Serhiy’s Reviews > Beautiful World, Where Are You > Status Update
Serhiy
is 96% done
Book Culture mention?????
At first I thought: a perfect example of our shallow self-congratulatory ‘book culture’, in which non-readers are shunned as morally inferior, and the more books you read, the better you are than everyone else. But then I thought: no, what we really have here is an example of a presumably normal and sane person whose thinking has been deranged by the concept of celebrity.
— Aug 25, 2026 11:51AM
At first I thought: a perfect example of our shallow self-congratulatory ‘book culture’, in which non-readers are shunned as morally inferior, and the more books you read, the better you are than everyone else. But then I thought: no, what we really have here is an example of a presumably normal and sane person whose thinking has been deranged by the concept of celebrity.
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Serhiy’s Previous Updates
Serhiy
is 99% done
I suppose I think that having a child is simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing. And I want that – to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care. To prove it to whom, I wonder. Myself, maybe.
— Aug 25, 2026 12:09PM
Serhiy
is 95% done
If you weren’t my friend I wouldn’t know who I was, she said. Alice rested her face in Eileen’s arm, closing her eyes. No, she agreed. I wouldn’t know who I was either.
— Aug 25, 2026 11:48AM
Serhiy
is 91% done
I think at the time I’d just finished reading Anna Karenina. And I wanted to go and work on a farm so I could be like Levin. You know he has these profound experiences while he’s cutting grass with a sickle or something, and it makes him believe in God. I don’t really remember the details now, but that was my general idea.
— Aug 25, 2026 11:41AM
Serhiy
is 80% done
Oh, I love you, he murmured. In a small childish voice she said: And am I the only one you love? He kissed the side of her face then, saying: Jesus, God, yes.
— Aug 24, 2026 09:44AM
Serhiy
is 78% done
Felix asked Alice about New York, and she said she had found it stressful and confusing. She said everybody there lived in very strange buildings, with hallways and staircases that led nowhere, and none of the doors ever closed properly, even bathroom doors, even in expensive places.
— Aug 24, 2026 09:21AM
Serhiy
is 68% done
It’s still better to love something than nothing, better to love someone than no one, and I’m here, living in the world, not wishing for a moment that I wasn’t. Isn’t that in its own way a special gift, a blessing, something very important?
— Aug 22, 2026 12:09PM
Serhiy
is 48% done
I was tired, it was late, I was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that wherever I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.
— Aug 20, 2026 05:35PM
Serhiy
is 10% done
After finishing her Master’s, Eileen got a job in a bookshop, wheeling loaded trolleys across the shop floor to be unloaded and placing individual adhesive price stickers onto individual copies of bestselling novels.
— Aug 18, 2026 12:55PM
Serhiy
is 4% done
"And what are your books about?"
"Oh, I don’t know," she said. "People."
— Aug 18, 2026 09:37AM
"Oh, I don’t know," she said. "People."