What Are You Reading Weekend

[highlyeccentric]

Currently Reading:
Fiction: All the same as last time: I have made desultory progress on 'One Night in Boukos', and more or less nothing else. First moving flats, then State of Emergency, have eaten my brain.
Lit Mag: Partway into Meanjin 78.4, haven't touched it for a while.
Poetry: A few more episodes worth into Paradise Lost (via Anthony Oliviera's podcast); have aquired and begun reading AJ Odasso's 'The Sting of It'
Academic: Largely disrupted, but I'm still working through Spengler's 'Literary Spinoffs' and enjoying it
Other non-fiction: The Queer Child is on hiatus.

Recently Finished:

Tison Pugh's 'Sexuality and its Queer Discontents', which is good, but one of those books where the best part is the intro?

And, uh, Love’s Labour’s Lost, courtesy of wildeabandon’s zoom-based readthrough.

Online Fiction

I think none?

Notable essays:

I've been reading bits and pieces from the blog Poly.land. Of her own writing I particularly noted Who are you rehearsing to be, and I really enjoy the Psyched for the weekend series where she summarises, well, pysch research, on the weekends.

Sara Fredman (Electric Lit), Margery Kempe had 14 children and she still invented the memoir. Although, as many grumps on Twitter pointed out, she hardly invented confessional writing (Augustine, anyone?), this essay brought me closer to understanding Margery-mania than anything in the actual scholarship on her. (That is, not Margery's mania, but the frenzied enthusiasm for her exhibited by a great many female medievalists.)

Hannah J Elizabeth (History Workshop), The slippery history of the dental dam

Ellen van Duyne (Lit Hub), Sylvia Plath and the Communion of Women Who Know What She Went Through. Much like the Margery essay, this illuminated something for me in the intense identification with Sylvia that so many women espouse and that I just don't share.

Daniel Mallory Ortberg (Danny Lavery) (Lit Hub), Upon realizing the golden girls was coming to an end I sat down and wept. I understand this is an extract from the recently released memoir, which, if it all has the tempo of this, promises to be something of a fever-dream read.

Yardin, Franks and McKeown (The Conversation), Science continues to suggest a link between autism and the gut: there's why that's important. I wasn't a fan of the part that talks about measuring the success of fecal transplants in terms of 'reduction in autistic behaviours' (geez, can you not just measure it in terms of... i dunno, improved gut health?), overall interesting stuff.

Tiffany at Don't Waste the Crumbs, How to soak and cook beans from scratch. I had success with this. Note, however, the blog sidebars are super Jesus-y. Sigh.

Ed Yong (The Atlantic), What we know so far about SARS-COV-2. Not about the disease, about the virus itself, and the until-now niche field of coronavirus research.

Up Next:

I have SO MANY books arranged in little piles (no shelves yet) and yet am very short on attention span. Possibly a book on feminist performance of Shakespeare.