Suzannah > Recent Status Updates

Guite has been extremely careful with the female characters in his version of the story but I really think he should have had Elaine do some repenting too.

Delighted to report that Malcolm Guite also thinks the vibe between Galahad and Dindrane could be romantic

I'm still having a hard time with the poetry but I'm loving the deft little tweaks Guite is making to the story to address some of the QUEST's weirdness about women and sex. Particularly the choice to centre female characters (from Guinevere and Elaine to Dindrane and MY GIRL Blanchefleur) does a lot to counteract all the fiendish temptresses in the original.

So far I'm having mixed feelings about this. Guite's editorialising is great (I LOVE his take on Guinevere, beautiful!) but I want to love the poetry more than I do.

Rereading this again as a refresher. It's good - readable and formidably referenced - but he uses too many ADJECTIVES

"my congratulations, you must be the only person in the relevant world who hasn't been allowed to visit Wilberforce" UNHINGED NOISES

"less a matter of accepting our hospitality and more a matter of trying to survive our chaos" is how William Wilberforce is describing his home to a house guest and now I'm vividly imagining my bestie's house

"I will always trust you" I'm going to cry myself to sleep

William Wilberforce being my book boyfriend of the year is NOT something I had on my 2026 bingo card but he's just mentioning in passing like it's not a big deal that he's refused to fight not one but two duels because it would be against his principles and I'm sorry if I was Barbara Spooner I would also have put a ring on it

If this vampire turns out to be Napoleon I will throw things

Look I don't know anything about Robespierre but HG Parry is pitching him as France's answer to Pitt and Wilberforce, a principled politician with high ideals if only he could have resisted the temptation to achieve his goals through brute force, a tragedy a hair's breadth away from greatness

CLARKSON NO

Finished my nightly Weeping Over Eighteenth Century Politicians hour, time to turn out the light

Shedding real tears over Wilberforce and Pitt

"Everyone does things that are wrong, but that wasn't really the point. It was that I wasn't doing anything *right*. ... If the religion of the Church of England was indeed true, then it was the most important thing there was, and it required all of me. I tried not to believe this, and it was impossible, and so I believed it, and that was harder still."

This is the most surreal experience I've ever had reading a book because half of it is stuff I did in OUTREMER and another half of it is stuff I did in MISS SHARP'S MONSTERS

I've had Williams Pitt and Wondered for less than 20 pages and if anything happens to them I'll kill everyone in the room and then myself

Okay this book has picked up speed now, the prose has smoothed out and the depiction of James I is fabulously chilling

I want to like this book but the prose is committing crimes

The authors define man as inherently political, but in terms that make me think the more accurate term would be "ethical". I am off course predisposed to like their argument, that the choices of primitive societies should not be seen in terms of ecological determinism, but of ethics.

This discussion of "schismogenesis", the process by which two tribes define themselves as the antithesis of the other, and therefore bind themselves into a shared system of dichotomies that can often seem peculiar and irrational to outsiders, sounds a whole lot like US politics of the past decade.

ALICE?????????

The notion of sacredness as the origin of ideas of private property is absolutely fascinating and feels legit. It's also fascinating to me as a Christian because of course, this links up with the idea that absolute ownership rights are something that only belong to God; humanity holds possession and stewardship under conditions.

stop press he WANTS her to light her candle??? and look on his face??? and she's refusing to do it because the crumby religious authorities drummed that into her? I'M CHEWING ON THE BARS OF MY ENCLOSURE???

"suppose that when everything was in readiness and the moment had come for God to look upon his work and see that it was good—suppose he had snuffed out the sun and tossed the world back into eternal night—then—even then, Mercédès, you could not imagine what I lose in sacrificing my life at this moment" guffawing, this book is The Most

"Medieval peasants often found it much easier than medieval intellectuals to imagine a society of equals" - perhaps thanks to seasonal festivals like Twelfth Night, which preserved an overturning of social norms and made it possible to imagine a freer world.

After the bombastic time of the opening chapter, this book is becoming absolutely fascinating.

Not Haydée arranging her own revenge off her own bat while Monte Cristo is having a weekend away at the seaside?! Love that she gets full agency in this

the mysterious count from across the sea paid ONE VISIT to the upperclass blonde lady and now everyone around her is mysteriously struck down...is this DRACULA

It's absolutely wild to me that a quarter of the way into this book the story just screeches to a halt and we have a commercial break for recreational drugs. One of a handful of things this book has in common with Frank Herbert's DUNE, along with appropriation of orientalism, and being long enough to crush you if it feel on you from a height.

Okay but this stuff tracing Rousseau's influences to interactions between Native Americans and Jesuits in New France is extremely fascinating