Simi > Recent Status Updates

Maya is ... she needs as strong smack upside the head & a healthy dose of reality. Yikes!

Eeps! I'm guilty of being a maximizer, but I'm working on shifting this mindset to be more okay with "good enough" or being a "satisficer".

The overzealous use of "yaar" is jarring and annoying.

I'm sure there's a valid reason, genuine trauma that will be uncovered later in the book & explain Smita's behavior, but without that context she's coming across as rude, judgemental, condescending, and unsympathetic. Makes for good reading, but I do miss a book where I just like my protagonist.

I'm not nearly as moved as others seem to have been by this book. Maybe I'm coming to it too late in life? Or I've read so much and read so many other (better?) versions of this? Or maybe I haven't gotten to the part that makes me go "woah that was profound & life changing!".

The dialogue is so fucking annoying!!! I can't tell if it was done intentionally to build tension (not needed at this stage) or just... gah!

The way she references Indian food is very British. Completely distracted me from an actually critical scene in this book.

Dear lord this book is LOOOOONG!!! Vaguely reminiscent of Holden Caulfield in that the protagonist is a dreary little shithead. At best, I have apathy for him because he very consciously chooses to make some remarkably idiotic decisions & moves.
Pretty much the only reason I'm going to finish it is because I'm too far in & it checks off a Goodreads challenge lol
Kicking myself for mixing it up for The Correspondent.

Accidentally took an over-long break from this daily practice. April just ended being a weird time and I needed a mental refresh before getting back into certain habits and changing up others.
The 10/10/10 rule is a great way to reframe decision making, especially when it feels urgent or high-stakes.

I've reached the age where I can see both the worker's pov and the boss's pov. Both sides' actions fraught with the legal, technical, ethical, and moral murkiness that plague human existence.

Finally getting to this book!

A lot of world building happening! Almost glad I'm reading it instead of listening to the audiobook. Almost.

Dear lord this book needed so much more editing!

Ahmed calls out the trope she's using, so I'll excuse her for it. A pretty compelling read and I'm surprised there's still a quarter left to read.

This last section was a tiny bit repetitive, but good to see the same point being addressed from different angles. Repetition is also how we build any muscle, and one of the first lessons was that this principle also applies to critical thinking, so I can appreciate that it's purposeful.

This book is filling me with anger and making me feel some kind of way!

Completely forgot this was on my TBR from 2019. A librarian recommended it and I'm finally getting around to reading it. So far, interesting!

I'm not really getting into it yet... high probability this will end up a DNF

1. Publishing isn't the thing that will give you satisfaction. Consider the journey to publication "enough".
2. You have to be "enough" before you do the big things/get the reward/etc., because those things will not make you feel any more enough afterwards.
3. Publication can be a painful process.

A little bit of that irreverence from earlier in the book is back in play towards the end as well. Her wit comes at you from the side and it's great! But someone show her how an oxford comma works!!!

This book is sprinkled with nuggets every few pages and I'm already looking forward to reading more by Lamott, both nonfiction and fiction.

She REALLY likes using "whatever" as an "etc." And I think ChatGPT is at least partially trained on her writing, because the pages are absolutely littered with em dashes!
I'm slogging through this because there are scraps of interesting takes and useful information that I want to learn and know as a writer. But on the whole, NOT a book I would recommend.

Good grief she's wordy!!! I found myself tripping over the lack of sufficient and well-placed commas, the tendency to write long, and to interject heavily with punctuations that made difficult sentences all the more harder.
She does it so much, I'm writing tediously long sentences now!
Her words choices are also ... a lot. It's a bit pretentious and a bit insufferable, especially compared to Lamott.

Schwarzchild must have read this book in preparing to teach his Creative Writing class. I see a lot of his limited beliefs in the pages of Le Guin's advise. (Yes, I'm still salty 13 years later!)

The advise around POV shifts is feeling a tiny bit dated, because everyone and their mother is doing multiple POV these days. Granted, as Le Guin warns, you've got to do it well or you'll leave the reader feeling very twisted and turned about.

A time travel sci fi feels more my speed. But I'm about to witness a terrible time in history, and I don't have the stomach for it right before I sleep. Butler's writing is very evocative.

Some of this advice feels a tiny bit outdated. Le Guin approaches POV with a rigidity that I don't think is as necessary in today's fictional and narrative writing.

The writing is a bit difficult to get through just because Le Guin chooses to write in a atypical sentence structures and the delivery is often overcomplicated.

On the flip side, intentional repetition is a thing of beauty. I try to incorporate that in my writing as well. Done right, in the right place within a piece, it can really lift the whole thing to the next level.