The Life and Times of Bryanna McGee @rachel-reviews - Tumblr Blog

'Alas, not me, lord!' she said. 'Shadow lies on me still. Look not to me for healing! I am a shieldmaiden and my hand is ungentle. But I thank you for this at least, that I need not keep to my chamber. I will walk abroad by the grace of the Steward of the City.' And she did him a courtesy and walked back to the house. But Faramir for a long while walked alone in the garden, and his glance now strayed rather to the house than to the eastward walls.

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alwaysbeenjessica

ray bradbury

expressions-of-nature

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Jane Austen gets a lot of credit (correctly, obv) for writing banger romance and biting satire about class but I don't think we spend nearly enough time talking about how she absolutely clowns on vanity and self-importance.

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Tree in the mist

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Road into the fog 🌲

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icebluecyanide

AR Meta: John Rider & Alan Blunt

I was rereading some parts from Scorpia and I do love the sense you get that Alan Blunt actually liked John:

“A very brilliant spy,” Alan Blunt muttered. “We recruited the two brothers - Ian and John - in the same year. lan was a good agent. But John was the better man by far.”

A man as cold as Blunt probably could appreciate John being a very good agent, aside from that business about him wanting to get married. And just, I do have to laugh at Blunt saying John was the better man despite Ian being in MI6 over a decade longer. Poor Ian could never live up to the standard his big brother set in his few years as a spy.

And then later in the conversation when Alex asks how his parents died, it's actually Blunt who answers, not Mrs Jones, and we actually see a rare glimpse of emotion from him:

He paused. His eyes, as ever, showed nothing. But there was a little pain in his voice. “Somehow Julia Rothman discovered that she had been tricked. We don’t know how; we'll never know. But Scorpia’s a powerful organization: that much should be obvious to you by now. She found out that your father was still alive and that he was flying to France, and arranged for a bomb to be placed in the luggage hold. Your parents died together, Alex. I suppose that’s something of a mercy. And it was all so quick. They wouldn't have had any idea…”

He even tries to soften the blow for Alex by reassuring him his parents wouldn't have suffered! And this comes from a man who sees the world as a series of calculations, but I do think John and Helen's deaths was something Blunt took as a personal failure. Because the Scorpia mission was his mission as much as John. He was the new head of MI6 Special Operations, he sent John out there, and the least he could do was help keep John safe after John gave up his own identity for the mission. And yet Scorpia was able to plant a bomb on the very plane Blunt arranged for John and his family. He failed them and even fourteen years later, that failure still hurts him.

And I love how while Blunt can be truly a horrible character in the way he callously used Alex before, in this book we also see a different and dare I say, sympathetic side to him. Sometimes, things do get personal for him.

faeriegardens

booksandpaperss

Suzanne collins wrote a trilogy where a main media propaganda strategy was to market a horrific act of violence as a love story to distract ppl and then it got adapted into a box office breaking movie and ppl made it all about the love triangle. so then since they didn’t get the point the first time Suzanne collins wrote a prequel story about the main dictator and she makes it so that you as a reader want it to be a genuine love story so badly even tho it’s so very clearly not and instead feels extremely unsettling to make her point even more meta which then gets adapted into another box office breaking film and now ppl are making romantic snowbaird tik toks. do u think she’s gonna write another book that’s somehow even more blatant or just give up and start executing ppl? hard to say but I wouldn’t blame her for the second one

pagewoman

Fountains Cottage, North Yorkshire, England

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"Don't get up on your high horse with me, Anne Shirley."

"Marilla pessimistically expected more trouble since Anne had again begun to go to school. But none developed. Perhaps Anne caught something of the “model” spirit from Minnie Andrews; at least she got on very well with Mr. Phillips thenceforth. She flung herself into her studies heart and soul, determined not to be outdone in any class by Gilbert Blythe. The rivalry between them was soon apparent; it was entirely good-natured on Gilbert’s side; but it is much to be feared that the same thing cannot be said of Anne, who had certainly an unpraiseworthy tenacity for holding grudges. She was as intense in her hatreds as in her loves. She would not stoop to admit that she meant to rival Gilbert in schoolwork, because that would have been to acknowledge his existence which Anne persistently ignored; but the rivalry was there and honors fluctuated between them. Now Gilbert was head of the spelling class; now Anne, with a toss of her long red braids, spelled him down. One morning Gilbert had all his sums done correctly and had his name written on the blackboard on the roll of honor; the next morning Anne, having wrestled wildly with decimals the entire evening before, would be first. One awful day they were ties and their names were written up together. It was almost as bad as a take-notice and Anne’s mortification was as evident as Gilbert’s satisfaction. When the written examinations at the end of each month were held the suspense was terrible. The first month Gilbert came out three marks ahead. The second Anne beat him by five. But her triumph was marred by the fact that Gilbert congratulated her heartily before the whole school. It would have been ever so much sweeter to her if he had felt the sting of his defeat.

Mr. Phillips might not be a very good teacher; but a pupil so inflexibly determined on learning as Anne was could hardly escape making progress under any kind of teacher. By the end of the term Anne and Gilbert were both promoted into the fifth class and allowed to begin studying the elements of “the branches”—by which Latin, geometry, French, and algebra were meant. In geometry Anne met her Waterloo.

“It’s perfectly awful stuff, Marilla,” she groaned. “I’m sure I’ll never be able to make head or tail of it. There is no scope for imagination in it at all. Mr. Phillips says I’m the worst dunce he ever saw at it. And Gil—I mean some of the others are so smart at it. It is extremely mortifying, Marilla.

“Even Diana gets along better than I do. But I don’t mind being beaten by Diana. Even although we meet as strangers now I still love her with an inextinguishable love. It makes me very sad at times to think about her. But really, Marilla, one can’t stay sad very long in such an interesting world, can one?”

Anne of Green Gabes (1908) by L.M. Montgomery - CHAPTER XVII - A New Interest in Life