Hello! I’m Citro and you can mostly find me on Fedi over at @citro@blorbo.social! I like sci-fi and fantasy and read a lot of manga too. Also a bunch of non-fiction reference books.
Most of my reviews won’t have rating as I’m deathly allergic to quantifying my enjoyment of any piece of media with a star rating: I might write down some things that personally tugged at me one way or the other in my comments or reviews (and that is when I do leave reviews) but they're mostly for the benefit of future me looking back to that moment.
Things either work for me or they don’t, just like they either work for you or they don’t. It's either no rating, or 5 stars for the books I genuinely hold dearest to my heart, and my five star rating will likely only mean something to you if we have similar tastes/brain worms anyway.
I also reread Storm Constantine’s Wraeththu stories with near religious fervor at least once a year so there’s that too.
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The Grigori are an ancient race; powerful people who possess abilities and powers humans do …
Only just started reading Stalking Tender Prey properly today, intrigued by the characters and turn of the century setting.
Two time-traveling agents from warring futures, working their way through the past, begin to exchange …
Finally finished reading this book! Tempted to reread it as halfway through it felt like this is the kind of book that benefits from it but time runs short in my summer break… Maybe later!
The Hobbit is a tale of high adventure, undertaken by a company of dwarves in …
Started reading this on a break :)
After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where the ghosts and other supernatural …
After the grisly murder of his entire family, a toddler wanders into a graveyard where …
Got a few Neil Gaiman books on Kobo so I’ll be reading them!
In those days the world was flat, and demons dwelt beneath. They walked among the …
A friend gave me this book because what kind of Storm fan am I if I never read Tanith Lee? Really enjoying it! ❤️
Through Yukari’s uncanny purple eyes, all people look just like robots. Her talent is both …
I first read and fell in love with Qualia the Purple sometime during college in one of my insomnia fugues. It was amazing, I finished it sometime in the late hours of the night and went to sleep knowing I’d forget all the Quantum Physics and Qualia and everything else and just stay with the love Gaku had for Yukari.
Fast forward a near decade and I saw it got officially licensed, put the manga on my to buy list and got the novel for Christmas last year. The manga itself went through a lot of mishaps and reorders and I only got to read it 9 months later.
And when I get it it’s a goddamn 618 page brick! I read it all again in two hours! Feeling the exact same way! I’m not so sleep deprived I won’t retain the concepts this time around but it was the …
I first read and fell in love with Qualia the Purple sometime during college in one of my insomnia fugues. It was amazing, I finished it sometime in the late hours of the night and went to sleep knowing I’d forget all the Quantum Physics and Qualia and everything else and just stay with the love Gaku had for Yukari.
Fast forward a near decade and I saw it got officially licensed, put the manga on my to buy list and got the novel for Christmas last year. The manga itself went through a lot of mishaps and reorders and I only got to read it 9 months later.
And when I get it it’s a goddamn 618 page brick! I read it all again in two hours! Feeling the exact same way! I’m not so sleep deprived I won’t retain the concepts this time around but it was the same gut punch and it made me happy!
Qualia the Purple really is the peakest of Yuri. The very essence of it. I just think you should read it. It’s amazing.
The Grigori are an ancient race; powerful people who possess abilities and powers humans do …
LESS GOOOOO, favorite author’s writing on a thing that’s kinda relevant to other interests let’s do thisssss
Content warning First trilogy spoilers
So this book is set in the period between the end of the first part of Enchantments and roughly before the climax of Fulfillments. I think I might make some notes of where each chapter gets slotted because I did want to stop at some point to read Bewitchments and Fulfillments but my vacation is already over at this point :(
Also Lileem my beloved…..
I'd enjoyed the essays I'd read over the years and read this book mostly over the course of a night I could barely sleep for. That might influence some of my following comments.
It's fun to me how I actually manage to disagree with some of the advice, genuinely not because I think I'm in any way better, I'm really not, but this book is very much Chuck Palahniuk's (and Tom Spanbauer's) approach to fiction writing and publishing goals - and Chuck warns as much right from the start! - so understandably there were certain things that didn't resonate with me (an hobbyist fan fiction writer - and I will return to that) or found quite odd actually - and in fact I can think of a whole school of authors who are not at all worse for the way they very much don't approach writing and teaching it like …
I'd enjoyed the essays I'd read over the years and read this book mostly over the course of a night I could barely sleep for. That might influence some of my following comments.
It's fun to me how I actually manage to disagree with some of the advice, genuinely not because I think I'm in any way better, I'm really not, but this book is very much Chuck Palahniuk's (and Tom Spanbauer's) approach to fiction writing and publishing goals - and Chuck warns as much right from the start! - so understandably there were certain things that didn't resonate with me (an hobbyist fan fiction writer - and I will return to that) or found quite odd actually - and in fact I can think of a whole school of authors who are not at all worse for the way they very much don't approach writing and teaching it like Chuck Palahniuk does.
Palahniuk's voice is very strong in this book that's part a collection of his writing advice essays, part episodic autobiography. I think it cements the advice as - while interesting for anyone to observe - not actual gospel. This is advice that's good for fiction writing but some of it is also for publishing, for the reader's reaction: In "Textures: Depict a Social Model through Repetition" I was left thinking that I don't want to write to captivate the kind of audience that takes Fight Club's rules as something to in any way emulate in real life - and frankly, specially with the context of a story further down the book, I don't think Palahniuk wanted to either, but he correctly pointed out that readers do love that shit, it does work and if it works well enough it can even pay your rent, so I understand his choice of not directly denouncing it.
It just felt a little sad, really.
I think for some people that strength of voice is going to be a negative. Palahniuk himself says he doesn't strive to be likeable, and it does kinda show, in a prickly sort of fashion. But with all the anecdotes (some quite messed up frankly, american book tours are something else) and advice I walked out of the book with a healthy respect for the man. Sure he might think slash fiction is a raunchy, absurd genre but as a slash fanfiction writer? Yeah it is! And it's why I like it but he personally doesn't - or at least it sure didn't look like he did to me - but because I've also seen him preach that good writing isn't about making the writer look good, I was left feeling that he at the very least respects it too, specially when it doesn't pull punches, and not pulling punches is a big part of what he teaches indeed.
In my novel Beautiful You I used space breaks instead of chapter breaks because I wanted to mimic the appearance of mass-market pornographic paperback books. In 1984 Orwell mentions pornographic novels written by machine for the proletariat - that and the raunchy, absurd genre of "Slash" fiction inspired me to mimic their use of white space for transitions.
— Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different by Chuck Palahniuk (11%)
Cut to me, reading this book to write my slash fanfiction gooder. 😅
One time, Flick said, “What do you want from this?”
And Cal replied, “Everything I'm getting.”
Flick wasn't quite sure what that was, but despite his earlier resolution, he was playing Cal's game, so much so he found himself saying, “Where else, Cal? Where else do you want to go around here?”
They were lying in the fodder loft above the stables, where once Cal had surprised Pell while he'd been working. He and Flick had rolled in the lingering atoms of earlier love. “I don't know,” Cal replied. “Where else is there?”
Flick pondered. Between them, they'd drunk a lot of wine and it was almost dawn. “There's only one other place I can think of,” he said. “Orien's house.”
“We were never together there.”
“I know, but it was where Orien trained Pell in the arts of aruna magic.”
Cal laughed. “You know what that means?”
Flick didn't like the tone of the laugh. “No. What?”
“I have to have Orien there, not you.” He narrowed his eyes. “Maybe I was waiting for a sign. Maybe you're an oracle. Maybe it won't be there.”
It was too late to take the words back. It was as if the whole time, from when Cal had first arrived, Flick had been manoeuvred into this moment, to say those words. They could never be taken back.
— The Wraiths Of Will And Pleasure The First Book Of The Wraeththu Histories by Storm Constantine (12%)
Sometimes Storm’s prose and characterization makes me happy and this is one of those times.
Content warning Spoilers for Fulfillments of Fate and Desire
“I once wanted to find Immanion, the Gelaming city,” Cal said. “I wanted to find it with Pell, to find Paradise. Take me there. Now.”
Flick laughed softly. “Cal, from what I know of you, I suspect you're quite capable of being king of Immanion one day. You could flirt your way there.” He lowered his head and breathed over Cal's closed eyes. He slid a hand over Cal's starved flank. “We have small paradises,” he said. “This is one of them.”
— The Wraiths Of Will And Pleasure The First Book Of The Wraeththu Histories by Storm Constantine (11%)
Ah, the joys of writing books set chronologically before your earlier books.
Get me going to the beach for long enough and I’ll just (re)read Storm Constantine eventually - reading this in preparation for the Grimoire Dehara but also experimenting with reading this right after The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit for a more chronological experience of the Mythos - So far (in chapter 5, there will be timeskips in the future and I might start Bewitchments then.) it’s been a very interesting perspective.
