I am grateful to @katha_logisch, creator of #booksandhotdrinkstuesday for asking us how we feel about reading goals & challenges, because I feel like... ranting!!!
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The books you see here are all books I started somewhere between January and early March. I have finished none of them. I’m the deplorable host of buddy reads for three of them, namely #aintiawoman and #Orientalism for my #1nonfictionamonth challenge (hahahahahaha who was I kidding?!), and one of the co-hosts of #middlemarch2019. #TheThingsIWouldTellYou, I should have finished more than a month ago, as part of @emmawatson‘s book club, @oursharedshelf. And with #MidnightsChildren I’m participating in @mksreading’s challenge #readingrushdie.
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I’m a thorough enemy of numbers, I don’t set numeric goals because it stresses me out, but I love thematic buddy reads. Some of these books are real challenges for me: reading nonfiction is difficult so I thought I’d do it with friends, reading Middlemarch is daunting so I thought I wouldn’t embark on this alone... and so on... Yet, four months into 2019 and I have made but little progress in all those buddy reads. I haven’t finished a book in two months. I never know which book to pick up now. I feel guilty of DNFin any of those, especially my nonfiction books. So I’m stuck, and I’m frustrated. And here I finish my ranting, because classes are over in a week and I won’t have to commute to Paris thrice a week and hopefully, hopefully, I’ll be able to read some more, catch up, finish books and surely, surely, I’ll embark on new buddy reads because I may be awfully late in all those ones, but the conversations we share with fellow readers are a real gift from #bookstagram, for which I am grateful.
I wrote that word twice in a ranting post so I think I’m not in such a bad state after all...
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#bookblogger #bloggingforbooks #thelitbooks #literaryfiction #currentlyreading #writersofcolour #nonfiction #readingchallenges
Let’s talk about race, baby!
If you are not tired of talking to white people about race, I have a question. I was having fascinating conversations with @shereadsox and @thatothernigeriangirl regarding the N-word. Assia asked me if I had ever used it in class and if I would, should the occasion arise. I don’t remember ever using this word in class (I obviously never use it in my daily life!) but I told her that I would use it IF (and only IF) quoting a text written by a black writer in which the word appears. Assia thinks it would still be inappropriate regarding the history of the word, carrying a heavy meaning of white dominance. Aeesha on the other hand realised only late that the word had a very negative and “white power” smell and she told me she probably wouldn’t mind if a white academic used it in such a context (again, quoting an author, not using it per se).
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I found these insights very interesting. While I understand that the word carries a heavy, bloody and painful history, it seems to me that a writer’s job is to choose words. And if a writer decides to write the N-word at a specific moment, it is for a good reason (shocking and upsetting might be one of those reasons). Admittedly, a writer knows that their text is going to travel and be read widely, even by people who shouldn’t pronounce the N-word.
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So, if I, as a white academic, use a text in which the N-word appears (see my story!) and need to read the text out-loud, should I say “N-word” verbatim or should I pronounce the word? If I’m quoting the text, if clearly it is not “me” speaking but the character or narrator, is it inappropriate? If I don’t use the word the writer chose, purposefully, am I not silencing the writer? Or is this last question a way of turning the problem up-side-down?
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What do you think? Where is the limit between respecting a text and respecting a racial minority who suffered, and for whom the word carries the scars of this suffering? What if the author doesn’t want us to forget and uses the word for that specific reason?
What says you, bookstagram?
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#bookblogger #bloggingforbooks #thelitbooks #bookfeatures #writersofcolour #blackliterature #nword #renieddolodge
I know it doesn’t look like it because I’m not very present these days(and this is going to be a filler post to prevent you from forgetting me because I do miss you, friends!) but yes, I AM co-hosting a buddy read with @sarahs89reads, @vapoursofthoughts and @_penandpapers. The book is Middlemarch, the hashtag, #middlemarch2019. 🕵🏼♀️ (really feel like a secret agent disclosing the nuclear codes now)
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There are a lot of us reading along but it seems that we do need to be many to support each other through this massive chunk! What personally keeps me going are @but_i_thought_’s thoughtful review when she read it last year, and @well.read.redhead‘s ecstatic order to “read it read it read it!”. So far, it is a slow beginning, one of those books you know you can’t fully understand without the political and religious context of the time. But I’m confident that, like most huge books from the XIX° century, there will be a moment when I won’t be able to put the book down.
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So far, I’m accepting the slow setting-up, getting to know the characters and I’m marvelling at how surprisingly resembling it is to both Jane Austen and Edith Wharton. A very intriguing blend, if you ask me. .
That being said, I’m off again to grading some exams (does this ever end?). Oh, and my position as a temporary lecturer at Sorbonne Nouvelle has been renewed, I’m over the moon!
What’s new with you, dear friends? Any good news to share, bookish or non bookish? (I could do with some positivity after losing my grandmother. The flower on the picture comes from a plant she offered me three years ago, and it had not given any flower in 18 months... I hold on to it like a last goodbye kiss).
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#bookblogger #bookreviews #bloggingforbooks #thelitbooks #bookfeatures #literaryfiction #currentlyreading #georgeeliot #middlemarch #readwomen #readclassics
“We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him. (...) We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
If I was acquainted with Orwellian terms such as Newspeak and Big Brother, I didn’t expect so much despair to inhabit the dystopian and upsetting novel that is 1984.
In a post-revolution world, the date of which remains unclear because the Party keeps altering the past and denying changes, Winston, a Party member, tries to make sense of his deeply incrusted instinct that life oughtn’t be like this, that constant surveillance shouldn’t be the norm, that being always unemotional and uncompromisingly devoted to the Party is inhuman. Winston longs to be a human, to hope, to love, to live, but Spies and traitors are everywhere, condemning everybody to an utter solitude.
1984 explores what happens when the few are intoxicated with power, when the mass is carefully kept in an uneducated and economically weak state (sounds familiar?), and when a party controls everything, from your emotions to your daily chores to the past. Winston is a cog in this huge machine and his job, precisely, consists in altering the past according to the Party’s often contradictory’s orders. When history is modified & commodified on a daily basis, truth is diluted. Events don’t mean anything, only what’s left of it on written documents do, and these documents are constantly being re-written. Therefore, only the Party knows, so the Party becomes the truth.
Human landmarks disappear with each piece of historical truth, and Orwell’s obsessive question as to whether we can remain human in such circumstances leads us to the most chilling conclusion. A book that is more relevant today than ever.
Read more on the blog, #linkinbio.
Oh and #zoyarayne is the same colour as BB’s eye. Coincidence? .
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#bookblogger #bookreviews #bloggingforbooks #thelitbooks #literaryfiction #classics #1984 #georgeorwell #dystopia
Dear friends I’m back!
The last 2 weeks have been epic, what with my iPhone being stolen (and me thinking I’m above such mundane things as backups, I lost all my pictures), my classes to prep, exams to mark, round-trips to Paris, and the daily chores in-between.... here you are: little time to read, even less to post. But for #ourdaughtersdaughterssociety, @sarahs89reads and @paperbacking invite us to talk about #WOC in honour of #BlackHistoryMonth and I thought I could make a post about my #PhDresearch.
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The stack you are gazing at, friends, is composed of my research books. My tentative title is: “towards transculturalism: the representation of alterity in the works of Adichie, Ali, Lahiri & Smith.” My very basic question at first was: how do we meet, genuinely meet, one another, when despite sharing the same language, we don’t have the same culture, hence the same frame informing the way we see the world? From this starting point, I wandered, and I am now trying to untangle a contradiction I see in the beautiful, humanistic but also optimistic definition of transculturalism by a Russian literary theorist and the representations of alterity and of transculturalism in the novels & short stories of these female writers.
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Because I only study female writers (I don’t know how this happened because I wasn’t consciously AGAINST including male writers), I will get to explore issues of intersectionality: how is society doubly punishing you when you’ve been, as Trevor Noah would say, “born a crime”, that is: woman and coloured.
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I’m exploring different cultures, from the Caribbeans to Nigeria to India and Bangladesh, different religions, and focusing on the migration to the US or the UK, and on the troubles it causes in one’s sense of belonging.
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All these ideas fascinate and passionate me. Now, writing an insightful, structured, well-developed dissertation will be another matter but... I shall not be defeated!
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#zoyairis is in the background for you to keep on admiring!
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#bookblogger #bloggingforbooks #bookphotography #thelitbooks #womenofcolour #blackliterature #readwomen #phdresearch #chimamandangoziadichie #zadiesmith #phdcandidate
