#reading log

do you have any childhood faves? or any book you think shaped you as a person and altered your brain chemistry forever?

and also, do you have any book characters you relate deeply to? it can be for the silliest reasons ahah i know i relate to any character thats vaguely a nerd lmao

hiii aj !! hehehe thank you for the ask ^_^

i don't think i'd had any books that were favorite to the point of obsession until mom bought me a bunch from the warrior cats series when i was 12 >///< that was when i started reading daily and nightly, ignoring even the beautiful sights on our family trips hahaha.. i always had a book with me and bugged everyone with my excitement so much that i've had my books ripped by my classmates ;-; but they brought me so much joy, especially when i joined forum RPGs and started role playing as my very own wild cat !! and i ran around the playground imagining i was one until i was almost 15 too! what about you??

i have heard of mickey7! I haven't read it but my dad did and he said it was pretty good, and I trust his sci-fi opinions because its his favourite genre lol

i havent read a ton of classics even though I've wanted to! I think my favourite was Dracula, its a lot more fun and silly than I think people would expect from the book that pioneered modern vampire literature. if you have any classic novel recs please send them to me! it might take me a while to get to them because my tbr is looooong but i love recs :)

and if you ever want any sci-fi and/or fantasy recs I'm happy to give them to you! I definitely have read more fantasy than sci-fi though :P

oh! i'll definitely give it a try then !! and as far as i know it's the first book of a whole series, so, who knows, maybe i'll get so into it i'll buy all of them hehehe :з

i haven't read Dracula but would love to one day! and ohh classics recs, hm.. i prefer the 20th century myself so some of the books i'd recommend are: - Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak - my absolute favorite because i'm enamoured with the way Pasternak writes both prose and poetry although i can't recommend a specific english translation ;-; but Yuri Zhivago is just.. UGH <3 !! - The Plague by Albert Camus - but i don't recommend it if covid is a triggering topic to you cause there's lots of similarities. - The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger - i read it for the foreign lit class in uni and i finished it in a few days which is impressive cause i'm an extremely slow reader. - The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse - read it a few years ago and even though its language was difficult to comprehend sometimes, i was fascinated with the fact that there was literally no romantic storyline in the entire book (apart from the tale written by the main character). another one of my favorites is Peter the First by Aleksei Tolstoy but i think you need to learn more about the local history first. oh, and it's an unfinished work... ;-; i wouldn't call any of those fun or silly cause i think i prefer slow-paced books that leave you with a strange and sometimes painful feeling in your chest. but maybe you'll still enjoy some of them >.<"

I love the archetype of the detective, so I was bound to like Will Graham, but the way he is presented as someone tormented by his own mind is something I find relatable.

He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.

the first one is Bunny by Mona Awad which I'm enjoying well enough so far! I haven't picked it up in a couple weeks though so I'm probably gonna have to re-read the thirty or so pages I already read so I can remember what happened :")

the second one is Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, which is the first book in my favourite series ever!!! I just moved so I wanted a comfort read (even if the book itself is not comforting lol)

as a little convo starter: what are your favourite genres of literature? I love sci-fi and fantasy as well as horror! (I'll read anything if it seems interesting enough though!)

hiii abby! ^_^ tumblr got so excited you sent me an ask that it showed it to me 3 times hehe.

i looked up Bunny by Mona Awad and woah, a few people i know have added it to their "to-read' pile on storygraph too! the plot sounds really tense, so i hope you'll enjoy it <3

and OMG yeah i know this series too !! i've never read it though but i know the character designs from my mutuals :з i think they're really cool, i wonder what the books are about too!

oh, back when i was in school i was forced to read tons of local classics cause i specialized in socio-humanitarian studies and had 6 literature lessons a week......... which made me 1) hate reading 2) believe that classics were the only option. about a year ago or so i decided to give contemporary literature a try. my first book was The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn, and it was a perfect choice that got a solid 5 out of 5 from me !! it felt like classics but was also, hmm, more exciting to me i'd say? since then, i've set myself a goal to try as many genres as possible. some other books i've enjoyed recently: - The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See (5/5) - Circe by Madeline Miller (4/5) ...and 2 other local books that haven't been translated :( i've been getting lots of recommendations from the official postcrossing forum and their books-related postcard exchanges, and i've never thought there was an entire world of interesting books that weren't classics!

i have yet to discover fantasy and sci-fi! have you heard of mikey7? it's on my TBR but the forum member who told me about it gave it a 3 out of 5. still, i'm curious cause the concept seems to be exactly what i like! as for horror, i think i shouldn't ever try reading it.. >///<

This sure is an ending. Don't particularly love or hate it. It is just there. That sure was a novel I just read.

There were points where the romance was interesting, but it just ended up falling flat due to conflict management.

Like, in the flashback to reveal the backstory to how Bimby was born, O'Neill showed us Starke thinking about how people just kept heaping adversity on Bimba and she was expected to just take it and how that's sad. And then he went to add onto her list off adversities by knocking her up and running away for months, leaving her to deal with a pregnancy that eventually left her disabled. We do get something approaching an admission of feeling guilty when he expresses his feelings that he's tainting Garda, but because Garda is just such a pure soul(and also had not found out his secret yet) , she doesn't seem to totally buy it

Then, Garda finding out about him hurting Bimby doesn't really alter their relationship that much. I,as the reader, get to find out that he didn't mean to hurt Bimby, and that he did seem to have some genuine feeling for Bimba, but Garda never does. She hears from Bastiano that he had a secret lover and he threw the baby on the floor, and she never talks to Starke about it. She just assumes there's this good explanation that she's never heard before to justify it.

Starke mainly seems to feel guilty about the Bimba situation when he's made to think about it from someone else alluding to it, and at no point does it feel like he's guilty because his actions betrayed his love for her. It feels like the tragedy is supposed to be "oh, he was just a young boy making young boy mistakes and now he's haunted by the consequences of them as a man" but that angle doesn't work because 1. I don't view making a baby as a little whoopsie , so I hold it against him full force and 2. Bimba bore the worst consequences of what they did before she died. He was man enough to try the "leaving for milk routine", and he's man enough that I think he's a dickhead for trying it. I'm not pitying him for having to raise a disabled baby he fathered to begin with because he got handsy with one of the maids. Boohooo. Should've kept your pants up or stayed your ass in Italy dodging responsibility like it's the draft, playboy; at least then, you wouldn't have had the chance to drop Bimby.

Also, it feels like the story leans into "the last/endgame love interest is the only one the character truly loves.", which is one of those things that can make my feelings for the main couple take a major hit depending on the writing around it, and it definitely does here. Starke doesn't mourn Bimba after she's gone; he just gets tense when she comes up like he cares that he hurt her, but not because he necessarily loved her in the way expected of lovers. He cares because he knows that if he'd left her alone, she'd probably have been better off. Once Bastiano offs himself, Garda doesn't seem that mournful despite saying she'd have liked to have both him and Starke as lovers at the same time twice. Her grief is focused entirelly on Starke. Arguably, this could because Bastiano is confirmed dead while Starke was only on the brink of death(and eventually survived). However, the fact that just hearing something bad about Starke made her lethargic and passively suicidal while hearing that Bastiano died doesn't affect her anywhere near as badly doesn't reassure me that she actually loved him.

When Bastiano is gone from Garda's side pre-death, she doesn't seem to care about him at all, and when he is around, she is still pining for Starke. It doesn't come across like her heart is being pulled in multiple directions by genuine love. It makes her seem fickle.

Narcissus notes that it would have been better for Garda to have just ended up with Starke to begin with, and because Garda and Narcissus are talked about multiple time as being parts of one whole, this could be seen as an admission that she should've just committed to one man, and that man is of course Starke.