Acqua > Recent Status Updates

Really good, but, also, could have been shorter

everything about this book sounds so absurd and cursed out of context.
including, you know, the FLESH TOILETS

"Admiral Taklibia was a diploid, a pairing of minds in a single form. [...] The admiral had been born of the pairing of a mathematician with a military strategist."

Feels like I've seen that one before!

this has somewhat slowed down

"Oh, yes. Just like your hero back there. Such broad shoulders! And his jaw. I loved his jaw. Why, you could shovel dirt with that jaw."

I will never not love lesbians' descriptions of conventionally attractive straight men. Talk about relatable

I mean I know *why* and I get it, I really do, but why does every f/f YA book have to involve the main girl being in some way pressured to be with a man. I mean that not in the abstract "you should be straight" sense, which would be less unbearable, but in the "I have to read scenes with that male character in them and nothing bores me more" sense

can we not

Sid gives me Nikolai Lantsov vibes

I love the writing here - it knows how to leave empty spaces

I'm just coming to terms with the fact that me and Orbit Books just have radically different ideas about what's an acceptable pacing for a fantasy book
(90% of their fantasy drags.)

Why is all plant/fungi horror so needlessly vague! Like this book would be perfect if only it cared to tell me what I'm actually seeing. To write about creepy fungi being everywhere and only describing them as "mushrooms" with no detail is like writing a book about a horse-riding competition in which no horse is ever described or even called a horse (only "animal"). What are you even doing

heard it had creepy plants. of course I'm reading it

- the parallels between Mirabel and Karou aka Madrigal from Daughter of Smoke and Bone. there are So Many of them
- I can't believe this book really named its Italian character "Allegra Cavallo". That's literally "Happy Horse". Who hurt you

Say what you want about the plot and the inevitable self-consciousness of books about books but the setting is just everything I needed. Please keep describing pretty rooms to me in overly detailed prose

Oh does this part about toxic friendships hurt to read

Got to Part Two (The Blue Pages); this might be the most I've read in one day this year, which feels weird

I still can't make sense of it but it feels like magic

in realtà sto leggendo! non si direbbe, ma

(hopefully the review will be in English when I'll get there)

I read something! That's surprising given how things are going lately but I can say that at least my ability to understand the English I listen to isn't declining at a pace as fast as my ability to write in English. I don't know if what I wrote made any sense. I'm back to having to use written Italian every day to communicate with people on the internet and that has its Costs™
anyway the audiobook is great

it is still dedicated to Not Slowing Down but it did get a little gayer so I'm not too annoyed. we have priorities here

the good news is that this is exactly the whole over-the-top magical space battle kind of thing that appeals to me
the bad news is that this seems to be the kind of book that thinks non-stop action is a substitute for interesting character dynamics, and. no. please slow down a minute

so far this makes absolutely no sense but that might be a good thing!

(also hate how depressingly realistic the near-future USA feels... in everything apart from Vivian Liao)

slow reread of one of my favorite bookish puzzles, hope it will remind me why I like to read

I know that everything I said up to this point seems to say the opposite but I actually think this is great! Sense without making sense, sideways, Catherine House might not be a great story but it sure is a *feeling*

it's weird how this is one of the strangest books I've read this year, but I keep having flashbacks to another book that felt exactly the same? they're similar but not.

sometimes when you read a lot of weird stuff it gets weird in similar ways?

🐌

this book reads the way a depressive episode feels

“Flowers,” I said.
Baby blinked. “What?”
“Flowers,” I said. “Botany. I’m going to concentrate in botany.”
“Botany?” Baby said. “Are you serious? Why?”

"flowers", lmao. If she isn't serious she'd have a Bad Time with botany even if this were a normal unhaunted university (do they exist?) because botany is hard and hates rules

I don't know if it's me or what but I'm finding this to be just barely creepy and (so far) kind of lacking in tension. I guess there are things we don't know but there's no sense of urgency behind them

anyway naming your creepy town "Phalene" (moth in French, but also obvious to any Italian speaker and probably in many other related languages) is a little too unsubtle, but then it doesn't look like the inhabitants care much for being even a little more subtly creepy?

now I know that's probably not the answer, but it would be really funny if it were all about the same woman copy-pasted over and over