Literary pretensions here are poorly served by an artily elliptical narrative, graceless sentences (“She supposed that one had someone one told about something like this, and she had told him”) and decidedly gothic plot elements, such as an illegitimate heir’s stepping forward at the 11th hour. These flaws, crowned by over-privileged Rollin’s whining, make Swallow Hard hard to swallow.

The music and drink are intended to be two manifestations of the same product.

We had way better fucking music. People were having way better sex. People were eating way better food. It’s like we had progression, and now it’s like all we have is electronic music.

I have a hard time keeping track of the difference between moral triangularity and psychological triangularity, and I suspect others who read this digest do too.

The original printing of this book was infused with magnetic vibrations by the Baron Eugene Fersen and printed on special paper using special ink.

Properly an “autonomous semiorganic complex replicator,” the Crystal Basilisk is actually a highly cooperative symbiosis of several dozen self replicating living crystal components, each of which function akin to organs within a noncrystalline animal.

By the time he matriculated at the University of Copenhagen in the autumn of 1903, when he was eighteen, the doubt had become pervasive, intoxicating him with terrifying infinities.

What has jaywalking to do with the theft of birthright and blessing?

The rat blew up.