“No,” said Valkyrie. “What do we do now? We’re partners. You’re my best friend. I love you. You were my … I looked up to you. What am I supposed to do“No,” said Valkyrie. “What do we do now? We’re partners. You’re my best friend. I love you. You were my … I looked up to you. What am I supposed to do now?” He turned away. “You need to find yourself a new hero.”
What's your favourite Skulduggery book and why is it Death Bringer?
girl sitting next to me on the bus was reading a skulduggery pleasant book (couldn’t figure out which one exactly but it was phase ii so it’s whatever who cares) and my brain immediately started getting nostalgic and demanded a reread of the best Skulduggery Pleasant book and i am unfortunately a slave to my own desires so i bought the kindle version of this book that i already own five minutes later.
Death Bringer continues being the best SP book and quite frankly the best fantasy book and also quite frankly the best book ever written period. I hate to give it to Derek cause i have major beef with him for fucking up my favourite series by not letting it fucking die and dragging it on way past its natural god given conclusion (book 9) but unfortunately this book slaps so hard - it’s perfect, it’s everything, i think about it all the time, it’s been fourteen fucking years and i still hold my breath reading that one chapter. undefeated. i wish every book was death bringer....more
I remember that as a kid Mortal Coil was one of my least favourite Phase I books (that's when I didn't know what a dumpster fire Phase II would Reread
I remember that as a kid Mortal Coil was one of my least favourite Phase I books (that's when I didn't know what a dumpster fire Phase II would be lmao). That didn't stop me from reading it a thousand times though.
I think I just wasn't into the whole Remnants thing but I can't really explain why.
Re-reading it as an adult, I am not sure I agree with kid me. I had a lot of fun and there were just so many great scenes in this particular book and Skulduggery's and Valkyries relationship really shone. Every interaction between them *chefs kiss*. Especially the whole "You are keeping something from me and that ends now"-scene.
"I want you all to know," Skulduggery said, "that we are the first line of defence. In fact, we're practically the only line of defence. If we fail, t"I want you all to know," Skulduggery said, "that we are the first line of defence. In fact, we're practically the only line of defence. If we fail, there won't be a whole lot anyone else will be able to do. What I'm trying to say is that failure at this point isn't really the smart move to make. We are not to fail, do I make myself absolutely clear? Failure is bad, it won't help us in the short term and certainly won't do us any favours in the long run, and I think I've lost track of this speech, and I'm not too sure where it's headed. But I know where it started and that's what you've got to keep in mind. Has anyone seen my hat?"
He's an idiot and I LOVE him.
*reread this for the first time since like 2012*...more
I literally finished this 5 minutes ago and I don't even remember the main character's name! I literally finished this 5 minutes ago and I don't even remember the main character's name! ...more
“And the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.” - Richard Siken
Reading count: 4 (12/2021)
--- Revie
“And the gentleness that comes, not from the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it.” - Richard Siken
Reading count: 4 (12/2021)
--- Review after 3rd read
This review will definitely contain spoilers, especially at the end.
Reading for the 3rd time is not a status update anyone thought they would ever see when it comes to this book, least of all me.
I first read A Little Life in February 2020. I started re-reading it in the same month. It took me 5 days to read it for the first time. It took me 8 months to finish it the second time. This third time it took me 3 months.
Why would I re-read the book that famously makes people sob their hearts out and that actually brings strangers flocking into your reading updates to warn you about the abysmal amount of trigger warnings? I could make a joke here, but I don’t think this is the place to joke.
The amount of love I feel for this book is impossible to describe. I know why I love it. I know exactly how it makes me feel. I know what draws me to this feeling again and again. I know why I keep thinking about it. I know why I have read it three times. And I know why I will inevitably read it again very soon. But I can’t put it into words. I never could. I don’t think I will ever be able to.
"If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more." (Jane Austen)
And yet, I have always wanted to write a long review about my feelings for this book. But how to do that, if you can’t put them into words, into a language that makes any kind of sense. How can I let you know what I experience while reading this book, in written word alone, if the only conceivable course of action would be to let you grab into my rib cage to touch my heart and to feel the pure pain but also the pure feeling of hope and comfort for yourself?
A Little Life is not an easy book to read, as many people will tell you. It is full of pain, of suffering. When people talk about A Little Life it seems like the very idea of joy is inconceivable.
Bad things happen in this story. Its exploration of trauma is deep and vast and seems to seep into every sad and happy moment. Every time you think a door opens for better times to come, it gets slammed shut in your face. With your hand stuck in the door frame. For maximum agony. Even seemingly happy sentences have sad undertones. I have written “This is the worst line in the entire book.“ in the margins multiple times.
“You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?“ (Richard Siken)
Knowing all this, the sheer amount of comfort I draw from this book doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t even make sense to me.
And yet.
Emily Dickinson once supposedly said:
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?“
A Little Life is sad. It makes me feel very defeated. Reading it is equal to getting punched in the gut repeatedly. Some lines and scenes are so horrible they make my breathing stop. They make me feel physical pain. It’s what I Imagine it would feel like if someone just grabbed my heart and started twisting. It’s a very visceral reaction. If you are in the room while I’m reading it you will know that something is horribly wrong and I don’t just mean the fact that I have tears streaming down my face on every other page. I just think that my emotional pain is as noticable as someone breaking their entire arm in front of you would be.
How is this a good thing? Well, first of all, I just really like reading books that make me feel. And I think the deepest feelings anyone can experience are ultimately sad ones. So I would rather read a book that makes me feel like I’ve been cut open with a knife than read something I have no feelings about. Ultimately, I read to experience pain. If it doesn’t feel gut and heart wrenching then I don’t want it. If it doesn’t give me ten panic attacks, it’s not a five star read.
Is there something genuinely wrong with me? Probably. But there’s also something about controlled sadness that a book can provide you that real life sadness just can’t. Like I don’t want to be sad in real life, that’s a horrible feeling. But book sadness is just not the same thing. Like, I am willingly subjecting myself to it and I just like to have this ounce of control: the ability to experience deep emotions in a controlled setting without any real repercussions.
I just really like to feel, is my point. I feel like we as a society try to control our emotions so much on a day to day basis that just letting go and experiencing something so deep is actually… good.
Another thing is that, I don’t think A Little Life is just sad. It talks a lot about relationships. Actually the entire book is just a study of human relationships. Some of them are horrible, bad, horrific - yeah definitely – but a lot of them are actually good. And some are the purest form of human connection there is.
Jude actually mentions this entire thing himself.
"On he plays, his recriminations beating a rhythm in his head. But then he also thinks: If I had never met Willem. If I had never met Harold. If I had never met Julia, or Andy, or Malcolm, or JB, or Richard, or Lucien, or so many other people: Rhodes and Citizen and Phaedra and Elijah. The Henry Youngs. Sanjay. All the most terrifying Ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well."
The human connections in this – the good ones, obviously, the ones Jude makes later in his life, after his 15th birthday – are beautiful. They are very hopeful. They show you how good people can be. They also show that even when bad things have happened to you, you are still deserving of love. This may be hard to accept, as it is for Jude, but it is true. Not only love, but just general happiness.
“You see, Jude, in life, sometimes nice things happen to good people. You don’t need to worry—they don’t happen as often as they should. But when they do, it’s up to the good people to just say ‘thank you,’ and move on, and maybe consider that the person who’s doing the nice thing gets a bang out of it as well, and really isn’t in the mood to hear all the reasons that the person for whom he’s done the nice thing doesn’t think he deserves it or isn’t worthy of it.”
“Willem“, I ask you, "do you feel like I do? Do you think he was happy with me?“ Because he deserved happiness. We aren’t guaranteed it, none of us are, but he deserved it.“
It does also help that some characters in this are the purest human beings imaginable. Do they make mistakes? Yes. But they are also so good to Jude. You know they love him. You can feel that they love him.
Harold and Willem have so many lines that just make my heart ache. They try so hard. They try so hard to be a good friend/parent/partner to Jude even when he doesn’t really make it easy for them. Because obviously he doesn’t, his distrust of closeness and the intentions of others is so deep because of his trauma – and yet they never give up on him. He doesn’t even tell them about his childhood for several years and they just accept it, because they love him, because they care about him no matter what. The unconditionality of their love gets me every time.
It is also very much life-like. It is literally called A Little Life, and while this is also a reference to something else in this, something much less poetic than what I am to go on about, it is also pretty much a metaphor for … life.
Disregarding the first 15 years, Jude’s life later on, except for some instances, is indeed a happy one. There is a whole section titled „The Happy Years“. And they are, they are happy.
And even the years before that, even if there are like setbacks and illnesses and fights with your friends and falling outs – that’s just what life is like: there is sadness in between your happy moments. And there are also happy moments in between your sadness.
So I think, in a way the sadness and pain in this is kinda relatable. Not on the specifics, but on a general scale. Have you never experienced something good but at the same time some more or less inexplicable sadness? Like you’ll be happy but then it just hits you out of nowhere. Maybe it’s a remnant of past trauma or something, maybe it’s a sense of nostalgia for an experience, a feeling, a person from years back or maybe it is indeed just something you can’t put into words and doesn’t necessarily make sense to you. Reading this is kinda like that? Being happy but getting that taken away from you. It’s a very humbling feeling. But it also just hits.
Also, ultimately – and SPOILERS !!!
- this doesn’t end well. Jude does in the end kill himself. Despite the love and friendship he experiences, despite him literally making it seem like he would try again, like things might actually look up for him …
"But maybe, he thinks, maybe it isn’t too late. Maybe he can pretend one more time, and this last bout of pretending will change things for him, will make him into the person he might have been. He is fifty-one; he is old. But maybe he still has time. Maybe he can still be repaired.“
“He could leave, he knows. […] But he doesn’t. Instead he goes the other direction, and returns to the office, where Dr. Loehmann is still sitting in his chair, waiting for him. “Jude,” says Dr. Loehmann. “You’ve come back.” He takes a breath. “Yes,” he says. “I’ve decided to stay.”
… he does kill himself.
Because in the end, his trauma was too big. And probably also because he got help too late. Because maybe he should have been made to talk way earlier about this as it just got harder and harder the more years he allowed to pass down the line.
Worst of all, he dies believing the worst things about himself. Cause even though people who knew, or at least could have guessed, tried to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, he just never managed to believe them.
“That he died so alone is more than I can think of; that he died thinking that he owed us an apology is worse; that he died still stubbornly believing everything he was taught about himself—after you, after me, after all of us who loved him—makes me think that my life has been a failure after all, that I have failed at the one thing that counted. [...] It isn’t only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.“
This isn’t a happy life lesson to end with. It’s like "Oh look, even though things might look brighter and there are people who love you, you will never be able to shake off your bad experiences and they will haunt you for many years down the line until they eventually kill you. Rejoice!“
But I feel like, it’s very real? Not saying that this is the way it has to end for everyone who has experienced something horrible in their life (please go to therapy, Jude is not a role model here). What I’m saying is that it makes sense to end the story that way. If it had ended with Jude being happy and not wanting to kill or actively harm himself ever again, that would not have made any sense. It has to end this way because life – for him – was just too much and his trauma never something he was able to deal with. Especially not after loosing his best friend and love of his life.
All in all, A Little Life is definitely not the happiest story on this planet, I can admit that, but there is comfort in pain – at least for me.
"But back then, back on Lispenard Street, I didn’t know so much of this. Then, we were only standing and looking up at that red-brick building, and I was pretending that I never had to fear for him, and he was letting me pretend this: that all the dangerous things he could have done, all the ways he could have broken my heart, were in the past, the stuff of stories, that the time that lay behind us was scary, but the time that lay ahead of us was not.
“You jumped off the roof?” I repeated. “Why on earth would you have done such a thing?” “It’s a good story,” he said. He even grinned at me. “I’ll tell you.” “Please,” I said. And then he did."
--- 2nd read
You never make me happy, but you can always make me sad.
I still can't believe that my first instinct after finishing this back in February was to re-read it immediately. It did take me 8 months to finish it a second time though but it really made me aware that I'm apparently a masochist.
Also: I put a post-it in for every time I cried and I counted 91 post-its so that's great. --- this book ends on page 690 of 814. the rest doesn't exist. i refuse to accept it. the last hundred pages of this book are cancelled.
--- 1st read
The e-book version of this that I've got had around 1800 pages (a fact that had me nearly falling out of my bed) and I've finished it in five days, hardly doing anything else except reading and sobbing.
After finishing my e-book I got out and got myself a physical copy and been rereading this book ever since. In a much much slower pace because let's be real here, there's only so much crying I can handle and I actually have to mentally prepare myself for some scenes, now that I know they are coming.
I'm a firm believer in that sometimes books will find you at a time in your life where you desperately need them and this one really came for me during such a time.
Needless to say it's my most favourite book ever. I don't think I will ever find a book that will touch me as much as A Little Life did. I still think about it daily (and it's been a few months) and mention it to anyone at any time, even if the conversation doesn't even warrant mentioning it.
Also, I would die for Harold. He's pure and he has my heart. That's all....more