Throughout my journey into The Night Circus , I had only one quote running through my head, and it wasn't even from the novel itself. It was from the first Star Wars prequel: The Phantom Menace, with the quote being Qui-Gon Jinn's, "There's always a bigger fish". At first, it seemed like my brain was just pulling up funny quotes for the hell of it, but the further I read on, the more I realized that it was referring to the amount of manipulation being done by the characters in the story. The story begins with Prospero and the man in the gray suit pulling Celia and Marco's strings, but after the circus is established as the venue, Celia and Marco begin to pull their own strings as well. Soon enough, the entire circus staff is under their control, as well as the exhibitions of the circus itself. Yet, despite manipulation having a negative connotation, there were some people in The Night Circus who used manipulation for good deeds. For example, Celia and Ma...
...but words can manipulate you and turn you into a traitor against your own starship crew. In all seriousness though, Babel-17 was a very strange read for me. Reading this novel right after The Martian was a huge change of pace. While in The Martian I felt that I had a clear picture of Mark Watney's surrounding environment and predicament, I felt like I was walking through a haze while reading Babel-17 . All the stuff about body modifications, and futuristic starships, and the whole concept of a "triple" not registering to me as a form of three-way relationship until I looked it up, it was very confusing. And yet throughout all the haze of world-building exposition, the one thing that stood out to me the most was the concept of using language and words as a weapon. At first I was surprised at Samuel R. Delany's choice to use a language as the main conflict of the novel. Normally when you think of space adventures, you would picture the main sourc...
Uzumaki is honestly one of the greatest mangas I've read yet. It's so compelling to see a town become swallowed by a shape- that being the spiral. It's also interesting to see how Junji Ito incorporates this unusual shape into the lives of the people of Kurouzu-cho, and how it drives them insane. That being said, I think my favorite story of the bunch is The Spiral Obsession, Part 2 . The human body is a fascinating thing. It feels weird to see diagrams of the stuff inside us and know that all these parts help us function. That being said, in Uzumaki , Shuichi's mother takes this uneasiness with the human body to the next level, in the form of her fear of spirals. The imagery that Ito includes in this chapter is horrifying. Watching the woman cut off her own fingertips physically made my OWN fingertips tingle, as if something was touching them. What got me even worse, though, was watching her jab the scissors into her ear, because of the spiral th...
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