Ex Libris Kirkland is my entirely self-centered way to keep track of what I read, what I enjoy, and what I want to remember.
📓 Recent Notes 📓
Duping this comment: I read this at the same time as RF Kuang's Katabasis, and both books feature a young woman protagonist who is sort of emotionally stupid. Like in the Katniss Everdeen model of 'I don't know when someone is trying to help me' and 'that guy I can't stand also hates me, he is definitely NOT in love with me'. I think it would have been less noticeable if I hadn't been reading both books and comparing them at the same time.
a note about The Fountain
The author runs an inn in the Catskills and hosts a residency - two friends of mine were there previously and I think that's how I came across this book? Anyway, living the dream.
a note about The Fountain
I really enjoyed this. A young(?) woman who can't die goes back to her hometown to finally find The Source of what accidentally made her immortal 200 years ago. And accidentally gets enmeshed in a community. This was great, I really enjoyed it. Page turner, just enough magic/scifi to keep it sparkling. And in a way it's a Groundhog Day story too, which I'm always interested in from a structural perspective.
a note about The Fountain
I read this at the same time as Casey Scieszka's The Fountain, and both books feature a young woman protagonist who is sort of emotionally stupid. Like in the Katniss Everdeen model of 'I don't know when someone is trying to help me' and 'that guy I can't stand also hates me, he is definitely NOT in love with me'. I think it would have been less noticeable if I hadn't been reading both books and comparing them at the same time.
a note about Katabasis
Sadly as the book progressed I started thinking of it in terms of the tropes it probably was marketed by ('Dark Academia', 'Enemies to Lovers') and this was kind of distressing. It's not a trope-y book, it's really better than that. It just broke my reading a bit.
a note about Katabasis
📖 Recent Quotes 📖
A small margin for error is the due of the most exact human machinery.
an excerpt from The Honeywood File
[ I do love a reference to the universal story: everybody thinks they are a Hidden Prince ] And now that we've done washing, and combing, and sulking—tell me whether you don't think yourself rather handsome? I'll tell you, I do. You're fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week's income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange to-gether? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors, and brought to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my birth, and the thoughts of what I was should give me courage and dignity to support the oppressions of a little farmer!
an excerpt from Wuthering Heights
...now we find skilled lawyers all at sea as to the meaning of their own carefully-weighed phrases. A great part of the business of lawyers is to determine the meaning of words used by other lawyers. The law is what is known as “a lucrative profession.”
an excerpt from The Honeywood File
General Sir Thomas Pamellor at once reminded me of a fine, freshly caught shrimp. Not that he was small, but he sprouted hair at odd angles from eyebrows and moustache, and also his coloring was exactly the right mixture of sand and grey. Lady Pamellor was a slightly smaller shrimp, but cooked. She was bright pink and had a good deal of pink in her dress.
... [and then a page later after not mentioning shrimp again] When Lady Pamellor had swum delicately off and hidden herself beneath the rocks of the drawing room, Sir Thomas pressed cigars upon me and one of the finest brandies I have ever tasted.an excerpt from Watcher in the Shadows
It was a natural partnership. We were both survivors from another age - a couple of dinosaurs, let us say - one of an older generation than the other, but both equally successful at persuading a society of little mammals that we were perfectly adjusted to it.
an excerpt from Watcher in the Shadows