What Are You Reading Wednesday

What Are You Reading (Actually On A!) Wednesday:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

What are you currently reading? Some changes this week!

Poetry: still working through the same two anthologies, but have finished the poetry course reader.

Ulysses: I'm running two chapters behind at the end of term. Oops!

Primary Sources: Still on the Romaunt of the Rose, ugh. I've decided to shelve the Anglo-Norman Horn for a while and proceed swiftly through the translation in The Birth of Romance in England instead, to see if there's anything actually useful in it. Of Arthour and of Merline is turning up an Evidence for me. Whoo. Evidence.

Secondary Sources: Jaeger's Ennobing Love is fascinating and has such lovely prose! I'm not sure why I've never read it before... Foolish me.

No fiction for fun atm, because I'm between books.

What did you recently finish reading

Poetry: Well, the first-year course I'm teaching finished, so I've finished with Prof Early Modern's poetry selection. Apparently this year he provided the ultimate unobjectionable poetry combination - the most disliked was Owen's 'Strange Meeting', which he won't take off the course because it's such a good example of half-rhyme used systematically. Apparently in previous years, though, students have vehmently objected to one or more poems by a much greater margin than they did this year.

Fiction:
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: oh wow, was that a ride! I'll review in full later, but wow. I was carrying it everywhere with me, toward the end.
Brad Boney (yes really), The Nothingness of Ben: I tagged this on goodreads on the recommendation of someone's What Are You Reading reports - I can't now recall who. It's an ebook from Dreamspinner Press, featuring Ben, a hotshot lawyer whose parents die unexpectedly, leaving him with custody of three brothers in Austin, Texas. Enter Travis, flopsy-haired good-hearted mechanic. There follows a surprisingly well-rounded plot, in which Ben and Travis both get a grip on their lives, and Ben handles realistic parenting challenges. I tagged this ages ago when I had a burning desire for fiction which demanded little of me and pressed emotional buttons - but I couldn't justify buying it or any of the seven other M/M romance novels I shelved. Recently that state of readerly need recurred, an I could spare the cash. WHEE.

What will you read next:

My winter reading list is long. I'll be leaving Chaucer behind while I travel (too heavy) and ploughing through the National Library of Scotland's transcription of the Auchinlek MS instead - assuming it doesn't persist in crashing my browsers.

In addition to Ennobling Love I'm looking forward to The Arthurian Way of Death and McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel.

For fun purposes, a slight step up from The Nothingness of Ben, I've bought and stashed on my Kobo Joanne Horniman's About a Girl. It'll probably give me expat angst as well as lesbian YA feels.

While at Jon's place I might make him happy and read Cold Comfort Farm.

Anonymous ('A Female Hand') - To My Niece, A.M

To my Niece, A.M. With a new Pair of Shoes on her first going alone. Written Dec. 22, 1774

When little girls begin to walk,
Their next attempt should be to talk.
Then why thus, Nancy, why thus long
Do you persist to hold your tongue?
Full sixteen months gone o'er your head,
And not a word by you been said!
Oh! let it never once be told
That silence reigned in a girl so old!
But let us hear, by Christmas day,
Your speech at last hath found its way:
In lisping accents sweetly prattle
Of fine new shoes, of doll, and rattle,
And prove to all your friends around
Your sex's province you have found.