The Reading Room

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bobble

03:07

10k! :D

1 hour later…

User1865345

04:36

@bobble 👏🏻

Brides in some places catch
moonbeams through a sieve.
A ritual insurance on a husband’s
longevity. When she left home,
my grandma smuggled a river
in her eyelids. Sugandha, it was called.
Su-gandha, the sweet-smelling one.
She stole the river so that whenever
she shed a tear, she could smell
the river in the air around her.
An insurance against forgetting.
Her new home had no water near it.
In Jhalokathi, her forever former

home, Sugandha courses on the same
as before. Canals branch out from its cool, aquamarine breadth to steer thirsty
travellers. With a little help, the brook
learns to punctuate herself.
A green dreamscape
holds the water in
a bracket.
A floating bamboo bridge, bony, resolute,
gives a paragraph break to its carefree
run-on sentence streams.

On the edge of a fisherman’s home,
little girls pull toy boats, their giggles
running over the river’s ripples.
In a video about Sugandha, I see a mother
combing her daughter’s hair. Before I know it, the daughter turns into my grandma
and breaks into a song.
“Why don’t you come to our house anymore?” she asks.

- Bhaswati Ghosh, Nostalgic For a Place Never Seen, [source].

5 hours later…

Rand al'Thor

09:39

@bobble Congrats! I'd pull out the usual quote about 10k powers being the best, but that doesn't apply here since Lit still has beta rep levels so 2k is the big one in terms of privileges. Still, it's nice to see the non-exact rep number next to your name after you pass the 10k threshold :-)

2 hours later…

Bookworm

11:13

Q: Origin of the idea that cranes ballast themselves for flight, in Drayton’s ‘The Owl’

In his poem ‘The Owl’, Michael Drayton lists some lessons taught by various species of bird: And every bird shew’d in his proper kind, What virtue nature had to him assign’d Michael Drayton (1604). ‘The Owl’. In Works (1753), volume 4, p. 1291. London: W. Reeve. Thus the turtledove teaches “cha...

1 hour later…

Bookworm

12:21

Q: What did Alfred Austin mean by “poetry”?

In an essay on Robert Browning, Alfred Austin (later poet laureate) stated, repeatedly and emphatically, that Browning did not write, and was unable to write, poetry: Now, Mr. Browning rarely, if ever, thinks in poetry. His thoughts are often tremendously deep thoughts—deeper than any Mr. Tennys...

meaning poetry alfred-austin the-poetry-of-the-period

1 hour later…

Bookworm

13:28

Q: Miss Arrowpoint’s resemblance to a carte-de-visite in “Daniel Deronda” by George Eliot

From Daniel Deronda by George Eliot: But to a mind of general benevolence, wishing everybody to look well, it was rather exasperating to see how Gwendolen eclipsed others: how even the handsome Miss Lawe, explained to be the daughter of Lady Lawe, looked suddenly broad, heavy and inanimate; and ...

meaning george-eliot daniel-deronda

4 hours later…

Bookworm

17:12

Q: Are some passages in "Pedro Páramo" influenced by William Faulkner?

In the Wikipedia article on Juan Rulfo, it is remarked that: In passages of the novel Pedro Páramo, the influence of American novelist William Faulkner is notorious, according to Rulfo's former friend, philologist Antonio Alatorre This assertion is based on an interview which Alatorre gave to t...

inspiration spanish-language juan-rulfo pedro-paramo

3 hours later…

bobble

20:23

> The further I got into Spine of the Dragon, the more I realized I should cut my losses and stop reading. This epic fantasy doorstopper (over 25 hours of audiobook) completely failed to live up to its blurb. According to that blurb, two human kingdoms have to work together against a greater enemy. To put it frankly, that never occurs.

But that’s not even the worst of the problems, which was the backstory. It dragged the book down and stretched it out. Somehow 25 hours went by with only a handful of plot sprinkled throughout. The rest was backstory: for each of the at least 18 viewpoint ch…

To be clear, when I post review drafts here that's to see if anyone has edits I should do before putting them on the blog