Gregisdead121 > Recent Status Updates

"All history is contemporary history: not in the ordinary sense of the
word, where contemporary history means the history of the comparatively recent past, but in the strict sense: the consciousness
of one’s own activity as one actually performs it. History is thus the
self-knowledge of the living mind.

Reading someone get buried alive then slowly suffocate to death will make you wish some authors weren't good writers because wtf now I'm traumatized

I am deeply in love with this book! Its like narrated like Patrick Süskind's "Perfume " but much more concise and poetic. I could read it for hours

"Yes, I was in love with you when we went to Venice three years ago.
You were like no man I had ever heard of. You could have made
whatever you liked of me. But you did nothing. A woman isn’t like
money that you put in a bank and it will bring you interest without
your doing anything about it. A woman is a person. "

"She has
never before been able to ignore Umberto’s advances because they
have offered her an opportunity to show him the intricate sexuality
of her body which has always seemed to her to be as unpredictable,
as delicate and as pure as an almond hidden in its two shells. Her
immunity now surprises her. Her child has already offered her the
gift of self-sufficiency."

"She lies in Umberto’s arms, content to be held but indifferent to his
passion. If he lies still, she is pleased. She finds it acceptable for him
to cherish her; she finds it absurd for him to desire her."

I'm being so naughty reading this as
1) I have no time at all for a new book
2) I'm hoping to clear my currently reading before 2026 and I have a 600+ page behemoth I've been reading quite slowly since September [*cue alarm*]
3) this is a books that scares me ,could cause a slump like Doris Lessing

But John Berger is so hot and woke I can't help it. Wish me luck!

"God puts earth far away from heaven because even he can’t stand the smell
of dead flesh."

* finished, working on a review for this racist mess *

"There is
nothing worse than making a bid for someone’s body & getting their soul instead."

"I remembered how I had watched those
places where his black, black skin disappeared into his white chef’s
uniform, the wrists and the long, thick neck, and the awareness I
had of his body. As he turned away I followed him with what was
probably a look of stricken devotion. It was the high, haunted
African brow, and the high, rolling African ass, and the long,
dangling, fishing, musical hands."

EWWWWWW

“Each individual of this species is locked up inside his own skull, his
own personal experience"

‘There you are. You see, I’ve had such an interesting life and now
it’s so bloody dull and everyone’s dead and I can’t remember what
I’m saying and all that sort of thing.’ He seemed to lose his thread.

Every straight author I've been reading has been dissapointing me but you know who has never dissapointed me? Who's lowest rated book by him I've read is a 4.75 star? Alan- graphic gay sex in between crushing love story's- Hollinghurst. I need him to save me. Make December less terrible than it usually tends to be.

Dark and hopeless end. Think of "The Zone of Intrests "(2023) , Höss walking down those stairs into the dark as the history we all know and should all regret plays out, is committed. But the book delivers this gut punch too late

Book club went over 2hrs ...
We
Were
Yapping!

Fingers crossed I can finish this before December as it was in my November TBR

"The moment of the present becomes instantly the past, I wrote. The
present was almost-nothing; I was almost-nothing – a momentary
arrangement of energy. And when the time came for the arrangement of
energy that went by my name to collapse, and become a different
arrangement, barely anything would be changed. A slight readjustment of
a few lives, for a while. "

First time reading a sex scene that made me want to peel off my skin and bath in bleach. Men have never been as unattractive as when they are in this book. If I had seen this during puberty I would have become straight out of pure horror. Jim Sterling is so horrifying as a sexual partner that it could reset my genetic code to heterosexual. Belinda shouldn't be just blinking she should be calling HR

Was laughing so hard my cat started staring at me unblinkingly as if witnessing a stroke and hoping to eat my body afterwards. Which is fair as I was so out of breath to assume I was near death would be something a doctor would echo. This is the rare example of a so bad its good 2star book. It's like a good 2000's camp movie that objectively is a 1 star but the enjoyment is 3 star so it becomes an outlier rating

Absolute blast, can't stop laughing. @aziraphale's_left_shoe would have so much fun ridiculing this😤

Childhood fave from my before I started tracking my reads. The accompanying podcast on spotify is perfect and if you love yourself you will listen to it immediately, which shouldn't be hard given here is the link : https://open.spotify.com/show/6nYCARK...