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#POC literature
beshi-kotha-bole-je · 2 years
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Dark Academia is the white saree draped seamlessly over a rounded, bronze-carved body as much as it is the laced blouse fitted on a slender one painted with moonlight. Dark Academia is the green wedding veil of your mother which she would love for you to wear on your nikkah. Moths have eaten small holes on it, but the joys of the imperfect union still bleed through. Dark Academia is listening to ragas on the radio. Dark Academia is the cardamom chai served at your mother's almost-daily tea parties with your khalas and mamis. Dark Academia is the bitterness on your tongue at your first chadō. Dark Academia is the broken singing of your grandmother as the "mo li hua" in her garden blooms. Dark Academia is more than just Shakespeare, Sappho, Dickens, Dahl, Wilde and Homer. It's Rumi, Darwish, Rabindranath, Sarojini Naidu, Li Bai and Matsuo Basho too. Dark Academia is more than just France, Britain, Greece and Italy. It's also Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, China, Japan and many many more.
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• nikkah- Islamic wedding ceremony, here referring to an Afghan one in particular.
• ragas- classical South Asian music
• khalas- your mother's sisters
• mamis- your mother's brothers'/male cousins' wives
• chadō- Japanese tea ceremony
• mo li hua- jasmine flower in Mandarin. Refers to both the plant itself and the folk song of the same name.
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soleilibrary · 2 years
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Book Review: Ophelia After All
Ophelia Rojas knows what she likes: her best friends, Cuban food, rose-gardening, and boys - way too many boys. Her friends and parents make fun of her endless stream of crushes, but Ophelia is a romantic at heart. She couldn't change, even if she wanted to. So when she finds herself thinking more about cute, quiet Talia Sanchez than the loss of a perfect prom with her ex-boyfriend, seeds of doubt take root in Ophelia's firm image of herself. Add to that the impending end of high school and the fracturing of her once-solid friend group, and things are spiraling a little out of control. But the course of love--and sexuality--never did run smooth. As her secrets begin to unravel, Ophelia must make a choice between clinging to the fantasy version of herself she's always imagined or upending everyone's expectations to rediscover who she really is, after all.
4/5 ★
This book made my little queer heart so happy. I loved following Ophelia on her journey of self-discovery. It wasn't only her journey I was interested in either--many of the other characters grew as people as well and it was so heart-warming.
I really appreciated the realness of Ophelia After All. Nothing was immediately solved and wrapped in a nice little bow. Even some resolutions were messy and left open-ended but that's just how life works, especially in high school. Every character had flaws true to being a teenager, whether that be not knowing how to handle your emotions, being selfish, or having a weak sense of identity. No one was really the "good guy" all of the time and I think that is incredibly realistic because, when you're young, you're really just trying to navigate life and figure things out for yourself and sometimes that leads to you doing things you might not be proud of. But those things help you grow.
I think this book contains so many important life lessons for teens, whether they are queer themselves or straight. It tackles topics like being true to yourself, not being afraid of change, being independent and not centering your entire life around other people... I definitely recommend this read to anyone who is struggling with any of those things.
Full review on Goodreads.
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mysharona1987 · 1 year
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angiospleen · 2 months
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belle-keys · 1 year
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The Ultimate Dark Academia Book Recommendation Guide Ever
The title of this post is clickbait. I, unfortunately, have not read every book ever. Not all of these books are particularly “dark” either. However, these are my recommendations for your dark academia fix. The quality of each of these books varies. I have limited this list to books that are directly linked to the world of academia and/or which have a vaguely academic setting.
Dark Academia staples:
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
Dead Poets Society by Nancy H. Kleinbaum
Vita Nostra by Maryna Dyachenko
Dark academia litfic or contemporary:
Bunny by Mona Awad
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever
White Ivy by Susie Yang
The Cloisters by Katy Hays
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Black Chalk by Christopher J. Yates
Attribution by Linda Moore
Dark academia thrillers or horror:
In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
Ghosts of Harvard by Francesca Serritella
Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth
They Never Learn by Layne Fargo
The It Girl by Ruth Ware
Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian
Dark academia fantasy/sci-fi:
Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang
The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Vicious by V.E. Schwab
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
The Betrayals by Bridget Collins
Dark academia romance:
Gothikana by RuNyx
Alone With You in the Ether by Olivie Blake
Dark academia YA or MG:
Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson
A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé
The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
Legendborn by Tracy Deonn
Crave by Tracy Wolff
Wilder Girls by Rory Power
The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
Dark academia miscellaneous:
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou
Alphabet of Thorn by Patricia A. McKillip
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dearlyjess · 2 months
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crocheting, tea logs, playing persona, recent bookstore pick-ups! also desperately awaiting spring 🌿
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chateaucapricorne · 4 months
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🖤
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the-readers-archive · 4 months
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“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race… poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
— Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams 🕊️
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blumenundpoesie · 1 year
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Images I wish 8 year old me could’ve seen <3
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subliminalvamps · 3 months
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The monster of Frankenstein~
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Ok call me racist but it’s the truth. Always complaining about something. Complain for not getting a black anime character complain for not having enough black people for a book or movie. Complain about black people not being mentioned for literally anything. Y’all call anything racist too
Chile you don’t know shit about what we been through, we deserve it. I would ask how you would feel but you wouldn’t care because you’ve probably never experienced racism or discrimination in your life. I’m not listening to some who’s afraid to show their acc and have to use anonymous to protect themselves. If you really want to make a point dm me or stop hitting that anonymous button PUSSAY
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black-academia · 1 year
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cardassiangoodreads · 2 months
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As someone who very much enjoyed The Poppy War and Dragon Republic, that's pretty much my problem with Kuang as well. She has a tendency not to trust her readers to figure out that "bad thing is bad" regardless of the circumstances she sets her characters in which can be a huge turn off for readers smarter than the average tiktoker.
Like, when I compare those books to something like, idk, She Who Becomes the Sun, just to pull from a similar pool in terms of genre and whatnot, the latter is much more enjoyable despite being in your face about how bad the mc actually is, because they're fleshed out. They don't feel like a blatant message board for what the author wants to say, despite it being obvious.
Yeah, and like.... again, I think that if she were writing YA, that would be fine that she has such little trust in her readers to get these things. I don't always like that YA is like that (in that I think it's kind of insulting to teenagers), but that is the genre expectation, and I think with some issues it is valuable to assume that teenagers who aren't specifically looking into social-justicey-style politics might need to be led a little bit to a conclusion like that. It's easy for a lot of us who were very online, raised by left-wing people, who've always been soaked in this, to assume everyone is up to speed and then I teach an online class where I get people who are in their 30s who are teaching high school who have never heard of the concept of "bisexuality" or "postcolonial" - just because, they took the kinds of classes and majors that didn't require learning that, and have only ever spent time around other white cis straight people. But long story short, when I do read YA, I have some expectation that they're going to explain things that I already know, point out themes that I already understood from the story, and... that's fine. I'm not the audience for those books, and I factor that into my assessment.
Thee problem is that Kuang's books are supposedly not YA. She wants her stuff to be taken seriously as books for adults, and as Serious Literary Literature (TM), or at least as at the cutting-edge of whatever genres she is writing in. She wants her stuff to be award-winning and celebrated by adult standards. Which, okay, but then you have to write for adults, which means not insulting and talking down to them by assuming that they won't get ideas that are really obvious. And you also probably should recognize that "postcolonial fantasy literature" is not a thing you invented, and look at what other people are doing in that space and why they're not being told that their books read like they were written for 15-yros.
Like a lot of the issue is she reads like one of those Tumblr posts where someone who has just taken like, Psychology 101 as a college sophomore responds to something assuming that the reason that people aren't talking about whatever essay they've just read that they want to spiel about is because we don't know it and it's like - no, everyone who has been to college knows this, bud. There's actually a reason this hasn't come up yet that you're completely missing because you're still at 101 and the rest of us are at 202 or higher.
That's clearly not the case with Kuang in her understanding of stuff - she went to Oxbridge, she's getting a Ph.D. at Yale in Chinese literature. The language stuff, the references to various academic essays clearly came from someone who knows her shit. I liked that stuff, even though I knew some of it (but not others! I don't speak Chinese, though I was able to guess the meaning of some of the characters because they're the same or similar in Japanese). I don't expect most adults to have read as much Edward Said as I or R.F. Kuang have. But there's a difference between that and like... thinking your readers won't get that colonialism is bad unless you say it, from a story that's all about how colonialism is bad. (Yeah, I'm even including BookTok doofuses here. Like, the blurb makes it obvious that this is a book that is going to critique colonialism; I think she's assuming that her readers are all like Letty, but I don't think very many Letties would choose this particular book!)
Honestly, though, responding to you made me realize what I think some of the issue might be: I think those of us who are academics and who have studied this shit on a deep, high level for years and years often are really really bad at telling what is like, the knowledge base of the average person on our areas of expertise, because we have always been eggheads and are surrounded by fellow eggheads. I have this problem with music all the time: either I assume that friends won't know some basic thing that they do in fact know, or I think something is "accessible" when actually it isn't and they're confused. I've been a classically-trained musician since I was 10, though, so I really just have no frame of reference for what adults who are not into classical music know about it! Because the last time I was that person, I was not an adult, I was a prepubescent child - and a very bookish one, but that's not the same as the kind of life experience and things-you're-expected-to-know of living as an actual adult.
Still, like.... I do think fundamentally her issue is that she feels like she has to outline stuff for like the dumbest people on Twitter, and doesn't recognize that they are not representative of the average person who is going to pick up her book. Like, if you want to get a sense of what the "average person" knows about this, Twitter is a bad choice because it's a lot of people who feel they need to vomit every thought they ever have out into the ether of the Internet, and so I think you're disproportionately likely to get half-baked takes from people who know significantly less than the average person. Twitter is a Dunning-Kruger system Petri dish. (Political discourse being a good example: like all the people on here and the other blue websites who have to have it repeatedly explained to them why Joe Biden, in fact, is not responsible for Roe v. Wade being overturned. Maybe I just have too much faith in the American electorate and civics education in this country, but I do think more people recognize that than don't.) But for all the weirdos out there who use books as this sort of #aesthetic commodity-fetishism, I do think people who read a lot tend to be more informed than most, and that she can relax and just let her books speak for themselves.
And I want her to! I mean, I get that she doesn't have to because she's a bestselling author and so on, but it seems like she wants to write these kinds of books that appeal to the kind of people who are criticizing her work as-is, and I personally would like her to get better at that because her books have a lot of cool ideas! The parts of Babel that I did like I loved. So much of that book is a Rose Book for Rose, but the fact that I really like parts of it means that the parts that are lacking bother me more than they would in a lesser book (I think I read a review saying something similar; the fact that Babel is so ambitious and so well-researched makes the way it ultimately cops out on a more probing, subtle analysis; or the way its characters so often feel like modern-day social media users rather than the anti-colonial activists of their own times; so much more frustrating).
Like, I get that a lot of people calling books like hers "YA" are just being racist and misogynistic and they also do that with books that genuinely don't deserve it. But I think if Kuang really wants to become the kind of writer she wants to be, to get the kind of reception she clearly desires, she might listen a little more closely to see if maybe the haters do have a bit of a point. Because it's just something that's holding her back so much.
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mysharona1987 · 9 months
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angiospleen · 2 months
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Slide 4: My new mugs + bookcase
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belle-keys · 1 year
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the age-old discussion as to whether or not ben barnes was poor casting for dorian gray is incredibly funny to me like yes we know that dorian is supposed to look like an innocent blond cherub instead of a dark luciferian daddy long leg prince of sin because literature but it all comes down nitpicking in the end because i’m just sure that oscar wilde the man himself would have been salivating over ben every waking minute of his damn life if he were here
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