Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Don’t Try This at Home

My book club is discussing Kiran Desai’s third novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, tomorrow night. The book is nearly 700 pages long—so when did I start reading it?

Friday morning. 🙄

The past few days have been a throwback to graduate school, with me racing through the book in 50-page sprints in between work-work and housework. I do not recommend this as a way to read if you want to fully enjoy or appreciate Desai’s dense, intricate novel. (She took 19 years to write the book; I powered through it in about 50 hours.) I finished earlier today and sighed in relief that I won’t have to take a quiz or write an essay on Sonia and Sunny.

Next time, I tell myself, I’ll start earlier. Of course, that’s been my mantra since fourth grade.

Two quick programming notes::

1. I’m going to take a break here during the month of June and will be back in early July. I hope you all enjoy the start of summer!
2. If you’re at the American Political History Conference in Washington, D.C. this week, look for me there—I’ll be speaking on a special roundtable for graduate students about diverse career paths for historians.

Thanks for joining me this week.

Recommendations

China Stories

Mary Gallagher, “Xi’s Push for Energy Security Puts Mining Safety on the Backburner”

Liangping Gao and Marius Zaharia, “Job ad for shepherds goes viral in China, exposing labour market strains”

Isobel Li, “An Octopus with Many Tentacles w/ Lynette Ong”

Tobie Meyer-Fong, “Competing Visions of China’s Distant Past”

Wanderings Around the World

Anuj Behal, with photographs by Elke Scholiers, “Life under a Delhi flyover: how one homeless family endures the city’s extreme heat”

Nilesh Dhotre & Shahid Sheikh, “Mumbai’s famed dabbawalas fed millions for over 100 years – now they are disappearing”

James Forde, “Inside Jinwar: The All-Women’s Village in Syria Where Refugees Are Rebuilding Their Lives”

In case you haven’t heard the very bully news, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library—which opens on July 4 in the tiny town of Medora, North Dakota—is a stunning architectural, archival, and multimedia achievement, a world-class memorial to a president who became the first great champion of American public lands and conservation. It’s also a project with built-in controversies that can’t be ignored, including Roosevelt’s grim Manifest Destiny views about Indigenous people. — Alex Heard, “The Hollow Man in the Arena”

Featured photo: Hudson Mills Metropark, Dexter, MI, May 31, 2020.