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#just classic lit things
paris-in-space · 3 months
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When your husband forces you to come outside even though it’s freezing.
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roppiepop · 2 years
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And then they started a book club.
((Click for better resolution!!! otl))
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fairydrowning · 1 year
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Rumi was right when he said "Do not try to explain. They will only understand you as much as they see and hear."
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ayphyx · 1 year
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The bros K
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i think that a les mis daily would work because. it's literally 365 chapters. we can't do it this year but—hold that train of thought actually someone already made a substack. i think that this needs to happen next year for my sake perhaps
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fereldanwench · 21 days
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OC Interview - Valerie Powell
I was tagged by @gloryride forever ago to interview my girl--Thank you, bb! I'm so late to doing this that I'm not gonna tag anyone else, but feel free to yoink it if you wanna do it!
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[Answers are directly from Valerie's POV before the heist in 2077.]
.ೃ࿔*:・ NAME?
Valerie Irene Powell. [laughs] Yeah, my initials are VIP. My dad had a dorky sense of humor, and my mom let him get away with it. "Irene" is my great-grandmother's first name on her side of the family.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ NICKNAME?
Pretty much just "V" these days, which was all Jackie's doing. A lot of the staff and some regulars at Nishimura's used to call me "Blue," but that was ages ago. Overly familiar acquaintances who don't know me well but think they do usually call me "Val."
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.ೃ࿔*:・ GENDER?
Biologically female, no gender alterations or augmentations.
A/N - Valerie is a cis woman, but I don't see that specific language being in her vernacular.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ STAR SIGN?
I was born in Night City on October 12 2041. Misty tells me that makes me a, uh--Hey, Misty, what am I again?
[Misty, calling from the other room: Libra Sun with a Taurus Moon and Scorpio Rising!]
Yeah, that. [laughs] Whatever the hell that even means.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ HEIGHT?
Tall. 5'10" or 178 cm. And I admit I have a weakness for a sexy pair of heels, so I usually look a lot taller.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ ORIENTATION?
People are out here fucking cyborgs with four eyes and chicks with gold dicks and electric nipples--What does this even mean? [laughs] I've never given it much thought. I like what I like, and I've liked a lot of different types of people with a lot of different things going on. [laughs again]
A/N: I say Valerie is bi, because that is the contemporary real-life word that best reflects her sexuality for me when I'm talking about her, but when I was really thinking about it from her POV and in the context of her world, I don't think she'd be too hung up on a label. She'd also probably see her wide spectrum of attraction as closer to the default, not the exception.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ NATIONALITY/ETHNICITY?
I'm a typical American mutt. My dad's side of the family can mostly be traced back to Western Europe--my grandmother told me "Powell" is an Anglicized form of an old Welsh surname--and my mom's side is from the Eastern Mediterranean. Dad's side has been in NUSA for a long time (like two centuries before it was even called NUSA), but Mom's family has only been here for a few generations.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ FAVE FRUIT?
I just love fresh fruit. It's such a rare treat in Night City--I'll take fresh strawberries or melons over any other kind of sweet treat.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ FAVE SEASON?
Spring! When everything starts turning green and flowers are blooming. There aren't a ton of places in Night City where you can really experience that, but I know a few hidden gems.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ FAVE FLOWER?
Hydrangeas, probably. Especially the blue and purple ones. Oh, and wisteria! A tree covered in blooming wisteria is one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ FAVE SCENT?
Freshly brewed coffee; new car smell; woodsy, smokey colognes and perfumes; real leather; whatever incense Misty uses in her shop; clothes right out of the dryer; lavender; a ton more that I know I'm forgetting!
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.ೃ࿔*:・ COFFEE, TEA, OR HOT CHOCOLATE?
Strong coffee, black, maybe a little sugar if I'm feeling indulgent. Tea is nice, but it's not my caffeine fix. I like a cup of lavender or chamomile tea at night. Hot chocolate is too heavy and rich for my taste. A sip is nice, but I could never finish a cup.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ AVERAGE HOURS OF SLEEP?
I try not to get any fewer than 6 hours, but that's easier said than done some nights. Okay, most nights.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ DOG OR CAT PERSON?
You know, I've only ever seen one dog in person. A childhood friend's family had one--I don't know the breed, but it was a yippy little shit and it bit me! Never really wanted to see another dog, if I'm honest.
I like cats, though. There's a stray that hangs by Misty's place--He's the sweetest little guy. I picked up a bag of kibble we keep there to feed him when he comes around.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ DREAM TRIP?
I've actually traveled a lot--My parents had to go to Biotechnica's HQ in Rome a few times when I was a kid, and they usually turned those trips into an excuse to have an extended European vacation. And I went all over the globe working for Arasaka for 7 years. I'd love to go back to Japan for non-work reasons.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ FAVORITE FICTIONAL CHARACTER?
You're gonna laugh, it's so predictable. In my defense, I can't remember the last time I watched or read anything new--Actually, that's not true. Jackie made me watch one of those Bushido movies last week, and I just don't get it. Anyway. It's Elizabeth Bennet. Don't look at me--What's the next question?
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.ೃ࿔*:・ NUMBER OF BLANKETS YOU SLEEP WITH?
Just a sheet and comforter.
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.ೃ࿔*:・ RANDOM FACT?
Oh, no, don't put me on the spot like this! [laughs] Um, okay, I shot my first firearm when I was about 7. Under intense adult supervision--My dad was really serious about self-defense and the right to bear arms, which always surprised people because he came across as such a meek science nerd. I didn't like it--It was so loud, even with earmuffs. Funny how things change.
Is that kind of a heavy note to leave on? [laughs again] Okay, how about this one: I can't roll my tongue.
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girlboss-girlblog · 2 months
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him: what are your hobbies?
me:
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pocketsizedquasar · 9 months
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the symphony
(ID: a photo of a sketchbook page with two portrait marker drawings: one of captain ahab, and one of starbuck, from moby dick. both of them are bathed in sunlight, and looking at the viewer (presumably at each other) with desperate expressions.
ahab is a middle aged arab man with warm brown skin and curly dark hair, with a thick beard and scars dotting his face. he is wearing a blue collared shirt. starbuck is a middle aged white man with light freckled skin, curly reddish hair, and a mustache and light stubble. he is wearing a white collared shirt and a waistcoat.
the next two images are closeups on ahab, then starbuck)
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autismmydearwatson · 1 year
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You are capable of amazing things when you learn to read and enjoy Shakespeare on your own, instead of being force fed literature by shitty teachers and borrowing opinions from edgy kids on social media and pop culture.
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possessedbydevils · 5 months
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Hate how much the term "literature" is general now. TikTok is killing me. I saw someone compare The Secret History to Brother Karamazov and call Song Of Achilles literature. I'm dying.
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rivilu · 4 months
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Vampire familiars are so fucking interesting by the way. Both in a Watsonian 'who are you, what brought you here, why do you STAY in this position, what keeps you' way and a Doylist ''how did we go from R. M. 'tried to take down Dracula with his bare hands when he realized he was getting scammed' Renfield to the current common interpretation of vampire familiars as complete pushovers' way
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eatingfiction · 2 years
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my favourite things // books: the blue castle by l.m. montgomery
beautiful classic 1920s novel
a lesser-known work from the author of anne of green gables
valancy, an old maid at 29 (lol), is perfectly well-behaved and utterly miserable. she gets diagnosed with a terminal illness and says screw it, I'm gonna live what little life I have left (to the horrors of her family)
enrapturing and wondrous
a genuine love of nature in the descriptions
a lush romantic mood
she has two cats named banjo and good luck. my beloveds
only under the threat of death does she truly live
“isn't it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up? before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. that would be worth the pain.”
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queenlucythevaliant · 11 days
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Northern Lights
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I heard a voice that cried, “Balder the Beautiful is dead, is dead!” 
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Who knows what to call the lonely exhilaration of gazing out into a bright Northern sky? Who can name it? 
Jill could.
It was the same feeling that came to her at the teetering edge of a cliff at the end of the world. The same feeling as when she said her goodbyes to Puddleglum and Scrubb before they freed the prince. It was the same feeling that engulfed her now, sitting in the professor’s library with a volume of poetry before her. 
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The wild northern wastes were well named: utterly wild, perfectly desolate, and terribly Northern. 
It was lonely there and often cold, but the sky was an endless whorl of gales and gray clouds. The stones were indigo under the pale winter sunlight, and at sunset they glowed a soft gold, as though lit from within. The gorges and moors lay before her, and Jill loved them for their vastness and their distance. Little grew in that country, but that which did was full of vigor. The grass was short and coarse. Every tree was victorious. 
On a still, deep breathing winter night, Jill lay on her back beneath a covering sky. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it until her tears began to blind her. Yet even then, she still couldn’t look away.
She felt bigger here in the wastes, like the landscape. Stronger, wider. The further she walked, the more she felt herself stretch out. One of these days, maybe, she would catch hold of herself at edge and tug, and Jill Pole would open up clear as the Northern sky. 
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And through the misty air passed the mournful cry of sunward sailing cranes.
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The thing that surprised Jill most about the battle with the serpent was this: there wasn’t any yelling. Always, it seemed, whenever she read stories about people fighting with swords, the combatants would let loose some guttural yell before their blows fell. They would scream and writhe in pain as they died. They would shout instructions to their fellows, “Look out!” or “Hit him there!” But the whole affair with the serpent passed with very little noise. 
The poison-green coil constricted around the prince; he raised his arms and got clear, struck the serpent hard, and then Scrubb and Puddleglum dispatched the creature with heavy, hacking blows. The monster died writhing, but not screaming. And then it was over. 
The thing that surprised Jill most about the moments before battle was, of course, the noise. She could hear her own heartbeat in her ears. She couldn’t stop listening to her own breathing. Every footstep rang out like a gong, and any words exchanged rang with a kind of finality that made them sound louder than anything. 
“You are of high courage,” Rilian told her when it was over. 
Yet the thing in Jill’s chest just then didn’t feel like courage. It was a deep breath, a plunge, and a release. It was loud and quiet all at once, till she was standing, blinking in the night air as snowballs whizzed round her, and maybe that was something like courage after all. 
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And now, there was a stirring in her chest as she reread the words on the page. Sing no more / O ye bards of the North / Of Vikings and of Jarls! / Of the days of the Eld / preserve the freedom only / nor the deeds of blood! 
She thought of grief. Of freedom. 
The lonely ache in her belly grew stronger. She felt herself uplifted into the huge regions of sky that were just beyond those cliffs, weightless as the breath beneath her buoyed her up, further, further…
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When she saw Caspian up close, Jill thought that he looked like the sort of person who was meant to live in a castle. A silly thought, perhaps, since she knew he was a king– only she wasn’t thinking of Cair Paravel. No, Jill was picturing the ruins of an old British castle she’d visited once on holiday. She still remembered how the stonework had loomed over her, all towering arches and crumbling walls. That was where Caspian seemed to belong. He had an air of ancient tragedy about him. 
When Rilian disappeared, all things had wept but one. The serpent coiled beneath the earth and flicked its forked tongue, spewing poison. 
Now, the king half rose to bless his son. He whispered a few words as he caressed Rilian’s cheek, words meant only for those beloved ears. Jill saw Caspian’s lips move and wondered what a man like that could possibly say, when time ran so short. 
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They laid him in his ship, with horse and harness, as on a funeral pyre. Odin placed a ring upon his finger, and whispered in his ear.
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Jill furtively took Myths of the Northmen and held it up to the professor with a question in her eyes. She was still shy around him and Miss Plummer, though she wished she wasn’t. 
“Would you like to take that with you?”
“...Please.”
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It takes a certain kind of person to be exhilarated by the heights. You’ve got to love vastness more than you fear falling. 
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They walked to the train station with an autumn wind blowing hard, and though Jill couldn’t fathom why, she turned and saw Lucy grinning, fierce and joyful– grinning and reaching a hand out towards her friend.
Jill reached back and grabbed it. “What will you do, once we’re back in Narnia?” she asked. 
The wind blew harder. The feeling of anticipation grew and grew, until it felt so big that she couldn’t dream of containing it. And there was Lucy, holding Jill’s hand and laughing like it was easy.
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Preserve the freedom only, not the deeds of blood!
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The second time Jill went to Narnia, she found herself not at its edge, but at its end. 
The thing about the Norse apocalypse is: it feels believable. It doesn’t reach beyond earth’s horizon to pull down hope beyond hope. It’s only the kind of courage that hopeless humans have: you are going to die, so you might as well die bravely. 
They found the last king of Narnia bound to a tree. His eyes were faintly red from crying, and his wrists and ankles red from the coarseness of his fetters. 
In the Norse myths, Loki broke free of his fetters at the end of the world. He escaped to the helm of a ship made from the fingernails of the dead.
The last king of Narnia fell forward onto the ground when Eustace cut his bonds. Jill crouched down beside him and watched as he rubbed feeling back into his legs. He wasn’t so much older than her, she thought. Jill was sixteen years old; the last king of Narnia could not be older than twenty-two. 
In the myths, the gods were ancient, hewn from the bodies of giants old as the earth. 
Jill put out a hand and helped the last king of Narnia to his feet. Not for the last time, she shivered. Something deep inside her (deeper than her chest, than her heart, than the marrow of her bones, deep as her soul, deeper) was singing an elegy and she didn’t know why, or how, or where it had come from. The king clutching her hand, who could have been her older brother, would have no heir.
Yet when he asked, “Will you come with me?” Jill could only smile. 
“Of course,” she said. “It’s you we’ve come to help.”
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And the voice forever cried, "Balder the Beautiful is dead, is dead!"
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“This really is Narnia at last,” murmured Jill. The springtime wood had little in common with the wintry lands she had traveled the last time she was here– but it awakened the same feelings of Northernness in her chest. 
Their party may as well have been the only people in the world, for how isolated their little wooden path seemed. Yet it wasn’t lonely, really, cocooned in all that green with the wind in the leaves and the primroses nodding and blue of the sky peeking through above. 
Jewel told stories about what ordinary life was like when there was peace here. As he spoke, Jill could almost hear the trees' voices speaking out of the living past, whispering, stay, stay. She was caught up to a great height, looking down across a rich, lovely plain full of woods and waters and cornfields, which spread away and away till it got thin and misty from distance. 
“Oh Jewel–” Jill said with a dreamy sigh, “wouldn’t it be lovely if Narnia just went on and on– like what you say it has been?”
She needn’t be a queen, as Susan and Lucy had been, but Jill would’ve liked to stay. She would've liked it all to stay, if it could. She might have been a woodmaid in a place like this: with the turn of the seasons, the swaying trees, swords into plowshares. Oh, if only she could stay!
Ahead, the last king of Narnia was softly singing a marching song. Jill tilted her head back and let warm shafts of sun caress her face. 
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I saw the pallid corpse of the dead sun borne through the Northern sky.
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“So,” said the last king of Narnia, “Narnia is no more.”
He tried to send them back. Jill shook her head. It was very loud and very quiet. “No, no, no, we won’t. I don’t care what you say. We’re going to stick by you whatever happens, aren’t we Eustace?”
They couldn’t go back anyway. Neither would they flee, not south across the mountains nor North into the great wide wastes. No, they would stay. They slept in a holly grove on the edge of ruin, waiting for the bonfires to light.
Jill slept fitfully, but in between she dreamed. She was high up in the air, buffeted by clouds and pierced by shafts of silver sunlight. 
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They all died, in the myths. Jill knew that. It seemed beautiful and brave when she read it in her book, tucked away safe in the Professor’s library. It was terrifying now– and yet it was beautiful and brave still.
The dogs came bounding up, every one of them, running up to the king and his men with their tails wagging. One of them leapt at Jill and licked her face, tongue roughly lapping up the sweat and tears that had dried on her cheeks. 
“Show us how to help, show us how, how, how!” the dogs were barking, almost ebullient in their enthusiasm. Jill bit back a sob. How lovely, she thought. How terribly beautiful. How dreadfully brave. 
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So perish the old Gods!
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The white rock gleamed like a moon in the darkness when Jill finally reached it. She ran back to it alone, her hands shaking, while her friends stayed forward with their gleaming swords and Jewel’s indigo horn.
The while rock gleamed like the moon. Jill’s first shot flew wide and landed in the soft grass. But she had another arrow on her string the next instant. It was speed that mattered, not aim. Speed, and turning aside when she cried, so as not to drip tears on her bowstring.
The white rock gleamed. In the myths, a wolf devoured the moon. Peter’s wolf, slain many thousand years ago in this world, opened his jaw wide and darkness fell over everything.
Her next arrow found its mark. After that, she lost track. She pulled, and she prayed that her hands kept still another minute. 
The unique thing–maybe the appealing thing–about the Norse myths, was that they told men to serve gods who were admittedly fighting with their backs to the wall and would certainly be defeated in the end. Jill let loose another arrow, felt the white rock at her back, and she knew that the clawing fear–beauty–bravery deep in her gut was the same feeling that she felt on the heights. The same feeling, but a different face. You’ve got to love vastness more than you fear falling. 
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“I feel in my bones,” said Poggin, “that we shall all, one by one, pass through that dark door before morning. I can think of a hundred deaths that I would rather have died.”
“It is indeed a grim door,” said Tirian. “It is more like a mouth.” 
“Oh, can’t we do anything to stop it,” said Jill. Better to be dashed to the ground than it was to be devoured. 
“Nay, fair friend,” said Jewel. “It may be for us the door to Aslan’s country and we sup at his table tonight.”
A hand tangled itself in her hair and started to pull. Jill braced herself hard, for a moment, until her strength gave out. She was standing on the edge of a high, Northern cliff. She took another step, and fell.
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Perhaps when the moment comes, our bite will prove better than our howls. If not, we shall have to confess that two millennia of Christianity have not yet brought us to the level of the Stoics and Vikings. For the worst (according to the flesh) that a Christian need face is to die in Christ and rise in Christ; some were content to die, and not to rise, with Father Odin.
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The world inside the stable was beautiful. It made Jill’s chest ache in all the loveliest ways. 
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Build it again, O ye bards, fairer than before!
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meursaultapologist · 2 months
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REAL picture of me on a date with Kafka !! (Not clickbait)
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ooh-daddy · 6 months
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frankenstein is a very sad book so far 😞 something something the consequences of your actions always in your periphery something something playing god for months only to realize the true horror of creation and know in the second that it’s finally too late that you fucked up. something something knowing you hold the power in your hands and there’s no going back
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romeoisalesbian · 2 months
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oh hey! its polonius' boy! i hope hes having a great day and nothing bad happens to him :)
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