Magdalena > Recent Status Updates

I paused this in 2020 when I thought the final volume was imminent, and I wanted to have it before I continued with this. Just, y'know, so I wouldn't be left feeling bereft and abandoned... again. But here we are, it's 2024, and I'm finally ABD and can read for pleasure again for a few weeks, at least. And seeing as this is all we're ever going to get, I thought I'd finally face it.

I'm so sad about, though.

Unique in form and content, this is a theoretically dense text that makes a strong case about how ontologically slippery our objects of study can be, even when they're as "straightforward" as a well- known human illness.

My god, this book. It's good. It's good for quite a while actually, but then in a flash it turns brilliant and your stomach starts to tie itself in knots over it, and then it's just otherworldly.

"I kept praying, thinking that the pain I felt would absolve me, that the fire I felt in my guts would abate, would cleanse me. And overhead, trees dappled in sunlight. You can’t know how beautiful the sun is there, how it touches everything and soaks it through, succulent, like water, like moisture. Light beading on the skin, dew, glistening. So much light, an ocean of it, a sea of light spread across everything."

"Listen. Long after the end of everything is supposed to have occurred, long after apocalypses have been calculated by cults and calendared by computers, long after the world has ceased believing in miracles, there's a baby born inside a mountain.

Earth's a thieved place. Everything living needs somewhere to be."

One day I'll tell you about the time I accidentally memorized Beowulf. In Old English. I always forget.

Miraculous, so far. Written for a particular version of me, and I resent - however slightly - being so addressed, but it can't be helped I suppose. We all age, we all deserve love. What else is there to be said? Well, maybe a few more words. Maybe.

I needed to read this again, if only to remind myself of what's being crushed now, and in our names no less...

"This slim volume is not a comprehensive history of this complex people and their enduring struggle, nor is it an essay on the Machiavellian geopolitics that have kept tens of millions of people oppressed for generations. This book is a bridge—between us radicals in the West, who have become cynica

I really wanted to love the heck out of this. I was envisioning myself snuggling with it for a few nights, slowing down to savor it, maybe taking it out to a nice coffee shop.

But 11% is as far as I can go and still feel (unpleasantly) lost.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong. I'll try again, maybe when I'm less tired, preoccupied or (apparently) grumpy.

But I did so want to love it.

“We did hear back from Khartoum about our dead djinn, Sennar. Turns out he was exiled from a lodge. The shaykh there accused him of “improper practices.”

Fatma frowned. “What does that mean?”

Aasim dusted sugary flakes from his fingers. “With revolutionary Sufists, who knows. All that mystic political talk hurts my head. You let some people read Marx…”

"A djinn. An Old One, at that—near twice the size of a man... His skin a sheath of aquamarine scales that shifted to turquoise beneath the glare of flickering gas lamps. He sat unclothed between tasseled cushions of lavender and burgundy, his muscular arms and legs spread wide and leaving nothing to the imagination."

46 pages of this aren't going to be nearly enough. Good thing there's (apparently) a novel coming!