the cross-fingered present.

(if you just came for the books: here.)

fifty-two. (2017)

By no means can this list be comprehensive since I literally got a master’s degree in reading this year, but to avoid listing out various critical theory texts, letters between old dead white dudes over the state of the “colonies”, and Said’s Orientalism 4234 times, I’ve narrowed it down to narrative (for the most part). The best ten I read this year are bolded– highly recommend!

1. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
2. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
3. Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia
4. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (Old Habits Die Hard– Also, Baby’s First College Lecture!)
5. Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (sue me, I’m an #intellectual)
6. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
7. Night by Elie Wiesel
8. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
9. And Then There None by Agatha Christie
10. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
11. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
12. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
13. Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
14. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (Old Habits Die Hard pt. II)
15. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
16. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
17. Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel
18. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
19. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (Baby’s First Faulkner!)
20. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
21. Ten Nights and a Night by John Barth
22. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
23. The 39 Steps by John Buchan
24. Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
25. Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
26. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
27. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
28. Adam Bede by George Eliot
29. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (Old Habits Die Hard Pt. III)
30. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
31. The Wanderings of Oisin by W. B. Yeats
32. The Winding Stair by W. B. Yeats
33. How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster (Baby’s First Book Reports)
34. The Sceptred Flute by Sarojini Naidu
35. The Bird of Time by Sarojini Naidu
36. The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu
37. Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore
38. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
39. Prometheus Unbound by Percy Bysshe Shelley
40. King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard
41. Dubliners by James Joyce
42. God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (Old Habits Die Hard Pt. IV)
43. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
44. Empire Writing: An Anthology by Elleke Boehmer
45. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
46. Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins
47. Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore
48. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
49. In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
50. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
51. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
52. Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald

five poems.

ghost exposures; fifty-two; home.

[perennial blog post to let everyone know I am Alive and Well and Overcaffeinated Per Usual!!]

I am about to commit treason to my literary kind: numbers fascinate me. The fact that math is an entire art based on the assumption of rules to be true is endlessly compelling. That you can use symbols that someone assigned meaning in some sort of code to quantify and calculate divisions of your life? Ridiculous. Crazy. Absolute certitude of how many days I have been alive (at the time of writing this, 8599), inches of rain fallen today (in Scotland right now, 3.4 with the conversion from centimeters), number of index cards sitting on my desk (94). And then people take these certitudes and combine them to establish larger averages of certitudes in an insane amount of ways!

How many hairs on my head: 90,000 (brunettes, 140,000; blondes, 110,000)! How many miles I’ll walk in my lifetime: 110,000! How many questions it takes to fall in love: 36! (or so they say, whoever the elusive “they” is.)

But how do we arrive at certitude? By arriving at the same certitude as someone else and deciding we must both be correct. Thus I contend, to any number-lover who tells me that they like math because it is black and white and not the shades of gray that words are, there is no difference. Numbers are like stories; established, tried, tested against time. These rules and theorems that create your number laws come from the same place that words do: the repetition of stories over millennia.

fifty-two. (2016)

fifty-two books I read in 2016.

inventory of joy.

“Unhappy am I that I cannot heave
my heart into my throat.”
—Cordelia, King Lear, I.i.91-92

chiaroscuro.

chiaroscuro

kɪˌɑːrəˈskʊərəʊ/

[mid 17th century: from Italian, from chiaro ‘clear, bright’ (from Latin clarus ) + oscuro‘dark, obscure’ (from Latin obscurus ).]

 1.  the arrangement or treatment of light and dark parts in a pictorial work of art

 2.  the interplay or contrast of dissimilar qualities (as of mood or character)

on thanks and giving, a thousand times over.

I wake, again, to rain. The gray fingers of sky peer through the fading maroon curtains our landlord left from the previous tenant. I push one aside. The power lines droop lazily between poles like cat’s cradles, the city sheathed in silver. Two men in lungis stand on the slick edge of a rooftop to survey the damage of the floors below. Watching them makes me nervous, so I drop the shade. I tug aside my blanket, flip off the mosquito repellant switch, and pad across the cool marble, trying to psych myself up into going outside. I pull on one of the few remaining clean shirts from my drawer and trace the sweat that has gathered at the nape of my neck; I heard the AC click off at 4am with another power outage, and judging from the status of my phone battery, it never came back on. I sling my purse over my shoulder, slide on chappals, and head downstairs.

of the great happening illimitably earth.

((Back to school now, but the holidays were good to me. I made sort of a grand harrumphing trip across the subcontinent: first to Delhi, then to Lucknow, then Jaipur, and then all the way to Sri Lanka in about ten days, sari mostly intact. I had some real enchiladas, failed horribly at getting on an elephant, got sunburned again, and overall had an amazing time with incredible people who make my sides hurt from laughing so hard. Pictures will follow at the end of this blog.))

becoming Madrasi, only.

(Broken into three parts. Sorry, it’s long. Sorry, it’s been a month. Sorry, it might not be as interesting as the last post. Sorry, people asked for more pictures of me in saris on here. Sorry, I didn’t properly cite either of the links I used in this post, because I currently can’t remember MLA.)