Ayo > Recent Status Updates

OMG!!! Walker is so annoying and insufferable!!! 😩😭🫠

“It’s a town where high school kids having no where to go on Friday nights, park their step father’s trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot, drinking Smirnoffs out of Poland spring bottles and blasting Weezer and lil Wayne until they look down one night and find a baby in their arms and realize they are 30 something . . .”

❤️😍🥰

I like how Pynchon takes time to explain the art(film, music, TV)that his characters engage with. It feels unnecessary by conventional standards and is something most writers would cut.It comes across as meandering but also creates a childlike sense of wonder,as if the reader is Alice in Wonderland, wandering rather than being led.

Also I like how time warps and doesn’t matter. The narration is driven by events.

“‘You want to bet on what would happen?’

‘Of course not. The movie’s made’”


Oh I LOVE THIS!!! 😍😩❤️

I was going to start Shadow Tickets, but a friend told me this is one of the more accessible Pynchons.

First Impressions: Very unique and strong voice, in fact - almost fearless. Specific and atypical diction. Strange and interesting narrative choices so far, bordering on whimsical chaos.

Why on earth is someone breaking into a song with lyrics right in the middle of a scene???

Here for it though. 🤣

This book has me laughing, sighing, saying ‘WTF is actually going on’, ‘What did I miss?’ all at the same time.

This is such a trippy book.

😂🤣😂

“Replicated services are primarily used for stateless services while shards are used for stateful service.

Sharding is not exclusive to stateful services though. They can also be used to isolate poisoned requests”

💡

“People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place.

They forgot that not having children was also something that took place. That is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack.

It had its own presence in the world. It was its own event.”

😍❤️

“You pull at the ropes tied to the statue.

You pull and nothing happens.

And then you pull and pull again and the whole thing topples over.”

😍

“Two people who want the same thing would never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things”

❤️

“Almost nothing about the way people live in New York makes any sense. . . Least of all when it comes to money”

🤣🎯

A case for / against reparations:

“I want a return of the vertebrae I was born without. I have contorted, bent, braced, ached like earthquake return to fault line.

I want an acre for every apology that never materialized in sound”

OMG!!! This is so BEAUTIFUL!!! My heart!!!😫😍🥰

“Marriages are nesting dolls too. . .

Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll - Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there but we have to open and open and open ourselves. . .our together selves to find it“

❤️

Maggie girl, are you spilling this tea or not???

What’s going on ???

This isn’t the time to be poetic. I came here for tea. It’s a memoir 😭🫠🤣

“There was no way he would have to spend Christmas alone.

Many women like men like him. Someone who never gave you what you wanted. Someone who’d leave you at the drop of a hat. The certainty that he’d walk out one day would fool many a woman that he was the only man for them. “

❤️

“His accent was as thick as pancake molasses”

SA Cosby please!!!! 😭😩

What in the Quan Millz??? 🫠

Idempotency is the notion that whether an action is performed a single times or many times, the result is identical.

Example: x=5(idempotent) vs. x=x+1 (not idempotent)

If we know that an operation is idempotent, in the face of failures, we can simply repeat it until it succeeds.

❤️😍🥰

“He thought of his parents and they were nearly as strange as the child they had born. He felt a mix pity for them and a distant love.”

OMG!!! The prose in this one is so crisp and beautiful!!! 😫

Reminds of Szalay’s ‘Flesh’ 🥰

“What was absolutely true and right? What was absolutely false and wrong? And how could any sane person live without crossing the borders everyday.

Lies were the life blood of the world. Lies activated the menacing truth he now understood which was - take what you want or others would take it”

WOW! That ending was grim 😭😫

My heart 😫💔😍

This might be one of the best books I read this year.

The writing is technically exquisite - such precision. Majumdar is a master of the written word. Every sentence feels deliberate, honed, exact.

And the story is effective. I genuinely don’t know where it’s going. I’m reading with my breath held, hoping - pleading - that it doesn’t end in more heartbreak 🥰

“He understood from every thing he had endured in his own life that the worth of honesty presented as noble before school children was itself a lie.

The honest souls who paused to deliberate on morals found when they made their choice that the treasure was gone.”

I like this one already.I like writer who don’t write people one way.I like writers disappear into the background & let the story tell itself❤️

“Soon she would say goodbye to this kitchen. It struck her then that the city wasn’t only what was outside. This was the city too - a tiny corner of a possible nowhere but here” 😍

The world building in this book is skillful and breathtaking!
Teach us your ways Majumdar 🔥🔥🔥

I like so many things about this book.

I also find a lot of how and why it’s written cringey, unnecessary, premature,and yes - a little heroic.

Hey!Gilbert is a damn good writer. No doubt about that.

We already know a lot about codependency from writers like Melody Beattie. What Gilbert does in All the Way to the River is cement these lessons with lived experience.

Is it worth a whole book? I’m not sure.

“ . . . And what if everything that was offered is simply this: whatever you see before you right now, that is what’s yours - a world called ‘enough’”

❤️

Say whatever you want about Gilbert, one thing is fact: this woman can WRITE!!! 🔥🔥🔥

“Addicts don’t do well when they loose contact with an higher power. . . “

❤️

Ehhhh Hmmmm *sighs* *scratches head* 🫠😔

Clarity is kind.

Wait what???

I was skeptical about this one, however the section on accepting and giving apologies is worth the price of the book.

So good!!! 🔥🔥🔥

I adore authors who clearly enjoy themselves on the page. You can tell Kuku is having a blast with these stories - the wordplay in ‘International Relations’ is unmatched.

I love how she just says the damn thing. No beating around the bush. Her style is technically lean. She doesn’t start with much, but she gives you exactly what’s needed as you move through the story (‘The Anointed Wife’). 😍

Eveline is the story I’ve connected with most of the seven I’ve read so far.

It feels timeless. Why did it remind me so much of Rapunzel? I loved it. 😍❤️🥰

I see why Joyce is heralded. No tricks, no overreaching, no forced wisdom - just focus on the written word and the story. Almost literal, yet also sublime in a quietly creative way. And he’s the king of endings. I adore how he closes. 🔥