Ridiculosity

hello all!! i had something cool to tell you guys that i don’t mind sharing on tumblr, bUT, @readingthenight, i, and one more of our friends who refuses to be tagged in this post started a substack newsletter for reading recommendations. i figured i spend ages on this blog talking about all the books i’m reading anyway, might as well make it official, and readingthenight agreed (she does the same thing, only less publicly). here is the link for the same!!

all of us are indian, so we’ll have at least one or two books from south asia and other south asian regions. we’re only dropping this once a month with six recommendations, and at least ONE free text in the middle of it. you can also follow this instagram if you like, because we DEFINITELY want to do themed months and it would be great to have people participate in that!! lastly, some of u cool people read much more than me, so i will 100% be soliciting recommendations from u guys <3

linseedling:

yes 

YES

dethblow asked:

STOP the meaning of ur URL is so precious

oh NO i was just an imaginative teenager hehe. i do think the poem itself has a sense of rhythm and i don’t mind cringing at it now, so many years later:

//I like to think that stories aren’t just built upon ideas

That somewhere that world exists with living, working gears

And from the cracks between universes thoughts come seeping through

For somewhere far, far away, every story is true.//

so stupid, right? well anyway thats where i’ve been sourcing my personality for over a decade now

em1e:

what made u guys pick ur url’s !

(via dethblow)

morkaischosen:

prokopetz:

Really enjoying how girls going “if you loved me you’d commit war crimes for me” is apparently just Nate Stevenson’s creative signature.

“if you loved me you’d commit war crimes with me”

(via jiragoku)

briarhips:

Tagged by the brilliant @roobylavender (ty love you!!! 💌) to make a post of 9 book recs! 📚

• The Laughter by Sonora Jha: The quote “Why do you people need me to be better than you?” is one of the best sentences I’ve read all year. Predicted + dreaded the ending but when it finally unfolded exactly as I thought it would I was actually thrilled. Might make you mad if ur a Muslim that frets over the general image of Islam/Muslims in stories and I guess I sympathize but… I love this book sm for the way it does not hinder itself trying to do the impossible and act as PR/damage control, challenging narratives that do try to do that. Not sure how to elaborate w/o major spoilers. Really hilarious (to me) depiction of how racism works consciously and unconsciously in the modern “enlightened” mind.

• Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt: straightforward but super effective fable-like girl meets death story.

• The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff: Really fun and impressively balanced story about wack job schemes and murder but also the dicey nature of womanly solidarity. Faithful to its feminist themes the whole way through + doesn’t bite off more than it can chew tonally or subject wise imo.

• Bhaunri by Anukrti Upadhyay: Super satisfying, fairytale ish, kind of sexy “revenge” story. A wife’s insistence upon being equals with the husband she loves unleashes chaos on the whole household that has you cheering the whole time (or it did me!)

• The Idylls of the Queen by Phyllis Ann Karr: part murder mystery part questy/adventure story, no prior knowledge of arthuriana really necessary to have fun w/ it. Biased because it’s told by my favorite KOTR (Kay!) but the narrative voice is v fun to read. Do not read if ur hoping to get to know Karr’s version of Guinevere tho, you’ll be disappointed with her page time. Lots of v funny, petty/gossipy/snobby characterizations of the knights and ladies of Camelot. Love the way Karr writes about chivalry and honor in the historical societies she chooses as the fallible concepts they are instead of given truths.

• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier: Jane Eyre but what if her identity was dwarfed and erased by the Other Wife. Never read a narrative so well serviced by an awkward, shy heroine. Go girl give us nothing not even your name !

• Umrao Jan Ada: The Courtesan of Lucknow by Mohammad Mirza Hadi Ruswa, tr. Khushwant Singh and M. A. Husaini: Don’t know what inspired me like an autumn ago to watch the 1981 film on a whim but I thought it was a great time. and ofc the opening title card informing me it was based off a book prompted me to seek it out and compare asap and I’ve been chewing on it ever since. maybe my fixation is because I am an out of touch reader unable to read anything but english, which cuts me off from a lot of cultural work I’m dying to read, but I’m v grateful I was able to track this down.

• Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner: I don’t know if anyone else I speak to will like this actually. Just love a slow ish, lonely-atmosphere and a story where a marriage almost happens and but doesn’t. Was a buffer/break book between more intentional + demanding reads for me a few years ago and the mundane grayness of it all scratched a vague itch for me.

• The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey: First and so far strongest installment of the Perveen Mistry mystery series. Can be read as a standalone!

tagging: @vympr @pinkafropuffs @noblyphantasmic @prairiewhisper @sailermoon @pendraegon @geryone @whalesfall @brownpaperhag @shehzadi @quimerical @mpaulluvr666 @snailmailthings @howaboutswords @cosmicrhetoric @transmutationisms most def forgetting a lot of mutuals w/ excellent taste but I am only human. Plz do this and tag me if u want to, I’m so nosy abt this kind of thing 🙏🏽

(via appsa)

wachtelbude:

submalevolentgrace:

submalevolentgrace:

this guy gets it

this is so funny

(via luminoustico)

centrally-unplanned:

oneheadtoanother:

Their savage Asiatic AI-operated drones vs our benevolent Judeo-Christian AI-operated drones

“Can a papel edict successfully align singularity-level AI employed in war to avoid human extinction?” The greatest thread in the history of the vatican council, shut down by the pope after 10,356 thesis-

(via moodysasuke)

demasiadapresion:

Louis… mon cher… Je sais that la petite mademoiselle Claudia means a lot to you, je veux what’s best for her too. Mais, pour être honnête, Je ne think pas she’s as happy with us in our home as she would be otherwise. Fortunately, I have found a group of mentors seemingly adequate to her needs. These cinq garçons, musiciens majestueux, one has your namesake, Louis, offer une grand récompense monétaire pour l'adoption d'une fille, and ous can see her when they’re on toure. Elles cinq sont called… Une Directioneaux???

(via darkcomedies)

lingonberryjamistakenwhat:

I was listening to a podcast earlier with the author of “Animals in the Qur’an”, which is a work essentially asserting that the Qur’an does not in fact have an essential anthropocentric understanding of the universe (though the book itself, being addressed to humans with a message for humans is focused on humans), but instead actually has a depiction of animals that can be read as viewing them as fundamentally equal to humans.

That is to say, rather than the view commonly understood in Genesis (that humans have dominion over animals, because we’re in the image of God and are given this by God), it depicts (at least according to a plausible reading) animals as having equal worth as one of the many creations of God (and in the Qur’an there is no claim of humans being made in the image of God [note: some Muslims do believe this but not as a belief read from the Qur’an]).

The book also argues that the Qur’an depicts animals as having a genuine spiritual relationship with God. And it draws upon other Islamic literature that also depicts animals being resurrected at the end of time to help demonstrate a broader understanding in Islam (not dominant in the last couple hundred years) of animals as on some level equal to humans.

I don’t have book buying money right now, but I found it on libgen and the author actually is pretty readable which is nice. I’m so excited

wherestoriescomefrom:

Rowling’s school is an imagination of what she wants a school to be, regardless of whether or not real schools are quite like that. Experience and scholarship have taught us that schools are not the egalitarian spaces they are imagined to be. The rich variety of literature that focuses on the classroom would be impossible to summarise: in particular, post-colonial scholars have focussed on the many inequalities perpetrated by the imposition of the British schooling system.

When placed in this context, one cannot escape the underlying implication of Hogwarts: that to have extraordinary agency, one would have to be a rather brilliant student of the British curriculum, preferably with access to one of the elite boarding schools that foster and nurture this kind of magic. By framing education as one of the central ways through which the magic of childhood can be imagined, we do a great disservice to forms of childhood that do not rely on schooling at all. And if children in schools have access to grand magic, so should everyone else.

[…]

The existence of the magical school is a complicated thing — it necessitates the existence of a colonial legacy that allowed schools to become part of our everyday. It further necessitates a complex relationship with the more untameable, the wilder — magic. Almost all magical schools are somewhere or the other problems because of this — they cannot help but be antithetical to what they are meant to provide students. The Scholomance is not a refuge; it is not a safe space; it provides so much agency to children — at the expense of their lives.

— Why Do We Keep Inventing the Magical School?

@treegona incidentally, that’s what some of the rest of the essay talks about! i feel like I didn’t do a good job with the extracts I picked, so here:

In the third book, the school is resurrected once again after a series of complicated political machinations necessitate its reconstruction. And with it, it becomes clear that the school is still, intrinsically, a part of our cultural makeup. As an Indian, I can tell you that when schools were established in the colonies, they were universally spaces for the establishment of British supremacy. Yes, schools were never meant to be anything more than bastions of inequality — and yet, as any student would tell you, we would like our schools to do the job they were originally given. Even if the job was given cynically and disingenuously.

(via treegona)