Reading this because it’s discussed, with considerable energy, in Sayers’s Gaudy Night. 📚
I’m reading Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island: War and Belonging in Auden’s England — it won’t be released until June — and it’s staggering. I didn’t think anyone could still write this kind of book: biographical, cultural, critical, moving easily between the close reading of poetic lines and tracing the sweep of vast social movements. I’ll be reviewing it later for The Hedgehog Review, but for now here’s my three-word review: it’s a masterpiece.
Currently reading: Bleak House by Charles Dickens 📚
Currently reading: Pax Britannica by James (Jan) Morris. This Folio Society edition is one of my treasures. 📚
The American National Biography is not as consistently good, but there are some fine entries there too. 📚
Currently reading: Lots of biographies from the Dictionary of National Biography. I love these: Detailed enough to be informative, but readable in one short sitting. Biographical short stories. 📚
Annotating Augustine’s City of God 📚 and listening to Dilla’s Donuts 🎵. As one does.
Currently reading/listening: Glenn Gould - The Goldberg Variations - The Complete Unreleased Recording Sessions June 1955. An extraordinary experience. 📚 ♫
Currently reading: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien 📚 (I’ve heard good things, but we’ll see 😉 )
Currently reading (in one of my most treasured volumes): Mont Saint Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams 📚
Currently reading 📚
Finished reading: Stealing for the Sky, by Adam Roberts. A terrific brief SF thriller — fast-paced, to be sure, but as always with Adam, there’s much more going on than might first appear. I hope there’ll be at least one sequel. And I hope I can figure out why one minor character is named Stanley Cavell. 📚
Currently reading: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison 📚
(Decided to save Solzhenitsyn for later)
Welp, I’m going in. If you don’t hear from me in a month, call the FBI, or a priest. 📚
Currently reading 📚
Currently reading: The History of the Computer: People, Inventions, and Technology that Changed Our World by Rachel Ignotofsky 📚 (It’s delightful!)
Currently reading: Science and Government by C. P. Snow 📚
Finished reading: The Railway Children by E Nesbit 📚 (first time in many years!)
📚 Currently reading, in a copy I acquired in (I think) 1972:
Currently reading: The Code of The Woosters by P G Wodehouse 📚 – I almost know this one by heart. In this difficult season of my life, Wodehouse’s stories have healing powers.
Currently reading: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 📚 – taking my own advice.
Finished reading: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers 📚
Lovely to renew an old friendship.
Currently reading: Death and the King’s Horseman: A Play by Wole Soyinka 📚
(I’ve been adding books I’m teaching to these “Currently reading” posts, but this will be the last of those until 2023 – classes end this week and then I’m on research leave for the Fall term!)
Currently reading: Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud 📚 (trying to remember to put books I’m reading/re-reading for class on this list)