Give the Dark My Love (Give the Dark My Love, #1)Give the Dark My Love by Beth Revis

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A tiring experience, not nearly immersive enough to outweigh its cruelness. 

I’m really on a fence with this one. On one side, this book gets pretty dark and tries to appeal to more mature readers by talking about heavier moral issues and questions of life and death, and it isn’t bad per se.
On the other, it still features the very YA shallow writing and world-building, dismissal of supporting characters… including the one who was probably supposed to be the second main character, since he gets his own POV and all, but ended up a repeatedly dismissed in both writing and story as a  shallow insta-romance love interest (I can’t say I counted, but the Nedra/Grey chapter ratio is something like 3-4/1, and a lot of Grey chapters are hardly longer than 1 page… I mean, why even do it if he can be so easily dismissed?).
The biggest issue I have with this book is with the way it ‘skims’ over everything, barely touching the surface. The time flies, days, weeks, months, lives, are only mentioned flying by, the flow of time doesn’t feel real, the reader has no chance to plant their feet in the world and look around, see how they feel about all of it. Nedra is strong, talented, clever, and mature girl… but she is also single-minded, closed-minded, arrogant, and dismissive in a very unpleasant way. I didn’t like reading in her 1st person POV because it was full of ‘I know what is best and everyone needs and appreciates me, and if they don’t understand how important what I do is they are clearly useless’, which was made worse by the shallow world-building that made it hard to feel the horrors of the plague real and see what was really going on in the world that it would make Nedra’s attitude at least more proportionate. I do not want to go in details to spoil the actual story content, but every time she would act almost likable and say something reasonable, it felt like a ‘fluke’ (or like the author/editor had to add it as an afterthought) and then she go back on it right away or acts like it was a mistake to feel anything human. Nedra is a tiring character to follow, but the Grey is written so shallowly he is even worse…

And that was the impression I got from this book – it’s not bad enough to actually hate it, but it’s so tiring to read and not nearly immersive enough to compensate for its cruelness.

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The glamour of working in gaming company:
Most mornings elevators smell like developers who didn’t go home for 3 days.
Or like excessive amount of whatever spray was used to hide that fact.
Depending on the department, you will find the most asexual workplace you’ve ever seen.
Others don’t come far behind though.
80% of people talk to themselves. Some in rather lengthy monologues.

I hear they also have to throw out a ton of sweets and present people send to fictional characters on the Valentines day and Birthdays and stuff.

 

 

I just saw a person on tv who is like the complete opposite of me in one very important aspect.
He can’t stand touching paper.

THERE’S A PERSON WHO CAN’T STAND TOUCHING PAPER. :scream::scream::scream:

There are many places I miss being at.
The problem is, even if I miss being there, I don’t really miss living there.

Because I feel that I wouldn’t be able to live there on my own. Unless there’s someone willing to act as a buffer between me and the society in those places in everyday situations
So I’m staying put where I am, where I can do things by myself.

“I want my book” sounds so unsettlingly like “I want my pacifier” in my head, … I can’t even….

Being anxious about every tiny social interaction out of your comfort zone is just that much more painful, when there’s a person around who appears like they don’t care about anything.

I honestly hate it so much when cosmetics for different purposes come in similar packaging… over the years it at very least led me to 1) put facewash or hand soap on my tooth brush(multiple, oh so multiple times); 2) put mouth wash into washing machine; 3) put hand cream on my face; 4) put under-eye cream on a sore on my foot for a week (they looked verysimilar)…

a whole full classroom of aspiring flight attendants practicing their perfect smiles by saying “Whiskey” loudly over and over

am I the only one who finds this so utterly hilarious

Masturbationtory writing… is not writing about masturbation, it’s the act of writing about anything at all that essentially represents an act of mental masturbation to the person doing the writing. If you actually allow yourself to realise it. Or you might not, and continue telling yourself that you’re just writing.

my brain likes to mis-read and mis-write words a lot
think food and write door
see liked and read killed

… but even I think that mixing up Astrophysics and Aphrodisiacs is a first

my defense is that they do have a lot of same letters, yes.