Saru > Recent Status Updates

i headed to Karachi’s Frere Hall book collection, which.. hand on heart.. is the best monthly money i spend. asked the sweet old baba jee at the counter to check the database and there it was..sitting under the colonial history section

a beautifully worn copy with a soft spine, annotations, the works

also, fifty pages in and it clicked.. this is very much in the lineage of The Wretched of the Earth?

a psa from Saru

readers’ 101: read with a counterweight.

dont raw dog heavy non fiction. pair the dense politics, philosophy, and world affairs brain food with an old classic in that time frame. one keeps you informed and the other steadies your soul.

surprisingly therapeutic.

Waiting 'round the bend
My huckleberry friend :)

Atlas Shrugged is officially a background read now.. eta to completion is twenty business days, im honestly baffled by whatever feral stamina i possessed as a teenager to survive The Fountainhead because my present day tolerance for a polemic has absolutely fallen off a cliff

Ayn Rand really took one idea and stretched it like it was made of taffy 🥲
im only 40% in and no there is no universe, capitalist, collectivist, OR FICTIONAL where i finish this in 2025. consider my self-imposed challenge dead on arrival

yesss i know, i know. 29 years on this planet and The Fountainhead has been my lone encounter with Ayn Rand so far. so im closing out 2025 with a deliberate, unapologetically lengthy (>1,000 pages) Rand pick, challenging myself to finish it by new year’s eve. wish me luck. let’s go

on the morning commute uptown, the lady seated beside me asked what i was reading. i flipped the cover toward her and waited for the moment to tilt one way or another. instead, she smiled in quiet agreement and called it a bold choice before coffee 🥲 we parted a few stops later, quietly reminded that books know how to break the ice for us.

i’m floored by the Panthers’ meticulous detail but travel mode means switching gears for a bit. will return to the revolution soon. rise up and resist 🫡

Black Against Empire is going to take me a while haha. the detail is very overwhelming i’ve ended annotating half the pages i’ve read so far just to keep up. should have warmed up with a smth more beginner friendly on panther politics but whatever, we ball. Blooms research is ridiculously thorough and it’s shaping up to be one of those political theory/history staples im glad to have in the stack

this took forever to arrive, i wanted to read it right after watching Judas and the Black messiah movie.
great so far, early readout: deep dive into the far left, Marxist-Leninist backbone of panther politics. how they actually worked and not the myth. already pulling me straight into the heart of the movement.

look all i’m saying is, enjoy the cage. the view’s nice from the bars

on a flight a genuinely lovely lady seated next to me glanced at my book and without hesitation said..”good choice. that’s the bookers winner. happiest. real readers still walk among us and somehow i ended up with one on a connecting flight of all places. turns out she’s a literature professor at McGill an absolute reading machine.. beautiful synchronicity. the whole worlds rigged in our favour 💕

i’m eating this alive. the prose is so clean, and the physicality of the book is amazing. makes total sense this thing just took the Booker. if the rest of the novel keeps up this level of tension and detail i’m going to cry (happy tears)

there are no bad books. money spent on books is never wasted and ive never once regretted blowing a small fortune on them, even if it meant maxing out for the day and pushing a bill to the next day. but this time liberty really did sell me a bad book 😏 i’m going to finish it still because i have also never not finished a book before. going to delve into the 2025 bookers winner soon. FLESH come to mama

intellectually compelling but not always narratively cohesive. thought i was hooked because i read many pages last night but im not too impressed tbh. read a lot because i have time to kill.
let’s see, though.

Had to pull this in, in tandem with the Malcolm X book to get my homework on an article going.

Absolutely feeling it. This is not about the 60s it’s about right now