{"id":746,"date":"2016-06-23T17:39:34","date_gmt":"2016-06-23T17:39:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/library.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoinreads\/?p=746"},"modified":"2016-06-23T17:39:34","modified_gmt":"2016-06-23T17:39:34","slug":"professor-morrison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/2016\/06\/23\/professor-morrison\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Morrison"},"content":{"rendered":"

After assigning Kathryn Lofton\u2019s Oprah: Gospel of an Icon<\/i>, which discussed, among other things, how Oprah\u2019s book club created a quasi-religious community, I was thrilled to be asked to be on this web page!\u00a0 I am currently reading The Moonstone <\/i>by Wilkie Collins.\u00a0 Completed in 1868, The Moonstone<\/i> is the first detective novel in English. As you may be able tell from the dated copy I am holding, I was given this book in the early 1980s, but couldn\u2019t get through it.\u00a0 Now that I spend most of my time worrying about the 14th and 15th centuries, I have found that 19<\/span>th<\/sup><\/span> century novels are akin to futuristic science fiction page-turners.<\/span><\/p>\n

The moonstone is a legendary diamond looted from a temple in India by British soldiers.\u00a0 The temple\u2019s hereditary guards, Brahmins I believe, seem to stop at nothing, including infiltrating upper-class British parties as jugglers, to get it back from the families of the British soldiers.\u00a0 As a scholar of religion, I am, of course, cheering for the guards, but am also struck by how, on one hand, the novel depicts a dichotomy between a religious Orient and rational, secular Occident.\u00a0 Yet, on the other hand, the British certainly believe the legend that the diamond will bring bad luck to whomever possesses it and how the Indian guards, while ostensibly motivated by religion, are certainly aware of the diamond\u2019s economic value.<\/span><\/p>\n

The book\u2019s portrayal of the servants, particularly Rosanna Spearman, is complex and sympathetic.\u00a0 Rosanna was once in a reformatory for theft, becomes a suspect in the theft of the diamond, and ends up committing suicide even though she was not the culprit.\u00a0 As a whole, the novel is more character-driven than modern examples. Yeah, the 500 page length and slowish pace turned me off as a 12 year-old, but as I read I am struck by how well-crafted the book is and by how the experience of reading is much closer to what solving a mystery might actually be like.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After assigning Kathryn Lofton\u2019s Oprah: Gospel of an Icon, which discussed, among other things, how Oprah\u2019s book club created a quasi-religious community, I was thrilled to be asked to be on this web page!\u00a0 I am currently reading The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.\u00a0 Completed in 1868, The Moonstone is the first detective novel in English. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Professor Morrison”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-readers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcl.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-reads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}