★ 2024 ★
*=reread
| date | title | thoughts |
|---|---|---|
| 05/01 | Gone Girl | this book makes me want to read mysteries again. it's soooo compelling, just believable enough to give you a sense/fear of the stakes. i'm not gonna spoil anymore, just go read it. |
| 16/01 | Mo Dao Zu Shi: Volume 2 | it's been slow getting into this series because a billion people always have it on hold before me at the library, but i'm really enjoying it. i think a basic component of what makes anathema-v anathema-v is a love of cool guys with swords (especially if they have unresolved romantic tension lmao). uhh yeah xianxia fun, mo xiang tong xiu good writer <3. |
| 02/02 | The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity | i don't really know much about anthropology, but this book was sooooo good. graeber and wengrow have a really easily understandable writing style that still manages to get so much information across. i like their idea that the purpose of history/archeology/anthropology is to better understand the present. also all the indigenous america societies/states that they talk about are really interesting. |
| 05/02 | The Open Veins of Latin America | god we're so fucked. death to the west for real. |
| 08/02 | Mo Dao Zu Shi: Volume 3 | yayyy more xian xia. are we not gonna talk about the blindfolded wei wuxian scene. like is he never gonna bring that up again. guess i'm gonna have to read the next book haha |
| 19/02 | Mo Dao Zu Shi: Volume 4 | lan wangji you need to learn how to be more expressive. wei wuxian is sooooo fucked up over what he did, and you, having the communication skills of a log, are not helping. still love and cherish you though <3 |
| 02/03 | Mo Dao Zu Shi: Volume 5 | a well written conclusion to the series. the extras needed more of teen wangji being cringe and relatable, and less of the incense burner chapter. |
| 05/03 | The Goldfinch* | i was highkey obsessed with this book in the eighth grade (read it twice over the course of many recesses spent in the girls' bathroom), and i felt like microdosing on the feeling of being in middle school (aka being miserable and having no friends). anyways, it's still a good fucking book. |
| 10/03 | Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong: Volume 1 | what's up everyone, it's your girl ana back at it again, "it" being reading xianxia danmei novels of questionable literary merit. they're fun though + cringe is dead. |
| 10/03 | Amulet: Books 1-8* | i looooved amulet in the 3rd-5th grades, and the last book came out so i decided to reread the rest of the series. it was pretty good; i can understand why child me liked it. trellis is still very gender. i really think that kibuishi could have cut down on some of the characters at the end. like we did not need those alien medics in book 8, they did jack dick besides look weird and crack unfunny jokes. *sigh*. also that entire space plotline could have been cut down a lot; it made this really weird difference between the space resistance program tech and the rest-of-alledia tech. whatever i guess. |
| 10/03 | Amulet: Book 9 | i'm gonna be real, this was a bad ending. there's so many plotlines and characters introduced that mean absolutely nothing to readers because they have less than 250 pages to do anything. and emily doesn't even resolve anything either, like even after her final confrontation with [spoiler], [spoiler] is later shown to still be doing stuff?? like actively continuing to be malicious??? and god trying to tie everything back to silas was a disaster, considering that no motivation is explained for silas wanting to carry out all these actions. and i might just be dumb but the shadows didn't really get resolved either. *SIGH* whatever it totally, definitely doesn't matter that my childhood fave kinda sucked in the end. i won't be salty about it (i will). |
| 12/03 | Dracula | two saturdays ago, i went to the library in chinatown to look for a book (rzfzx), and it straight up wasn't there, so i checked this out to not seem suspicious or whatever. i understand why it's a classic. |
| 14/03 | Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong: Volume 2 | more xianxia/danmei. definitely less of a slow burn than mdzs. idk but luo binghe is looking kinda scummy rn. |
| 20/03 | The Secret History | i've wanted to read more of tartt's work since i first read the goldfinch, and there was finally a copy not checked out at the library! it was a pretty messed up book, but messed up in just the right way. i liked it a lot. haunting |
| 22/03 | Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong: Volume 3 | goddamn a lot of stuff happened in this one. luo binghe's such a weirdo i love him. |
| 27/03 | Annihilation | sooo fucking good...i kinda wanna study biology now ngl. |
| 04/04 | Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong: Volume 4 | the series as a whole was kinda meh. i did think the airplane extras were fun |
| 11/04 | Gideon the Ninth | okay gang, i'm off my danmei addiction and on to my... tragic yuri funtime!!! literally so good; i love me a good mystery. |
| 17/04 | Fight Club | i saw the movie a few weeks ago, so i had to read the book too. incredibly fucking good. palahniuk does good stuff with prose + punctuation. also the whole reason i even ended up looking in to fight club was b/c i saw this fanart of it on tumblr (in like 2022/23?), and i've been going crazy over finding it for like 30 mins lmao. i am joe's blue light-induced eyestrain. |
| 19/04 | Doorways in the Sand | good scifi adventure. i liked the weird structure + style that zelanzy used. also someone on wikipedia in 2011 was incredibly passionate about it... like insanely so; the article is unnecessarily huge. |
| 03/05 | Harrow the Ninth | soooooo plot twisty, you could not imagine. very solid overall. |
| 03/05 | The Summer Hikaru Died: Volume 3 | i am never not enjoying a new hgsn volume. so good for real... good enough that i read it in the span of one train ride haha. |
| 08/05 | Ways of the World with Sources | apwh textbook. taught me more than my teacher did :/ |
| 13/05 | Twelfth Night, or What You Will | we took forever (like a month) to read this in english. still good though. poor antonio :'( |
| 13/05 | The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark | i saw r&g with my dad in april and was quite confused because i didn't really know the plot of hamlet. so i decided to go and read r&g, but first hamlet to actually have some frame of reference. horatio was pretty cool. it was also wayyy funnier than i had expected (hamlet and ophelia making dirty jokes &c). |
| 17/05 | Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead | see above entry for context. bizarre and funny and sad and just generally good. i can always enjoy some confused guys trying to make it through. |
| 24/05 | Nona the Ninth | that was wild i didn't understand much lmao. john gaius is a horrible little man; he's fascinating... |
| 28/05 | The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys | read in the span of a bus ride because traffic is just that bad. it was fine i guess. writing was kinda mid and rushed. |
| 05/06 | One Punch Man, Volume 1 | checked out some manga from the library to kill time. this one was decently funny, which i expected after watching mp100 |
| 05/06 | Again!!, Volume 1 | also pretty fun. good character drama. |
| 05/06 | Blue Period, Volume 1 | i read some of this on mangareader before, but it's much nicer with a physical copy. very pretty. |
| 08/06 | Internet Love! | i generally don't put whatever trashy yaoi/yuri shit i read on mangafire out of self consciousness, but this one weirdly resonated with me, and i'd like to remember it. uno is so me for real it's honestly insaaaaane. |
| 10/06 | RASL | ooooo i love jeff smith. also the title acronym is so good. |
| 10/06 | Blue Period, Volume 2 | oh yuka my beloved |
| 12/06 | Blue Period, Volume 3 | yotasuke!!! we would get along so well i feel. |
| 14/06 | In Utero | short and spooky and sweet. maybe i should go to abandoned malls to make weird friends some time. |
| 15/06 | Blue Period, Volume 4 | yayy my local library branch has blue period, not just the main branch!! |
| 16/06 | Blue Period, Volume 5 | yuka-chan... :'( |
| 16/06 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 1 | i tried watching naruto when i was like 11 or 12, but the filler was too much so i stopped. but now i'm trying it again (but reading so i don't get all the filler). it's fun! oh and getting this from the library took forever, despite the fact that they had a bunch of copies available. and the bus there and back was a nightmare because of all the reroutes. |
| 17/06 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 2 | read on the plane. haku... :( |
| 19/06 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 3 | i loved all the sakura slays in this one. she deserves the world. and ino too i adore her. |
| 19//06 | Freshman Year | i've been doing a ton of college planning, despite the fact that i'm nowhere close to going to uni yet lmao. nice to see that i can still have a good uni life without getting into a super prestegious school. |
| 20/06 | Be More Chill | so i hung out a lot at the library in my grandparents' town because it was hot af and there was no ac at their home. anyways i went to the ya section for a trashy read and saw this next to the book that devestated me at age 12 (It's Kind of a Funny Story). i thought it would be bad because a lot of the early/mid 2010's tumblr musical faves are bad, but it was actually decent. yay |
| 24/06 | Naruto Volumes 10-18 | discovered that the library there also has a bunch of naruto (but not the 3-in-1s), so i read a lot of naruto. the part where neji starts leaking state secrets to the entire crowd watching the chunin exams was insane. and also everything about gaara. oh and i love tsunade and shizune. |
| 24/06 | Cat's Cradle | this one was really hard to get into, but i liked it after ~100 pages. it also helped that i had nothing else to do when i read it in the airport. |
| 26/06 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 7 | sasuke no!!! good dramatic development, but i have some criticisms:
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| 29/06 | Bratsk Station and Other New Poems | so beautiful and also so marxist. my faves were nushka, and so piaf left us..., and his poems about the sea. |
| 30/06 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 8 | oooo the fights in here were so good. my personal fave was shikamaru and tayuya. whoever previously borrowed the copy i got from the library had been ripping out some of the chapter title pages, which was really so fun and lovely of them (it's fine i just went on mangafire. but still man...). |
| 03/07 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 9 | the big confrontation was really good. the obito thing needed to be more fleshed out to make a decent emotional impact like kishimoto seemed to want. also discovered that screamo makes a really good soundtrack for this series. |
| 09/07 | Solaris | this was a lot different from how i remember tarkovsky's film. mostly a lot easier to follow. there was some absolutely beautiful prose, but i also got bored as hell during that chapter where kris drones on and on about the environmental processes on solaris. but overall very good; i love me an ambiguious ending. |
| 13/07 | The Tatami Galaxy | i love love love the anime adaptation of this book, so i was super psyched to see that my library had a translation. morimi has such an iconic writing voice... he's so good at being funny and formal and genuine to his characters. the ending was so sweet ahhh!! |
| 14/07 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 10 | yayy sakura finally has a major role in the plot again. |
| 14/07 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 11 | gaara and naruto are literally so great together for an emotional plotline. and also i like sai a lot, despite, y'know... |
| 16/07 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 12 | ahhh sasuke my boy!! ahh sai my boy!!! the first two volumes in this set were very fun, the last one not so much. kishimoto needs to have a proper buildup in character info to make us care about deaths. that does not mean dump a bunch of flashbacks we never saw previously as they are on their deathbed. spread out doomed character apperances for a good chuck of time beforehand. who am i kidding this is shonen manga; 10 year old boys won't understand the nuances of fine storycraft. |
| 22/07 | Blue Period Volume 6 | the library branch that i usually get my holds from, which isn't close to my home but is close to my commute route, is undergoing construction, so i can't get copies of naruto etc brought there from far away branches that i can't/don't wanna go to. so instead i've been walking the mile to my "local" branch, where they don't have naruto but they do have blue period! this volume was really tense, but great. yayyy yatora!! |
| 23/07 | Blue Period Volume 7 | i'm a big fan of yatora's art school cohort. just hoping that he doesn't get too depressed in school. |
| 24/07 | Blue Period Volume 8 | okayy art students, that's a crazy way to spend summer vacation. also the bonus was hilarious. |
| 27/07 | A Wild Winter Swan | this was very much so a christmas story, which is wildly unsuited to late july but who cares. the plot kinda meanders, and laura is very introspective (so me for real!), but the whole thing is more about the vibes than the execution of pacing and stuff. it was perfect for getting me back into reading things that aren't manga. |
| 12/08 | Dungeon Meshi Volume 1 | this series is popular asf on tumblr rn, so i decided to read it too (those gays always have some sort of taste). the library branch i usually place holds at is open again, so on my way to the dojo today, i stopped there, checked out this hold, read it in ~an hour, and continued on my commute. now for actual thoughts on the work: very silly and fun, love the senshi-chilchuck bonding, laios definitely has some sort of sex thing imbedded in his monster-eating interest. will continue reading. |
| 17/08 | Cloud Atlas | this one took me foreverrrr to finish. the idea behind the book's structure was cool, and mitchell pulled it off, but i simply did not like a lot of the stories. the pacific journal was hard to follow and i hated all the characters (until the ending, that was good... if you ignore the mild homophobia), i similarly despised timothy cavendish, and sonmi was stupidly doomery. i wasn't super into zedelghem at first, but it ended up being my fave, with half-lives and sloosha's crossin' following. despite the parts i didn't like, it was still a good read. oh and also the cover art was killer. |
| 17/08 | No. 6 Volume 1 | i thought i was going to get a translation of the original light novel, but it turns out that the library only has the manga adaptation. that's fine though, it's still a solid scifi story so far. i like the dynamic that shion and rat have going on. |
| 18/08 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 13 | it's been like a whole month since i touched naruto (thanks, slow-ass library hold system), and it's good to be back! i loooove sasuke's new little squad of freaks, especially karin. naruto's new jutsu is so lame though. oh also that one scene where konohamaru gaybaited was kinda funny in a very 2000s way. |
| 18/08 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 14 | nooo jiraya! i'm being so patient about tsunade decoding that frog's back. also the sasuke-itachi fight is going well; the level of mindfuckery is certainly in-character. |
| 21/08 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 15 | ooooo the uchihas make me go crazy crazy insane. naruto's frog time was a fun breather from all that stuff (he makes such silly faces oh joy!). also why is pain attacking konoha now—like what makes this particular time so oppurtune? |
| 21/08 | Witch Hat Atelier Volume 1 | very cute and fantastical start to a manga—it vaguely reminds me of BONE. i probably won't continue reading any time soon because the rest of the series is in the kids' section at the library and idk if people will give me dirty looks or whatever for going in there u_u. |
| 22/08 | No. 6 Volume 2 | not many thoughts on this one—it continues to be a fun scifi manga. oh, and after that scene w/ rat and shion and that prostitute, it's either going to go full-on shonen ai or it'll be typical 2000s gaybait. |
| 24/08 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 16 | okay the conclusion to the pain fight was admittedly pretty sick. i am concerned for my queen tsunade though. hoping to see more of team taka soon ^^. |
| 26/08 | Dungeon Meshi Volume 2 | first day of school read! lovely and fun and full of worldbuilding, as in the previous volume. |
| 27/08 | Kaguya-sama: Love Is War Volume 1 | second day of school read. even though they have the disclaimer that he's japanese and it's just for illustrative purposes, it's really offputting that they draw miyaki's hair pale. besides that it's fine. i'm not placing holds for it, but i'll continue reading if i see a volume just up on the shelves at the library. |
| 28/08 | No. 6 Volume 3 | ooo the plot thickens! i do not care about safu, but i guess i'll have to because of my guy shion. |
| 28/08 | No. 6 Volume 4 | wow, we're really seeing rat's dark side... damn, kid. allysonic.jpg |
| 30/08 | The Tatami Time Machine Blues | goddd everything that tomihiko morimi writes is so delightful!!! i loved the story of course, but also the afterword and the translator's note (as a side note, i want to be a translator so bad after college and stuff. it sucks that job opportunities are so terrible in that field.). i wish i had someone like ozu in my life... |
| 02/09 | There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom | okay so i saw this in a little free library when i was going out for a walk, and it looked mildly interesting, but i didn't take it bc i knew that a) i barely have space on my bookshelves, and b) i wasn't going to want to keep some random kids book just around in my room. so instead i went home and found a pdf hosted online and read that in like an hour, give or take. it was honestly pretty solid in terms of message and all that—i agree that we should be nice to kids. |
| 07/09 | The Summer Hikaru Died: Volume 4 | okay by this volume we've gotten past the chapters i read on mangafire before i got sick of giving myself eyestrain. the opening color spread was really fucking good; i loved the perspective and colors. honestly everything here was a hit: yoshiki being insanely devoted to hikaru and "hikaru", more of kurebayashi, and some spooky scary guys. oh that cliffhanger... also the bonus was fun teehee :-) |
| 12/09 | The Human Face of Karate | i recently got invited to the october shodan promotion test at my dojo (!!!), so i've started rereading kaicho's books for my essay. there's this insane contrast between the start of the book, where he describes how he hit those muay thai boxers in the solar plexus hard enough that they threw up, and the end where he's talking about peace and love on planet earth. it's a good duality to have, i feel. |
| 15/09 | Modern Cannibals | this woman i follow on tumblr is super into all this niche internet fiction ("chili and the chocolate factory" and "serious weakness" are the others i've read), particularly this author's work. i read it in like a day bc i was kinda bored like that. it was cool and fun to read and analyzing it was somewhat doable for little peabrained me. i relate to zelda and maximillion a scary amount. |
| 16/09 | Tekkon Kinkreet | i saw the anime film adaptation of this a while ago, and i really liked it, so it was cool finding out that the library had a copy of the entire series. i was not expecting them to completely flip around the pages to read left->right though. its art style is so gross, but in a very beautiful way; i like it so much. the story is also wonderful and thoughtful and just good stuff if you like kids trying to survive and be kids. i too would like a house whose roof is the same color as the sky. |
| 03/10 | The Great Gatsby | read for english class. i really, really enjoyed it, particularly because my teacher this year really made us think about what was going on with it. all the characters are so complex, and you can never really pick an unproblematic fave (as the netbrained would say). nick/fitzgerald narrates so loquaciously that it's kinda daunting to pick apart, but it's quite enjoyable once you do. my only complaint is that it took up all my bus reading time (a girl's gotta study), so i've had to renew my library book like 3 times. |
| 06/10 | Karate: Technique and Spirit | more reading for my shodan essay. ahhhh why is the due date so soon. |
| 09/10 | The Red Queen | i checked out this book in late august, so i'm kinda annoyed with myself that it took me until now to finish it. the book has a bit of an odd structure: it's two stories in one, one of a real-life (but somewhat dramatized, as i understand it) korean princess and the other of a fictional british academic. the book is very convinced that these two stories are crossing over into each other, and at times elements of the princess' tale match up with the academic's life, but those are just elements—their actual lifepaths aren't that similar. it was an alright book, but margaret drabble writes like she thinks she's the coolest writer who ever wrote, which just made me roll my eyes sometimes. |
| 09/10 | No. 6 Volume 5 | ventured into the teen section of the library to check out this + some other manga today. the library has some "maker" stuff in there (computers and mics and stuff), and this guy was practicing the opening bit of mcr's "demolition lovers". i was happy that i could recognize music that other people like. this has nothing to do w/ the book, i just wanted to write it down somewhere so i could remember. anyways the actual book was good. kind of melodramatic, but you kind of have to accept that when reading manga adaptations of light novels. i truly have to applaud asano for writing such good yaoi into her sci-fi story, and in the early 2010s (dark time when most yaoi plots were intolerably bad imo) no less! shion and rat are just so devoted to each other, but they also both remark that they don't know each other very well at all. truly bizzare but delightful character psychologies. |
| 10/10 | No. 6 Volume 6 | i like the new characters introduced in this volume. dogkeeper's actions in the correctional facility (the maintanance robots) seem bizarre and useless to me though. |
| 11/10 | No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! Volume 1 | borrowed this on a whim from the library bc one of the sites i read yuri on has some doujins based off it. sometimes tomoko is scarily relatable, but i mostly spent the book being like "i could fix her... i could make her better". pretty fun. |
| 12/10 | No. 5 Volume 1 | i saw this on the shelf next to no. 6 at the library because they sort manga novels by title for some reason. the cover looked really like moebius's art style, which immediately drew me in. then i figured out that it was written by the same guy who wrote tekkon kinkreet, so i basically had to keep reading. very fun plot so far. i really relate to matryoshka; we're both girls who eat more than we talk. |
| 16/10 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 17 | back on the naruto grind. sakura is crazy i love her. killer b is obnoxious i hate him. also the sasuke-danzo fight was cool. |
| 19/10 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 18 | there was a delightful amount of toxic yaoi in the first part of this one (sasunaru 4 ever bitchesssss). i also really enjoyed the fight with kisame (he's such a freak i love you sharkboy). also the alive-ness of samehada is really cool. i love when it just chomps on stuff ("stuff" meaning killer b) to suck out their chakra. the megaflashback was alright; i liked seeing little itachi. "dark naruto" made me roll my eyes, but whatever. |
| 24/10 | No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! Volume 2 | tomoko had so much swag on the cover of this one. the ant chapter made me physically uncomfortable. 'summer is ending' was pretty touching. |
| 24/10 | Naruto 3-in-1 Volume 19 | okay a lot of this volume was stuff i did not care about (can we see sasuke again mr. kishimoto plsss). however it was nice to have haku and zabuza back for a bit. and i suppose that the doppleganger plot was somewhat interesting. |
| 25/10 | No Matter How I Look at It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Not Popular! Volume 3 | all-around good collection of chapters. in particular, i liked her struggle to find a spot for lunch. |
| 29/10 | Princess Jellyfish Volume 1 | read at the library to kill time before my first black belt class and blow off some steam from a math test i know i did poorly on. very very lovely cast of characters; i will 100% continue the series when i have the chance. |
| 31/10 | Miles From Nowhere | i got this on sale from a used book store bc the cover is absolutely gorg and also it has perfect book dimensions. the story was nicely structured, some snippets from the protag's life that are arranged nonlinearly but still conclude in a satisfying manner. it's a very sad and gritty book, but there were these moments where i had to stop myself from snort-laughing too loud on the bus. i guess that's how city life is, hilarious in all its tragedy. |
| 01/11 | No. 6 Volume 7 | mmm...shion's going through some stuff. hope he'll turn out alright. at rat too, ofc. |
| 01/11 | No. 6 Volume 8 | i wasn't really a big safu fan, but everything going on with her in this volume was really good. her personality still sucks imo, but she's got something interesting going on. perhaps this is just a case of fujos only liking female characters when tragedy befalls them, though. |
| 02/11 | No. 6 Volume 9 | the thrilling conclusion!! the whole elyurias thing kind came outta nowhere, but that's fine i guess. the rat/shion wrapup was nice :) |
| 07/11 | Ficciones | my dad recommended that i read this, though it was already on my radar previously. borges is really into writing about stories, story structures, information, etc etc. his style is a bit dense for my liking, but his ideas are interesting enough to get me through it. pretty good, though a lot of it definitely went over my head. |
| 10/11 | Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones | read bc of people i follow on tumblr. really good novella! i'm not trans, but i find trans people, and the concept of gender in general, very interesting. |
| 23/11 | Memed My Hawk | i'm continuing to try and work through all these used books i've bought but haven't read. this one was very simple but quite good. it's very clear that kemal loves anatolia from the way he describes the land in pretty much every chapter. i was kinda confused about the time period that the story was set in. at first i thought it was medieval bc serfs and such, then i thought 19th century when all the gun stuff started happening, but then everything was set straight by the middle-of-novel exposition about the ottomans and wwi. i think i maybe need to bone up on turkish history. |
| 28/11 | The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories | a very very wonderful collection of chinese short sff stories and a few essays. i particularly enjoyed the pieces about translation. |
| 02/12 | The Association of Small Bombs | i believe that this is entry #100, which is very exciting! the book itself was very depressing, but in an interesting way. i knew there were pretty big religious tensions in south asia, but i never really thought about terrorism and such. really engaging doom spiral. |
| 04/12 | No. 5 Volume 1* | wanted to read this again bc of how good it was the first time. i think that taiyo matsumoto might be my favorite writer of comics, not just manga, now. and also the particular dimensons of the book itself are really good. it's got the perfect length and chunkiness going on. |
| 06/12 | No. 5 Volume 2 | as usual from matsumoto taiyo, stunning art. the first chapter or so of this volume was so trippy that i really have to reread. the flashbacks we're really good, particularly the one where mike has his public little "snack". and the worldbuilding is getting good too! i'm very sad about the twins, though. |
| 08/12 | No. 5 Volume 3 | the chapter or so that no. 3 narrated was very cool. no. 1 is getting stranger and stranger. i'm quite sad we didn't get to see more of no. 2... they're getting picked off like flies. |