itselv > Recent Status Updates

B's POV is excruciatingly exhausting! Kudos to the voice actor, they captured the tone too perfectly to the point it got on my nerves

I cringed so hard I wanted to throw my phone away

Actually laugh out loud funny!
The book does portray an atypical (though common) misogynistic pathetic man very well, rather than lazily using the angry incel archetype.

"No one can tell, when two people walk closely together, what unconscious communication one mind may have with another."

"No one warned me that with your child comes death. Death circles your growing body, and once your child has left it, death circles her too. This is why mothers don't sleep. This is why mothers don't look away from their children. This is why, even with a broken heart, a mother will bring herself back to life."

"Ani says that when a white man is described as a genius, even once, he can get away with anything including murder."

"You know, Natasha was saying, they say that grief is love with nowhere to go. I think that's true at first, but then, Natasha was saying, I think that undersells love. Love finds its rightful place."

"I told [my sister] we were identical in the parts of ourselves that our parents could not see or even imagine and those were the parts that mattered."

"A painter I love does these big paintings of rooms, the rooms are empty, but animated. A book left open, a drink half-finished, a lamp left burning. The rooms appear as if someone had just exited the frame."

This sounds beautiful.

"she had never worked, so she could measure her worth only through her children."

"Cherry said people saw depth in Rothko but it was only searching. Searching does not make you great, Cherry said. Searching makes you the same as everyone else. People use the word genius for Rothko not to elevate his art but to elevate their own tastes."

"There was something desperate about the sun."

I have never thought the sun to be desperate!

"like everything you do, your love has been a performance."

"In the nineteenth century, a fan was far more than a practical accessory. It was an essential part of a fashionable wardrobe. A lady needed one for morning visits, another for afternoon calls, another for the theatre or the ball-and, naturally, they had to keep pace with the ever-changing whims of fashion."

In every timeline there's a fashion item that *must* to be changed every occasion, but does it actually?

The fight scenes/maze plot are simultaneously underwhelming and confusing.

I am here for Calla though.

I appreciate the subtle representation of medical gaslighting,
when the brothers had their own individual paranormal encounters, they immediately believed each other
but when the sister said she felt something was wrong with her, that she was struggling with for a long time, and even had anecdotal evidence, they brushed her off thinking she was just being hysterical.

"This was the genius of the great nineteenth-century department stores. They did not merely display merchandise; they staged fantasies.
Long before today's luxury boutiques spoke of "immersive experiences," Mouret had already discovered that the surest way to sell an object was to surround it with beauty, mystery, and a little magic."

As an eldest daughter, her brothers are so unbelievably frustrating that I had to take a break because I got too heated 😬

LOVING the women spaces🤭 I was about to give up on this but the beautiful female artists saved the day

Got a bit used to the humor style! Two minor scenes happened that recontextualized some aspects
1. Someone who was rude in his inner monologue had it slip into his actions and got called out for that.
2. A bar scene acknowledged a dynamic and turned it from off-putting to adorable and funny.

Always fun when the author is aware of how their characters are coming across and is playing with it rather than around it.

Not liking the way anyone is talking about anyone.. feels like an attempt to be funny? But is ultimately off-putting.

It is challenging to appreciate the normalization of chaos in small spaces here when some of the examples showcase unclean mess rather than overflowing with items due to the lack of storage expected from such tiny apartments.

Sometimes I feel I'm too judgmental, sometimes not. I still haven't stuck to an opinion.

"You can order more than one dessert."
🍨 🧁 🍰🍪🍫

"I am led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction; there is only narrative."

"Every so often your children come to visit.
They are, amazingly, completely charming people. You can't believe you're lucky enough to know them. You love them madly. They survived you. You survived them. It crosses your mind that on some level, you spent hours and days and months and years without laying a glove on them, but don't dwell. There's no point. It's over.
Except for the worrying. The worrying is forever."

Skipping On maintenance chapter!
Read the 1st half of it and didn't like the tone.

I despise talking about women's beauty and care as a chore we all hate but have to do, without talking about why we feel so.
The author is aware of how much nonsense and unattainable expectations are there, but still extends the worries and insecurities to the reader.

"«Beauty is to be found in disarray.»
Indeed, no matter how confused a home-or homeland-might appear to others, the residents themselves will invariably see a resolute order underscoring all their living conditions."

"But how many of these places look lived-in? That's because what these books show are the co-creations of known architects and photographers, or else very skillful presentations of designer products. It's because no one can live like those pictures that make them attractive showpieces."

"لا تزال تريد الحياة، وهو أمر هي نفسها كانت تستغرب منه؛ إذ كيف لها أن تحبّ الحياة في الوقت الذي لم تحبّها الحياة فيه؟ لكن حوّا كانت تريد الحياة غصبًا عن الحياة نفسها."