Well. This is it. My first review written since the Electoral College decided the will of the people didn't mean shit. Am I scared? Yes. Am I angry? Yes. Will this interfere with my reading? Rate-wise, probably. Make-up wise, however, I've been practicing my avoidance of white male authored lit for so long that I can't make as much of a dramatic shift in reading habits as I could have a year or two ago. I could start dedicating successive reads to authors whose people are going to have even bigger targets pasted on their backs in the coming years if those Elector types decide to roll with it and over the people that Dump and Penis have professed a hatred for. Between the two, there's a lot to choose from: black people, women of color, women, people of color, muslims, LGBTQIA+, emphasis on trans people, poor people, Latinx, and those are the only ones I can think of in terms of what speeches I've read the transcripts of, so you better throw Jewish people and populations of countries that don't have a lot of white people within their borders. Compared to a lot people I know, A.S. Byatt is better off, but the fact that she writes about Victorian times doesn't mean she wants to return to them.

I have memories of being so swept away by [b:Possession|41219|Possession|A.S. Byatt|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391124124s/41219.jpg|2246190] that I spent literal hours transcribing the reams of poetry peppering a supposed novel of prose. This time, whether due to the lack of modern day looking back to Victorian day structure in this bifocal piece, or my own enhanced analytical abilities when it comes to the Gothic novel, I admired from more of a distance. There's also the matter that, where once I glanced over the peripheral gleams of worlds beyond England and their merry whites, I now take significant notice of whenever "bronze" or "gold" relating to the matter of skin are thrown around, every moment in which the wealth which riots of the page is delicately traced back to the blood and guts and gouging of an empire in which the sun never sets. The fact that I didn't sink the rating down much for this rather glib coverage of 99% of existence was probably aesthetic more than anything, as how exactly do you quantify a white person covering the experiences of those who are not white in a way that both seriously acknowledges yet leaves the main spotlight to be filled by those who, on a hereditary level, actually have the right to knowing what they're talking about? In a word, you don't, but you keep an eye out for the stuff that looks good and listen to the experts telling you what's good, and eventually you'll come to a world of writing where it's human beings out there, not your goddamn fucking metaphors that convince cohorts they can elect an orange ball of genocide and make it all better by making it all go away.

Anyway. If you know anything about anything going down in the US, you know people are going to be watched and tracked and hunted down a lot more these days. Same goes for the Internet. Considering the things I've put up here for public perusal, I can't promise that I won't take some or all of it down one of these days, depending on how much the public puts its activism where its mouth is. Reading and writing are all fine and well, but we don't remember [b:Les Misérables|24280|Les Misérables|Victor Hugo|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1411852091s/24280.jpg|3208463] for the barricades. We remember the barricades because all that is worth living for depends on them.

You are accompanied through life, Emily Jesse occasionally understood, not only by the beloved and the accusing departed, but by your own ghost too, also accusing, also unappeased.