Misha > Recent Status Updates

this is a tough read, so harsh and depressing 😭 no-one has any kind of joy or hope

A brilliant first few pages wow!

reading this alongside anais nin’s diaries and seeing some interesting parallels, self aggrandising reflections on the role of the artist in society, analyses of one’s artist friends and their neuroses, etc

Paintings are frequently mentioned without the name of the painting given which is a little frustrating and difficult to follow

Fun to see Princess Bamba Duleep Singh mentioned as a friend of Amrita’s father!

I’m sorry but i really don’t enjoy the sentence to sentence writing style of this book. it’s such a slog to get through 😭

Honestly expected Breton to be an egotistic misogynistic maniac like many of the other male surrealists but I’m enjoying his narrative voice a lot so far. We’ll see once Nadja is introduced if he has any success writing women (i’ve heard he does not)

Ooh I love Cecilia so far

This is so weird and dense and hard to read but for some reason i can’t stop? there’s so much random esoteric knowledge expounded on each page

cette histoire devient plus déprimante de ce que j’ai attendu

not sure what i expected from a book about poverty but this is fucking grim. i’m unsure how Orwell ended up in this situation after growing up middle-class. also side eye to the way he talks about people of colour. more research on Orwell needed

this book is mental. Manette’s letter from the Bastille tower shook me to my core

Trying to read this on the bus to work was truly a task

When Harris comes in late he slams the door cheerfully behind him. He's trying to be quiet, but not that hard. His mind is on other things, and why not? This is his house. He doesn't see how each moment can be made terrible if you only try. There can be a problem every second so that life is a sort of low-grade torture. Then, when you are free, like when I was eating dessert with Jordi, it feels really, really good

The second half of this is so good

Haven’t read a commercial romance book in my adult life so v interested to see how this is gonna go

The last of the seven books I picked up in an amazing secondhand bookshop in Aix-en-Provence 3 years ago!

omg loving this - so wholesome!

Fascinating portrait of queerness a century ago so far. Hall explicitly talks about clothes as self expression. Stephen is shunted by other girls, in part because she is very uncomfortable with allusions to periods!

wow i’m only 25 pages in but this is already an incredible record of lesbian desire. I can only imagine the impact it would have had on women, seeing their experiences and feelings represented for the first time.

Had this book on my shelf for at least year because i’m intimidated by its 600+ pages, tiny writing and devastating subject matter. But I know I’m going to be on holiday with a fun summer read next week so that’s my motivation to read this til then

“J'aurais tant voulu être une personne idéale, sage, évoluée, et ce n'était pas le cas bien sûr. Je ne me laissais pas ôter la liberté d'être capricieuse, jalouse, coléreuse, égoïste ou irresponsable. J'étais aussi liée par mon Moi idéal que Moira par ses traditions. Pour respirer la liberté il fallait que je vive proche de mes ombres, mes ombres primitives.”

It’s fascinating reading this book from the 50s about colonialist missionaries arriving in Nigeria, and seeing a similar narrative play out as what we’re experiencing. People seeking power manipulate those who are dissatisfied, saying that they will assuage their troubles, and then using that power to discriminate and harm.

“Lorsque je rencontre Leonora Carrington, elle me plonge dans la perplexité en me disant que sa plus grande inquiétude est que la source de ses images en peinture ou bien la source de son matériau pour écrire, risqueraient de se tarir. Cela a toujours été le dernier de mes soucis.”

even though theres a lot happening im finding this really dry for some reason. maybe the writing style just isnt for me

I’m enjoying Anaïs building more strong and complex relationships with women in this volume, beats the repetitive cycles of emotion with Rango and Henry in volume 2.

“It was hard for Cyrus not to see waking as the enemy. The way it corroded your power to exist - to live and think with acuity - until you finally submitted. Being awake was a kind of poison, and dream was the only antidote.”

“I’ve read your poems, Cyrus. I get that you’re Persian. Born there, raised here. I know that’s a part of you. But you’ve probably spent more time looking at your phone today, just today, than you’ve spent cutting open pomegranates in your entire life. But how many fucking pomegranates are in your poems?” so fucked for a white friend to say this but also kinda resonates with me and raises qs-interesting