Jonathan > Recent Status Updates

... realised too late that this doesn't work for me as an audiobook :/

why am i still here TT

picking this one back up. surprisingly amusing, and touching in how it navigates a grieving and jaded gay character so far. would need a slice of life tag on ao3 which also amuses me, but it meanders in ways that lend it a kind of depth i need to work on in my own writing

i do question if i have any sense of someone building intrigue at all since i am usually not a quitter of books and tend to read faster the less i enjoy one. it's not an enjoyable experience. my notes on her short story collection said 'determined to never read her again', should have stuck to it. it's a tangle of me simply not liking her, the middle class vibes of it all and the walls kept intact btw author & reader

interrupting a memoir about a topic as difficult as emotional abuse with pop culture references and factual stories about domestic abuse that escalated to murder distorts its focus. there's a lot of reluctance to bare herself as expected of a memoir. i think the closest this book came was a mention of why people like to live close to volcanoes, as in this gf, but there's near zero about this inner conflict otherwise.

tone is far more casual than imagined, speaks too broadly about issues so far which makes it uninteresting, tries to be funny, lacks also the urgency and bite that e.g. ed zitron has on this exact topic. 2026 will be the year i drop books that don't introduce anything new to me, so...

idk that i enjoy this book, maybe because it often takes the tone of a lecture for the uninitiated...? (those refusing the possibility of violent/abusive women at large and queer women in particular). idk it's strange i'll have to think about it some more

such tiny chapters

wish gr let you make a checklist of books to read in one year. in other words i need to read tove jansson's true deceiver rather urgently but i'll have to buy a used copy and cannot make up my mind whether to read it in german or english ;-; i know the german translator might take some of its shine off, unsure about the english one's capabilities. how do people decide these things (<- person who never reads samples )

"geumbok's long-dormant sensuality and passion were slowly beginning to awaken. now that her chest had swelled and puffed like an angry blowfish and her rear had grown even more shapely, [...] her young, fresh womb was now desiring the genes of a stronger man." wasn't even the worst description. what makes you think i was interested in anything you had to say about women if you describe them this way. she's 13-14 btw

mildly pleasant prose in the first chapter immediately overshadowed by the most atrocious descriptions of all female main characters. might go on the dnf pile because damn is it disgusting

so yeah too much rpf when the promise was non-fiction. also reading the last chapters that lead up to and described his execution before going to bed was a very bad idea, takes many hours to shake the details of cruelty this besotted with itself.

reviews on here + introduction of the book itself: 'he refused to identify as homo- or bisexual'. source, according to the book itself: a transcript of a police interrogation in which he hoped to escape graver consequences by claiming he wasn't gay and had only had sex with men for money. i'm not the brightest bulb around but why are we taking this at face value...?

miffed that this was thrice tagged as nonfiction and the blurb made it sound that way too, but it turns out it's (for the most part) rpf. not sure i'll enjoy this but at least it's short

this manga is genuinely perfect, and feels humiliatingly tailored to my taste in a way something does once every few years, no notes at all. (except, how does one learn to write like this? though i fear it requires the calm of textless panels.) will have to buy this and find out just how unwieldy 400-500 page mangas are.

hmm unsure if i am misremembering, but the writing style seems to have changed to a degree i find uncomfortable. maybe i did enjoy the first book a little better simply due to the biologist pov

so eye-opening i had to set it aside for now as it contributed substantially to suicidal ideation

ridiculous how much this, despite being set in france and a decade or two earlier, reminds me of my own youth: small town surrounded by vineyards, minus the encounters with other gay boys.

so happy i came across this author. g and tomorrow were my favourite stories, yeti lovemaking got better the more i thought about it (ao3 authors could never write monsterfucking this way i'm so sorry and embarrassed by extension both). this is what i mean when i say i like mild body horror. super frustratingly abrupt endings, but at least it was all of the stories TT

i don't enjoy worldbuilding done this way (book inside the book was the worst thing to happen to me personally). let's stop with the villain monologues @ 1984 & fahrenheit 451. unfortunately the mc was terrible enough that i did not care much for his fate ;; and i think it was a loss for the story that he didn't have to die. boring choice. also couldn't suspend my disbelief about torture having this kind of effect

the first third annoyed me so much, got better towards the end, but still very middle class-centric to its detriment. feels very voyeuristic since most patients only find mention once. everyone talks the same... those are certainly not quotes; one of the pre-genai books that read like genai text dfhj. a lot of it is ridiculous to me especially, too ace to Get the thrill of the forbidden

no surprise: give me a book about a character who feels so lonely, detached from life they're suicidal, i'll enjoy it. i suspect being familiar with canada makes this more enjoyable, it goes over a lot of history (the colonisation isn't much reflected upon hmm) and nature. ended on too positive of a note, but that's me feeling left behind. you wouldn't find this nuance in the bestiality ao3 tag & that has me so sad

why is this man so gay

backed out at the second mention of bts, it was so viscerally digusting i fear there may be things wrong with me (also the plot was moving way too slowly)

i know i'll regret this one. it's Fine (through gritted teeth) -- on a related note, i think some/many of the children's books i grew up reading took young readers seriously as people, and this lack of respect towards young readers translating into writing that doesn't even attempt to be deep or beautiful but capitulates to 'trendy' really rubs me the wrong way.

idk if it was listening to it as an audio book but this was a rather disappointing experience. just not very impressive or interesting, overall. maybe the pov switches contributed to the detachment? it felt in many parts more like a very trodden-out thought experiment rather than a story. also painfully white cishet man-centric. interesting that fahrenheit 451 had an echo of its main oppressive character hmm

randomly came across this and thought, why not, knew nothing at all about it. mild regret, because i read he was an eugenicist and now i'm very confused as to which aspects of the book are meant to be dystopian ;;