A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope

Here are the US reciprocal tariffs against all the territories mentioned in Enya’s Orinoco Flow

#rreads Daisy Jones & The Six: not my kind of thing. Having seen That Look in the Fleetwood Mac concert I understand the impulse, but the characters feel like cardboard and I'm surprised people still go for Mary Sues in the year of our lord 2019.

#rreads A Clockwork Orange: Lots to think about. Still parsing! Real horrorshow. Linguists really went wild on this one, huh.

#rreads Chestnut Street by Maeve Binchy: friend lent to me otherwise I wouldn't have picked this up; ok for a quick kind of read! Some stories were nice, but a lot of them were of the O My Husband Left Me variety and too similar

#rreads Project Hail Mary: better than the Martian insofar as the narrator is a lot more bearable, but I have yet to find a book that can make really hard scifi interesting

#rreads What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher: Right I'm calling it. I don't understand the point of retellings if either a) you don't change that much of the original story or b) what you do change doesn't add very much. Undecided which this falls into, but definitely one of the two.

#rreads The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst: I would have liked this if it were 200 pages. As it is it was SUCH a slog to get through, spotted with "'Oh...' said Nick. "Yes..." murmured Wani. "-esque conversations that also made the denouement feel ridiculously fast.

#rreads She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan: eh, all right. I did like that they didn't shy away from morally grey decisions, but the whole thing dragged a bit too long, and if I had a penny for every time they were like 'ALAS MY FATE' I would have retired.

#rreads life, the universe, and everything: i really loved the first hitchhikers book and progressively they feel like they've gotten sillier and sillier. there were flashes of fun with this one but i dunno, some of the tangents were just too much for me

#rreads trumpet by jackie kay: oh, oh. I think it must have been quite brave for its time, but some of the ways that it handles transness reads difficult now. i also wish there had been more music; why make joss a trumpeter if you're not really going to go into the music

#rreads mythos by stephen fry: a typically amiable frolic thru greek mythology. i do think it would have been less engaging if he hadn't been reading it (did the audiobook).

#rreads jurassic park by michael crichton: after i finished this i opened letterboxd and made a new list of movie adaptations that are better than books. then i looked up similar lists. JP appears on... a lot of them.

#rreads orbital by samantha harvey: ohh, i really loved this. is it booker bait? yes. is it meandering without plot? yes. is it too purple/mary oliver at times? yes. still loved it somehow.

sorry my bsky is just a book log at this point. one day i will be more interestin

#rreads Endgame by Samuel Beckett - as always, something I think I like but need to read 234798 things around it to understand

#rreads Bel Canto by Ann Patchett: I loved this a lot more than dutch house. Maybe because it's about music? Parts of it really moved me. I do still think it was a trifle too idealistic, but maybe that was the point, living in a dream world.

#rreads all systems red by martha wells: love the concept but felt like it was a bit too short fr me to really get a sense of it as a book. (which, like - i love novellas, but i think there are novellas and books that are too short if that makes sense) am interested enough to read the next one tho

#rreads malibu rising by taylor j reid: I found seven husbands ok, very booktoky, and this was the same. endless parade of unnecessary characters at the end. really only picked it up bc i needed a read and it was in the community box, and finished it in like 2 hours - literal airport book

#rreads welcome to the hyunam-dong bookshop: kind of a strange break from the coffee gets cold kind of vibes wrt the fairly serious discussions about work and place in society, as if it couldn't make up its mind whether it wanted to be a commentary or cosy read

#rreads the teller of small fortunes by julie leong: out of my wheelhouse, read for a book club. commits a cardinal sin (in my book) of lazy naming - 'laohu' and 'malaya'. it would take too many characters to explain this. its nudgewink moments didn't fit into the earnestness, which sometimes grated

You: They did the math. Me: ᵀʰᵉʸ ᵈⁱᵈ ᵗʰᵉ ᵐᵒⁿˢᵗᵉʳ ᵐᵃᵗʰ You: What was that? Me: Nothing. Me three hours later in a whisper: ᴵᵗ ʷᵃˢ ᵃ ᵍʳᵃᵛᵉʸᵃʳᵈ ᵍʳᵃᵖʰ

#rreads mystic river by dennis lehane: i don't think you could call this a thriller when it was such an absolute slog. midway thru i was like by god could we be done already??? i think it would have worked if it'd been half as long. also some real questionable victim blaming stuff lol

#rreads memorial by alice oswald: such a great example of why it's called lyric poetry... some beautiful lines and i found that i never got tired of it even though the conceit is the same throughout

#rreads and then there were none: sometimes you just gotta reread a classic. (also we're doing a book club with english second languagers and thought this would be a good, easy intro!)

rach @nopickls.bsky.social and i are doing twin peaks dates on sundays now so i made an image for the occasion

hms terror, babyyyyyy

#rreads the rainbow by yasunari kawabata: had more than a few moments of ah yes male author trying to write female characters, and honestly nothing much happens - not even in a remains of the day kind of subtle emotional way - but the reflective mood of it was nice.

#rreads another country: baldwin's writing is just so lyrical........ will say the misogyny is still there (esp wrt leona i feel like, bordering on SA). the dealing with race and masculinity is so thought provoking. that last convo that vivaldo and ida have!! and what a choice of ending.

#rreads brother. do. you. love. me. ostensibly i know i should be moved but a part of me feels really uneasy about it, almost like the exploitation of his brother's story - which is probably harsh, especially since the care and love is obvious, but i can't shake it

#rreads the little sister / raymond chandler - sometimes u just gotta read a hard boiler. not even for the plot (not particularly memorable) just these turns of phrase! he was quiet, dark and shattered and all the misery of life was in his eyes. bazinga

#rreads pygmalion: as much as I loved my fair lady as a kid the realisation of how tamped down it is re feminism is rattling my bones. some really interesting stuff about class also, although in the back of my head i can remember orwell yelling 'champagne socialist' at shaw in wigan pier.

#rreads where shall i wander (john ashbery) - god, i love the tone and feel of his writing, but i do not understand any of what he's trying to say

#rreads the french lieutenantt's woman: con book damn. was not aware of the metafiction stuff & it blindsided me in a good way! I think I liked it more as an experiment than as a book; I wasn't super interested or invested, but that's probably just my personal prefs showing again

once again thinking of makin the move to storygraph but most people i know are on gr & i just cba to manage two accounts

#rreads in memoriam: as I expected.. trite, verging on YA, unconvincing except in convincing me that i could have written something better. badly paced & the somme as a centrepiece was a massive letdown.. i did like some of the character sketches but a lot of the deaths then felt like cheap shots

[crossposting from twtr] i'm trying to get a poetry/book club going - we're doing a poem sharing next saturday! i'd love to do reads as well at some point. it's mostly terror folks but come hang if you'd like <3 discord.gg/txx9zq3Z

A navel-gazey book roundup! Big Picture Stats: 103 books, 25k pages, with about 6 books that I may or may not finish by the time I post this. (Spoiler: I didn't.) I’d like to make this more of a thing throughout the year (taking a leaf from Dante and Ash) so mute #rreads if you aren’t interested!

From Ted Kooser's book, Cotton Candy: bookshop.org/a/862/978149... #poem #poetry #tedkooser #books #writing

spent the night goin thru my tbr against leicester's holdings & more than half of the ones I want are in the off limits basement bc no one checks them out 🥴

a pox on 'recipe - five stars - wow these look so good I can't wait to try them!' reviewers

tryin to pick a single shot of in the mood for love for film diary is wild bc they are all so good. literally all