honeysweet-hakunon-blog

[aseaofquotes]

Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

[litandlifequotes]

Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

[colettesonpluto]

a fine balance, rohinton mistry

[abookishshade]

Book Haul (May 2024)

Paperbacks (thanks to a cool book fair in my city) -

The God of Small Things

A Fine Balance

The White Tiger

Audiobooks (thanks to audible offer) -

The Body Keeps the Score

Woman's Lore

[andrasthehun]

What is Canadian Culture

February 7, 2024 During a lively discussion with friends, I asked: what is Canadian culture? After a surprising period of thoughtful quiet, someone suggested that Canada has musicians, authors, and artists who combine to define Canadian culture. But I said that many of these have made their career in the US. For example, Celine Dion, Joni Mitchell, and The Guess Who (Burton Cummings) have become…

[baejax-the-great]

47, 30, 44, and 26 (if you have them)! :)

47. What are the last three books you read?

"Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI" by David Grann. This is a nonfiction book about a truly horrific period of history in Oklahoma. It's a good read in that I cannot believe I never learned about this in school but wow am I depressed now.

"Ancillary Sword" by Ann Leckie. Second in a trilogy that I am really enjoying and recommend heartily.

"The Empress of Salt and Fortune." Short enough to be considered a novella, I think. It's an interesting and quirky little story beautifully told.

30. How many books do you have on your 'currently-reading' list?

Three. A history book about Ajax the Greater, Gilgamesh, and "The Vanishing Half" by Brit Bennett.

44. The book(s) whose stories have become part of your very makeup.

100 years of Solitude, ROTE, Probably Lioness Rampant from when I was a child lmao, and Discworld, The Iliad...

The very first Discworld book I read was Small Gods when I was like 12. I don't remember much of the plot, but I have always remembered Bilius, the god of hangovers. Coming down with chronic migraines, I suddenly related so hard to this character I had read about 15 years prior, and I think about him often. You and me both, Bilius.

26. Favorite novella(s).

I can only think of two that I've read off the top of my head--Candide by Voltaire and The Empress of Salt and Fortune, mentioned above. I recommend them both, though I don't think either counts as a favorite story.

[itbe1964]

One of my favourite things is deciding which book to read next. I love all the possibilities. Starting a new book feels like a gift, every time

[coolvieilledentelle]

Il est impossible de se fier au temps - quand je veux qu'il file, les heures se collent à moi comme de la glu. Et il a un caractère changeant. Le temps est le fil qui ligote nos vies en paquets d'années et de mois. Ou un élastique qui s'étire selon le bon vouloir de notre imagination. Le temps peut être un joli ruban qui orne les cheveux d'une petite fille. Ou les rides sur un visage, ou celui qui vous vole le teint et les cheveux de votre jeunesse.

Rohinton Mistry- (l'équilibre du Monde)

[beesly-pam]

Tag 9 people you want to know better

Tagged by the lovely @braedenhales

Last Song : Janiye by Vishal Mishra and Rashmeet Kaur

Sweet, Spicy or Savory : Spicy

Last Thing I Googled : Normal People book by Sally Rooney

Favorite Color : Green

Tea or Coffee : Coffee always

Last Movie : The Proposal

Current Obsession : Fleabag just finished the last episode today and the tears I have cried watching this show. I don't mean this lightly but it is a must watch and actually genius.

Currently Reading : Fanfics 😅 and A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

Relationship Status : Single

Tagging : @userlaylivia @autistichalfblood @partiallypearl @fishyyyyy99 @youdonothavetobegood and anyone who wants to play the game I don't have any more mutuals 😅😅

[hamliet]

did you read Indian literature and what your opinion about it?

I do! I like quite a bit of it. I will say that I love Arundhati Roy's essays and the like, but The God of Small Things gets at my pet peeve (incestuous twins) so it's a no from me. That said I still recommend it to many people, because it is a very good novel.

Other Indian writers I recommend:

Amitav Ghosh

Cyrus Mistry

Rohinton Mistry

Aravind Adiga

[magicaltear]

How many have you read?

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Bold the titles you’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

As found in the original post I saw by @macrolit

My total: 43/100

[litandlifequotes]

Everyone underestimates their own life. Funny thing is, in the end, all our stories…they're the same. In fact, no matter where you go in the world, there is only one important story: of youth, loss and yearning for redemption. So we tell the same story, over and over. Only the details are different.

Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry

[authorsreport]

English Literature?... Who else but the legendary Shakespeare!

Meanwhile English Literature:

Mark Twain

Jane Austen

RK Narayan

Leo Tolstoy

Rabindranath Tagore

Mulk Raj Anand

Kalidas

Horace

Ovid

Iliad

Plautus

Sophocles

A. K. Ramanujan

Sarojini Naidu

Rohinton Mistry

Marlowe

Geoffrey Chaucer

Edmund Spencer

Arthur Miller

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Ernest Hemingway

Walt Whitman

Emily Dickenson

John Milton

Alexander Pope

Agatha Christie

Franz Kafka

Virginia Wolf

Salman Rushdie

Fyodor Dostoevsky

JD Salinger

James Joyce

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Brooke Allen

Published: Mar 5, 2023

Many of us who care deeply about education in the humanities can only feel despair at the state of our institutions of “higher” learning. Enrollment in these subjects is plummeting, and students who take literature and history classes often come in with rudimentary ideas about the disciplines. Interviewed in a recent New Yorker article, Prof. James Shapiro of Columbia said teaching “Middlemarch” to today’s college students is like landing a 747 on a rural airstrip. Technology such as messaging apps, digital crib sheets and ChatGPT, which will write essays on demand, has created a culture of casual cheating.

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.

Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet. Cyber-cheating, even assuming they wanted to indulge in it, is impossible. But more important, they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones. My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.

My students at the prison sit through a 2½-hour class without any loss of focus. They don’t yawn or take bathroom breaks. I have taught classes on the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Romanticism, George Orwell, South Asian fiction. We’ve done seminars on Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Together we have read Montaigne, Rousseau, Keats, Erasmus, Locke, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Goethe, Petrarch, Rabelais, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rohinton Mistry. The students write essays in longhand; during the pandemic I taught a correspondence class via snail mail. Some of them do read “Middlemarch,” and their teacher finds the experience far more gratifying than trying to land a 747 on a rural airstrip. We encourage them to treat different societies in history as experiments in time travel, where they try to understand the mores of particular eras as though from the inside. They are very open to that approach, unlike university students, who tend see the past only as one long undifferentiated era of grievous unenlightenment: not just one damn thing after another, but one damn oppressive thing after another.

Like students at elite institutions, most of my incarcerated scholars are politically liberal. Unlike them, many are religious, and that proves surprisingly enriching in studying these authors, who would have been amazed to know they would one day be read by classrooms full of atheists. One of my more devout students, a Protestant who converted to Islam, was so distressed by Voltaire’s disrespect for established creeds that he had to be comforted by other class members. They informed him that he was exactly the sort of person Voltaire was aiming his polemic at, and therefore he could understand the force of it in a way his irreligious peers couldn’t.

My hours at the prison are rich in such moments. In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades. Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits. No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements. And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.

If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same? Or ask professors to try to create an atmosphere where these habits can prevail? Perhaps prison education can serve as a model of how to return to true learning and intellectual exchange.

[ Via: https://archive.ph/5YRih ]

==

The state of things.

[andrasthehun]

What is Candian Culture

February 7, 2024 During a lively discussion with friends, I asked: what is Canadian culture? After a surprising period of thoughtful quiet, someone suggested that Canada has musicians, authors, and artists who combine to define Canadian culture. But I said that many of these have made their career in the US. For example, Celine Dion, Joni Mitchell, and The Guess Who (Burton Cummings) have become…

[butchkaramazov]

my god i despise the fountainhead so much. abandoning intellectual nonsense for rohinton mistry + anuradha roy