💾 Archived View for bluet.flounder.online › december24.gmi captured on 2024-12-17 at 09:23:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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12122024. hello flounder
semester is over. no trip this year. recently i reread last year's happy december flounders from i visited [college town and dear friends] which i had planned to do again this year but D forgot i was coming and made plans which they offered to cancel, but no one who really wants someone to visit them says "i made plans but i can cancel." so i'm visiting my parents instead
last night i read "anyone's ghost" by august thompson. it was beautiful and made me want to reread "a home at the end of the world." it also made me curious about listening to metallica but i got over that quickly
sometimes i feel really annoyed by the way people write about books. like this goodreads comment for example
If you're looking for a read that combines hauntingly beautiful prose with a gripping narrative, Anyone's Ghost by August Thompson is the book for you. Thompson has weaved an intricate, emotional story that keeps you hooked from the first page to the last. The characters are richly drawn, each with their own unique depth that makes them feel incredibly real.
you could sub in like any title into this review. i think people sometimes overthink it when they're writing book reviews and lean on language that they lifted from other book reviews. you actually don't even have to describe books in terms of how "richly drawn" the characters are or how "gripping" the narrative is. you can actually just talk about the characters and the narrative themselves
another thing that i think is kind of related: recently i was trying to figure out if a certain title included alcoholism as a strong theme, and in what way (to decide if it should go on a certain book list). i searched its goodreads reviews by the term "alcohol" and it pulled up a bunch of reviews but in almost every instance it was just a user including "alcohol" in a long list of content warnings with no further engagement, no reflection on the theme itself. if everyone is on goodreads just independently making determinations of how "richly drawn" and "gripping" various aspects of the story are and tagging content warnings then what's the point. the quality of user reviews doesn't get much better on book instagram, a part of instagram that instagram thinks i want to be on. it's just people being like "this book wrecked me. so tender" (fiction) or "radical honesty. hard-won wisdom" (memoir). get me out of there