teenagers TRULY can't lie for shit, the rest of them are doing just fine

this is SO DENSE and while it's information i am interested in, it's a book that would be so much better served by images, images are expensive and words are free, but bro, you can only describe a space so many ways before it sounds like gibberish

i know it looks like i'm really going through something rn but i assure you i am very normal and well

this was a mess from the jump but it is 2022 and you cannot trust a woman that idolizes coco chanel