jacqui > Recent Status Updates

been craving a reread of this since basically the first page of the king’s general…. cornwall i miss you so

cracking up over this decidedly heterosexual soviet man buying gay magazines in copenhagen out of sheer curiosity & a delight in the freedoms that allowed it to be sold, taking it home to show his wife, & completely befuddling the danish intelligence service about why their subsequent attempts to honeytrap & then blackmail him failed so badly he didn’t even realize he was being chatted up

what if your estranged former love showed up after fifteen years, had a visible meltdown about seeing you, insulted all your weird and annoying relatives, and then broke the bounds of propriety by inviting himself to eat dinner alone with you in your room. and he’d started greying at his temples

“It is not easy,” he said, “to be gallant in an apple-tree.”

so this woman fucking hates tacoma huh

Picking this up for the readathon challenge “something you wouldn’t normally read” and boy howdy does it fit the brief… but I’ve done academic work on the Pickton murders and Vancouver’s lower east side, and the question of violence—especially femicide—and the PNW is one that I can’t help but circle around for maybe obvious reasons… people I trust say this isn’t too “true crime-y” so… 🤞

holy fuck i can’t believe i’ve never read this before but also i’m so happy that i get to do so now

read half of this in one fell swoop while sitting in the park for the first time this year, and while it’s true that the sunshine probably made me euphoric, babitz’s prose definitely helped. she is always just such a PLEASURE to read!!

was struggling to focus on physically reading even things i really want to so decided to just try whatever audiobooks i could find on libby while crafting etc. this isn’t my usual thing but it’s cute so far!

ngl i’m reading this bc i actually want to read the christmas appeal and appaz there’s a huge spoiler for this in that, but it’s not like cosy mystery + am dram + epistolary DOESN’T intrigue, so

let’s see what all the fuss is about then

Time for some drastic measures to get the taste my last read out of my head and hopefully finally break the reading slump I’ve been in all month so far

time for august readathon’s only timed challenge: read a long book as quickly as possible (ideally over this weekend) let’s gooo

can already tell—could already tell around page four or so—i’ve made a terrible decision reading this at the very beginning of a month-long readathon. i’m not going to be able to think of anything else for ages, if the past two days are anything to go by

Listen, I’ve had several excellent conversations about Shakespeare with dear friends lately, so, I have to. I just have to.

“At dawn one still October day in the long ago of the world…”

weirdly GR doesn’t have my edition listed? so i’ve gone with this one as it’s got the same # of pages etc

reeeeaaalllly remembering how formative the phouka in particular was to my, well, everything with this reread

It’s absolutely miserable out there tonight—howling winds, icy rain, the lot—and I’ve had a disappointing enough reading month that I’m ending it by indulging in an old face

“The spectacle of Dr. Gairdner trying to make his facts fit his theory was the most entertaining thing in gymnastics that Grant had witnessed for some time.” Is a VERY funny thing for a Ricardian to write about anyone.

“Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about ‘a new Silas Weekley’ or ‘a new Lavinia Fitch’ exactly as they talked about ‘a new brick’ or ‘a new hairbrush.’ They never said ‘a new book by’ whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.”

why is it still impossible to actually tag or respond to people on this stupid app. i don’t use desktop bc i find it even clunkier!!

still loving this so far, but i do wish that she hadn’t insisted on writing out the scottish accents—preferably at all, but definitely not as intensely as she does, especially since she likes to give her characters long uninterrupted speeches