“I Was Talking With The Guys In The Band Yesterday, And I Asked, Them, ‘Do You Ever Look Around And

book recs masterpost

an ever-updating masterpost of books i've recommended. please check these before you ask for recommendations in case they've been covered —

fiction

"the tragedy still happened, but it was important that the love was there"

japanese literature

korean literature [1], [2]

gothic writing

spooky adult horror gothic

some favourites

marathi books

some ruskin bond

indian fiction [1], [2], historical fiction, stories, [3], [4]

non-fiction

general assorted ones i like

some favourites

about people living through crises

on geopolitics, foreign policy, international affairs

on political philsophy

vaguely sociology

biographies

on economic history

on the silk route

on prisons, convict labour

on afghanistan, soviet invasion, terror

capitalism

on language and linguistics

on the ancient and prehistoric world

just a bunch on india

the indus valley

indian aestheticism, art

gupta empire

sangam literature

on the northeast

india and southeast asia

nur jahan, mughal women | more

islamic conquest and state-making

on kashmir

assorted nonfiction

colonisation and aftereffects

on nationalism

on cities

on mumbai

on bollywood in bombay

on cities

on delhi

on kolkata

essays

history, migration, labour

art, reading, travel, gender, sports

nature, climate, some history

political economy, environmental and urban history, cartography and space

my comfort books

light reading

books that have got me out of my slumps

on art, photography, aesthetics, design [1], [2], [3]

on the environment

just some story and essay collections

kate bush featured on top pop (tv), march 1978 ꩜

i remember the feeling of teenage obsession, and i miss it desperately. few things about our everyday lives are more genuinely magical to me than the way that loving something with commitment can rewire your understanding of time: instead of dates or semesters, i can place moments of my early life inside the year where i only read vonnegut, the month i first loved the smiths, the autumn i spent with that rilke poem. it manages to make time physical — it turns it into something that can be tasted and touched. i want my life to be textured by the periods i spent perfecting a stone fruit hot honey cake or watching murder mysteries. wouldn’t it be wonderful to one day taste a cake and remember how you felt in september? i have many criticisms of rapid-fire, non-stop consumption, but none are so personal to me as this: when we submit to a cultural landscape that tells us to never stop looking for the new shiniest thing, we lose a kind of language for understanding ourselves and others. loving is a muscle that’s been strategically atrophied by a culture of manic consumption and constant availability.

- rayne fisher-quann

can’t criticize plastic surgery as an institution because it’s none of your business if a woman wants to “fix” her insecurities. can’t criticize the makeup industry or beauty standards because some women feel good when they shave and wear makeup. can’t bring up the challenges women face in the workplace because some women want to be stay at home wives instead of working. everything a woman does is automatically feminist and we shouldn’t stop to think about the context surrounding her actions because that would be misogynistic. here’s what i had for girl dinner. according to my girl math the barbie movie was a revolutionary piece of feminist media. i may not show it but i feel the life slowly draining from me day by day.

The sexual tension between a girl and not feeling real every time her birthday comes around

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/24/overturning-roe-story-is-women-unfreedom

Agyness Dean in “Spooky” by Tim Walker for LOVE Magazine (Spring/Summer 2015)

*through gritted teeth* you are not a child taking a test with the purpose of getting the highest score, you are an adult trying new things and finding ways to enjoy your life, make mistakes, be a beginner, be mediocre, be where you need to be, be unlikeable, just. be.

{Alice Oseman, Radio Silence/ Emily Palermo, from Untitled/ Franz Kafka, from Diaries/ Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar/ Marya Hornbacher, Waiting/ Nikos Kazantzakis, from a letter to Galatea Kazantzaki wr. c. May 1922/ Mahmoud Darwish/ Anna Akhmatova, from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova; "The Old Portrait"/ Lyric Hunter, from "A Garden," Swallower/ Albert Camus/ Varsha/ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Meek One}

This is my aesthetic. I've found it at last. mountain road signs bearing sexual puns.