Nicole > Recent Status Updates

“By the time [William] Haggard wrote The Power House, his publishers had cottoned on to the Bond effect, and the paperback cover featured an alarming décolletage perched over a pile of roulette chips.”

This book is a pure DELIGHT.

Why have I waited so long to read this!? It’s wonderful so far.

Time for a re-read of this. The last time I read this I was unimpressed, but I am approaching these books in a better spirit this time around. I read and enjoyed The Lady of the Rivers and having that additional context before starting this one has already made a lot of difference. Also I think last time I wanted it to be an intellectual exercise but this time I’m just looking for a bit of enjoyment.

What? Where is the satire?? This just feels like a overlong and slightly fictionalised "lol real life" piece written for a weekend newspaper supplement. It's too real about the time period in question and doesn't seem to have anything to say about it at all. Am I missing something? Abandoning for something better on my Christmas holidays..

"Once rendered many thousands of times their own size, the [bees] are transformed, made wondrous and strange. Likewise the close-ups of their faces – the blankness their eyes reveal when expanded both invite and repel identification; their unknowability is like a space into which one can fall, a reminder of the presence of otherness in the world, and of the loss of its passing."

“And how does this parasitic one percent of the population hold onto their wealth when we are so many? Racism, immigrant bashing, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, nationalism — they get us to fight each other while they hoard their wealth, and they keep our stories separate from each other, so that we never understand the entire story, only our particular part of it.”

— Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

“There are 400 billionaires in this country. They are the reason why there are forty-seven million poor people. You cannot have untold, obscene wealth unless you have untold, obscene poverty. That is the law of the free market.”

— Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

“The question that we all face is in whose hands is this wealth, the wealth that is created as a collective effort by all of the American people?”

— Owen Jones

“The strategy of this kind of attack, of coming at everybody all at once, is to continue this feeling of destabilization. You’re not supposed to find your footing.

That’s why finding each other is really important; talking about what you’re reading, sharing ideas, developing a narrative together — that is the way we resist shock.”

— Naomi Klein

Only a few pages in and already... wow. For so many reasons. Shocking, horrifying, enlightening, moving, gripping. Already.

So grim.. so captivating.