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Adding this crucial reading to my shelf!

Re-read for my lecture on mid-Victorian representations of colonial India this past week, and let me tell you that The Moonstone is everything that your Victorianist friends have been talking about for ages. By the time you're through Gabriel Betteredge's narrative, you are hooked! There is no escaping. My favourite scene (obviously): Opium and the re-enactment! The novel is also the origin point for many of detective fiction's foundational tropes: bunging local policeman, prodigal brooding city cop, poor maid with the stained dress wrongly accused for the crime, digressive polyvocal narrative, the found document, and so on!

@sophiemng7 Ahah great! I have updated the cover. You can always do it manually by clicking on 'Edit Book'

2024 was for me a year of brilliant memoirs—I'll keep going back to A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, and I also enjoyed reading Clair Wills's Missing Persons, Or my Grandmother's Secret—but right at the very end of the year I received this as a late birthday present and my god did it not blow my mind. One heck of an opening, and it only gets better; cerebral, jaw-clenching, full of long beautiful ruminating passages about the body and what is left of it if half your face is eaten up by a bear. Also found the book to be a really good peek into how anthropologists think (something that ethnographies don't do imo, seduced as they are a little by the ethnographer's abstracted historical voice)

On Kubra's recommendation, I started reading this long essay, and it is heartening so far—especially the way it reconciles with its own anger, shows that we are trapped in what is a historical process, and why the struggle—despite its everydayness—cannot be normalised!

Mother State truly does have the most beautiful and hard-hitting Preface

@sophiemng7 yippeee!

for 'Critical Love Studies'

I must, I must

This utterly breathtaking, surrealist, delicate and wry approach to minor characters is why Andrea Levy is so good. Reminds me of Chekov's plays, where every minor character has this something indelible that even when the rest of the character dissolves away it is left in memory

Very ideational. Could have been an essay, which is a funny thing to say about a book that is short anyway. I guess its a form thing; I expect, perhaps for my own prejudice, a certain form still from the novel. Chie's teardrop scene was beautiful, I could not stop thinking about it

Also: did anyone else feel that reading this book helped them sleep better at night? That cosy dormy spaceship feeling! 🤔

Not impressed! Short, profoundly sad, and unbearably slimy. It had however one very very hard-hitting moment!