Manda > Recent Status Updates

reread szn starts now 😴

"It never occurred to me to be competitive or even jealous of men. For a long time, I’d worried that it was internalized misogyny before I realized that the only artists I respected enough to envy were women."

💅🏻

I always expect weird when it comes to Nat….but I did not expect whatever this is & I don’t know if that’s good or bad yet 🫣

my intuition is telling me that i'm not going to like where this is going, so i'm not going to put myself through it.

mmm, yes. the tender paradox of feeling cared for while being probed like a product on a conveyer belt. tenero, si

“We put diseased animals out of their misery, we don’t want them to suffer, to infect the rest of the lot. We let men live.”

🙂‍↕️

why are we wasting pages on a cooking competition right now?????????? KEN...............this book is 1000 pages and now I know why. WHAT ARE WE DOING

it's insane how much i'm enjoying this book based on how indifferent I was to the first one. giving female characters agency, complexity, and significant roles in your stories actually improves them! who knew??????🤐

if this book wasn't specifically recommended to me I would have dnfed it at the first run on sentence. no line breaks. no quotation marks. i'm suffering here.

“I’d rather apologize for something I didn’t really care about, and leave someone on Earth wishing me well, than to be stubborn and have that someone hoping that some alien would slurp out my brains. Call it karmic insurance.”


you know what? hell yeah

lost interest the second the romance subplot started 😔🤙🏻

It's finally happening. I convinced my nephew to read A Monster Calls with me!! A new era incoming: me re-reading every book I've ever tried to make him read so I can see it through the lens of a teenager in 2025.

what! the! fuck!

Yearly reminder that celebrating Thanksgiving as a tradition of togetherness and gratitude with your friends and family is lovely, but rethinking how we remember and tell our history is extremely important as well 💛

"Very well, you stingy old bastard, you flaccid pig’s dick, you donkey’s dirty anus."

okaaaay

as a lore whore, this book is so much fun so far.

The end of year transition into books under 300 pages is my favorite phenomenon. We're all tired—enjoy your short reads; you deserve it.

"It’s the mids, the people who aspire upward without knowing and who look down on us without compassion, that will be the most reluctant."

"Though it often eluded her, she liked sleep. It presented her with something that her waking moments perpetually denied her: freedom."

this book already hurts

"authors will tell you that every vampire is, has been, or can also be a witch, a shape-shifter, a phantom, and demon, among other things. We are likely to be some part of all these at any point you may encounter us, or we may be all of one and none of the others, or all of all"

girl pick a struggle

"It was late spring and the river smelled strongly of brine. I grew up here and had come to ignore that smell; you were a Pennsylvania girl, whose nose was more attuned to the stink of refineries."

oooookaaaaay your wife is dead and you're slandering her for what

"-but that’s the problem with pressing yourself down too much, folding and folding when you’re not really made of a material that’s suitable for those kinds of creases. At some point, you just spring back up when you can’t take another bending, not a single pleat more. And upon that, you spring back with force, and your momentum can be quite upsetting to people who didn’t expect you to claim your space"

"After everybody else left the funeral home—after our closest friends and family had said their private good-byes to my mother—I stayed behind to use the restroom. As I squatted on the old toilet, I wept for the first time since my mother died. And then I shat. I wept and shat. And, yes, I am famously gifted as a weeper and a shitter."

"I didn’t like dogs. Not because they scared me—they didn’t—but because their deaths were so much harder to take than people’s."

It's taken me over 100 pages to notice this book doesn't have chapters, and I don't hate it?? 🧐

"Trying to read his eyes was like searching for sentience in a pool of murky water: I thought I saw things moving deep down in there, but all I could be sure of was my own faint reflection"

"I pulled him towards me as if I meant to kiss him again, and drove his head back against the wall as hard as I could. It sounded like a ripe melon landing on marble and left a dark smear on the tiles"

I can imagine this sound, and I don't like it. thanks!