Alasse Irena

It was so good! I loved it. Very tense. Quality plot twists all round. Stifling atmosphere.

It was just very well written, and I found the main character sympathetic and relatable and endearing.

The one thing I would probably criticise is that it kept raising the kind of issues that a relationship with a 15 - 20 year age gap is bound to have, and then never really dealt with them.

I suspect there's a bit of product-of-its-time there, and that that seemed a little less questionable when she was writing it. But I don't really know.

My only other thought is, think how much better it could be of they were lesbians... There's a corner of my mind rewriting it already.

Today I unintentionally sat down and read the entirety of Size Zero , a memoir by a French woman who had a brief and somewhat horrifying career as a supermodel and wound up with an eating disorder.

Mostly I am just kind of bemused that I went from idly browsing the library new books display to sitting down for an hour and a half and finishing thing book in one go, given it is not at all my usual genre, and recently I've been having trouble finding the time and motivation to read the (also very readable) autobiographies I must read for my thesis.

I guess it just proves that Literally Anything is more appealing that the thign you have to do.

Anyway, it was quite engaging and quite compelling, so I guess that was an hour and a half unintentionally well-spent.

 Of late I have read:
( I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith )


( Void - Rhiannon Lassiter )

So of late I dragged my girlfriend down into the pit of YA feeeeeelings which is the Raven Cycle, and she is having a lot of fun. She read them all of the books in a very short space of time, and then messaged me with, "Why did I return them? I want to read them again," and then trawled through pages and pages of fic in the hope of fulfilling her desire for more.

This all happened because I was at her place the other day, rereading the Dream Thieves for the purpose of planning a fic (we will see how this goes; I am not the best at finishing projects, but I have high hopes), and I mentioned to her that there was homoerotic drag racing, which was of course, exactly her cup of tea.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that I ordered all three current books on Book Depository, and preordered the final one - and they arrived at my house yesterday! This is very exciting. I have never ordered a book online before, and it's like shopping but without the effort of shopping. You just look at things, and then you click on them, and then they appear. (Okay, so admittedly some of your money goes away in this process also, but less than if I had done it in person, and also I have a job now!) And now I am ready to fill them with sticky notes!

In unrelated things, I keep seeing those soulmates AU posts appear on Tumblr. You know the ones: "imagine if the world was black and white, and you only started seeing in colour when you met your soulmate", "imagine if their first words to you were tattooed on your wrist", "imagine if it was their last words".

You may want to skip the rest of this paragraph if you enjoy those AUs, unless you really want to explain the appeal to me, because I don't get the appeal, and honestly the implications of the soulmates idea make me angry.

The idea that there's a predestined someone out there for you seems....well, for one, it seems like the opposite of romantic, a relationship that only exists because it was predetermined. It's missing all the getting-to-know-each-other and the deciding-if-this-is-right-for-you parts. But then if people try and add any of that gradual developing stuff, it just seems to emphasise the lack of free will. These people aren't into each other yet: they're just here because they know this is their only option for a romantic relationship; it's written in the stars that nothing else will be as good. I am just puzzled. I would much prefer to read a story where two people choose each other, out of all the people they've ever met, because they've looked around and figured out that this relationship is going to be what they want, than one where people meet each other and know immediately that they're going to have to learn to love this person, because no-one else is going to make them feel as strongly.

Romance is just...not magic, or at least, not to me, and I wish more people would start showing it as stories about people who like the way they fit together, rather than stories about people who feel *mystically drawn to each other* or whose relationships were predestined before they even met.