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stephen-narain · 3 years

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The Work of Art in the Age of Virtual Reproduction

By Stephen Narain

This essay received the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing.

We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history, and in a way, that was a gift. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.

—Jay-Z, Decoded

I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

—T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“Cut” by Kara Walker (1998)

1. The Disintegrating Sugar Sphinx

This essay is about not seeing the physical exhibit of Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety.” This essay is about seeing hundreds of its virtual reproductions online.

I first encountered Walker’s work in 2007 at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum. At the time, I was an undergraduate preparing to tell my parents—Guyanese immigrants to the United States—that, no, I would not be applying to law school. I wanted to become a writer. Still, my family’s pragmatism shaped the vision of the writer I wished to become. Socially conscious. Committed to a community’s particular experiences. Unafraid of upsetting that community’s standards if necessary. I had big ideas about the novel and about what the novel could do. Yet, I was also aware that the bridge between aesthetics and politics was a difficult one to build. Add to this the sophomore’s struggle with interpretation. A discerning professor during a course on the American counterculture of the 1960s encouraged me to constantly examine the assumptions guiding my claims about the political uses of art. Such proclamations might best be made after a more nuanced study, she suggested more than once in red ink on my C- papers. My response in the months to follow was to run in the opposite direction of grandeur: to read so minutely that I could never be charged of falling prey to the affective fallacy. The ideal criticism, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley wrote in 1949, “will not talk of tears, prickles, or other physiological symptoms, of feeling angry, joyful, hot, cold, or intense, or of vaguer states of emotional disturbance, but of shades of distinction and relation between objects and emotion.” I might as well have tattooed that quotation on my arm. I don’t think I laughed or cried my entire senior year.

Viewing Walker’s exhibit, which included silhouettes of slaves superimposed on lithographic renderings of Civil War battle scenes, I tried to remain as “objective” as possible. But a slave’s decapitated head was floating in a cloudy sky. Blobs that could either be blood or feces were nestled in a valley. Entire appendages were flung into the lithograph’s white borders, beyond the image entirely. I tried to be subtle when what I felt was disgust. What was the nature of this disgust?, I wondered. And how do I ensure my response to it became neither parade nor parody? How do I neither scream the near-platitudes of Amiri Baraka nor dwell in the ignorance of those people privileged enough to proclaim “art for art’s sake?”

Writing on her visceral response to E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View, Zadie Smith suggests: “We are aware that there is an emotive response for which the novel explicitly applies that is not properly requested by an atom or a rock formation or a chemical compound. Sensing the anomalous nature of this emotive quality within the university, we have resolved not to speak of it much.” My gut emotive response upon seeing Walker’s modified lithographs was a sense that they were gesturing toward the stories that remained hidden within my family, within my country, within the region I choose to call home. Walker’s pieces were the most brilliant evocations of historical revisionism I had ever encountered. The vital differences between American and Caribbean slavery aside, I wondered how my particular experiences as a West Indian person related to those “objective” criticisms I was tasked to make in the classroom. Was I supposed to suppress these experiences? Channel them in some measured, productive—and ultimately palatable—way? What, in the name of “nuance,” might I elide? And those basic facts of biography—a Bahamian childhood, a father who grew up on a Corentyne farm, Indian ancestors who crossed the kala pani many generations ago—what became of them?

Seven years later, I still have not answered these questions. (I might spend a lifetime as a writer trying to do so.) I follow Walker chiefly because her work encourages me to not only examine my assumptions about the political uses of art as Sullivan instructed—but to constantly examine the professor’s assumptions as well. I was sad when I arrived in New York a week too late to see Walker’s thirty-five-foot-tall sugar sphinx, but I was grateful that I could experience her work the way most young people living in the world experience things these days. I scrolled through hundreds of photographs posted on the Instagram and Twitter and Facebook pages of people I did not know. Things got complicated, however, whenever I clicked the hashtag #karawalkerdomino. Disturbing images loaded on my screen—the skinny boy sitting next to me at the coffeehouse might have assumed I was interested in some strange pornography. “Sowapowa” angles her camera to make it look as if she were squeezing the sphinx’s impressive areolas. “Bulzeye”—in an unfortunate accident of nomenclature—inserts his tongue into the sphinx’s vagina. “Nealmaffei” smirks beneath the sphinx’s derrière.

The virtual fourth wall demolished, I wonder how Wimsatt and Beardsley might react to the Brechtian theater that art-viewing has become on social media. I wonder what they might make of the constant bombardment of images we encounter where individuals have inserted themselves into the text. I wonder what they might make of Kara Walker.

This essay poses—and refuses to answer—questions about the nature, production, and consumption of art in this current age of virtual reproduction. It is written by a Guyanese-Bahamian-American person three days after he faced the Domino Sugar Factory for the first time, holding a fancy camera his great-grandfather could never afford, preoccupied not by the onus of history, but by all the aggressive facial hair to be found in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. A photograph is stored in his imagination. In it, a forty-year-old hipster with a handlebar moustache stands in front of an artisanal cheese shop. A young orthodox Jew—hat black, locks brushing against his ears—holds his son’s hand.

They are all waiting for the light to turn green.

2. Good Selfies/Bad Selfies

“The photograph,” Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, “represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.” With each social media post, we experience the ghosts of our previous selves. For a Caribbean community that has had its identity reduced for centuries, this layering of character can provide a powerful tool for cultural change. Frequently, the region’s social evolution has been framed in postcolonial language, and I wonder if changes in media consumption might serve as a viable alternative—or complement—to these critical constructions.

In his 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners, Samuel Selvon paints a portrait of a balkanized metropolis. “It have people living in London,” Selvon writes in the inimitable voice of Moses Aloetta, “who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening to the other ones except what you read in the papers.” Newspapers, in the past quarter century, however, have radically evolved in their platform: when was the last time you sat down with a hardcopy of The New York Times or the Trinidad Guardian or the Stabroek News? Moses’ nostalgia in Londoners is fed by his physical distance from Port of Spain—but in a visual sense, his nostalgia is fed by his distance from real images of the city. If nostalgia is built from a triangular interaction between memory, desire, and sensation, the Internet has radically transformed how we remember, want, and feel.

The post-independence generation of artists emerging from the Caribbean and its diaspora are hyperaware in narrative effect—if not in poetic intent—of this cultural tide change. Christian Campbell, in his poem “Lightskinned Id,” takes a joy in the simultaneity of his skin’s multiple shades—and in what effect such a coexistence might have on the evolution of his perceptions. In “Disappearing Houses,” a collaborative project published in the Summer 2013 issue of Wasafiri, Andre Bagoo and Vahni Capildeo employ photometric techniques to disrupt our often vision of Trinidad’s economic progress. They create otherworldly images of working-class detritus in tension with the vision of glass and steel development promoted by tourist boards and self-fulfilling prophecies. The works of Shivanee Ramlochan, a journalist, poet, and editor, and Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné, a painter and poet, are preoccupied with the spiritual shape-shifting we might trace back to Hindu mythology.

Boodoo-Fortuné, influenced by Frida Kahlo, works in watercolor and ink. Her exhibit “Criatura”—Spanish for “creature”—ran last summer at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago. The forty-four pieces, the artist writes, were intended to “prompt reflections on the alchemy that governs a mixing of selves, straddling life and death, their natures fed by forces of both fruition and decay.” The title piece portrays a woman, part human, part tree. Wildflowers grow from her hair. Her elongated neck is composed of skin and bark. Her eyes are exaggerated like an anime temptress, yet sadness resides behind seduction. This balance of boldness and vulnerability marks Boodoo-Fortuné’s representations of the feminine spirit. Each of the painting’s women can be interpreted as conversing with one another. But this observer wonders if the piece “Separate and Same” provides a key to understanding the exhibit as a whole. Might all the women in Boodoo-Fortuné’s collection reside in a single body, the way Parvati and Durga and Kali belong to one entity? Is Boodoo-Fortuné’s collection a yoga of sorts? And if so, is a walk through the gallery akin to clicking through a friend’s Facebook album—that peculiarly twenty-first-century mythopoesis—titled “2013 was a great year!”? Image one: a kiss on a mountaintop. Followed by a stare behind a glass of Cabernet. Wisps of hear behind a commencement cap. A contemplative look into nowhere. Then a click. A true nowhere. A white space. Until we choose to close the page, to log off, and to get on with our ordinary lives.

3. A Brief Note on Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné’s Tumblr Page

The title of Boodoo-Fortuné’s Tumblr page, “Wings & Fire,” further signals the artist’s fascination with flight and destruction, with hubris and humility, with Icarus and Daedalus. My interpretation of Boodoo-Fortuné’s work fundamentally changes because I follow her on Tumblr. Below one of “Criatura’s” paintings, “Mother of the Hummingbirds,” is a quote by Sandra Cisneros: “I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin (via radicalheart82), 16,625 notes.” On June 20, Boodoo-Fortuné posted an animation of a turtle with a Band-Aid on its shell. The caption: “Don’t knock my shell. It hurts a lot.” Two weeks prior, Boodoo-Fortuné posts a picture of puppy prints in her studio floor. A week before, a statue of a lady grasping wilted flowers. The same day: what looks like mortar and pestle and ferns on a woodblock. That same day again: a GIF of a woman like a 1960s Elizabeth Taylor with a halo over her crown, an image of the sun eclipsing the moon, and moving constellations, dippers—big and small—Orion, Hercules, all these stars I cannot name.

4. Anatomizing Self Construction

If Boodoo-Fortuné’s gallery exhibition represents an endpoint—and epiphany—her Tumblr page provides a glimpse into the rough work behind the artist’s elegant proofs. This is a very modernist sensibility, something I can only now articulate in this manner, in this moment because of the discerning professor allergic to bullshit. A scholar of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, the professor helped me realize that the works—The Waste Land, The Cantos, Ulysses—I romanticized as spontaneous acts of genius experienced passionate revisions by their respective their editors. These works were not created in isolation. They were the product of many hands.

“What happens when a new work of art is created,” Eliot writes in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.” In our current age of virtual reproduction, Caribbean artists frequently—and subconsciously—shuffle inherited sequences. The texture of old ideals is constantly impacted by the Caribbean artist’s engagement with, or negation of, those ideals and by her reifications of historically marginalized forms, be they of griot storytelling traditions or of the aesthetics of creolization or of the Walcottian mythology-mixing created within the region’s social web.

Through Tumblr’s interface—consisting of patterned visual displays, a dated archive, and a dynamic social network—we can glimpse, in unprecedented ways, the versions of the Caribbean artist’s self she wishes to represent to the world. Boodoo-Fortuné’s Tumblr page reveals a deep interest in gender roles, in spirituality, in the factors that facilitate—and hinder—empathy with fellow human beings and with nature. We see the influences she wishes us to see. Insodoing, we also see the content of each influence differently. We see Cisneros in relation to Boodoo-Fortuné’s “Mother of Hummingbirds.” We see bruised turtles in relation to Boodoo-Fortuné’s “Mother of Hummingbirds.” We see the stars in relation to Boodoo-Fortuné’s “Mother of Humingbirds.” And somewhere along the way, our perceptions are altered, our foci shift. The life of a hummingbird’s mother becomes foregrounded in our minds. What might that life entail? And I think back to Walker’s Civil War lithographs. I think of Toni Morrison’s Sethe.

“Every negro walk in a circle,” Marlon James writes in The Book of Night Women. “Take that and make of it what you will.”

5. Bridging the Uncanny Valley

Right eyebrow arched against social media, Smith writes in her essay “Generation Why?”: “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way, it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.” Yet, the impulse to acquire multivalent information is precisely what drives many Caribbean users to social media in the first place. It’s difficult to deny that Facebook inspires narcissism (it’s called “Facebook”) or Instagram, idiocy (young man licking the vulva of a sugar sphinx). But this generation’s online capacity to curate their visual representation—individuals actively insert themselves into dominant images, if they wish—facilitates a freedom denied to many individuals in the colonized Caribbean.

I won’t risk grandeur by arguing that Facebook feeds political independence, but I wonder how the Arab Spring might have turned out if millions of people took Smith’s skeptical route. She is correct on this point, however: the Internet user loses himself in the social network’s vast garden of forking paths. The pornography addict, the terrorist recruiter, the pro-democracy activist: all of them transcend their physical selves online, becoming the “set of data” points they wish to project to the world.

Two of the most promising voices in Bahamian culture—the novelist A.L. Major and the academic Angelique Nixon—both engage with the ways in which the expectations of the tourism industry have impacted, for good and for ill, the prism through which Bahamian people view their history and themselves. “When colonialists discovered the islands,” Major writes in a Michigan Quarterly Review blog post “Going to Watch Junkanoo,” “they found a way to instantly categorize those areas, a way to describe and recognize the islands easily. Tropical birds, exotic fruits become the recognizable features of a tropical landscape, and not, for example, poorly maintained roads or overburdened garbage collection sites. It’s this brochure self-knowledge, an ability to see the world as tourists might, that stifles creativity.”

Uncovering the garbage, for Major and for other post-independence Caribbean thinkers becomes a call to action, even as—for the sake of propriety and tourism advertisements—many Bahamian citizens might want to keep these images concealed. Yet one can’t help but feel that figures such as Major and Nixon take an end-justifies-the-means approach to criticism: in their ethical cost/benefit analysis, their people’s self-understanding far outweighs a Norwegian tourist’s ability to enjoy her suntan.

If Major uses a literary magazine’s blog to interrogate the images coming in and out of the region, the Barbadian photographer Risée Chaderton uses a TED talk to interrogate how such images, in real ways, impact the Caribbean body politic. In “Shaping Who We Are,” Chaderton discusses the rise of eating disorders amongst Caribbean men and women. She studies the “uncanny valley”—a perceptual space where non-human images appear to be human. Near the cusp of this valley might be robots or Disney characters—as well as many of the models on the covers of style magazines that make their way into Caribbean dental offices and public libraries and teenage bedrooms. Chaderton’s photographs, committed to celebrating healthy Caribbean body images, necessarily oppose the images that fall within the uncanny valley, just as Major’s blog opens a space for Bahamians—and non-Bahamians—to interrogate the assumptions guiding the country’s history-writing.

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What artists like Chaderton—and Walker and Boodoo-Fortuné—encourage is a radical reconception of the Caribbean female body, a site that has been abused, distorted, and commodified for much of the region’s history. Understandably, these artists’ work is in constant battle with the sheer force of incoming images from international media. However, the intimacy of these artists’ visions allows us to anatomize self-construction—physically and spiritually—in the tradition of Janine Antoni, Paule Marshall, and Jamaica Kincaid, three of the most innovative Caribbean artists of the twentieth century. As Walker’s giant sugar sphinx appears lower and lower on the public’s collective Instagram feed, I wonder how these artists’ work will evolve in the years to come. I wonder what their art (and their tweets) might teach us about who they are individually becoming—and about what the Caribbean, as both a region and a sensibility, seeks to represent down all its plural avenues.

#Alice Yard #Caribbean #Art

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ayemamiblog · 3 years

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Southeast Asian Literature

Southeast Asian Literature is a text-based collection that showcases the literary imagination and linguistic inventiveness of Asian writers as they negotiate their varied cultural identities. Searchable together for the first time are thousands of pages of English-language fiction, short fiction, and poems written from the end of the colonial era to the present. Scholars of literature, anthropology, linguistics, postcolonial theory and criticism, history, politics, and culture will find the collection rich in insights into modern experiences and their traditional connections. Writers originate geographically and culturally from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and Fiji and have relocated to the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, and African countries including South Africa and Uganda. The collection captures a broad range of personal experiences—South Asian elites educated in legacy British colonial schools; Indian descendants of 19th-century indentured plantation and railroad laborers, now living in the Caribbean or Africa; and writers born into immigrant communities in London, Toronto, and New York. Featured authors include Cyril Dabydeen, Ismith Khan, Chitra Fernando, Michael Ondaatje, Romen Basu, Surjeet Kalsey, Romesh Gunesekera, Githa Hariharan, Samuel Dickson Selvon, Gopal Baratham, Alamgir Hashmi, Brian Castro, Husna Azhari, and Zulfikar Ghose.

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someones-reading-list · 4 years

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Fall 2019: 20th century British Literature

Simon Lee - Texas State University

Course theme: Nostalgia and Memory

Reading list:

Pat Barker: Union Street

Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

John Osborne: Look Back in Anger

Samuel Selvon: The Lonely Londoners

Ali Smith: Autumn

Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited

Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse

Ancillary materials:

Proust: “The Madeleine”

Eliot: “The Waste Land”

Davis: “The Nostalgic Experience”

Chase/Shaw: “Dimensions of Nostalgia”

Turner: “A Note on Nostalgia”

Boym: “Taboo-Reflective-Restorative”

Tannock: “Nostalgia Critique”

Lowenthal: “Nostalgia Tells It Like it Wasn’t”

Howard: “Nostalgia”

Davis: “Nostalgia and identity”

Davis: “Nostalgia and Society”

Su: “Remains of the British Estate Novel”

Davis: “Nostalgia and Art”

Sedikedes: “Nostalgia: Past, Present, and Future”

#british literature #20th century

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lingually · 4 years

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relationship status: single

favourite colors: cool colours and earth tones

lipstick or chapstick: neither

three favourite foods: provision and saltfish, dhal, rice and bhagi and rice, lentil peas and fry fish

song stuck in my head: bang bim by marzville x unruly empire

last song i listened to: turn back time by wayv

three favourite tv shows: brooklyn 99, blue exorcist, pink panther

current book(s): the mystery of three quarters by sophie hannah and ways of sunlight by samuel selvon

last film i watched: black panther

number of blankets i sleep with: one thin cover when it's warm, a second thick blanket when it's cold

anything i want: an ipad and apple pencil

current time: 15:09

dream trip: no particular place, would justlike to see the world

i tag @eirlon @nouvellestudy @backpackcrumbs @plancake

#tag game #about me #ari answers

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maangoes · 4 years

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what is your thesis about?

ahh!!!!! thank u for asking thats so sweet. i’m writing about the development of multicultural london and the relationship between xenophobia and burgeoning postimperial politics/national identity :~) i hope at the end to talk about the gentrification of places like brick lane & brixton. it’s technically a literature thesis so this semester i’m working with a text called the lonely londoners by samuel selvon, n then next semester i’m deciding between several works from the asian diaspora set in the contemporary moment.

#💜💜💜💜💜💜whoever sent this i hope u have a good day #Anonymous

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reviewsphere · 6 years

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The Anguish of the West Indian Diaspora in “Basement Lullaby”

“Basement Lullaby”, a short story written by Samuel Selvon, tells about two West Indian musicians – Bar 20 and Fred, who reside in an old and gloomy basement, alienated from the society in ways both spatial and social. Coming home from a late-night performance, they find themselves in a conflict: Bar 20 is sorrowfully reflecting on their miserable lifestyle and reminiscing about home, while Fred,…

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#Basement Lullaby #Calypso Overseas #Caribbean Diaspora #Sam Selvon #Trinidad

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faidhabsi · 3 years

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Curiosity Blog Post on Hybridity and Cultural Identity.

Contemporary society house an integral system of a culture where various cultures co-exist at a go. A combination of two cultures takes place to bring birth to a new culture with unique values that cut across both communities. Arguably, this forms the baseline for cultural hybridity, which contends to the genetic definition of hybridity as the breeding process of different varieties, species, or races of living things to generate offspring of improved identity. This post aims to take you through the journey of cultural hybridity and cultural identity struggles that immigrants undergo in foreign countries until they form an integrated culture. However, this roadmap cannot be possible without flipping through the pages of "The Lonely Londoners," an iconic publication by Selvon Samuel, in matters pertaining to cultural hybridity and identity.

The adage, "For anything good to happen then a price has been paid," ends up being justified in "The Lonely Londoners." An extreme crisis of identity preceded the Creole immigrants' cultural transition from the Lonely Londoners to Moses Ascending before attaining the London culture's full hybrid identity. The Creole people's initial identity as they stepped into London was inclined to racial discrimination by the London people's arrogant and hegemonic nature. London culture's dominance overwhelms the Creole immigrants who suffer from the crisis of identity: Mixed up reactions build upon whether they should remain adamant on their culture or accept that they are in the new environment that calls upon their admittance to the new cultural identity.

The dilemma of immigrants' identity and the host community's perception becomes evident when an immigrant mother encounters difficulty in asking Galahad of his identity due to the unease of her child and being surrounded by numerous people. Galahad reveals the endless questions of misery all immigrants ask themselves due to their distinctive cultural identity. For instance, Galahad talks to his hand's color attributing to it all the problems and blaming its inability to change into white, blue, or any other color so that his identity could at least get hidden. Hence blending into the London culture is initially hectic that translates to life, and job hunting becomes an uphill task.

The discrimination thus pushed the Creole people to the wall to the extent that they decided to blend the London culture into their Creole culture. At this point, various Creole characters who admired the London culture start infringing. For example, Harris goes to opera with the primary goal of socializing with the upper class to be considered one who embraces the London culture. Besides, he displays humility and respect when he offers a certain woman a bus seat. After sometimes, the immigrants start presenting themselves as out standers and get slowly assimilated by Londoners. Further negotiations of hybridity between the two cultures thus resulted in Creole immigrant metropolitan culture. In the long run, immigrants start emulating and practicing the living standards of the London people.

A representative example in the hybridization of culture in "The Lonely Londoners" lies in the significant shift of Moses's habits to new ones. For instance, he shuns his old Creole friends and culture and decides to be self-centered as the Londoners. He decides to move into a new house and starts a habit of traveling and lodging as Clifford contends. Moreover, Moses's view and relationship with women suddenly changes from the Creole's traditional angle to the Londoners' point of view. In The Lonely Londoners, Moses has no considerable appreciation for women's beauty and wisdom and could not be associated with women. However, after assimilation and gaining London's hybridity, Moses starts viewing women in a modernized view. He develops a strong and passionate relationship with women and particularly white women.

Something that was initially opposed by both cultures. These are the improved vices and values that stem from cultural hybridity (The fruits of the Creole cultural identity struggle).

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onelittlebookgeek · 4 years

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Book Challenge 2019 - I DID IT!

Hi guys, after tracking all the books I’ve read here from 2013-2016, I completely forgot this whole thing for more than 3 years! Sorry!!

No fear though: I’m back! Even though 2019 has almost ended, I’ll make sure this post correctly reflects the whole of 2019!

Since it’s already the end of October, I do feel like I have some hindsight vision into my reading pace this past year, but before I mention how it actually went, I want to explain my original expectations! So 2019 for me is the year I’m finishing my Classics Bachelor Degree in July and the year I’ll be studying abroad for one term from September to December (I’m doing two degrees, so I’ll still be doing my English degree after Classics!). So for my reading, I’d expected not to read a lot. Perhaps for my thesis some books on the subjects and of course for English my course work. So my original reading goal was 50 books!

Looking back on these expectations I must say I’ve read a great deal more than I expected! Writing my thesis did include reading a lot of books and other course work had more reading than I thought I would which boosted my challenge in the first half of the year! Of course, I’ve also read quite a lot during the holidays because what else is there to do in the holidays :D? Regarding my studying abroad experience, I’m reading more than I expected. This is partly because the course work is again much more based on reading books than articles or just parts of book. At the same time, I’m doing less studying than I used to do back home, so I have more time free to do some casual reading. On top of that - since I’m walking everywhere here - I’ve started listening to audiobooks which also adds a couple to the challenge.

So my challenge became 80 books! But I had already surpassed before November, so that’s great! I’d expressed my hopes to read 100 books this year as well, but out of fear of not making that I hadn’t changed my goals. Seeing as of now (mid-November), I’ve already read 93 books I feel confident I can read at least 7 more until a 100, so I’ve changed my goal to read 100 books

The crossed book is the one I’m currently reading, I’ve written reviews for books that have a (x) behind them; the (x) is a link to my Goodreads review!

Update: Today (December 31) I’ve read 135 books so I’ve finished my challenge!! Let’s see where the rest of this year brings me :D!

January

The Oresteia - Ted Hughes (4/5) (x)

The Sign of Four (Sherlock Holmes #2) - Arthur Conan Doyle (3/5)

The Suffragettes - Various (3/5)

The Poems of Phillis Wheatley - Philils Wheatley (3/5) (x)

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave - Frederick Douglass (3/5)

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself - Harriet Ann Jacobs (4/5)

February

Darius the Great is Not Okay - Adib Khorram (5/5)

A Disquisition on Government - John C. Calhoen (2/5)

March:

‘s Nachts verdwijnt de wereld - Jaap Robben (Dutch) (4/5)

Public Opinion - Walter Whitman (3/5)

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives - David Eagleman (5/5) (x)

Zalig Uiteinde - Viktor Frölke (Dutch) (2/5)

Vampire Academy (Vampire Academy #1) - Richelle Mead (reread) (4/5)

Frostbite (Vampire Academy #2) - Richelle Mead (reread) (4/5)

Language and Power - Paul Simpson (3/5)

Language Change: Progress or Decay? - Jean Aitchison (3/5) (x)

Shadow Kiss (Vampire Academy #3) - Richelle Mead (reread) (4/5)

April:

Blood Promise (Vampire Academy #4) - Richelle Mead (reread) (4/5)

A Latin Lover in Ancient Rome - W.R. Johnson (2/5) (x)

The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot (5/5) (x)

Propertius: Elegies - Propertius (ed. Hutchinson) (2/5) (x)

Propertius: A Critical Introduction - J.P. Sullivan (3/5)

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett (4/5) (x)

Lanny - Max Porter (4/5) (x)

Between the Acts - Virginia Woolf (5/5) (x)

Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy - Jeri Blair DeBrohun (1/5)

Yukon Ho! (Calvin and Hobbes #3) - Bill Watterson (4/5) (x)

Emancipating Lincoln - Harold Holzer (3/5)

The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon (1/5) (x)

May:

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov (5/5) (x)

The Shadow of Callimachus: Studies in the Reception of Hellenistic Poetry at Rome - Richard Hunter (2/5)

Literary and Artistic Patronage in Ancient Rome - Barbara K. Gold (3/5)

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America - Nancy Isenberg (2/5) (x)

Act of Justice: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Law of War - Burrus M. Carnahan (3/5)

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America - Allen C. Guelzo (3/5)

June:

Apollo, Augustus and the Poets - John F. Miller (2/5) (x)

Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam #1) - Margaret Atwood (3/5) (x)

Circe - Madeline Miller (4/5) (x)

Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson #1) - Rick Riordan (reread) (4/5)

Callimachus and his Critics - Alan Cameron (2/5)

July:

Elegies - Propertius (5/5)

Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson #2) - Rick Riordan (reread) (4/5)

Er was er eens en er was er eens niet - Judith Herzberg (Dutch) (1/5)

Percy Jackson and the Titan’s Curse (Percy Jackson #3) - Rick Riordan (reread) (4/5)

A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf (5/5) (x)

Red, White and Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston (4/5) (x)

The Book of Extraordinary Deaths - Cecilia Ruiz (3/5)

The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems - Oscar Wilde (4/5)

The Epic of Gilgamesh (3/5)

Much Ado About Nothing - William Shakespeare (5/5)

Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth (Percy Jackson #4) - Rick Riordan (reread) (5/5)

Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian (Percy Jackson #5) - Rick Riordan (reread) (5/5)

The Peloponnesian War, Book 2 - Thucydides (3/5)

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (5/5)

August:

A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses #2) - Sarah J. Maas (reread) (4/5)

Hold Your Own - Kate Tempest (4/5)

Slimy Stuarts - Terry Deary (3/5)

Orlando - Virginia Woolf (5/5) (x)

Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker (3/5) (x)

Songs of Innocence and Experience - William Blake (4/5)

Windharp: Poems of Ireland since 1916 - Coll. by Niall MacMonagle (4/5)

Kaas - Willem Elsschot (Dutch) (1/5)

Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti (4/5)

Brand New Ancients - Kate Tempest (3/5)

September:

The Fall of Arthur - J.R.R. Tolkien (3/5)

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (4/5)

The Bees - Carol Ann Duffy (4/5)

Poems - Allen Ginsberg (5/5)

Spirit Bound (Vampire Academy #5) - Richelle Mead (reread) (4/5)

Last Sacrifice (Vampire Academy #6) - Richelle Mead (reread) (4/5)

Callirhoe and Caereas - Chariton (3/5)

Bartleby the Scrivener - Herman Melville (3/5)

Benito Cereno - Herman Melville (4/5)

October:

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave - Frederick Douglass (4/5)

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself - Harriet Ann Jacobs (2/5)

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing - Hank Green (4/5)

Song of Myself - Walt Whitman (4/5) (x)

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson: Poetry of the Central Consciousness - Salsa Agnieszka (3/5)

A Thousand Ships - Natalie Haynes (4/5) (x)

Roderick Hudson - Henry James (4/5) (x)

All That She Can See - Carrie Hope Fletcher (3/5) (x)

The Priory of the Orange Tree - Samantha Shannon (4/5)

All the Crooked Saints - Maggie Stiefvater (3/5) (x)

Daphnis and Chloe - Longus (3/5)

The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett (1/5) (x)

November:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (2/5) (x)

Lily and the Octopus - Steven Rowley (4/5) (x)

First World War Poems from the Front (4/5)

If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio (4/5) (x)

The Republic - Plato (2/5) (x)

Observations - Marianne Moore (5/5)

Poems (1930) - W.H. Auden (2/5) (x)

The Professor’s House - Willa Cather (1/5) (x)

Becoming - Michelle Obama (4/5)

The Outsider - Albert Camus (4/5)

Three Poems - Hannah Sullivan (3/5)

Leucippe and Clitophon - Achilles Tatius (4/5)

The Book of Mirrors - Frieda Hughes (3/5) (x)

Sophist - Plato (5/5) (x)

Selected Poems - E.E. Cummings (4/5)

A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry (4/5)

The Beats (A Very Short Introduction) - David Sterrit (4/5)

The Cat Inside - William S. Burroughs (5/5)

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton (4/5) (x)

Kindred - Octavia E. Butler (4/5)

Remains of Elmet - Ted Hughes (3/5) (x)

Dear Boy - Emily Berry (1/5) (x)

The Merchant of Venice - Willaim Shakespeare (3/5)

Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov (4/5)

How to Be a Woman - Caitlin Moran (2/5) (x)

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America - Bill Bryson (3/5)

December

Tracks - Louise Erdrich (3/5)

Derrida (A Very Short Introduction) - Simon Glendinning (x)

Ariel - Sylvia Plath (5/5)

London Triptych - Jonathan Kemp (3/5)

Two Cures for Love - Wendy Cope (5/5)

Citizen: An American Lyric - Claudia Rankine (4/5)

Magnus Chase and the Ship of the Dead (Magnus Chase #3) - Rick Riordan (4/5)

The Vegetarian - Han Kang (4/5)

Selected Poems - Philip Larkin (3/5)

Kid - Simon Armitage (1/5) (x)

The Children Act - Ian McEwan (4/5)

On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan (3/5) (x)

The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (4/5) (x)

Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs (4/5)

Man met hoed - Lieke Marsman (3/5) (Dutch) (x)

Koffers Zeelucht: Gedichten - Hagar Peeters (Dutch) (4/5)

Selected Poems - Gregory Corso (3/5)

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone - J.K. Rowling (reread) (5/5)

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (reread) (5/5)

Erotic Poems - E.E. Cummings (3/5)

Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare (reread) (4/5)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Edward Albee (2/5)

Carry On - Rainbow Rowell (reread) (4/5)

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