Akiva ꙮ > Recent Status Updates

Ayyyyy! I made a website! For book reviews! Check it out?? https://tshynik.github.io/

I am the A1 prime audience for this kind of thing, but so far: nearly incomprehensible; every character talks the same (which is especially annoying when you're reading dozens of pages of pure dialogue), and no real human has ever spoken like that; not remotely funny. I'm going to stick it out for a few more chapters if I can.

Strongly considering abandoning this because the writing is so off-putting (info dumps to infinity, oh the female main character is an interplanetary hottie ok), but people whose taste I usually jibe with like this so maybe I'll go a little longer...

I wasn't at all sure I was gonna like this and then whoops I'd read 50 pages. Unlikeable characters is usually a tough sell for me (sorry, I'm basic), but an interesting mystery + alternate history are very strong draws it turns out!

Kid with a scar in/near his eye turned away from immigrating to the US by ship and on his second attempt - Stag Dance deja vu!!!

TBQH I am struggling with this one, it is poetically overwritten in a way I don't enjoy and the magical realism elements are mostly making me roll my eyes. Keeping at it though.

Looking up from reading a passage about fleeing Vichy France over the mountains to Spain in the middle of the night with two toddlers after being sprung from jail and hidden by various resistance members, and seeing an article about the FBI arresting Judge Hannah Dugan this morning for helping an immigrant evade ICE, is..............

omg i am so stressed

(yes i did already read the last page because i am a monster so at least i know ******** ********)

I didn't think I was connecting as much to the chapter on rage as on envy, and yet the phrase "Breaking with what breaks you" (via Butler, p 112) has been rattling around in my head all week.

My sporadic experiment in being honest about what I'm actively reading on GR: this, Babel, and Side Affects. I'm also casually and occasionally reading Oliver Sacks' _Oaxaca Journal_, but I don't know that I have the momentum to finish it just at the moment. Hopefully I'm not jinxing myself by posting this, lol.

This is landing a little too cute for me right now. Hopeful that the plot will pick up, though. People going "but what could they possibly see in ME???" repeatedly while being totally gaga for each other may be very realistic but I'm finding it annoying.

Sarah rec!

I'm confused - don't they practice as a team? Or even meet each other before the morning of their first game?

I need a list of characters or an index so bad that I might have to write one for myself.

Ok I'm all for fanfic bonding shit but DON'T YOU HAVE ANYTHING A LITTLE MORE IMPORTANT TO DO RIGHT NOW?????????????

I know Peter's immaturity is very much the point, but omg he's really getting on my nerves.

I'm MAD about how less-than-useless the "vocabulary list" at the end of this edition is. I'm not even fucking trying to look anything up in it anymore!!

oh my GOD

Paragraph 1: so what you are saying Georgette is that this man is a flaming queer, yes?

Also I am reading this for #disguisedasaboy queer/trans subtext and I gotta say, it delivers. ---"What about girls?" ---"Mahmud doesn't go see them either." ---"Every man is different," Uthman said in a soothing voice. ---"Not in that respect, Not if he's a man." ---Nasir merely smiled. "Perhaps in that respect I'm not a man. If you wish to avoid my company on that account, so be it."

It's interesting how learning Arabic has changed how I see some stylistic translation choices! "O my father" sounds super formal in English, at least in part because it's so polysyllablic, but when it's a literal translation of "ya abbi" and you know that ya is an indispensable part of speech, you can see how it could actually be just a normal and familiar way to talk.

The experiences of.... flip that story on its head, and suggest that ideas of self-acceptance and queer liberation were percolating among the most marginalized even before they manifested in well-heeled homophile organizing. ...the radical Black activist tradition of "freedom dreams"---communal coming to understandings of life as as it could be lived, outside of the oppressive forces of white supremacist patriarchy.

How do you go through all this stuff about the gender inequality and eugenics of male primogeniture and not realize that any kind of aristocracy and inheritance thereof is equally bankrupt! Talk about a cultural delusion.

When quoting organizations/governments, the reader can manage to signify that she's quoting without using a silly voice. C'mon!

Leaving aside how the accents are a mistake (the accents are always a mistake), Harry Benjamin was German and I doubt he had a southern drawl.