Books: an update

Non-academic books, that is. There's been a few academic ones of late, too.

Witi Ihimaera, Nights in the Gardens of Spain ( Good but sort of disappointing )

Victorian Women Poets: A New Annotated Anthology, ed. by Virginia Blain - I posted selections in my poetry updates here. I liked it! By and large I skimmed the biographies, going back to read more about the poets whose works I liked most. One thing which did irritate me was that at times Blain's commentary on the poets' sex lives got a bit... snide.

Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel - This was fun! Classist as all get-out and radiating English smugness. But Marguerite was pretty damn fabulous, which makes up for many things.

... huh, I'm actually reading faster than my sporadic three-book updates would suggest. I'm too sleepy to write a cogent review of the next book, though, so it can all stay backdated for a while.

Three Apples - Richard King

I
Adam's: scrumped from the Tree of Knowledge;
the old man furious; Eve looking on;
the serpent heading back through the grass,
past the discarded core, now brown.

II
Newton's: buried in the grass at Woolsthorpe;
young Isaac sitting 'in contemplative mood';
about to spin from his dizzying orbit
and crash, brain-first, into a strange new world.

III
Turing's: half-eaten on the bedside table;
the other half turning to mush in the gut;
its sharp insinuation of cyanide
quickly decoded in the brilliant blood.

- From Best Australian Poetry 2012 ed. by John Tranter