Laura > Recent Status Updates

goin slowly but i'm taking notes

This book is so fucking good

'Viens m'embrasser,' he said.
I was vividly aware that he held a brick in his hand, I held a brick in mine. It really seemed for an instant that if I did not go to him, we would use these bricks to beat each other to death.
[...]
I dropped my brick and went to him. In a moment I heard his fall. And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder.

"Somebody, your father or mine, should have told us that not many people have ever died of love. But multitudes have perished, and are perishing every hour—and in the oddest places!—for the lack of it." well ***** and ****** have died of love. sorry ignore this update please. "And here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face flushed and his hair flying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars." ok

love the writing style

I AM DONE!!!! only the appendix to go but i'll read that later

home stretch babey......

keep playing skyrim instead of reading. whoops

"The seriously ill, the deranged, are another race, an inferior race. I won't let anyone persuade me otherwise." briony tallis gamer moment

cecilia in her ***** ***** era

The constant mentions of how the twins were going to be back soon made me definitely think they weren't going to find the twins lol, and I was right. Anyway, now I'm wildly curious as to what happened to them. Finding the twins dead is what immediately jumps to mind but I feel like if McEwan was going to kill the twins as a significant plot point he would've focused more on the twins already?

I'm so confused... What just happened? Briony interrupted Cecilia and Robbie in the library but there was no mention of this in the previous chapter? In the previous chapter I was under the impression that Cecilia hadn't seen Robbie since the fountain incident & also I assumed that Briony had edited out the extra line in Robbie's draft, but she doesn't edit it in ch10. Hm.

The parts where Pappé gives us information on what a destroyed village was like—what buildings there were, what village life revolved around—are just so depressing. Pappé tries to preserve these villages' memories as best as he can, and the entire history and life of those villages is reduced to just a few sentences on a page now.

Le Guin's writing is just gorgeous.

Ohh the bit about how Genly & Estraven are equals now, how Estraven doesn't have any other Gethenians around him and they're all alone. Yeahhh

"What good seeking the safe course, on a journey such as this? There are senseless courses, which I shall not take; but there is no safe one."

I love the comparison between masculinity and shifgrethor.

Also: "We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself."

"it is not human to be without shame and without desire."

also. chapter 14. omg. the devotion the relationship building etc. 💚💚

"It is a terrible thing, this kindness which human beings do not lose. Terrible, because when we are finally naked in the dark and cold, it is all we have."

"I had not come to Mishnory to eat roast blackfish with the Commensals of my own free will; nor had they brought me here. [Estraven] had."

"The people of Winter, who always live in Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence."
Enjoying this worldbuilding.

"[Tibe] was after something surer, the sure, quick and lasting way to make people into a nation: war."

Also Estraven and Osboth :(

There's no Karhidish word for war!!!

"'Will the law ever be that in England?'
'I doubt it. England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.'"
Written in 1914.

"Clive had helped him. Clive would help him again when the pendulum swung, meanwhile he must help Clive, and all through life they would alternate thus" :)

"'I can walk: you mustn't do this sort of thing.'
'You'd do it for me.'"
:(