Quinto Reads

Reviews and miscellanea from my mind•User image from @malintfalch on twitter•

[snoopyoftheday]

snoopy of the day

[huariqueje]

You are Doing Well - Line Holtegaard , 2025.

Danish , b, 1980 -

Oil on canvas , 120 x 150 cm.

[cyphir-spacerobot]

Victor Frankenstein after achieving the impossible and building a fucking person from scraps of the dead: Oh god, ew, ew it's ugly! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew! Ew! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew!

[koiagain]

[quintoreads]

The Unexpected Journey: Finding Strength, Hope, and Yourself on the Caregiving Path | Emma Heming Willis

Who really knows what the future has in store for them? In this book, Emma Heming Willis shares her journey as Bruce Willis’s wife. From the beginning of their relationship, through their marriage, and to Bruce’s current diagnosis.

For those who don’t know, Bruce Willis, actor of films such as Die Hard, The Sixth Sense, and many other blockbusters, has frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The book shares the moment in which Emma and Bruce got the diagnosis, and how they left the doctor’s office with barely any information on what to do after that moment.

What many people don’t know about living with someone with dementia is that it can often be a very isolating experience. You don’t know how this is affecting your loved one, how fast it will evolve and, more often than not, what you should be doing to stop/diminish/slow down its evolution. You try to juggle all the normal tasks of your life, plus the ever-growing needs of your person, and you end up feeling like you're falling behind in life, missing experiences with your friends, family, and even on your personal development.

What took Emma (and really, every caregiver), a lot of time to process, is that you can’t go through this alone. You have to eventually open yourself to the people closest to you, and accept (and sometimes even ask!) their help. Being a caregiver is a grueling experience. It’s a never ending job. That’s why it’s extremely important to also take care of yourself. You really can’t do it all alone, and the people closest to you will want to help you.

For Emma, who has access to a lot of resources thanks to Bruce’s legacy, that meant she could hire specialists around the clock for her husband. While the vast majority of caregivers will not be able to do that, I think that Emma really explains her situation with a lot of tact, being very conscious of the privilege in which they live, and never flaunting it or saying that any part of the process was easy.

Emma writes with astonishing honesty. You sympathize with her struggles, you smile reading about her relationship blossoming, and you cry reading how it all changed, but she gathered her strength and courage to keep going through.

This book hit close to home. My mom has dementia, and I could really bond with many of the experiences Emma describes in the book on a deep, personal level. It is quite a beautiful thing to read something similar to your experience and to know that other people have gone through it and are thriving.

If you are a caregiver for someone, especially someone with dementia, I really recommend this book.

[petitesaffron-blog]

I wonder what he is dreaming about.

[dogpuppy]

[quintoreads]

House of Day, House of Night | Olga Tokarczuk | Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

For me this is a book that turns the famous tenet “don’t judge a book by its cover” on its head. Even though I didn’t end up reading the version that first caught my eye, the beige cover with the black bird and purple font caught my eye and made me read the synopsis.

House of Day, House of Night narrates the story of people in a small village in a very interesting way. Through short glimpses, we follow different villagers. This is not a linear book, and it’s apt-described as a “constellation novel”, and just like one of them it is composed of many different parts that makes a stunning view once you put all the elements together. It pulls you through and keeps you enthralled with its beautiful use of language.

Even though every chapter was enjoyable, my favorite parts were when we learned about Saint Kummernis and the monk who wrote her story. I didn’t expect for this book to go so far back in time and it actually ended up being one of the most interesting sections, with many chapters dedicated to it.

The way the book’s written is beautiful. Nature, the stars, a conversation between friends, recipes; everything has a special touch that gracefully elevates it. The end result is a book filled with a myriad of moments that paint a vivid picture in your imagination. It’s a perfect read to escape to a different world, one where magic and the inexplicable coexist, and it's also part of everyday life.

[mysharona1987]

[o-blivia]

If you're wondering why there's so much resistance to the idea of a 4-day work week, or why automation hasn't actually led to people working less like it was supposed to...

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[atlinmerrick]

I literally said, "Are you kidding me?" IN THE GASPED ADMIRING WAY.

[decomposedmaw]

the evening light feels different here.

[valentinetheeviljester]

Maybe lean out

[valentinetheeviljester]

[datasoong47]

[quintoreads]

Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children #3) | Seanan McGuire

The third installment in the Wayward Children series is an odyssey that takes us through different worlds to bring someone back from death.

If you don’t know about the Wayward Children series, it’s a very interesting take on what happens to the children of stories who travel to different worlds and eventually come back. In these books, the children end up in Eleanor’s West Home of Wayward Children, where they wait to go back to the world that claimed them. Being back on Earth is hard for them, and while some do adjust back to reality, many suffer while waiting for their “door” to open up again.

In this book a girl appears out of the sky and tells the kids that she is the daughter of a character that died in the first book of the series. She comes from a Nonsense world, so time and reality apply differently there. Armed with a magical bracelet that allows her to travel through worlds, she and some of the kids manage to visit some of them on their mission to put their friend back together thanks to their many abilities combined.

While the premise of the series is pretty interesting, I always feel like the books fall a little flat for me. They are very short, which is great if you want a quick read to get out of a reading slump, but I think that they would benefit from having a little bit more pages to expand on worldbuilding and character development.

Nonetheless, I’m intrigued on what the overarching arc throughout the series will be, as every story follows a kid from a different world, and as we see in this installment some actions have repercussions on other realities.

[miseducatedmelanicmuse]

[animentality]

[pmamtraveller]

The Pearl With The Girl Earring by Olaf Falafel

[epiphainie]

people get so mad when you tell them that their lowbrow entertainment they enjoy is actually lowbrow

[epiphainie]

everyone wants their self-indulgent romantasy to be considered high literature and whatever new mainstream pop boy/girl to be treated as the next beethoven and their gay fluff show on streaming apps to be revolutionary art changing the world and like, they're not. and that's okay. i'm literally watching the stupidest show right now and it's fine. it doesn't have to be more.

[epiphainie]

there's also the argument of how pop culture used to be the trickle down from high culture for the longest time but now it's an ouroboros eating itself as access and willingness to engage with high culture have been systematically destroyed and diminished through the last decades so your popcorn flick moviemaker now only gets inspiration from other popcorn flicks when their foreparents used to actually read literally and see art of all kinds and your pop musicians used to listen to all sorts of new and old music rather than just their contemporaries/competition and maybe this absence of any sort of culture outside of our easy algorithms is why everyone's so defensive of what they passively consume and so attached to it as a part of their identity but that's a discussion for another day