Immunity : Unfiltered

Weekly reading reviews ? (and the slightly inconvenient habit of everything turning into autobiography- How very "2010 influencer-chic"...) This week’s reading list looks, on paper, like a mix of classics, travel writing, academic texts, and one very committed detour into moral discomfort. In practice, it turned into something else entirely: a series of books that kept reflecting each other, and me, in ways I did not particularly ask for. Lewis Carroll — Through the Looking-Glass (5/5) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is the reread that anchored everything else. I first read Through the Looking-Glass when I was around seven years old. It was the first novel I ever read completely on my own, which already gives it a slightly unfair advantage in my personal hierarchy of books. At that age, I identified with Alice very directly. Not as a character in a story, but as a mode of being in the world: slightly displaced, observant, trying to understand rules that kept changing depending on who was speaki...

Early May always feels strangely bittersweet to me. The light changes almost overnight. The evenings begin stretching themselves lazily across the garden again, the air softens, and suddenly everything feels alive after months of damp British hostility. Even the birds seem unbearably pleased with themselves. One blackbird outside my window has recently begun performing at approximately 5am every morning with the confidence of a West End lead who believes the nation personally requested his return. And somehow, alongside all of that renewal, comes this horrible creeping awareness that the academic year is ending. I genuinely don’t know how I’m supposed to cope with that. This semester has done something to me intellectually that I was not prepared for at all. Somewhere between lectures, heritage work, books piled dangerously high beside my bed, museum visits, essays, and fieldwork discussions, I seem to have fallen completely and irrevocably in love with my subject. Not in the vague “th...