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My 2025 in Books*
*This includes audiobooks because 2025 was my first foray into listening to books alongside reading them with my own eyes. As you can tell, it was a year of many adventures. Read: Did not finish (DNF): Parked (to pick up another time): 1. Animal Farm by George Orwell (Secker and… Continue reading
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The Texts from my Degree That Have Impacted Me The Most: Non-Fiction
1. The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault (Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (1976) 2nd year “Briefly, my aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes… Continue reading
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The Texts From My Degree That Have Impacted Me The Most: Prose Fiction
1. The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy 2nd year text *This book features child sexual abuse and domestic and other kinds of violence. All are depicted graphically. “At Pappachi’s funeral, Mammachi cried and her contact lenses slid around in her eyes. Ammu told the twins that Mammachi… Continue reading
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Review: You Are Here by David Nicholls (Sceptre, 2025)
Time is a sensation that alters depending on where you are, and the cursed hours between three and five on a February afternoon lasted forever, as did the same hours in the morning, times when she had nothing to contemplate but the same circling anxieties and regrets, times when she… Continue reading
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‘An Act of Love’: The Representation of Bodily Autonomy and Free Choice in Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’
In the afterword to ‘Bloodchild’, her self-described ‘pregnant man story’, Octavia Butler writes that she wanted to challenge herself to write a story of a man becoming pregnant ‘as an act of love — choosing pregnancy in spite of as well as because of difficult circumstances’. ‘Bloodchild’ imagines a world… Continue reading
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Liberty in John Milton’s Paradise Lost
As a text depicting the Fall of humanity, the question of liberty and by extension, free will, is central to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, with questions of Adam and Eve’s freedom in the poem being the subject of extensive criticism. The discussion of the characters’ liberty—most commonly defined as self-government… Continue reading
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Human and Non-Human Entanglements in Mid-Late Medieval English Literature
Carolyn Dinshaw begins her chapter ‘Ecology’ in A Handbook of Middle English Studies with a discussion of medieval roof bosses depicting humans with leaves sprouting from their heads and growing out of their mouths. The ubiquity of these sculptures across Europe, as ‘one of the most popular decorative motifs in… Continue reading
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Report: The voyages and adventures of Fernand Mendez Pinto, A Portugal
The voyages and adventures of Fernand Mendez Pinto, published in 1653, is the first English translation of Fernão Mendes Pinto’s 1583 memoir Peregrinação, which details Pinto’s experiences in various parts of the world not yet widely explored by contemporary European powers. In being translated into English at all—around the beginning… Continue reading
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Close Reading: Autobiography of Eve by Ansel Elkin
Wearing nothing but snakeskin boots, I blazed a footpath, the first radical road out of that old kingdom toward a new unknown. When I came to those great flaming gates of burning gold, I stood alone in terror at the threshold between Paradise and Earth. There I heard a mysterious… Continue reading