HRose/Abalieno > Recent Status Updates

"And often I have asked myself, if I am not on this side of life where I am, how shall I be on the other side of the watery abyss where I am not, and how shall I perceive there what was not perceived here? It is possible that we are illusions in the light-streaked fog."

"He had found that there was no enduring foundation stone to this creation"

Midnight here, halfway point reached.

"Mr. Spitzer had forgotten at what hour his necessity had ceased"

"He was the journeyer between two worlds, both of which were non-existent."

"what could be sadder than to be born after the moon set and to die before the moon arose, and thus one would never know the moon or would know the moon only as one knew the unknown before one knew the known and would know the unknown after one knew not the known?"

"just when she was about to change beyond all future recognition."

Quite an understated way of describing death...

I'm trying to get exactly at 50% for the end of the year.

"truth seeming only another precarious organization of the fleeting and mistaken dream"
"perhaps it continually diminished, indefinitely divisible, and space was the illusion in a frameless mirror"
"Never had she believed that it would not be possible to live in a vanished time"
"And there were so many refractions, oblique passages from one medium of being into another"
"For to see all things would be to see nothing

'She had always seemed to give her attention to those who were not there. For she had walked in circles and semicircles, describing various elegant patterns in her most casual movements, measuring the distance from a blue brocade divan to a gilt and ivory chair as if this distance were a complicated problem in infinity or in eternity, as if, when she walked from room to room, she walked between two stars >"

"Cousin Hannah, who had urged her independence of man, that she should arise, take horse, make war, join her troops, fly her skirt upon some lonely mountain top as that great flag which would be seen by all the nations of the world and would strike pity and fear in all men’s hearts."

Almost precisely 400 pages in two months. I mostly stick to 8 pages a day, but someday gets skipped. Be done by March, if I keep up.

"that all the people who were more than three miles tall should be put out of the house, as she would say, for fear they should bump their heads into Mr. Chandelier with his candle lights like dim stars in some dim, glassy heaven."

"whether he would stare at that wild, precipitous abyss which would stare at him."

Lada walks the Shortest Path.

"for in this mortal chaos where we now were caught, this constant fluctuation of distorted mirror images and principle of nothing but error repeating error like a mad, sad dream, no man knew where or who he was, and no man knew what he might become"

You wouldn't expect to find wish fulfillment in Vlad the Impaler... but here we are.

It's completely implausible and reads like a fairy tale, but it's well written and fun to read.

I read some pages of Empire of the Vampire by Jay Kristoff and thought they were written so well that somehow I remembered I bought this other book, years ago, and decided to read first.

This becomes my main-secondary read. Characters are paper thin and a story told is episodic broad strokes, it looks like, but seems really good as well.

Now it feels like reading The Elephant Man.

Sometimes I think it's a joke on me, personally. An impossible object. That all existence is one giant prank.

There has been a plot twist through the last few chapters. It's very simple. So simple that I don't know anymore what I'm reading.

"That this was the garden of the blind could surely in no way have influenced my own clarity of vision in that amorphous, wet, clammy night of clouds and whirling fogs—even though, I have wondered ever since, what is the influence of place?"

A good chunk of the book done.

"The P’s were crowding upon her—Pandora’s bottomless box, pyramids, peninsulas, pebbles, prologues, pterodactyls. The P’s were crowding upon her—planets, Pythian games, polygons, Prussians, petunias, pseudopsias which are the delusions of sight, pseudosmias which are the delusions of smell, and there was no other guest expected through all that empty house."

Chapter 10 (next)

"She sat upright, the stuffed bird bobbing on her flower-laden hat, mechanical as consciousness, always in agreement with the dual-minded wearer of the hat"

This is now an exercise in concentration. I read 8 pages a day, but some days I have to skip. It seems doable. The book is like inside-out, everything that goes inside characters is exploded outwardly. A dreamlike reality, loosely connected with elsewhere.

"taking all the roads that went nowhere"

102 pages and chapter 5 done.

"sitting all day at my mother’s shadowed bedside, talking to a mad, sick lady who supposed her head was the only world, that nothing existed outside of her and her inflated imagination"

I think I found at least two common typos.

"Magic, action and romance in equal measure. It's utter shit."

(that's a quote from the pages)

This my side-read to Miss MacIntosh, for now.

"We should be grateful for every new day we had gotten through, for every sunset, for that was our only success in this world of failure, the fact that we had lived through another day."

"all the apples fell downward in all the orchards of this earth"

Done with chapter 3, onward.

"yet though she was herself only the deceived, enchanted head to whom had been transferred as through a glass tube the conspiratorial illusion of this unreal reality, the idea of a world"

There's a moment where some plot surfaces and then...

"that it was not simply illusion facing illusion?"

"whether the world had not always been this vast, supernatural joke played upon her or someone, poor, euchred humanity"

I'm now past chapter 1, but in the last page there were precise references to Weaveworld, Infinite Jest and Blue Prince.

That, obviously, were false.

"She had gone to bed for no reason at all, only that she had found the so-called real world unsatisfactory"

Read the first chapter and it will be enough for quite some time.

The overall settings seems very interesting. Other than that, we have another protagonist who's good at everything, and there are so many things in the writing that are so wrong to me that I could write SEVERAL pages for a line by line analysis of just these few pages in the first chapter.

"my mother, believing herself dead, that she had died long ago, had tried to kill me in order that I should be free of the influence of reality"

so far, it happens that I have to reread a line, but otherwise patience is rewarded with full comprehension.

It's like a wall of text of incredible poetry.

...and on and on and on.

"I had walked alone, searching, seeing only, though I sought for an ultimate harmony, the fleeting image, the disrelation, the chaos begetting the chaos, the truth as but another illusion, that which must perish, the rose which must fade, the heart which must stop."

Wow, just wow. I did not expect at all this being my thing.

It almost blends with 1Q84:
"It was spring, but it might have been winter still, another planet, the face of the dead moon."

From there the rabbit hole goes on and on:
"(Frozen lights) in the mist-shrouded, dark plain as if all the houses from which they emitted were travelling with us into an unknown distance from which no man returns alive."

672k wordcount, why not then?

On top of sheer length, this has the classic accessibility problem, despite what's claimed in the introduction, that it's not simple to parse what I'm reading.

Even basic description: "Her tiny face was covered with an artificial complexion like a mask too heavy, streaked with grey"

Streaked with grey?

DON'T BUY THE BOOK WITH THE ORANGE COVER!

https://loopingworld.com/2025/09/26/p...

The prologue was 130 pages long, out of 700.

There's a problem when you polish something way too much: it becomes straightforward, artificial and predictable.

LOL, he wrote this in the book.

"When you wait a few span or a month to hear a finished song, the anticipation add savor. But after a year excitement begins to sour."

I only start things, in a neverending cycle.

The writing is pretty good here, but artistically harmless.

Some Robin Hobb tones, but even more bubbly.