#all our wrong todays

[escapeintothepages]

“This is how you discover who someone is. Not the success. Not the result. The struggle. The part between the beginning and the ending that is the truth of life.”

All Our Wrong Todays, Elan Mastai

[spockvarietyhour]

Currently reading

[initiala]

I’m tired of Sad Adult Male Literary Protagonists repeatedly talking about how terrible and annoying they are, because they are terrible and annoying and acknowledging it does not endear me to them.

from now on, the only time male protagonists can complain about being bad at stuff and feeling like they’re annoying others are in the following situation:

when they’re teenagers

because teenagers are annoying

but they’re supposed to be because they’re teenagers and they’re still growing and developing

they’re also bad at stuff because they’re teenagers

because they’re still learning and growing

IF YOUR SAD ADULT MALE LITERARY PROTAGONIST DOES NOTHING MORE THAN ACKNOWLEDGE HOW TERRIBLE HE IS WITHOUT ACTUALLY PUTTING IN EFFORT TO IMPROVE AND THE PLOT JUST HANDS HIM A BETTER LIFE, SHUT UP FOREVER AND GO TO THERAPY

[catmint1]

The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.

Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

[cricketnationrise]

Quarantine Reads Part 3

Part 1 Here

Part 2 Here

51. Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books by Paul Collins: I wanted this to be better than it was, honestly. Just kind of a collection of anecdotes about moving to the UK to live in the town that’s all bookstores that i can’t freaking remember the name of right now but like, Paul, My Dude. I did not care about your life.

52. All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai: a man from an alternate timeline finds himself stranded in OUR 2016 and encounters our versions of people in his life including his soulmate? does he stay or go back to the timeline he knows?

53. Cold Fire by Tamora Pierce: 14 year old master metal/fire mage Daja gains 2 temporary apprentices just discovering their power and tries to figure out who’s behind all the serial arsons in town. she also falls down while trying to learn to ice skate a lot.

54. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles: my mom and i decided to start a bookclub with just ourselves as a structured way to stay in touch and also because we have a lot of the same books on our TBRs and this was the first one. amazing. Russian aristocrat gets placed under house arrest after the revolution and is sentenced to spending his life in a hotel. pictures of his life from that point on. featuring accidental child acquisition, using his knowledge of wines to run the dining room of the hotel, and a little light remodeling.

55. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins: don’t worry, Coriolanus Snow is not set up to be Pensieve Memories!Snape. it was really cool to see the worldbuilding and origins of the Hunger Games themselves and what the districts/tributes used to have to endure - plus she tied in the songs from the movies and managed to firmly root them in the lore

56. The Women Who Made New York by Julie Scelfo:  quick read about the history of new york from the women who were there

57. The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris: i really liked this one, a Holocaust novel from a perspective i hadn’t read before. and i’m 88% sure that its based on the real people involved? also trigger warnings for what you’d expect from a Jewish protagonist in a WW2 novel. there’s a sequel out now.

58. The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison: yet another accidental plague novel. i didn’t know anything about it when i started and if i had i probably wouldn’t have opened it. in a near future world a plague breaks out that kills something like 98% of women and babies. our pov is a midwife who somehow survives being sick and starts making her way through the northwest and her misadventures. trigger warning for kidnapping, rape, disease, sexual assault, violence, murder, starvation. it ends hopeful if not happy? book one in a series.

59. Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly: fantastic read on the whole. i usually have trouble with group biographies like these because i want there to be more plot despite it just being people’s lives? like duh, sometimes life is boring and that’s okay. also i usually feel like there’s too much extended family information in bios (i know i felt that way when i read jim hensons and mr. rogers’) but i digress. BLACK LADIES DOING MATH TO GET TO SPACE HELL YES. also there’s a movie, but i haven’t watched it yet because i think about black ladies doing math to get into space and i want to reread the lady astronaut series and watch the martian

60. Brida by Paulo Coelho: a short, weird book. young irish woman wants to explore her magic with experts, meets two that have opposing views on tapping into her power and she struggles with that.

61. The Cracked Spine by Paige Shelton: part of the Scottish Bookshop Mystery series. girls starts a new job at a bookstore and moves to scotland. cozy murder mystery. also a Hot(TM) Man.

62. Where the Forest Meets the Stars by Glendy Vanderah: a strange girl comes out of the forest claiming she’s an alien with no family. she is taken in by a scientist visiting the area for a summer and a grumpy neighbor. tw harm to children and dog

63. Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor: very cool worldbuilding, secret magic society existing within the mundane, being good at soccer, book 1 of a duology

64. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett: a cowoker goes missing in the amazon, protagonist volunteers to go after him and find out what happened. its all downhill from there.

65. The Dream Peddler by Martine Fournier Watson:  novella, a literal dream peddler comes to a small town. does some harm and some good in the community. multiple and shifting POV

66. The Road by Cormac McCarthy: i know people have lots of opinions about this author, both positive and negative. my opinion is that i probably won’t read more by him without a good reason

67. Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett: 10th book in the Discworld series, riffs on hollywood/filmmaking industries, dogs as the heroes, lots of wordplay and puns so buckle up

68. Shatterglass by Tamora Pierce: Tris’ POV, theres a serial killer loose in the slums, Tris learns to see the future/present by seeing pictures on the wind. featuring a HUGE dog and accidental child acquisition

69. Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater by Eddie Shapiro: what it says on the tin. an excellent group including a bunch i hadn’t heard of before.

70. Fight No More: Stories by Lydia Millet: short story collection, a touch surreal, a touch magical realism

71. The Library of the Unwritten: AJ Hackwith: book 1 in the Hell’s Library series. adventure story. demons, angels, and librarians stuck in limbo. the library can fight back.

72. When It’s A Jar by Tom Holt: book 2 in the YouSpace universe, you don’t need to read the first one, but i think it helps. ridiculous. discworld adjacent but less wordplay.

73. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: novella, alternating POV, plays with timelines. half epistolary??? kinda???, plays with form in a way i haven’t seen before.

74. The Ones Who Look by Katharine Duckett: tor.com short story. custom built afterlives based on each person’s uploads.

75. The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson: book 3 in the first mistborn trilogy. absolutely need to read the other 2 books first. fantasy. brandon doesn’t know how to write a short book. the first book starts off like a heist story and then they invent their own religion. so that’s fun. lotta people die in this series. but hey they’re trying to save the world.

[loveinquotesposts]

https://loveinquotes.com/when-someone-dies-they-get-very-cold-and-very-still-that-probably-sounds-obvious-but-when-its-your-mother-it-doesnt-feel-obvious-it-feels-shocking-you-watch-winded-and-re/

When someone dies they get very cold and very still. That probably sounds obvious, but when it’s your mother it doesn’t feel obvious—it feels shocking. You watch, winded and reeling, as the medical technicians neutralize the stasis field and power down the synthetic organ metabolizer. But the sentimental gesture of kissing her forehead makes you recoil because the moment your lips touch her skin you realize just how cold and just how still she is, just how permanent that coldness and that stillness feel. Your body lurches like it’s been plunged into boiling water and for the first time in your life you understand death as a biological state, an organism ceasing to function. Unless you’ve touched a corpse before, you can’t comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother’s face. You feel sick with guilt and regret and sadness about inconsequential anecdote. You can’t remember anything thoughtful or sweet or tender that you ever did even though logically you know you must have. All you can recall is how often you were small and petty and false. She was your mother and she loved you in a way nobody ever has and nobody ever will and now she’s gone. ― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

[phatburd]

[coolladydot]

Omul care a cucerit timpul (recenzie)

Omul care a cucerit timpul (recenzie) N-ai nevoie de călătorii în timp să zdrobești o lume. Dar te ajută.

Autor: Elan Mastai

Număr pagini: 447

An apariție: 2017

Editura: Litera, București

Titlul original: All Our Wrong Todays, 2017

Traducere: Vlad Pojoga

Elan Mastai este născut în Vancouver (trăiește în Toronto) și scrie scenarii de film. „Omul care a cucerit timpul” este primul roman al scenaristului.

Deci chestia-i că eu vin din lumea pe care ar trebui s-o avem.

Asta…

[painfullyspecial]

Why, oh why, does this make me so happy? Lol.

I've been in this weird reading slump, so I'm so happy to find a book like this.

[chlfl]

Favorite Books of the 2010s: Quick Takes of 2017 Novels

Favorite Books of the 2010s: Quick Takes of 2017 Novels

This is a series of reviews of my favorite books published between 2010 and 2019. These are shorter reviews of good reads published in 2017.

 The River at Night by Erica Ferencik (2017)

Four women friends go on a whitewater-rafting adventure trip, but an accident leaves them lost in the Maine backwoods, where they run into unexpected dangers. This was a quick page-turner of a survival story that…

[escapeintothepages]

“Life is defined mostly by how you handle failure.”

All Our Wrong Todays, Elan Mastai

[littlewriters]

That's the magic trick of creating life: it takes every bad decision you ever made and makes them necessary footsteps on the treacherous path that brought you home.

Elan Mastai, “All Our Wrong Todays”

[sophielovesbooks]

Aaaand we have another pair of dyzygotic twins!! At least in terms of the cover art. 

Can you believe these two books have absolutely nothing to do with each other?! Has anyone besides me noticed how crazy similar these covers are for no good reason at all? Haha!

By the way, I read “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves” years ago and highly recommend it! Psychology is a good part of it, so I loved it even more for that. It was a really incredible read! 

Has anybody read “All Our Wrong Todays”? Do you recommend it? 

[calebs-hangout-corner]

You know, Chapter 56 of "All Our Wrong Todays" really manages to perfectly capture all the emotions I have all the time at any point when I am forced to talk to another individual.

[amusedowl]

What a mood

[chlfl]

Here we are almost at the end of April already, so I’m declaring my favorite book of the month to be The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch. I received this book in a mystery box and had no idea what it was about. I discovered a complex and unique story combining elements of time travel, multiverse, police procedural, conspiracy, and horror, with a compelling and realistic female protagonist. A great discovery I probably wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. And it has a gorgeous cover!

Honorable mentions go to Dark Matter by Michelle Paver, a ghost story set in Antarctica, and All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai, a twist on the time-travel story. And of course I must mention the sheer delight that is Norse Mythology, especially if you listen to the audiobook read by the author, Neil Gaiman, who is often quite funny. Even if you get the audiobook, you’ll want a print copy for its beautiful cover as well.

Reading April 2018: The Gone World and more Here we are almost at the end of April already, so I'm declaring my favorite book of the month to be