Famous Last Words: The Palace of Illusions + Looking Ahead

Last week I outlined some changes for my course schedule, replacing the weekly writing assignments with extra credit options to help make room for homework in other classes. So far, a couple of weeks in, that's been a huge help. Juggling my other assignments and projects in other classes has been less stressful, especially with graduation looming, and since the extra-credit assignments take me so much less time than the writing assignments, I’ve been able to start working ahead in this class on the weekends, too.

In terms of reading, this week I finally finished up The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. It’s a retelling of the Mahabharata from Draupadi’s point of view, and the really cool thing about it is, that’s it’s entire hook: it follows all the usual events of the Mahabharata faithfully, but it manages to add fresh content and its own twists to the lore by examining all those same events through Draupadi’s perspective, with all her complicated and conflicting internal monologue and narration. That adds a lot of interesting new layers to the story, but what’s also striking is how perfect Draupadi is as the narrator—I didn’t realize it till reading Palace, but she really is the center of a web of a large and interconnected web of characters. More than anyone except maybe Krishna, she’s the one who interacts with all the different groups, and by nature of that and her role in bringing about the Pandava-Kaurava War, she truly is instrumental to the plot. Anyways, it’s a great read and adds a lot more depth to the same original stories, without straying too far from its source material.

Now I’m sitting back and trying to figure out what reading options I want to use for the rest of the semester. It’s bizarre to think that it’s already almost over, but I have plenty of good choices, so we’ll see what I end up with.

Image Credit: Book Pages, by Snufkin. Source: Pixabay.