Ace > Recent Status Updates

This is quite a bit different from the second season of the TV show. I'm enjoying the increased Darkling & Alina scenes, which really crackle. The dashing pirate crew is quite fun.

Opening thoughts: Short but raw. Does not pull many punches if any.

This is a very dickens-style ghost story, up to and including the slow burn aspect. It is not unpleasurable to listen to; the narrator is quite fun, and perfectly prim.

This is light and breezy for a bio but man there's almost no primary sources about this woman and there's so many times that the author has phrases like "I am SURE that [Agrippina] would NEVER grovel to her brother."

I'm not sure if it's terrible or genius that this book opens with "Roman history? Yeah, it's truthiness is all on the level of that story about David Cameron allegedly fucking a pig." Like it's accurate but...

(Sidenote: They should have kept the British title for this book.)

It says something that the only difference between the male protagonist and the female protagonist is that the former only thinks about his prick and the latter is all about "motherhood"

WOOF. I love Octavia Butler, and this is one of the few books by her that I haven't read, but I'm ngl, I'm giving strong thoughts of DNF when the first chapter starts with writing explicitely about a pre-teen/early teen presenting vampire having sex with a trucker. I know she's a lot older than those teen years, but him patting her breasts and talking about her lack of hair...ugh. Bad! DNW. UGH.

I am so close to the end I am going to finish it but I swear this novel is 99.999% about sex and cocks and 0.001% about werewolf politics.

I really, really like the ongoing twists and turns of the story.

I really, really don't like how every woman in this is pretty much There To Have Sex With. I know SO MUCH about this wolfman's prick I'm pretty sure I could pick it out of a line-up.

I'm not a prude, but its absolutely asinine to me how much this book revolves around getting this werewolf laid.

Literary horror <3. Lovely to listen to while I'm working, but man, I wish this werewolf didn't focus so much on the sex, because it means I have to keep this to just headphones only. (Though hey, this male author remembers to use lube in anal sex, so I suppose there's an upside there.)

I'm not sure I really like the main character, but he's distinctive in his voice, and I like that.

murrrgh. Ends of a cliffhanger, I won't be getting volume 2.

I feel weirdly guilty about my feelings but I'm kinda bleh on this one. I think a lot of my mehness with it is that I'm listening to this as an audio book and its harder to keep track of the characters. But part of it is that every scene in this seems to go on far too long and the characters are kinda blah outside of the mc.

You ever feel the sword of Damocles hanging over the character's head? I feel it here. Woof. Every bit here is a tragedy. Every pin is getting set up and every pin is gonna get knocked down. It's a good book.

And the queer pining in this is so fucking sad and potent.

This opens with the most "imagine you are a [x]" kind of tumblr-esque prompt that I've ever seen in an academic paper. (That sounds like an insult, but it's not: it's well-written, good detail; just an atypical choice for this sort of thing.)

Finished "The Coat of Stars" by Holly Black, about a bisexual male fashion designer going home to his traditional family. Needless to say, It's Complicated, and becomes more so when he rescues a family member and realizes in doing so that a (male) lover of his may have also been taken -- by faeries. Really clever use of the theme, and the fashion is indeed very nicely described.

Finished "Zombie Lenin", a story about a girl haunted by either her own mine or the ever-following body of the former Soviet chairman. It's a dense story about death, about chthonic gods and their bargains, and about one's isolation. Needless to say, I liked it; I've always been a sucker for this type of story and I really was fascinated by this one. Not my favorite thus far - that's still Citizen Komarova, but good.

Finished "you dream." 2nd person narration, my love! This is the story of a girl, haunted by both her past sexual assault and a boy who showed her kindness and has died/somehow/someway. This isn't my favorite story in this collection; I love 2nd person but felt this was kinda confusing. It's a fine line between "too vague to really do much" and "vague enough to make the details scary" and this landed on the former.

Finished "One, Two, Three." A childless couple adopt a slavic folktale, the kikimora. The kikimora doesn't respond well to human life, and it slowly but surely begins to divide the couple apart.

This one was just sad. The kikimora's human struggles are heavily suggestive of autism, and it struck a bit of a nerve. Good story, but personally not one of my favorites.