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"You're a nice girl," the Lyctor said. "I had a nice girl as a cavalier too...once. She died for me. What can you do?"

Insane thing to ask. What can't Camilla Hect do?

WHO is doing it like the Eighth House ❤️ let’s be overzealous and off-putting and needlessly antagonistic and categorically anti-immortality for entirely the wrong reasons and yet somehow at the end of the day still hold the moral high ground, just like great (great great great etc) grandmama

"Captain, you are of no use to anyone dead."
"It is my privilege to no longer be of use."

All Judith Deuteros has ever wanted is to die a noble and completely preventable death with net zero impact on the story, but unfortunately everyone around her is as committed to making sure she does not do that for equally unclear reasons

The scary thing is your situationships actually will unionize if you spend too long in the catacombs

"So," she continued, "all this time, for all my life, I might as well have been ordering you around, for all the difference it made."
"It made," Goody said out loud, "a difference."

This is the closest thing there is to a cheat code for characters to get to me, and WOW is it working

I ❤️ stories about toxic sisters from an illustrious (dare we say sexy?) bloodline, where the brash, golden, larger-than-life one's only real gift is supernatural charm, while her eclipsed, worn-down-to-the-bone sister carries the weight of their house on her volatile, untested necromantic gift, and also they share this space of frustration/cruelty/resentment with a subjugated and periodically resurrected boy toy

"Warden--that means she can hit your cavalier anywhere below the neck, and it ends only when you give in. She's being an absolute cad, and I'm not even slightly sorry for pantsing her when we were eight."
"Nor should you be."

God!!! the specific/banal/confusing heartbreak of being 2nd/3rd/6th house and pitted, life or death, against people you've known, not liked, not agreed with, but known!!! your whole life

We have no reason to believe that Cytherea was clued in to honestly either of the deeply ill-advised polycules responsible for Gideon's conception, which invites the fascinating question of what her read on the strange irreverent teenager from Anastasia's doomed frozen gulag planet with Alecto's eyes/G1deon's name/Pyrrha's glasses/Wake's looks could possibly have been

Can't say I'm Holsten Mason's biggest fan but I certainly don't hate him nearly as much as Adrian Tchaikovsky, who keeps pitting this tiresome-if-narratively-necessary stuffy old man's exposition chapters against the ones chronicling the constantly evolving endlessly compelling technological/scientific/ethical/theological developments of the warrior-scientist-priestesses of the mutated matriarchal spider civilization

"Judith!" said Corona, more coaxingly, before an interhousal war kicked off. "This is us. You've come to all our birthday parties."

Can't even pull military rank and take charge of a grisly possibly haunted double homicide crime scene without your crush going Remember how I only got to choose one person to invite just for me and every year I chose you? in front of everyone either of you knows #JudithDeuterosMoment

Officially committing to this re-read as my Abigail Pent re-read, in which I enjoy the approximately three sentences dedicated to her in this book & console myself by remembering how absolutely narratively fascinating her abrupt and frankly very upsetting removal from this story will make her in the next one

"Put me in. Dyas can get another look at me." (Next to him, the Cohort cavalier who was obviously /Dyas/ raised her eyebrows the exact one-eighth of an inch to indicate how much she wanted to get another look at him)

The cocky soldier romantasy love interest archetype can actually be tremendously interesting, provided that everyone around him only starts caring if he lives or dies when actively hunting him for sport

I think all books should begin with a quote from the hit 2007 movie Ratatouille

So far my favorite thing about this gory/visceral/irreverent/nasty piece of work is how genuinely unbelievably compassionate it is

Undeniably hilarious that Laurence & Temeraire & co spend about 200 pages doing fuck all on that ship, and then the second they take off for Beijing, the Allegiance becomes a key player in the final showdown of an epic pirate war off the coast of China, all relayed to us in about two paragraphs by the least important of Laurence's boy best friends

Beautiful and important that Laurence has already committed, prompted by nothing and entirely on his own initiative, to stepping up and raising Emily Roland as his own by the time he loses focus and has a consensual workplace relationship with her mother. Affairs with your boss are fleeting but adopting your employee is forever #girldad

"I'd rather a few peasants die than you, /min bror,/" Anna said. "Or every fucking peasant there ever was, if I'm honest."

She is trying soo hard to create some real moral conflict in this book but unfortunately everyone else keeps ignoring that to focus on the evil wizard looking to mass-ritually-sacrifice all their children. sad!

My favorite thing is when historical (fantasy) fiction masters the balance between basically normal people trying to lead basically normal lives in a world that is deeply, unequivocally weird. It always invites fascinating questions, such as, for example: how will the evil wizard hollowing out the warlord-turned-reluctantly-competent-baron and re-establishing him as a puppet ruler affect the fiefdom's tax policies?

"A rogue unit would have left a trail of dead bodies across this station."
I said, "Maybe I wanted the trail to start here."

The genius of Murderbot is that it can say things like this and have it be 100% effective against people who have not spent the past couple of chapters watching it valiantly attempt (and utterly fail) at tasks such as 'being in a store' and 'finding things to do with its arms while in public'

RJB will not catch me slipping again, which means this time around I'm keeping meticulous tabs on my categories of, among others, "characters who are comfortable with (weaponized) religious guilt," "characters who have been described as looking bored," and, of course, "characters who I suspect are mostly in this story due to their unique abilities to ID other key players"

Once again Din and I have the same taste in men (beautiful eyes that hold a deep sorrow in their depths)

I think I'm meant to be getting that Jack doesn't really understand how this kind of ship is usually run, but what I'm mostly getting is that I don't really understand how this kind of ship is usually run

Most unsettling thing about this book so far is its confirmation that Hoid has been unable, rather than (just) unwilling, to resort to violence this whole time

The Shinovar arc seems designed to show that there are no absolute truths and that neither Windrunners nor Skybreakers can or should claim ultimate moral authority, but what it has actually done is identify that there actually is an order of Knights Radiant who ARE the moral backbone/last bastion of integrity, and that is the Willshapers

5 books of build-up and THAT was the Recreance reveal? what are we doing here Brandon

It's actually a beautiful kind of full-circle moment that the only characters I find truly compelling in this one are Jasnah and Adolin Kholin

“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents” the mark of a truly great book is when each chapter begins with 1-2 pages of freestyle philosophizing from the author, even (especially) when it is only tangentially related to the plot

Maximizing the number of characters getting this much-needed exposition is an admirable goal, but we have got to be way past the point of diminishing returns for how many can realistically fit into one vision. At this point it's just kind of a collaborative historical reenactment project

"We've found my father. He's in a vision."
"Good," Pattern said. "Excellent, even! Let's go murder some folks!"

Many excellent explorations of the complexities of the Radiant bond and spren relationships with humanity in this one, but What if the most special least stable girl in the world had to teach a sentient QR code how to be a person? truly has never had a bad track

If Brandon isn't going to take this book seriously (no!!! long overdue Shallan/Jasnah confrontation even after Shallan's Ghostbloods bombshell) then I don't have to either. at this point we might as well just hard pivot to focusing on the sitcom hijinks of Wit and Lift impersonating Dalinar and Navani and to be honest that might even be what's happening here