"Why were you embarrassed by her?" asked Farrokhlaqa, unwilling to leave the subject. "There's no shame in becoming a tree." ?

Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.
#gatsby

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ " No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all. Strongest of these emotions was the sense of exile and of deprivation, with all the crosscurrents of revolt and fear set up by these." #plague #camus

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

"Every White Feminist I have come across will argue until they are blue in the face that women should have the right to decide how to dress themselves. And then those same people are unwilling to stand up for a Muslim woman who wears a hijab or burqa because they 'don't believe in it' or 'feel like Muslim women are oppressed'." #feminist #essays

In his book 'The Descent of Man', Grayson Perry writes about the way the world revolves around the idea of the default man, who is white, middle-class, heterosexual and usually middle-aged. The default man is seen as 'the reference point from which all other values and cultures are judged'; he and what he represents is the backdrop against which all other identities exist.
#feminism #essays

One of the best and most depressing dystopian novels simply because it's not dystopian but close to reality in some towns here in Northern Europe. I think the term is Conservative Laestadianism.

There is supposed to be nothing entertaining about us, no room is to be permitted for the flowering of secret lusts; no special favours are to be wheedled, by them or us, there are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.
#margaretatwood #equality

A servant gets to know his master's intestinal tract from end to end - from lips to anus.

One fact about India is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down and then you will have the truth about that thing.

Not my fav Atwood but quite surprising and fresh still. Shakespeare goes prison milieu, and a lavish revenge story is served.

So we made a deal / He'd help me steal it / I'd pay him back / And we grabbed my Bro / that Pros-per-o / In the dead of night / We paid off his guards so they didn't put up a fight

Just sumptuous! So rich in human emotions and filled with carefully crafted details of the 80s that you read it at one sitting. And gotta love the reality in this "love story": a strong woman has a life to live but two useless and vain men keep prowling around her.

"Five thousand dollars for a baby doll?" Olive fanned herself with the magazine, lifting her peach-preserve hair. "I guess that's why God invented white folks."

If I were to advise them that they could extend this period by drinking coffee, I know quite well that some, because it was Satan speaking, would do the exact opposite and refuse coffee entirely, or worse yet, stand on their heads and try pouring it into their asses.

At first this feels but a poor rendering of Ferrante's excellent The Days of Abandonment but no, here we follow that one who abandons. I appreciated author's decision to turn the tide in the end and instead of recounting a memoir of an emotionally constipated whimpering elderly man, Starnone gives voice to man's children who are burdened with their parents' past and bad choices. But this definitely should've been the focus from the beginning.

"I am not, in the least, familiar with Death", said the miniaturist.
"We all know Death", said the old man.
"We fear it, but we don't know it."
"Then it falls to you to draw that fear", said the old man.

A merely average incident of the dog in the night time. Austerity and certain simplicity and coldness of the text does channel the point of view of the protagonist who, apparently, is on autism spectrum quite well but is still too plain and arid to read for more than 200 pages. Honestly, a bit uninteresting.