I’m starting 2023 strong by reading a gratifying amount of books. The highlights thusfar are Shveta Thakrar’s Star Daughter, Angela Slatter’s The Bone Lantern (this glorious author gifted me a small parcel of her books as a get-well present and I feel so very lucky indeed!). Run, do not walk to get The Bone Lantern as it is set in the same connected universe of Slatter’s best-loved gothic fantasy.
I’m currently reading Hafsah Faizal’s We Free The Stars which is an engrossing read. I also deeply admire the way Faizal crafts sentences. Really a fantasy author that you should not sleep on.
On the romance fiction front, I appear to be galloping through Ali Hazelwood’s books. While I am not a crew-member of the ship named Reylo, I do find Adam Driver compelling and oddly hot, therefore I rather enjoy that aspect of the books but more than that, I find them smart, refreshing and funny with the focus on women from STEM and with all of the vagaries of a research/academic life in focus.
On the philosophy and critical theory front, I’m rereading a stack of spatial scholars because a significant number of my PhD supervisees are working with spatial theories. I also did my annual reread of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus two months late. This is usually my NYE reread, along with Derrida’s Aporias! I’m shaking things up this year as I’m determined to read both more than once. This weekend, I reread the Ogden translation of the Tractatus. Soon, I’ll read another translation as I’m chewing on atomic facts.
On The History of Middle Earth front, I finished rereading The Silmarillion, The Unfinished Tales and The Book of Lost Tales 1 last year, but am stalled on my reread of The Book of Lost Tales 2, simply because I wanted to read other things.
That’s it for now. I’m actually reading about 15 books right now including stuff I’m writing/co-writing articles on, but this is all you need to know. 😉